Pandemic Climate Lessons: In the Face of Collapse, We Need Economic Degrowth
The change will not happen without joint efforts and much less is it a simple mission, but the pandemic presents us with an important fissure in the modus operandi of the world
People are gradually realizing the gravity of the pandemic plaguing the world. I believe that the coronavirus will completely change all ways of thinking and acting as a society. As always, the poorest and most vulnerable already emerge as the main victims of an unequal system. Amid the chaos, people are forced to remember we are social creatures: contracts, travels, meetings, weddings, studies, romances — all canceled. The social functions that were not postponed became spreaders for the disease that is not expected to have a cure anytime soon. We are more connected than ever; we depend more and more on each other, and we will only overcome this situation with a sense of collectivity and community action.
COVID-19 is a symptom of a greater disease that affects us as a global civilization: the capitalist system. It triumphs on the philosophical foundation of individualism, accumulation, and infinite economic growth. It has the majority of the world population and the very environment of which we are an integral part of its adversaries and everlasting losers. The moment is, therefore, favorable to present an alternative concept that has been developed by social scientists worldwide: economic degrowth. There are numerous discussions about the name, methods, formats, and possibilities about its execution. The scope of this article is to present a justification for its emergence and to support future discussions on the topic.
The scientific community has been pointing, for dozens of years, to what has been conventionally called the Anthropocene, a geological era marked by changes caused by human beings in the environment. The final decision on whether we have indeed entered a new era will be made in November in India, during the International Congress of Geology. Imagining a roller coaster-shaped timeline, we are at the apex of the path before the free-fall: a massive and catastrophic change to the lives of all living beings on earth.
One of the primary causes of this significant change since the industrial revolution is the mentality of infinite economic growth and consumerism, promoted by Global North countries and exacerbated by the entry of the countries of the South in the same model of consumption. Some scholars and social scientists began to point out this blunt flaw from the perspective of a planet and nature with finite resources, and suggest possible ways out of this deadly labyrinth in which humanity finds itself.
Today, the extinction rate of fauna and flora species is a thousand times higher than in prehuman ages. Projections point to a rate ten times higher than the current measure until the end of this century. This means that we are undergoing the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s life history, which is around 4.6 billion years old. To make matters worse, it would be the first time that mass extinction would take place in historical time, that is, within a human time scale of tens or hundreds of years, instead of thousands or millions of years. It would also be the first mass extinction caused by a single species, rather than massive events like asteroids or ice ages.
Earth has already endured five other mass extinctions. For it is not the environment or the planet that needs salvation. What is under debate is the extinction of our own species and more than two-thirds of all others we would bring with us. With the current rates of deforestation, pollution, and habitat destruction, we are putting all life support systems, including human life, in check.
Who is to blame?
Before talking about the current production system, we need to recognize that such human interventions are not exclusive to the dominant economic organization. In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari devotes an entire chapter to the extinction of large mammals and birds caused by the human species, homo sapiens. They mastered navigation techniques and reached other continents hitherto untouched by humans, like America or Australia, and annihilated several species through hunting and burning. “Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinction. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology,” he explains.
It is equally undeniable, however, that the industrial revolution has exponentially accelerated the environmental destruction. It is no coincidence that the Anthropocene was born concomitantly with the capitalist system. With the expropriation of communal lands and the dissolution of established social systems, we saw the introduction and growth of private property, which deprived the peasant mass of their means of subsistence (food and housing) and initiated the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism.
This new method of production is based on private property, profit, and the accumulation of wealth (money and goods). Basic macroeconomics uses a somewhat simplified scheme to explain the order of the economic course in society, called the circular flow of income. In this representation, as long as the dynamics are not interrupted, the system works perfectly well and expands as there is a continuous investment to increase production capacity. With increased capacity, the number of jobs and wages can be boosted. With an extra income available to families, it can be spent consuming the new products that have just been produced.
It is interesting to note how this closed-loop looks a lot like one of the basic models of environmental science on the functioning of the energy flow and natural capital.
