As the elusive quest for winning trade “deals” continues, Liberation Day has led to debates on US emissions reduction strategy and degrowth vs. abundance. As is often the case in America, the two parties are largely divided by matters of degree. One side is for neoliberalism and embrace of eugenics while the other wants to put a friendlier face on it. Meanwhile, those further to the left argue there’s a better way, but they’ve almost never appeared further from power. Let’s rewind a few weeks and review.
At the height—or depths?— of Liberation Day(s) it looked like Trump was going to crash the global economy to the point that emissions could fall sharply. While he has taken a few steps back from the abyss for now, there’s no telling what tomorrow will bring. Here’s the AP:
Experts say a slowdown in international trade might have a brief and slight benefit in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which come in part from fuels like gas and oil that are used to move goods around the world via ships, planes and vehicles.
In this way Trump is like a pandemic personified:
Are Trump‘s efforts to shrink the global economy a secret ploy to reduce global CO2 emissions?
🙄 pic.twitter.com/uWj6z8NH7j— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) April 5, 2025
The AP paints this a great price to pay because it would set back the “energy transition” since China leads in the production of “clean tech.” While there are caveats about the cleanliness of clean tech and whether wealthy lifestyles can continue as they are now if emissions are to come down, one must also note that a major hurdle in the US is that whatever planning is done in the US emanates from profit-seeking centers of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and there just ain’t as much of that profit right now in non-fossil fuel energy—nor are there incentives to do a whole lot else that needs to be done.
Nevertheless, the climate tailings of Trump’s Days of Liberation began to gain supporters from what might seem like unlikely quarters. A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye. It is penned from the bastion of American liberalism by Amy Chan, chief sustainability officer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In it she urges those who care about the climate to take solace in the fact that Trump’s “Liberation Day” policies could be a win for the environment. And there are others that have been making similar arguments.
While Chan doesn’t mention “degrowth” she presents three main arguments along those lines that all seem wildly out of touch with what’s actually occurring; let’s take them one by one.
First, the reordering of global trade is forcing companies to rethink supply chains. Many supply-chain leaders are outlining an emerging strategy called “manufacturing in region for region.” This means producing goods in North America for North American consumers, in Europe for Europeans, and so on. That’s good for stability and even better for the planet. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for roughly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Fewer transoceanic journeys mean less emissions.
But this isn’t really what the Trump administration is doing. If there’s any pattern to Liberation Day policies, it is economic warfare against China and extracting better deals for US oligarchs, such as pushing nations facing tariffs to approve Starlink permits for the world’s richest man. [1]
The administration is trying to relocate supply chains out of China while mega corporations like Apple are trying to relocate cheap labor to places like India. Vietnam’s imports from China and exports to the United States both reached a post-pandemic record in April. Hard to see how that’s a positive for the environment.
At the same time, the administration is defunding programs that aid American manufacturing. Hard to see how that helps lead to “manufacturing in region for region.” And policy-induced recessions can have their own goals like weakening labor power, which the Trump administration is clearly pursuing at home and abroad. Here’s Chan again:
Second, Mr. Trump’s recent move to end the de minimis tax exemption for low-value imports from China could curb America’s addiction to fast fashion and disposable goods supplied by retailers like Shein and Temu. This would result in fewer impulse buys and less landfill waste. Manufacturers may also respond by producing higher-quality, longer-lasting products. The effect won’t be limited to cheap goods. Higher prices on electronics, appliances and vehicles will encourage consumers to extend the life of what they already own. The greenest car isn’t a new electric vehicle; it’s the one you don’t replace.
Is there any evidence this is happening or will happen? As mentioned above, we’re largely seeing the shifting from China to low-cost manufacturers with the additional tariff pressure on these nations to keep costs low, which typically means crushing labor and leaning on the cheapest, dirtiest energy available.
What else does Chan have?
Third, the U.S. remains deeply dependent on China for critical minerals such as rare-earth elements. Rare earths are vital inputs for everything from smartphones and EVs to wind turbines and military systems. China accounts for more than two-thirds of global rare-earth production. The U.S. can mitigate this vulnerability by investing in domestic rare-earth recycling infrastructure.
Yes it can. And it is to a degree. In April, Trump issued an executive order that called for U.S. government support of critical mineral recycling efforts, including rare earth recovery. But where will those resources be allocated after recycling? Chan doesn’t say. Much of them will no doubt be funneled into US priority one: the Military Industrial Complex — the greatest greenhouse gas emitter the world has ever known. And by investing in militarization and economic sabotage towards China, Washington is forcing Beijing to divert money away from its clean tech industry towards its own militarization. As the Transnational Institute states, “A war between the US and China over Taiwan would trigger a global disaster on various fronts, one of which would be to set back decarbonisation everywhere by years, if not decades.”
Is any of this creating space for a better economic life for Americans? Or for more environmentally friendly infrastructure? Well, Trump is “unleashing” American fossil fuels, and just blew through billions racing aircraft carriers around the Red Sea, bombing civilians, and dropping fighter jets overboard.
A quick note on the idea of “degrowth,” courtesy of Malcolm Harris’ recent review of the book Abundance by the liberal duo of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson:
Influential economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s argument that entropy was the dominant factor for our world—increasing scarcity and environmental degradation were products of a fundamental law of physics, not human mistakes—helped inspire a “degrowth” line that came to dominate ecological economics in the West. All there seemed left to offer was less.
