3 Comparison of views
In the next activity you will watch a debate between two leading economists in the field of climate change. The first, Sam Finkhauser, will set out the case for sustainable growth, which he calls green growth. You will then hear from James Hickel, a proponent of degrowth, also called post-growth.
Activity 3: Comparing and contrasting
Timing: 1 hour
The two video clips in this activity are from a debate at Oxford University in 2022 that was chaired by Kate Raworth. Before Finkhauser and Hickel presented their argument, Raworth posed the following questions:
How can it be that two highly informed people…can reasonably hold such different perspectives about the future?…I invite you to listen to the deeper root of disagreement:
- Is it over different definitions?
- Are they talking about different regions of the world?
- Are they focusing on different ecological challenges?
- Is it different beliefs about human motivation or possible futures in terms of technological and political and economic and social scenarios?
- Or something else?
As you watch Videos 2 and 3, make some notes to help you answer those questions.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 2: How to secure a thriving future: Sam Finkhauser
Transcript: Video 2: How to secure a thriving future: Sam Finkhauser
Sam Finkhauser
I’m going to make the case for green growth, or climate-compatible growth, as it’s known in one of the programs I’m involved in, which is sort of sponsoring what I’m doing.
I’ll start with some conceptual points, things we might agree on, although I realize they might be boring. Then, I’ll address areas where we might not agree, and I’d like to finish with a few words on climate change, where I hope to touch on things we definitely disagree on. That’s the plan.
First, let’s consider some of the conceptual things I believe we agree on. The first point is that GDP is a lousy measure of human progress and prosperity. Most of us likely agree that we should be looking at something beyond GDP growth. While we could degrow other things, I’m assuming we are focused on degrowing GDP.
Most people, including economists, would agree that GDP is a measure of economic activity, the pile of things an economy produces. However, it’s not a measure of prosperity, human welfare, or happiness. This is not a particularly novel or controversial statement. We all learn in Economics 101 about the things GDP doesn’t measure—unpaid work, defensive expenditures, wealth, and more. In fact, we’ve learned that a car crash can contribute positively to GDP, since it generates income for doctors and car mechanics, even though that clearly doesn’t represent progress.
Thankfully, there are measures being developed that provide a broader view of human development, prosperity, and progress. For example, systems like environmental economic accounts and the Human Development Index are crucial to understanding where we are. We need to pay more attention to these.
On the nuance of GDP, I believe that many things we care about—health outcomes, poverty reduction, and climate change—are correlated with income levels. While it’s just correlation, not causation, it’s clear that as income increases, problems like poverty and vulnerability to climate change often become easier to solve. However, there are exceptions to each rule, but as a broad trend, it’s true that less budgetary constraint and higher income help resolve various challenges.
The second point I believe we agree on is that economic activity must respect planetary boundaries. This isn’t about growth that disregards environmental limits, but growth that stays within those boundaries. We’re talking about "green growth," which optimizes prosperity while respecting ecological limits.
It becomes an empirical question—either prosperity can increase, stay constant, or decrease within those limits. I would likely agree with Jason’s perspective that at some point, we will reach limits to growth. If GDP grows at 2.5% per year, it will increase tenfold over a century, 100-fold over two centuries, and 1,000-fold over three. This exponential growth is clearly unsustainable. Yet, human ingenuity has always found solutions—take Thomas Malthus, who predicted agricultural limits to growth 200 years ago, only to be proven wrong.
Another example is the communication revolution. If we still communicated in the way of the 19th century, with post riders on horses, it would be unsustainable. The amount of food required for all those horses alone would be unmanageable. But we’ve found ways to communicate more efficiently, staying within environmental constraints. There are other examples, like the successful solution to ozone layer depletion, which shows that challenges can be solved through green growth strategies.
These examples make me optimistic that we can grow for a little longer while respecting environmental limits.
Now, let me turn to climate change. I’ll make three points that I’m sure will spark disagreement. First, I believe we can solve climate change without degrowth. Second, I think that a little bit of income growth actually helps solve the climate crisis. Finally, I will argue that the degrowth narrative is disastrous for the politics of climate change.
Can we solve climate change without degrowth? There’s a cottage industry of people calculating decarbonization pathways—how we can technologically, economically, and behaviorally bring our economies down to net zero by mid-century. These models, from organizations like the International Energy Agency and the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, show that it’s possible to stay within planetary boundaries without negatively impacting prosperity. The pathways don’t require reducing GDP—they focus on reducing carbon emissions through energy production and efficiency.
We can drastically cut carbon emissions by transitioning to renewable energy, electric vehicles, and hydrogen. We can also reduce energy consumption relative to GDP through better energy efficiency. These technological and economic shifts will be costly, but they won’t require degrowth. In fact, these solutions can lead to new jobs and economic opportunities, much like how the rise of IT and the iPhone sparked innovation and prosperity.
The second point is that a bit of growth or increased income helps in solving climate change. To transform our infrastructure to green energy, we will need massive investment—trillions of dollars annually. This capital must come from somewhere, and increasing the slice of GDP devoted to investment and government expenditure is crucial.