This so-called productivist view is no longer exclusive to capitalism. It is possible to be productivist and seek a circular and expansive flow of production even in a non-capitalist economy, like in the Soviet economy. It also favored productivity and the use of natural and human resources to pursue economic growth and the production of goods and services, with no concern over environmental preservation. The idea behind productivism is that more merchandise and services bring greater prosperity, or happiness, to society — we will deal with that shortly.
The dilemma indicated by several ecological economists is that, in fact, the circular flow of income is not circular. If it was so, perhaps at least from an environmental perspective, capitalism could be functional (disregarding issues such as crises, social inequality, unbalanced accumulation of wealth, labor exploitation, etc.). In reality, the modern production cycle is linear, from input > production > consumption > disposal.
This aste is not useful for any other productive or natural cycle. Besides, discharges and pollution occur in various stages of this flow, from the extraction of resources, through production and consumption to the actual disposal itself. Thus, we extract natural resources, use a part of it, and dump a used product at the end that is not recyclable by nature. And we have been doing this for centuries, more and more intensively and in greater quantities. Have you ever stopped to think that we cannot continue to manufacture without natural raw material? Everything, absolutely everything we produce requires extraction of some natural material.
Herman Daly, considered the father of ecological economics, brought concepts from physics (thermodynamics) and ecology (nutrient cycling) to show that the input supply is finite. While the economy can grow indefinitely in theory, the global ecosystem is stable both in its ability to provide its material means, the production inputs — land, water, oil, rubber, wood, cellulose, energy — as well as in its ability to absorb and recycle waste and pollution.
So, on the one hand, we have an economic system that only works if there is growth in consumption and production. On the other hand, limited natural inputs are needed to guarantee this growth. The math in this equation does not add up.
Technology will not save us
Many capitalism and “free market” economy enthusiasts claim, however, that environmentalists are alarmists. The logic used is that our species has managed to dominate science to a point in which technological progress can reduce our dependence on natural resources. With increased productivity, they say, it is possible to do more with less. An addendum is needed here. Even if we demanded less natural resources to produce due to technological efficiency, environmental degradation is one of the critical factors that threaten the existence of humanity — emission of polluting and toxic gases and reduction of species that offer ecosystem services free of charge to everyone, including ourselves. Now let’s get back to technology.
There is an equation known to environmental scientists and ecological economists since the 1970s called the IPAT model. Despite many criticisms (some relevant), this model seeks to simplify and expose the main variables responsible for environmental impact (I).
I = P x A x T
“P” refers to the population or number of people. “A” stands for affluence or income. Or even GDP, production, the number of products and goods produced. A crucial detail about this is that advocating limits to population growth (P) has been seen as an infringement of fundamental human rights. Reducing income (A), in turn, means economic degrowth, which is anathema to any country today. So the only variable left to be changed is “T,” which brings the concept of technology or technological advancement. If T decreases, it means that we are achieving higher productivity because technology has advanced.
Technology and science have significantly improved productivity and resource use over the past few decades. Learning how to convert energy from one form to another, as Harari explains in Sapiens, was one of the great precursors of the industrial revolution and made it possible to stop relying exclusively on solar energy and natural cycles to produce food and products. We were able to expand production capacity and to use machines in factories, lands and to send consumer goods worldwide.
Recent history shows, nevertheless, that there has never been a decrease in the total environmental impact resulting from increased productivity or technological advancement. Precisely because the economic system works solely based on growth, efficiency has never acted against it. It drives growth by limiting the quantity of input, i.e., lowering the cost of production. This, in turn, stimulates the demand for these goods that can now be cheaper and more accessible, promoting… economic growth. Far from restraining the total production, technological progress serves to increase it, by reducing its costs.
As Tim Jackson puts in Prosperity without Growth in the chapter dedicated to the capitalist system deadlock, “efficiency is a grand idea. And capitalism sometimes delivers it. But even as the engine of growth delivers productivity improvement, so it also drives forward the scale of throughput,” albeit more efficiently.
It may seem obvious, yet it is necessary to write and repeat ad infinitum: in essence, technology is one of several tools that we need to use for a transition to a genuinely sustainable society. It is not, and never will be, the solution itself. Public policies, government efforts, laws, social changes, and in the collective imagination will be necessary to find alternative routes.