The counterargument is that it’s not necessarily less that’s needed, but less of certain items. Think less bombs and fighter jets, more—or any—high speed rail, solar panels, and regional self-sufficient production. And if you want to find an easy target for degrowth, the trillion-dollar defense budget should be the place to start. Instead we’re moving in the opposite direction:
All of this highlights the limits to arguments for Trump-style benefits for climate policy. The financial planners on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley prefer to invest in self-licking ice cream cones like the military-industrial complex rather than climate-friendly self-sufficiency or the most simple infrastructure that would reduce emissions and improve Americans’ quality of life.
Yet we now have the likes of Chan, who spent a decade leading environmental initiatives and investments at the World Bank and Apple, selling us on the benefits of Trump’s policies, which simultaneously is working to strengthen that capitalist class.
At the same time, the Trump-Vance project actually calls on Americans to sacrifice—a rarity in American politics— in the name of that project. That’s something widely acknowledged to be necessary to build more self-sufficient communities. As Adam Tooze writes:
The embarrassment for advocates of the Green New Deal and Bidenomics is that in pursuit of their visions of the future, Trump’s national economic strategists are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic party ever were. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, what Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: A direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.
But who is being asked to sacrifice? And who will bear the brunt of the pain? And what type of future is such sacrifice in the name of? This again highlights that there are some rather large blindspots in Chan’s championing of Trump’s “Liberation Day” climate byproducts.
It’s not just that the US war machine isn’t mentioned, but the issue of class is erased entirely.
There are already words that better describe the economic fallout from Team Trump’s Liberation Day policies, such as “recession” or potentially “depression.” And this one, like others previous, is going to hit poor countries and poor Americans the hardest.
While temporary degrowth might be a side effect, it’s being done in such a way to maximize pain to the most vulnerable:
Maybe a lost cause but I remain annoyed at descriptions of Trump’s bungling of world trade as “degrowth.” Degrowth even in the most minimal version entails welfare protections, expanded leisure, north-south rebalancing. This is the difference between crashing & parking your car
— Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation) May 7, 2025
“Environmentalists shouldn’t waste time hoping for a different political landscape. This is a moment for pragmatism,” Chan assures us.
That pragmatism boils down to that if the Trump oligarchs want to detonate the global trading system and try to rewrite the rules to their benefit while inflicting untold pain on billions of people, well, it’s got some good stuff in there too. Maybe. Even if it’s just temporary. Inspiring stuff.
Worst of all, accepting this argument means more power accruing to the very capitalist forces preventing meaningful action on climate and any other meagre efforts at a less brutal societal arrangement. And by doing so lends credence to the idea that emissions reduction requires the poor to suffer, eugenics, and a reliance on our current economic system.
Democrats Embrace “Abundance”
There is another liberal argument making the rounds these days. It comes from the book Abundance, another attempt to find a way out of planetary crisis without addressing the issue of class. The book is leading to numerous reviews and much debate over alternatives to the current course of action: potential emissions reduction if the economy crashes coupled with a hollowing out of the state and seeing what Elon and company have in store for us.
Abundance, as its title suggests, makes a case for more via YIMBYISM.
I’m glad to share that in my review of Abundance I do engage with the specific policies: https://t.co/AsavGk1AMF pic.twitter.com/qrJHSxy0gn
— Isabella M Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) May 10, 2025
It zeroes in on zoning laws and environmental regulations as the problems preventing abundance and argues that less will equal more—essentially DOGE-lite. Let the builders build.
While zoning and other red tape certainly doesn’t help increase housing supply, centering that as the impediment to solving the polycrisis is deranged. Isn’t there someone already promising that cutting regulations and workforces will save money, solve problems, and unleash American ingenuity? And just to mention one hole in Thompson and Klein’s retread theory, here’s Matt Stoller on the US homebuilder cartel rooted in control of land and financing:
In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023! …The story here, in other words, is consolidation.
And without more democratic control over the allocation of capital, what difference does it make if there’s “less red tape”? Abundance, rather than charting a new course, is really more of an argument for liberals to double down on neoliberalism, and it highlights the lack of any real Democrat opposition to Trump’s economic policies.
Here’s coauthor Derek Thompson explaining the role he sees Abundance playing within the Democratic Party, in an interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast:
So, what we’re trying to do is essentially say, here’s a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right? We believe that we have answers on housing and energy and high-quality governance and science and technology, really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. We’re trying to be oppositional in a way that’s constructive rather than just destructive.
“Our” ends? And “constructive” and “destructive” for whom? In Klein and Thompson’s telling the dividing line is between parties and those who care about the climate and those who don’t. They don’t mention class, but their argument boils down to a defense of the plutocrats, and that will fit the Dems just fine. A bipartisan(!) group of lawmakers led by Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.) is now starting a roughly 30-member bloc that’s claiming inspiration from the “abundance movement.”
“This is a moment that has been building for a while,” Harder told Politico. “I think there’s been a lot of simmering interest in permitting reform and making sure that things are built faster, better, cheaper.”
Because everyone knows the best things are fast and cheap.
Is there another way that the fighting Dems are omitting? I think Malcolm Harris puts it best in his review of Abundance, describing the very simple way to tackle housing, as well as emissions reduction and a whole lot else:
The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general.
That path might be “destructive”—as Thompson says— for American oligarchs, but it would be constructive for the rest of us. That is the choice we are currently faced with. As NC commenter Henry Moon Pie put it recently:
…degrowth is coming regardless of what we do. Consider property insurance, for example. As disasters increase in spread and severity, more and more areas will become uninsurable. What will happen to real estate values on the Gulf Coast if another couple of hurricanes hit it this season? What about any property located in woods west of the Mississippi? For that matter, as fires rage again in the Tri-state area, any wooded area east of the Mississippi looks iffy.