If you shrink the overall economy (i.e., through degrowth), it becomes much harder to gather the necessary resources for such a transformation. Moreover, people’s interest in environmental issues often wanes during economically difficult times. This has been shown statistically—climate change laws are passed more frequently during prosperous periods, and much less so during economic downturns. So, a little bit of growth, however measured, makes addressing climate change easier.
Finally, I believe the politics of the degrowth narrative is disastrous for the climate movement. Those who oppose net zero often portray it as a story of hardship. The narrative they use is about zealots who want to take away your steak, job, holiday, and car. It’s a compelling story that many people find convincing.
I went to the Net Zero Watch website, a platform critical of the UK’s net zero plan. Their narrative is full of statements like “Britain’s economic suicide plan” and “Biden’s green energy agenda is a beeline for degrowth.” This is the story they tell—the story of degrowth and sacrifice. If we, on the other hand, tell the story of green growth and prosperity, we can shift the conversation and counter their narrative. Why make the problem more difficult than it has to be? Why focus on hardship when we can focus on the opportunities and prosperity that green growth brings?
In conclusion, we have 30 years to solve this problem. Let’s focus on creating solutions that excite people, not ones that turn them off with a story of hardship. Let’s tell a story of prosperity that is not only true but also achievable.
Let me stop here.
Video 2: How to secure a thriving future: Sam Finkhauser
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Download this video clip.Video player: Video 3: How to secure a thriving future: James Hickel
Transcript: Video 3: How to secure a thriving future: James Hickel
James Hickel
We stand at a difficult juncture in history. To quote Antonio Gramsci, the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born.
So let’s start with the old world. The global economy is driving dangerous ecological breakdown with existing government policies. We’re headed for 3.2° of global heating this century within the lifetimes of present generations. Humans have never lived on such a planet. Scientists warn of severe displacements, crop yield decline, species extinction and political upheaval. And climate is not the only crisis that we face. We’re also overshooting five other planetary boundaries, including a staggering collapse of biodiversity.
This is not because of ignorance or individual behaviour or a lack of concern. It is due to structural features of the capitalist economy. And by capitalism here I do not mean markets and trade and businesses. These existed for thousands of years before capitalism, and they’re innocent enough on their own. What distinguishes capitalism from other economic systems is that it is organised around and dependent on perpetual growth, ever increasing levels of industrial production.
It’s the first and only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history. If it does not grow, it collapses into crisis, which happens, of course, every few years, with the devastating consequences for working class people and the poor. This system is profoundly unstable. Crucially, also, capitalism is undemocratic. Decisions about what to produce and how to use labour and resources are controlled by the 1% who own the majority of corporate shares and who appoint the directors of firms.
And as far as they are concerned, the purpose of increasing production is not primarily to improve people’s lives or to achieve specific social goals. It is not about use, value or social progress. Rather, for them, it is to extract and accumulate an ever increasing quantity of profit that is the overriding objective. And this leads to perverse forms of production, such as SUVs instead of public transit or gadgets designed to break down and increased product turnover.
The result is that we have an economy that massively overuses resources and energy and yet, remarkably nonetheless still fails to meet basic human needs. It is dangerously inefficient.
Now scientists are clear that it is the rich economies of the global North that are overwhelmingly responsible for the ecological crisis. Their use of energy and resources is extremely high and vastly in excess of what we know is required to meet human needs, even at a good standard. What is more, growth in the global North relies on a large net appropriation from the Global South. This is draining poor countries of resources and energy necessary for developments, colonising their atmosphere and ecosystems, and offshoring the social and ecological costs of growth onto vulnerable communities.
And yet, despite this immense production and appropriation, in the US, which is the richest country in the world, 1/4 of all people live in substandard housing, half cannot afford healthcare. In the UK we have 4.3 million children living in poverty.
Why? It’s because the enormous productive capacity of these countries is organised in the interests of capital rather than in the interests of people.
So what do we do? What does the new world look like? For 50 years, our ruling classes have promised that green growth will save us. They say that efficiency improvements will allow capital to continue increasing production and profits, while at the same time reducing ecological impact to sustainable levels.
It sounds nice, but of course it hasn’t happened. And now scientists are challenging this narrative on empirical grounds.
Let’s start with emissions. We know, of course, that it is possible to absolutely decouple GDP from emissions. If that wasn’t possible, we’d be doomed. And this happens by shifting to cleaner energies. Indeed, several nations are already on this path. But what we face here is a question of speed. To meet the Paris Agreement target, we have to cut emissions in half in seven years and reach 0 by 2050. And remember, that is a global average target. Rich countries must decarbonise faster than this, since they’ve contributed most to cumulative emissions. That’s a basic climate justice principle.
This requires a rapid rate of mitigation, and growth makes this task extremely difficult. The reason is because more production means more energy demands, and more energy demands makes decarbonisation harder to achieve. It’s like trying to run down an escalator that is accelerating upward against you.
Green growth proponents know this problem, and they deal with it in several ways that are apparent in the green growth scenario models. First, they assume efficiency improvements big enough to achieve an unprecedented decoupling of GDP or production from energy to an extent that is not supported by the empirical literature. And the main problem here is that in a growth oriented economy, savings from efficiency are leveraged to expand the process of production and accumulation, thus wiping out many of the gains.