Growth, development, and happiness
Once we understand the current functioning of our society and how we arrived at the prevailing climatic and environmental crisis, it is necessary to counter-argue the fallacy repeated to exhaustion by some economists. That economic growth is required and must be pursued at any cost because it is synonymous with well-being.
The accompanying paradigm to growth is economic development. Economists (at least honest ones) distinguish both concepts carefully. While growth is linked only to the increase in the country’s GDP, regardless of income concentration, economic development refers to a diverse range of socioeconomic indicators such as inequality, the income level of the different extracts of a national population, number of people in a poverty situation, etc. Pursuing economic development is, therefore, in theory, a more noble goal than just aiming for growth. However, the terms are increasingly used interchangeably, especially by mainstream media.
An even more significant problem concerns the taxing role itself originated from the term economic development. Author Miriam Lang raises several objections to its unrestricted use. One is that the word expresses a promise to the so-called “underdeveloped” countries to participate in the way of life (a.k.a. consumerism) of the industrialized countries of the North.
But data shows that incorporating the Northern life model by other countries is not viable. The “developed” nations use more than 70% of the earth’s natural resources and correspond to only 17% of the population. The United States alone is responsible for 30% of resource usage with only 4% of the world population. Promising to all the remaining 83% of the population that they will be able to consume — and pollute — at the same levels as “developed” countries is more than irresponsible. It is completely unrealistic. We have already exceeded the Earth’s capacity for resource renewal; there will not be enough raw material available to cope with this increase in production and consumption.
The second objection to the term economic development is its epistemology itself. Globalization and technological advances (videoconferences, air travel, multinational companies) give us the feeling that the distances between countries have never been so small. So using indicators such as GDP and per capita income was introduced as a guide for comparing the “standard of living” of all countries. In the second half of the twentieth century, a specific culture and way of life (from countries such as the United States and England) was established as aspirational. From now on, all other societies should resemble, desire, and work towards it.
“The ways of organizing society and the economy, the ways of conceiving the world and being in it, the knowledge and culture of a large part of the world population were disqualified as poor, dull, insufficient, for one reason only: they existed outside the capitalist system of production and market. This is the goal of development: to include territories not entirely permeated by capitalist logic and practices into the circuits of capital accumulation; transform people in consumers, subsistence farmers in wage or informal workers, natural capital in commodities, collective property in private and marketable. With only one objective: to increase the money flows and, consequently, the economic growth”.
Even if we differentiate the concepts, the issue around the relationship between economic growth/development and happiness/well-being remains open. An interesting way to explain it is to compare what prosperity and a good life are in countries with varying income levels.
A study conducted by the World Watch Institute showed that around 80% of Brazilians said they were happy with their lives. Austria and Japan, with GDP per capita in dollars almost ten times that of Brazil at the time of the survey (1995), had essentially the same percentage of happy citizens. The Philippines, with the lowest GDP among those mentioned, also remained around the same level of satisfaction with life.
We all know the basket of goods and services each family has access to is very different in each country. How to explain, then, equal degrees and a positive feeling of happiness and prosperity? Following the rationale, how can we explain Cuba’s social indicators being as high as those of countries with higher GDPs and almost unlimited access to the variety of goods provided by capitalism?
The answer, very well presented by several authors, among them Tim Jackson, is that prosperity, or — more simplistically — happiness, does not have a linear relationship to the amount of money or goods accumulated. Studies already show this fact, and, after a certain level of income, the general well-being feeling can even diminish, something called the paradox of happiness. Several factors, including freedom, generosity, and a community to rely on, are some other agents responsible for how happy people are. In Lost Connections, the author Johann Hari dedicates the book to explain why anxiety and depression became the biggest mental health problem of today.
So if all the inhabitants of the planet had the same income level and access to consumer goods available to an average citizen from a developing country, it would still be possible to be as happy as a citizen from an industrialized nation. However, this would occur at a much lower level of economic activity, with less production and, therefore, less environmental impact (given that basic human needs and other important factors were being met). We don’t need to consume (and pollute) like an American to have a good life.
What if the economy does not grow?