We could act like a grown-up society and admit that we’ve trashed the environment with 50 years of McMansions and seeing the USA in our Chevrolets. We could acknowledge that we’ve changed the Earth; now the Earth is going to change us, our children, our grandchildren, our culture, our economy, our worldview. With that facing up to reality behind us, we could begin the hard work of “landing the plane” as Kate Raworth says in Doughnut Economics. We could eliminate economic activity that adversely affects the environment but is non-essential to human welfare (everything from the military to luxury goods) while upgrading public services to cushion the blows of climate and decreased economic activity on the struggling majority as Jason Hickel advocates.
This system of endless growth and consumerism is coming to an end. The question is what will replace it: an Elysium with a few living in luxury while the masses die young in an Earth venting its rage against humans; or a world where we share the hardships that we and our recent ancestors have brought upon ourselves as we learn to live more meaningful lives with less stuff.
Trump charts a course towards an elite Elysium, while the working class and most vulnerable Americans are going to get hammered. What little remains of the US social safety net is being set alight while the government shifts the financial burden of climate change onto individuals. Meanwhile Trump is using immigration policy and other tools to further decimate labor.
The wealthiest Americans, most responsible for climate change emissions, are not being asked to make the same sacrifices and will be able to ride out any tariff recession. While Trump might have asked Americans to go without thirty dolls, there’s a difference between that and shortages of more essential items, but we know who will lose out first while the wealthy horde supplies.
And what is all this sacrifice for? According to Trump, it’s to Make America Great Again, yet his idea of greatness increasingly resembles 1990s Russia-style shock therapy that allows the likes of Musk, Bezos, Altman, Thiel, and company to take over core government functions, self-enrichment, and a Golden Dome over a land of more exploitation and more eugenics.
Any “degrowth” arising from such policies is not a silver lining to celebrate, but rather marks the arrival of a societal tipping point to an accelerating descent into further depths of dystopia.
The other way sounds better.
Notes
[1] A reminder that there are other ways to go about tariffs that don’t mean widespread suffering and actually help the working class:
NEW: Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff fiasco angered everyone from Democrats to Trump’s billionaire friends.
Now some people are suggesting that we go back to free trade.
They’re all wrong. Tariffs can help build a more fair and just economy — but not the way Trump is using them. pic.twitter.com/j4vX7wqp37
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 6, 2025
“The Impossible Plight of the Pro-Tariff Liberal” in today’s @TheAtlantic captures the perversity of Trump’s tariff chaos undermining 30 years of advocacy from the Left to replace damaging corporate-led globalization w/ trade policy that works for people & the planet. Pl read👇 https://t.co/vC4HVWhxZf
— Lori Wallach (@WallachLori) May 7, 2025
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Essentially, advocates of ‘degrowth’ or ‘negative growth’ have caught themselves in a epistemological trap by buying into the notion of growth = energy/resource use. The much maligned and mis-used term ‘sustainable development’ is actually much more useful and precise in comparison. ‘Growth’ is such a poorly defined term it is essentially useless in assessing environmental damage – the variables used to quantify them are not commensurate.
There are plenty of historical examples of accidental or deliberate degrowth leading to environmental benefits – WWII being the most prominent in the 20th Century (the only significant period of CO2 emissions stabilising), but there are plenty of other historical examples, many involving genocides. So in its broader historical context, there is nothing inherently wrong with pointing out that Trumpist policies are pretty good (at least temporarily) in reducing CO2 emissions. So was WWII, so was the Black Death.
Global trade is supposed to be about enhancing efficiency, but a large proportion (I’ve never seen a proper figure produced, but its not negligible) of global trade is not about increasing efficiency, but in arbitraging tax, labour or regulatory restrictions. Tariffs are a crude device, but they do act as counterweights to such arbitrage, and as such benefit more localised manufacture. Whether localised manufacturing is of necessity less polluting/more sustainable or not is an arguable point, but at the very least it has the merit of being subject to localised regulation, and usually when people are given the choice, they prefer clean air and water, even at some financial expense (up to a point).
“Essentially, advocates of ‘degrowth’ or ‘negative growth’ have caught themselves in a epistemological trap by buying into the notion of growth = energy/resource use.”
With fear and trembling, I’ll beg to differ. This chart seems to show a pretty strong relationship between GDP and per person energy consumption. In the aggregate, energy demand worldwide rose at an annual rate of 2.2%, including a rise even in rich countries which had been offloading energy demand to manufacturing centers in China, India and Southeast Asia. At this rate, energy demand will DOUBLE in roughly 30 years.
Even though there has been very limited progress is loosening the link between energy consumption and carbon emissions, it is not happening nearly fast enough to keep us below 2 degrees C of warming:
And these points only refer to the carbon problem. Issues related to resource availability, habitat destruction, plastics pollution and others tell the same tale. Growth in consumption means more breaching of Earth’s boundaries. The only way to address that is end exponential growth at the global level while allowing growth in poor countries, redistribute wealth and income and pursue societal goals other than profit and one-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins.
Growth – as defined by GNP (or other similar measures), does in aggregate generally rise with energy use, but even energy use itself is not necessarily a good measure of environmental damage, especially at a more regional scale – there is a huge variation in CO2 production across countries with similar levels of development for a wide variety of reasons. There is also increasing evidence, at least at individual country levels, that the linkage is being broken, mostly due to electrification and renewable use.
But even this comparison is I think questionable – ‘Growth’ as measured by money (and that is how its generally measured) is not in any way a measure of real human life quality or sustainability. They are non-commensurable variables, and conflating them confuses discussion of the issue in my opinion.
Now of course its possible to nail down a series of more precise definition of ‘growth’ and ‘sustainability’, but when you do, I find that all that happens is that the discussion ends up in a series of motte and bailey arguments.
