Thread by @jasonhickel

Critics of degrowth simply don't read degrowth literature. This take on emissions keeps making the rounds, so here's a brief thread on what it gets wrong:

First, literally nobody argues that GDP cannot be absolutely decoupled from emissions. Such a claim would be absurd: to get to zero emissions, we would have to reduce GDP to zero. This is obviously ridiculous.

*Of course* GDP can be absolutely decoupled from emissions. Indeed, it has been happening in several rich nations for some time, even in consumption-based terms. We've known this for ages. Hello, renewable energy!

The *actual* argument is that decarbonization cannot be accomplished fast enough to reach zero emissions in time to stay under 1.5 or 2 degrees, *if high-income nations continue to grow at usual rates*.

Remember, high-income nations need to get to zero emissions by 2035. Even the best performers are nowhere near this trajectory. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

Here's the problem: more growth means *more energy demand* than would otherwise be the case, and more energy demand makes it more difficult for us to cover it with renewables in the short time we have left. It's like trying to run down an up escalator.

We make this argument here in Nature Energy, with all the references you need: nature.com/articles/s4156… Here is a free PDF: jasonhickel.org/s/Hickel-et-al… Please read it, so this debate can move forward.

Degrowth scholarship points out that if high-income nations scale down socially less necessary production (i.e., SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, planned obsolescence, advertising, etc), we can reduce energy demand and enable a *much faster* transition to renewables.

And if you do this while at the same time shortening the working week, introducing living wages, ensuring universal access to good public services and housing, and redistributing income and wealth, you can improve social outcomes at the same time.

This has been demonstrated by several models. Here's a recent one in Nature: nature.com/articles/s4146…

This argument about emissions has been made repeatedly, in the clearest possible terms. We also articulated it here: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… Here's a free PDF: jasonhickel.org/s/Hickel-and-K… There is no reason for continued confusion.

And here's the other thing we point out in that paper. Even if emissions were not an issue, we still face another problem: resource use. GDP is tightly coupled to resource use. Once again, high-income nations are the problem here - way over the sustainable threshold.

This is a problem, because resource use is *the* major driver of biodiversity collapse and ecological breakdown. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.10…

The issue is that existing model-based projections find that sustained and sufficient absolute decoupling of resource use is unlikely to be achieved even under high-efficiency conditions (see the NPE paper for refs). So here too, rich nations need to scale down excess production.

The literature in ecological economics is clear that we can achieve high levels of well-being with modest resource and energy use, consistent with a stable biosphere, if we organize the economy around human needs rather than around elite interests and capital accumulation.

I understand that simple graphs showing GDP-emissions decoupling might seem comforting and compelling. But they do not speak to the real complexities of the problem we face, and they do not address the questions raised in the scientific literature. We need a more nuanced debate.