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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!