I believe in a broader political sense, using any term like ‘growth’ falls into the trap left for environmentalists by the dominance of neoliberal discourse. ‘Oh, you don’t like growth? So you want us all to be poorer, do you?’. Once you are explaining (or defining), you are losing.
I don’t believe our planetary systems are collapsing because of ‘growth’. They are collapsing because we are using terrible farming practices, we are living in oversized leaky homes, we like to travel too much and too far, we are using 2 tonne trucks to go buy some milk, we eat too much meat, we cut down too many forests for stupid reasons, and so on. These are problems of human behaviour and the political economic systems we have created. These are the problems we need to solve. Applying terms like ‘degrowth’ or ‘zero growth’ or ‘sustainable development’ or whatever, is in my opinion a distraction from actually changing the things that need changing. To be honest, I don’t care if that change comes about through behavioural change, or because of technological breakthroughs, or whatever. I just care if it works.
Agreed!
I am lucky to work from home, so lots of sustainability there.
If I were to go to office again I’ll get an electric bike.
Buy meat only on sale, and except for undies, t-shirts and socks I try to get clothes second hand.
Travel by Google Earth. In fact a lot is brought to home via internets (no, I am not talking about Amazon).
However, peoples all over are engaged in degrowth big time: Total Fertility Rate is crashing.
Good points. There is a great deal that people can do to greatly limit their own env footprint without suffering much if any loss in quality of life. “Degrowth,” at least as a matter of rhetoric, evades this and becomes the question of who shall be degrowthed and how, and things get ugly from there.
And once all the people who “can” limit their own env footprint have gone ahead and done so, and it is seen that all their individual efforts will not be enough to make an actual survivalgenic difference; they WILL have established the personal credibility by limiting their own env footprint to the point where they may have a chance at being listened to if they say individual action is not enough and systemic planned degrowth will be needed.
Yes. The current problem is that the ptb seem to want exactly the opposite: make policy to forcibly degrowth the weak while excepting themselves…
Measures of growth
Population size
Energy use
Material throughput
Space occupied by human activity
You are just wrong that there are not good measures of economic growth.
I’m with you on this front. The abstract notion of “degrowth” doesn’t fly well in face of reality: it almost invariably becomes forcing degrowth on “undesriables” in some form or another–people generally don’t want to degrow themselves voluntarily if it can’t be shifted on someone else. At best, they’ll go for symbolic sacrifice for themselves and death and misery on others “because the latter deserve it” for some reason or another, if they can manage the political process thereof–and this leads to all manner of problems, obviously.
“Degrowth” is, ultimately, a political problem–who will be degrowthed? I don’t think this is a problem that can be easily solved without much bloodshed.
I’d hope people would distinguish between:
1) what I’ll capitalize as Degrowth, a point of view that recognizes that a Mad Max collapse is coming without radical change directed toward ameliorating the effects of human society on the Earth’s boundaries, andl
2) the degrowth as projected by The Limits to Growth in 1972 and which current elites plan to manage with The Market (you can buy your way out), increased censorship and repression, and maybe worse.
The first Degrowth is an effort to think through our situation with the goal of triaging civilization to save as many and as much of value as possible.
I don’t see how the two would diverge once we start thinking about “politics.”
Your definition 1) sounds like what I call “abstract degrowth.” I don’t think too many thoughtful people can disagree with it, at least as a matter of principle.
The rot sets in when we stop thinking in abstract, as we must, if we want to do something aboit it. Then it becomes the question of who shall be degrowthed. The answer is always the same: the weak, undesirable, the “political losers.” Of course, they’ll fight back, and, maybe, we might wind up with degrowth after all…just not the kind we’d lime.
I don’t think we are in disagreement, necessarily. That there is a “need” for degrowth in the abatract is clear enough. But I do think the feel for this “need” is blinding too many people to how complicated actual peocess would be. How to turn degrowth in abstract to degrowth in practice without serious bloodshed is the real challenge snd I’m just pessimistic that it can be done within reason.
A guy named Daniel Schmactenberger is pretty adept at game theory, and spends a lot of time talking about this issue. He argues that “restraints” external and above the system can succeed. Think a community getting together and setting rules that protect the commons over the long run after watching a race to the bottom for a while.
“Restraints external and above the system,” ultimately, add up to another term for national myths, religions, sense of “community/nation/tribe” and such things–which, incidentally, became quite fashionable among game theorists last couple of decades, although, incidentally, these actually undermine the premises of “classical” game theory significantly, but that’s topic for another day: it suffices to say that we have been busy rediscovering “culture” and “sociality”–the kind of stuff the modern classically liberal world has been undermining for generations now. I can imagine a Japan, China, or a Russia pulling it off. The West as it currently exists…no way. (We have no way back to real communal/national myth in US, for instance–both Dems and Reps, cons and libs, are busy tearing apart communal sentiments in their own ways and nobody is calling for building new national myths that can serve as the bases for social superstructure.)
Short version: to actually pull it off, we need to rebuild the “American nation” (or some other super community that its members feel special ties to, enough to willingly sacrifice themselves.) I can and do hope, but I’m not optimistic. You can’t do it through politics, legislation, or even a movement. You literally need an “Awakening.”
Maybe you should drop the word “Degrowth” for the Degrowth you describe, and give it the straight-up phrase Mad Max Collapse.
Tariffs to the rescue, lol.
I’ve a sneaky suspicion that degrowth is synonymous with depopulation.
Please see below. It’s quite the opposite.