The second feature is that these green growth scenarios assume a mass deployment of speculative negative emissions technologies, mostly in the form of BECCS, which stands for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. This would require biofuel plantations up to three times the size of India, with substantial deforestation, biodiversity loss, and constraints on human food systems. So you solve one crisis while exacerbating others. Moreover, BECCS is unproven at scale, and if it fails, we’re stuck in a hothouse trajectory from which it would be impossible for us to escape.
This is a dangerous gamble with the future of human civilization and all of life on Earth.
Third, green growth scenarios maintain excess energy privilege in the Global North and among the rich. By suppressing energy use in the Global South and by appropriating southern lands for biofuel plantations. That’s built into these models, this approach perpetuates colonial inequalities. It is clearly immoral and unjust.
Finally, even if we imagine these problems away, we have to deal with another issue. Regardless of the type of energy that we use, more growth means more material extraction, which is the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss and ecosystem damage. Several major scientific reports in recent years have found that sufficient reductions in material use are unlikely to be achieved if growth continues as it is in rich nations, even in high efficiency scenarios.
This is not good enough. We can and we must do better. In our vision for the new world, we must be attentive to scientific evidence and insistent on global justice.
In its latest reports, the IPCC points out that scholarship in degrowth offers an alternative. Now some people will quickly assume that degrowth is somehow anti-technology. This is not accurate. In fact, degrowth embraces efficiency improvements and feasible and safe technological change, but it recognises that this alone is not enough and therefore also calls for rich nations to transition to a post-capitalist eco-social economy, abandon growth as an objective and focus instead on equity, sufficiency and human well-being.
We need to recognise that when it comes to well-being, it’s not aggregate production that matters. What matters is what we are producing, whether people have access to essential goods they require and how income is distributed.
This focuses the mind on what is important and the first step is that we need to decommodify and expand essential public services: healthcare, education, housing, public transit, energy, water, Internet, nutritious food. Mobilise the productive forces to ensure that everyone has what they need to live a good life, regardless of fluctuations in aggregate output. This stabilises the economy, directly cuts the cost of living and improves the welfare purchasing power of income.
Second, introduce a public job guarantee with workplace democracy and living wages to empower people to participate in the most important collective projects of our generation, building renewable energy capacity, insulating homes, restoring ecosystems. This approach abolishes economic insecurity, improves the bargaining power of labour, delivers high levels of well-being and enables us to pursue radical climate action without anyone getting hurt.
This is the bread and butter of a just transition. In other words, we need to improve socially necessary sectors and with this foundation in place we can then scale down socially less necessary forms of production: private jets, SUVs, air travel, mansions, beef, fast fashion, single use packaging, advertising and obviously the widespread practice of planned obsolescence.
In other words, forms of production that are organised around capital accumulation and elite consumption and which are largely irrelevant to human well-being. As part of this we can of course also introduce policy to extend product life spans and guarantee rights to repair. If our products last twice as long, we will consume half as many, right?
Next, we need to curtail the purchasing power of the rich using policy tools such as wealth taxes and maximum income ratios. This may sound radical, but think about it. It is irrational and unjust to continue to devote energy and resources to supporting an over-consuming class in the middle of an ecological emergency.
Now this is powerful in terms of climate mitigation because policies like these would dramatically reduce energy use and allow us to achieve a much faster transition to renewables. And as our society requires less aggregate production, we can shorten the working week, give people more free time and share necessary labour more evenly.
This approach has been shown to have a strong positive effect on health, mental well-being and gender equality.
Finally, the central pillar of degrowth scholarship: Economic democracy. Democratise workplaces. Democratise public services. Democratise the media. We know empirically that when people have democratic control over production, they choose to use resources more wisely, they focus on what is required for human welfare, and they sustain ecosystems into the future.
Radical democracy is the antidote to a socially and ecologically destructive economy. It should therefore come as no surprise that core degrowth policies happen to be wildly popular. Universal services, a job guarantee, working time reduction, living wages, an economy focused on well-being and ecology rather than growth.
Polls and surveys repeatedly show strong majority support for these ideas and official citizens assemblies in Spain and France recently have called for the very policies that I’ve mentioned.
With this path we can build a more efficient, more rational, more just economy that is capable of ensuring good lives for all with less energy and resources.
People often say that 1.5° is dead. There’s no feasible path to sufficiently rapid decarbonisation. But this is only true if we assume continued growth in rich countries. If we liberate ourselves from this assumption, then 1.5° is back on the table.
Models show that with a post-growth, post-capitalist transition, we can achieve our ecological goals and improve social outcomes at the same time. It is technologically feasible, ecologically coherent, socially just and anti-colonial.
That is a future worth fighting for. And fight we must, because none of this will happen on its own. You’ll require an extraordinary struggle against those who benefit so prodigiously from the existing structure of the economy.
But so is every struggle for a better world. Thank you.
Video 3: How to secure a thriving future: James Hickel
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