We have finally reached the article’s key conceptualization. The unraveled theoretical framework serves as a basis for arguing and understanding why thinking about degrowth and reducing the number of goods produced can, at least, be an idea open to debate. Many of the authors cited to discuss the best ways to do this, which countries should do it first, and what tools we have at hand to test and experiment with this new mindset.
Some practical strategies have been discussed and debated for years by environmental scientists and ecological economists long before we reach the disasters we are experiencing and watching daily on our smartphones with 5G technology. Among them, workload reductions while preserving salaries; investment in clean technology and energy; focus on ecological services and tourism; remuneration to southern countries by northern countries for the conservation of their forests; pollution and carbon emission taxes and fines. Each item on this list has dozens of articles debating its feasibility and operationalization. Besides, “ecological macroeconomics” models, new socioeconomic indicators, and novel frameworks for a postcapitalist society are emerging in the academic field.
There is no magic solution
A warning is due here: solving environmental problems or making capitalism green does not make it the ideal system. And the same is true when we talk about economic degrowth. In Post-Extractivism and Degrowth, Acosta and Brand evoke that a steady-state or degrowth economy can still maintain commoditized relationships and objectification of the social relations, both typical of capitalism. Therefore, degrowth or steady-state do not necessarily mean the end of capitalism or are anti-capitalist ideas in themselves.
Ecological economists also advise that even if we succeed in driving governments to change strategy and pursue economic degrowth, we would still have many problems of environmental degradation, pollution, and damage reversal to be done. It took us a few centuries to get to this situation, and we probably won’t solve it in one generation.
Still, we need to start somewhere.
Perhaps the most significant advantage of the degrowth concept is the symbology of economists daring to consider that the status quo is doomed; that the “free” market economy is flawed, non-omnipotent, and non-omniscient. We can finally get rid of the binary logic responsible for automatically limiting us to fans of a planned and centralized economy and/or an authoritarian and undemocratic state if we criticize the capitalist system.
When this Manichaeism is accepted, we assume that capitalism is synonymous with freedom and, in criticizing this system, we are criticizing individual freedom. However, a few questions are raised: what freedom do we speak of when we recognize the growing number of people who are forced to leave their homes and their lives because of climate change? What are the limits of freedom in an environmentally unjust and racist society, where half the population of the planet is impoverished and daily experiences the effects of the wealthiest’s environmental neglect?
What we observe is an incredible vocation for inactivity and silence of government officials when these questions arise. Despite this, several initiatives take place and are strengthened at the community level, in neighborhoods, favelas, and collectives under the terminology of solidarity economy, affection economy, and time-sharing, rejecting the foundations of the capitalist economy. There are also experiences of cooperatives for solar energy production and consumption, new ways of producing, sharing, and consuming, all converting an individualist logic to a collectivist one.
All of these ventures and their successes pave and strengthen the path towards steady-state or declining economy formats. Nevertheless, the real and necessary change will only happen if there are political capital and will to carry it out. This can be heeded since nation-states have failed miserably to meet sustainability goals and agreements that they have been signing for decades. Real and intentional slowdown experiences within the public sphere are still virtually nonexistent. It is only through awareness, demand, political struggle, and coordination between us, citizens, for effective public laws and projects that this transformation can take place.
The desolation and emergency brought about by the coronavirus pandemic prove that governments around the world have the capacity for this change to occur quickly. Reduce carbon emissions; the speed of production; giving up polluting means of transport; adopt teleworking and shorter hours; eating more local, less industrialized products, less meat, and dairy.
These are not impossible efforts — in fact, we saw we can massively execute them all over the world within days. After only a few weeks, it is already possible to see the blue sky again in some Chinese cities. Animals are reappearing in Italian cities after a one-week lockdown. These remarkable facts show us we are not that far from the possibility of achieving a greater equilibrium with non-human beings.
Is it possible to use this painful and frightening moment to build a post-coronavirus world? It may be optimism. Or perhaps the eagerness to hold on to the hope of a foreseeable future. The dream that we have the capacity to learn from immense tragedies and move towards a more equal, just, better society for all, humans and non-humans.
Written and translated by Carol Bardi
Originally published at modefica.com.br on March 18, 2020.