Strictly speaking there’s no reason it should, or at least not “depopulation” in some insidious sense. We suffer the consequences of growth (really manifesting as line-go-up ultracapitalism and rent seeking) in a time where its greatest beneficiaries live in countries which are depopulating themselves anyway. Is there a single country outside the global south with a birthrate above 2 per woman (the answer – yes depending on how you feel about Israel, but mostly no)? Or are we to imagine that all this “growth” is mostly accruing to Chad and Somalia? The global leaders in emissions and the global leaders in stork visits have no overlap whatsoever.
Thank you both. I’m thinking domestically here in the US. Am I wrong thinking degrowth leads to recession/depression which leaves those dependent on employment based income vulnerable to hunger/homelessness/lack of healthcare, this in a time where the backstops for these are being dismantled?
Edit, I see I’m talking about the “Trump version”.
Only if, as you say, the “Trump version” is conducted and with the guiding hands of malevolent actors. I think Henry’s post below is a decent (if in my view deeply optimistic) framework for what moral degrowth could look like; I’m more inclined to a reductionist view that an operable degrowth is one that prioritizes the squashing of rent-seeking and the redirection of excess resources to extant humanity. Now again I am quite bereft of optimism and believe such a thing could only come to be at the hands of an absolutely heroic revolutionary reformer (not any Democratic party or politician I’m familiar with) but that’s somewhat beside the point.
It’s really the Market Version, and we get that with Rs or Ds. The individualized “buy your way out” ethos dominates under The Invisible Hand, God of the Takers.
Degrowth is a term used to shock us because we’ve swum in the “growth is good” sea all our lives. We can’t start to work together to land the plane until we notice it’s nearly out of fuel (and room in the atmosphere and oceans for CO2).
Thanks. I’m all for it, but can we get there from here?
It’s beyond my imagination that this sort of thing could gain much of a foothold in this country until Gaia has disciplined us further. The EU let Hickel speak to the delegates a few years back, but they have other priorities now. Some cities claim to be in various stages of employing Raworth’s Doughnut Economics approach to economic planning. There’s a site with details linked above in my long, initial post.
If you’re lucky enough to live among a polity that’s looking ahead, it should be pretty easy to take part. Democracy (small “d”) is a big thing as it was with Occupy.
For the rest of us, it’s gather the forces, hunker down and prepare to organize, rather care for, the victims of what’s coming outside the sane places.
Several commentators (the usual suspects on YT: I think I heard Doctorrow and Mercouris mention this) thought that, in effect, Trump has imposed stringent economic sanctions on US hoping that we could pull a Russia. I am deluded enough to hope that we have some chance of achoeving this. But, if we do not, this could be the first set of economic sanctions that actually “worked.”
US trying to copy Russia by sanctioning itself sounds like a cargo cult to me, which is hilarious because it’s a thing attributed to primitive societies. :)
I can’t wait to see if Trump can even properly copy military parades from Russia, because it seemed that he really wanted one for birthday.
Thanks for addressing this issue, Conor, and I’m honored that you have chosen to include my comment.
As both a committed DeGrowther and someone whose “accelerationist” point of view prompts me to note the silver lining effects of recessions, depressions and even pandemics on our carbon problem, I thought I ought to explain how these two views are distinguished in my mind even as they are both ultimately related to the existential issues of the polycrisis.
Degrowth aims exactly at preventing the kind of “let the Market decide” approach that can destroy small producers and further crapify the lives of all but the most affluent consumers if any kind of meaningful action is taken to slow down our march to self-destruction.
Jason Hickel is my favorite exponent of the Degrowth strategy to “land the plane.” In this article in Nature in 2022, Hickel laid out the goals of Degrowth:
These policies seek to do just the opposite of what Trump’s policies will inflict on us. It could be called “the Great Leveling.” Resources are to shifted from private to public use, and the public uses that do not benefit the public directly, like absurdly bloated defense expenditures, are to be greatly reduced or eliminated. It’s what is called Eco-socialism in some quarters.
Kate Raworth, while she does not call herself a DeGrowther, takes a similar approach in Doughnut Economics, cited in the quote from me above. She sees the role of government at the local, regional and national levels to engage in economic planning that keeps environmental impacts within the 9 planetary boundaries while providing everyone’s essential needs. Kate is a big believer in visual aids, and her doughnut (scroll down to “What is the Doughnut?”) does an excellent job of explaining the process. (Note that Doughnut economics are in various stages of implementation around the world.)
Now about that accelerationist point of view that finds something positive in anything that slows down carbon emissions: the hour is getting so late and the determination to continue with Happy Motoring and Bigger and Better and More Stuff is so strong, that any additional time that calamity grants is needed while the many people working on the Metacrisis have some time to complete their critical work. Our problems are deeper than even capitalism. Socialist countries like China contribute to the breaching of these planetary boundaries as well, and humans have been destroying bits and pieces of the biosphere since Mesopotamia. It’s just that now, our technology has given us the “power” to render the whole planet inhospitable to any kind of human civilization.
These deeper problems have been recognized for some time by writers like Thomas and Wendell Berry, but Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael does an extraordinary job of revealing them to the reader piece by piece, resulting in what many have called a “conversion experience.” After all, that’s what “conversion” really is: a change in worldview.
Scientists tell us that several tipping points draw ever nearer. If they begin to kick in, heating and its effects will accelerate even more, and our civilization will become toast much sooner than we think. If societal collapse is made inevitable by our elites’ stubborn clinging to power and their kingly lifestyles, the sooner it happens, the better chance remnants can find habitable space to begin rebuilding a culture as sad as that outcome would be.
Your comment is a great summary and connects many dots that I also agree with re: climate catastrophe, planetary boundaries, economic incentives, etc.
However, none of it will come to pass. Humans as a species got to this point because we value material comfort and convenience. We are an invasive species that has spread to every corner of this planet in pursuit of our biological programming. It’s a collective action problem and we aren’t all going to suddenly come together to pursue any of the initiatives you outline.
