Blue Earth Summit

And, while it will likely upset all sorts of apple carts, it so closely chimes with my own thinking that I thought I would try to capture its essence here. And there’s no better way of doing that than relaying the author’s thoughts in their own words.

A Few Words on Green Growth

By way of further background, I coined the term “green growth” back in 1987. So, when I co-founded SustainAbility in 1987, in pre-Internet days, its tagline was “The Green Growth Company.” The idea was in part based on my experience with Japan’s MITI (Ministry of International Trade & Industry), which strategically ran down increasingly obsolete sectors of the economy while helping build out new ones. The notion was also central to books I did at the time, including Green Pages and The Green Capitalists.

Now, some forty years later, if you ask ChatGPT why the green growth concept is still useful but also increasingly challenged, you get the following responses:

Why useful: It offers a pragmatic framing, aligning ecological goals with economic incentives. By suggesting growth and sustainability can coexist, it’s more politically and socially acceptable than calls for “degrowth” or “post-growth.” It encourages policies, technologies, and financial flows toward clean energy, circular economy, and efficiency improvements. Governments, businesses, and development agencies find common ground in a narrative that does not appear anti-growth. International organizations (OECD, World Bank, UN) use it as a framework to guide transitions without destabilizing economies. And it provides a positive vision, countering the idea that sustainability only means sacrifice.

Why challenged: Critics argue that absolute decoupling of economic growth from resource use and emissions is rarely observed at the global scale, especially at the speed and scale needed for climate targets. Then there are the “rebound effects.” Efficiency gains often lead to increased consumption (e.g., the Jevons paradox), offsetting environmental benefits. Even “green” activities (renewables, batteries, infrastructure) require mining, land, and energy—shifting rather than eliminating pressures. Growth-oriented models may also reinforce global inequalities if benefits are unevenly distributed or if rich countries “green” themselves by outsourcing extractive impacts to poorer ones. And so movements like degrowth, post-growth, and the wellbeing economy argue that pursuing endless growth—green or otherwise—is incompatible with finite planetary boundaries.

OK, but what does degrowth mean?

Adam Dorr defines “degrowth” early on in his highly readable book, but some might consider him a little partisan. So, to guarantee a degree of neutrality, let’s ask ChatGPT to define the term:

According to ChatGPT, degrowth calls for a planned, democratic reduction of material and energy use in wealthy economies, to bring human activity back within ecological limits while improving social wellbeing. It’s not about chaotic economic collapse or austerity. Instead, it’s about deliberate downscaling of overconsumption and resource use. And it moves away from GDP growth as the primary measure of success, toward wellbeing, equity, and ecological health.

It is championed because:

Continuous growth in production/consumption is incompatible with climate and biodiversity limits. Critics of green growth argue that absolute, global, and fast-enough decoupling of GDP from emissions/resources hasn’t been shown. Degrowth emphasizes redistribution, reducing inequality, and ensuring sufficiency for all, rather than wealth accumulation for a few. And it promotes alternative routes to prosperity, including the wellbeing economy or doughnut economics—thriving without endless expansion.

Examples include:

Shorter working weeks and job sharing, stronger public services (health, education), limits on resource extraction and pollution, encouraging repair, reuse, sufficiency over consumerism, and redistribution (e.g., wealth or carbon taxes, and universal basic services).

Key misunderstandings

Here we are informed that, “Degrowth is often misread as anti-progress or anti-development. In reality, it mainly targets overdeveloped, high-income economies where growth no longer improves wellbeing but drives ecological overshoot.”

So, what is the “degrowth delusion”?

Which now brings us back to Adam’s new book, which is very far from reassured by such definitions. As for his intended audience, he explains that he is targeting:

...decision makers in government ministries, corporate boardrooms, and nonprofit organizations who are focused on actually solving our environmental challenges and not just posturing or virtue signaling. It is for genuine environmentalists, including many of my fellow environmental scientists and scholars, who are committed to the actual goal of healing our wounded world and sense something deeply wrong with their apprehensions. It is for everyone who cares about both human flourishing and planetary health, and who suspects—correctly—that we don’t have to make an impossible choice between them.