My suggestion is to be less anthropocentric in your viewpoint. The myth of progress and destiny of our species is not a moral dilemma, it’s an outcome of ecological dynamics. Just like the fate of yeast fermenting a nice wine, we are destined to consume all resources and suffocate ourselves. Whether that happens in the next century or millions of years from now after the magical AI deus ex machina saves us – you can’t beat entropy.
The Modern Industrial Civilization nations are the ones which do that. Many other human nations never did any of that.
Amazon basin Indian Nations up-terraformed the Amazon over a several-thousand-year-period before the arrival of the Euro-Explorers and their diseases, for example.
There is a constant tendency in the Techno-Modern world to confuse “Industrial Civilization Man” with humankind in general.
It is nature working in concert with culture. And since Bernays Sauce appeared on the menu, lots of smart if unethical people have been working to exploit those natural tendencies and create the hyper consumer.
It’s a tough thing to deprogram. It’s the cultural ocean, and we’re swimming in it. I recommend Dan Quinn’s Ishmael, the Tao te Ching, browsing Nate Hagen’s videos on Youtube or long walks through woods as close to “natural” as you can find.
And therein lies the problem.
Humans discover fossil fuel energy and apply it as a work output multiplier Thereby, becoming no longer dependent upon personal exertion and harnessed animal work output coupled to a range of simple force multipliers for sustainability from the output of the earth. Humans are able to devote more time and energy via the scientific method to improve longevity, rapid growth in numbers and survivability. It’s just that humanity was going to get to where we are today somewhere over time. It has been the harnessing of fossil fuels that has ensured that it be know with the dynamic system all speeded up by a flawed economics and capitalism.
That can only happen if the Mad Max Collapse can preferentially exterminate all persons within the elites.
If they are able to survive Mad Max Collapse, or are permitted to survive it, then they will make sure that no culture rebuilding will be permitted without them solely and only recieving the benefits.
Look at the budget shifts. I say again. Look at the budget shifts. Who wins? Who loses in the funding wars? Grand prize to the MIC subset of the MICIMATT that fills the DC Bubble and Echo Chamber to bursting with stupidity, greed, and hubris. Defense is, theoretically, aimed outward. DHS is, categorically and lethally, aimed inward.
To suggest that The Don ( I use the term as did Gay Talese.) is concerned about an energy transition seems delusional to me. After all, how would he and the family business profit from an it?
The Don’s understanding of tariffs is on a par with that guy who comes into your mom and pop store with a can of gasoline and a box of matches and asks you to share your profits with him.
We might also start referring to Donald ” the President” Trump, after the manner of how mafia guys have a nickname between their first and last names.
Anthony ” Tony Pro” Provenzano.
Anthony ” Fat Tony” Salerno.
Donald ” the President” Trump.
I think it’s important to realize that “abundance” is intended as a marketing pitch to give Dems something to use to compete against “make America great again.” Isabella Weber got to the heart of the problem with that in her review: working class Americans see abundance all around them but do not participate in that abundance. As a campaign slogan I like “abundance” better than “fight the oligarchs” but not by much. “Abundance for everyone” would be better, but that smells like distributive politics.
Fight the oligarchs isn’t as pithy as it ought to be but I think abundance is an absolute mess of branding. It’s a slightly too uncommon word which isn’t instantly emotionally evocative (this is not to say the American people don’t know what it means, just that it doesn’t stir their hearts) and on its own it possesses no call to action; it’s just a noun detached and floating about. This is par for the course for Democrats though who’ve been Velma on the floor looking for her glasses with regards to their branding for at least the entire decade of Trump.
“Abundance” sounds New Age-y. Will not fly in flyover.
Maybe they should try “land of milk and honey.”
Ezra is so funny.
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table
From some Steely Dan tune.
The name Amalthea might…
Maybe “America For All.” Consisting of Medicare For All, Clean Air For All, etc.
Anyone else pick up on the shift from “1%” to “oligarchy”? That’s like the shift from “HBO” to “Max”, giving away all the accumulated brand equity. Putting aside the limpness of Dems always “fighting”?
For people like me, the Dems have been making empty promises for years. I’ll need to see that “abundance,” particularly my share thereof, up front. Once I get it, then we can talk about me voting for Dems in future elections.
Hey the hippies tried to drop out of consumerism and the Empire struck back by Powell Memo-ing them into submission. But that era did give us higher mileage cars, less pollution and the rise of computers which themselves enable a cutback on resource use (much less paper) when not being dragooned into energy gobbling AI server farms.
The unalterable fact is that growth is ultimately driven by humans having sex and producing lots more humans. So cutting back on the gadgets and McMansions may slow things down but not address the ultimate cause which is that we as a species are being too successful, evolution wise, for our own good. Being the monkeys with big brains, maybe the brains will save us. However there’s not a lot of that in evidence during the Trump adminstration or the Biden that preceded.
Monkeys with big brains — and over-active gonads.
To reiterate: when I was born in the mid-1950’s the world population was a bit over 2.5 billion people. Today it’s passed 8 billion lives in being and is projected to pass 9 billion by 2037. Tell me an ethical way to de-growth that.
In the logic of Amy Chan’s WSJ op-ed, Biden’s attempt to provoke a nuclear war with Russia was far more “pragmatic” for de-growth than Trump’s mere attempt to crater the global economy. The ensuing Nuclear Winter would guarantee a serious retreat of the human population.
In the immortal words of Randy Newman: Let’s drop the Big One and see what happens! Abundance for all who survive!
This article from the Union of Concerned Scientists provides a good response to your point about population.
“In fact, data show (PDF) that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population contributes 50 percent of annual global warming emissions.”
So the rich aren’t also having sex? The US population has doubled in my lifetime.
Of course back in those underpopulated times birth control and population concerns were up front whereupon the environmental movement decided that asking for sacrifices, including having fewer or no children, was bad for NGO contributions. The Sierra Club isn’t what it used to be either.
And I’m not advocating some sort of Final Solution either. But let’s be real about what the source of growth really is. Take David Attenborough’s word for it or E.O.Wilson if not mine. Both have talked about this (Wilson now gone).
We either use contaception to bring numbers down nicely, or war, famine, and pestilence will take it upon themselves. Degrowth is coming, our choice is whether it is on our terms or not.
Birth rates are below replacement everywhere but parts of Africa, even pro-natalist Hungary.
Look at the US growth ex immigration.
US energy growth per capita should drop if new immigrants bring in the lower energy usage and lower consumption of their homelands.
Anecdotally, I don’t observe this in California.
Shopping in big box stores in Los Angeles and hearing other shoppers, with full carts, speaking in their native tongues is anecdotal evidence that the US high consumption lifestyle is quickly adopted by new arrivals.
LA is quite the melting pot, as a search has that 224 languages are spoken in Los Angeles county.
It may be a reasonable proxy to the word wide embrace of consumption if it is available.
Imagine the uproar if US immigration policy required new citizens to maintain a low consumption lifestyle.
It would be viewed “un American” by politicians and business.
I can only see changes being forced on consumers.
The Seattle Times reports that in King County WA (Seattle and environs) fully 20 percent of the current population were born in Asia, people from India making up the largest cohort within that group. They aren’t cooking over cow dung fires. Not one of them.
The UCS link above perpetuates the paternalistic notion that concern about population growth being the driver of climate change is racist. Walk through any Ikea in America and you will be disabused of the notion that consumerism isn’t universal to our cross-cultural monkey brains. It’s a Small World after all…
Pointing to declining birth rates also perpetuates fallacies that population growth is irrelevant. Increasing life span is the driver. I’ve already outlived the U.S. life expectancy in the year of my birth and I’m likely to outlive it by a full generation. More lives in simultaneous being, all extracting, consuming, and excreting together.
There is no ethical answer to this conundrum. We all can and should consume less and more wisely, but only in the hope of pushing out the inevitable collapse beyond our own lifetimes.
The climate change condition conundrum is all part of resource depletion, be it capacity to accommodate more CO2, diminishing quality of farmland, available fresh water, deforestation, species extinction, available metal ores.
Alice Friedemann has been covering this for years at energyskeptic.
A small percentage of people are even concerned, and a small percentage of this group are willing /able to do anything about it.
Some people I know are just trying to survive and significant changes to their lifestyle are unlikely as they are shopping at thrift stores and discount grocers already and use their vehicles sparingly.
Abundance is not something they would see on the horizon.
The USA needs to plan for a shrinking pie that is shared more equitably, but that won’t happen.
I hope the world will not have resource wars, but I fear that will occur as abundance and growth are promoted.
> maybe the brains will save us
That would require planetary-scale species-wide cooperation, which seems highly unlikely, absent some kind of external threat on the scale of the one portrayed in “The Three Body Problem.”
Blaming growth on sex is giving greed a free pass. Even with no population growth, compound interest driven finance will bake the planet.
All these thinkpieces concerning tariffs are looking mighty navel-gazing since Trump doesn’t really appear interested in following through. We believed them for about a month? SPX is nearly back to 6000 and all these pundits are left chasing the next media buzz.
Degrowth is coming because Mother Nature will make it so, not because we legislate it in some naive hope that we can maintain modern industrial life. It’s why AI is such a feverish topic that the tech mongrels grasp on for dear life: it’s the only thing possible to “save” this version of the human species and modern development. Because if it all turns out a waste of time, what is Silicon Valley left building besides the next Uber for gulags?
I’ve almost totally tuned out of this “discourse” myself because, again, it’s all just navel gazing. Hairless apes with indoor plumbing and refrigeration desperately trying to think their way into a future where they maintain material comfort.
Who cares. Species come and go, populations boom and bust. Don’t be so wedded to our continuing existence as organisms. Life will find a way, and the universe will move on without us.
Making Shit Up is a violation of our written Site Policies. Tariffs on Chinese goods of 30% (and 54% for low value shipments) and 10% for everyone else IS following through. And my post today on the investment provisions in the UK deal says that Trump is using these tariff-induced trade agreements to isolate China via restrictions on Chinese investments.
There are times I feel just as you’ve expressed. The stupidity of it all, the lack of appreciation for how beautiful life is, can be crushing.
But humans are nothing if not malleable, and a sudden change of culture would do the trick with a minimum of pain for us all, but without deep cultural change, political change radical enough to make a difference is impossible. I think collapse of the current system is more likely. Still, there are some people I consider not only smart but also wise who are working hard on it, while Hickel and his colleagues are working hard on modeling how the plane might be landed with a minimum of damage, no mean feat with an energy-addicted society and economy like ours.
As a student, I was fascinated by Joan Robinson’s, “Economic Philosophy”, Keynes’, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” and Leo’s Rerum novarum, and being less than totally enthralled by analysing a dynamic world of which we had imperfect knowledge with tools playing about with a couple or three variables and ceteris paribus, I opted to take courses in marketing, consumer behaviour and industrial relations which gave me some of the tools to describe, and perhaps lead to greater understanding of a complex reality.
In my dotage, I’ve revisited the more optimistic world as viewed from Cambridge in the immediate pre and post-war years, and see that Keynes’ vision might be a good place to start to think how best to get to a world of relative prosperity without destroying the planet’s resource base. I find it difficult to think of degrowth as a viable strategy but regrowth into a less resource intensive, “greener” (God, I really hate that word so debased as it has become in reality) economy in which Keynes’ vision of a future work of occasional work, more leisure time, a greater concentration on the arts and on learning, etc, may be a politically viable strategy. We define where we wish to be in 10 or fifteen years, and adopt the means to get there.
The technological base exists and is continuing to develop in terms of clean energy systems with built-in redundancy (to avoid failure like the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal, and the coming ones in Europe due to it’s inability to live alongside its largest neighbour with throwing rocks over her wall or pissing in her water supply), cheap transportation, clean water and high nutritional levels, free health and education (I think I’ve learned more from youtube and blogs as well as books like this than I ever did at university), and an acceptance that a free market is never free and in the West leads only to Hayek’s Nirvana of the most efficient firms surviving in a oligopolistic market or as a monopoly in which they have great political power – pretty much what we are heading towards now in the West, unlike, say, China, where political power overrides market power and encourages a high level of competiton between firms.
Tariffs may have a role to play in a multipolar world, but the sensitive use of FDI, a freeing up of intellectual property rights and subsiduarity will play a much greater role in the world’s social and economic development. Now, you may say I’m a dreamer… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAn-AWXtHv0&list=PLiN-7mukU_REcNckIQMJC9wWxMU9xHGFJ
One conclusion I came to is that “efficiency” is a dangerously value-laden term: you waste more of some resource thst you value less instrad of the resource thst you value more. But what resource is more “valuable” is usually socially constructed…
I can think of another blind spot in Ms. Chan’s efforts to find cheer in the thought that Trump will lower carbon skydumping by shrinking the global economy.
And here it is. If Trumponomics drives the global economy into recession or depression, particulate and sulfate releases will drop as fast or faster than new carbon skydumping. But the carbon that was already skydumped will still be up there in the sky, still skydumped. And lower particulate and sulfate releases will mean more sunlight gets through to the surface in order to be turned into more heat faster, and then even more heat even more faster, and then even morer heat even morer fasterer. Leading to an amazing rise in the rate of surfacespheric heat retention and buildup with its attendant amazing rise in new amazing weather extremes.
Looking somewhat upthread at Henry Moon Pie’s long comment containing ” 5 main things we must do to land the plane”, I would suggest that one approach to spreading this list around and maybe even popularizing it would be to create a political party-movement to seek the doing of these 5 things. People who think that is a good idea can get to work on it. People who think other ideas are good ideas can get to work on those.
Perhaps a better word for ” mutual degrowth mutually agreed upon” would be Power Down which was invented by Richard Heinberg. Some guy in Britain created the name and concept of Transition Town.
Perhaps one could marry those two phrase-concepts with Power-Down Transition Town.
R. Buckminster Fuller once said something about the futility of “fighting” something one does not like, as against the effectiveness of building and demonstrating a model so much better that the something-one-does-not-like is driven extinct by slow and then fast uptake of the new better model which the better-model better-builders have built. Here is a copy of that exact quote.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/347381
Some Blue States have tried to build that better model with their own less-carbon-skydumping state-level energy portfolio reform initiatives. Donald ” the President” Trump and his Administration is so afraid they might work that he is trying to persecute and torture these states into dropping these initiatives. That says to me that these Blue States might be the test-beds for trialing new politicultural movement and political parties to achieve Power Down and Power Cleanup. But only if they and their citizens can bear to think of themselves that way.
Perhaps giving such new movements and parties the right kind of names can help people in the Blue States and Blue Zones to think of themselves that way. Names like Blue State Survival Party or Separate Survival Party or other such. Perhaps such parties can take power in two or more Blue States and then create a
Blue States Legislative Exchange Council to use Koch-Brothers ALEC methods against the Axis of Koch and the Axis of ALEC.
” Growthist keep on moving. This is a Power Down neighborhood.”
” God help you Growthist, if the sun sets on you here.”
Every time I read about this book it sounds exactly the same as what Urbanists have been pushing for the last couple of decades. The only problem is what Urbanists have been pushing hasn’t done anying to lower the cost of housing, the centerpiece of their platform. On the other hand, a failed model that will change exactly nothing sounds like the perfect agenda for the Democrat Party to embrace, an exact match even.
I take and use the least that I am able. A penny saved…
Degrowth in at least one sense can be a decoupling of the idea of prosperity from the idea of material wealth or consumption. And not about anti-tech, nor anti-development, nor anti-production, nor population reduction, nor to do with climate change.
1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, 110 million Anglicans, etc., are familiar with Jesus’ condemnation of wealth, presumably hold it as a principle that money is satan, temptation, is a key spiritual test, is what stands between us and salvation. And wealth is about pride, the root of all sins, since it is love of self – thus leads to vanity, envy, wrath, contempt for others, lust, greed, sloth. Christianity is or should be about selflessness, about avoiding all of these.
At least a majority of Christian cultures envision a future where money and wealth are, if not eliminated, then at least minimized, downgraded, deprioritized or used primarily to eliminate poverty or create a better society, and not used to enrich oneself. And there won’t be money in heaven, there will be no need, and arguably it’s the Christian duty to create that heaven on earth, especially if you want to go to the other heaven.
JD Vance wants via ‘ordo amoris’ to create a society where your duty is to enrich yourself before all others. Witness the reaction of the church, and not just the Catholics.
In other words, I tend to think degrowth is what Christianity should be aiming for by virtue of what Christ taught. The world is a gift of god, worship of money corrupts it.
Mad Max, or Waterworld? Mad Max, then Waterworld? What of denial?