It is soon very clear that he won’t be pulling his punches:

Many of us have had the same nagging feeling in the back of our minds: degrowth is nonsense. We know it instinctively. When someone tells us the solution to poverty is to make everyone poorer, alarm bells go off. When they claim the path to environmental sustainability requires dismantling the very systems that could deliver clean technologies at scale, our BS detectors start pinging. When they insist that human progress itself is the enemy, despite millennia of evidence to the contrary across every domain of concern, every fiber of our being rebels against such cynical and nihilistic rubbish.

He explains that he is not aiming at the ivory towers of the academic world:

This book is for a general audience, not an academic one. But why? After all, degrowth has its deepest roots in the academy, where it has metastasized through environmental studies departments and humanities faculties around the world, so isn’t that where the intellectual battle should be fought?

Absolutely not, he concludes, and for four key reasons:

First, the academic High Priests of degrowth are entrenched ideologues who have built identities and careers on this orthodoxy. They won’t be swayed by evidence or argument, no matter how compelling. I know this because I was once one of their acolytes. During my graduate studies at the University of Michigan and UCLA, I was fully inculcated into the degrowth ideology. It took years of intellectual effort and honest self-reflection to wrestle free from its snare. Like any orthodoxy in the ivory tower, the degrowth priesthood has too much invested professionally and emotionally to ever abandon the Faith.

Second, engaging in academic debate about degrowth would mean descending into the most esoteric weeds from which the overwhelming majority of readers would glean no value. Parsing footnotes about planetary boundaries, debating the finer points of throughput accounting, and arguing about which metrics properly represent complex aggregations and floating signifiers like growth and wellbeing would obfuscate more than it would illuminate. These theatrics might impress a narrow subset of readers, but it would turn off the audience that matters most: the people actually making decisions that shape our collective future, whether in the halls of power, the c-suite, or all the rest of us in the day-to-day of our own lives.

Third, some or even most of the commitments of the staunchest degrowth ideologues have nothing to do with concerns about humanity’s ecological footprint. The academic degrowth orthodoxy is unapologetic about its mission to overthrow capitalism and radically restructure society with draconian government controls. As in other totalizing cults, the cloak of ‘green’ virtue that degrowth ideologues so proudly wear is a means to other ends, not the primary end in itself.

Fourth, and most importantly, degrowth simply does not merit an academic level of intellectual engagement. To treat it as a serious scientific proposition requiring careful scholarly refutation would be to grant it a legitimacy it does not deserve. Degrowth is trivially easy to debunk. Its fatal flaws are many and obvious to anyone willing to look. The real mystery isn’t why degrowth is wrong—it’s why so many smart people adhere to it despite its transparent absurdity.

Then comes the core of his argument:

Think of this book as an inoculation against a particularly virulent strain of intellectual contagion. Once you see how degrowth fits the pattern of other truly terrible ideas throughout history, you’ll recognize it for what it really is: not a solution to our environmental challenges, but an obstacle to solving them. Once you understand the resentment and misanthropy at its core, you’ll see why its proponents are so eager to tear down the very systems that could deliver environmental restoration at scale.

Our challenge: to do (exponentially) better

The solution to our rapidly evolving polycrisis, Adam argues, “isn’t to do less. It’s to do better. Degrowth stumbles right out of the gate because it fundamentally misunderstands what growth actually means. Growth is not about using more stuff. It is about creating more value. There are limits to physical stuff, but no meaningful limits to how much value we can create with the finite resources available to us here on Earth. This in turn means that degrowth fundamentally misunderstands technology.”

He argues: “Changing the amount of value our societies create in the form of goods and services is not a solution. The solution is to change how we create that value. It’s like drinking from a poisoned well—the solution isn’t less or more of the same toxic water, the solution is clean water.”

Then he zeroes in on the nature and scale of the transformations ahead of us. “We are on the cusp of a phase change for human civilization,” he says. “It would be extraordinary enough if even one foundational sector of the global economy were poised for disruption, but we are going to see energy, transportation, food, and labor all disrupted simultaneously over the next two decades. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of the transformation that lies ahead.”

Then he goes into overdrive:

Superabundant clean energy and labor will allow us to solve virtually all of today’s environmental problems. Deforestation, desertification, habitat fragmentation and loss, overfishing, coral bleaching, eutrophication and hypoxic dead zones, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, biodiversity loss, endangered species, invasive species, air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, soil contamination, and waste management—they will all become solvable over the next several decades.

...Even better still, the good news goes beyond just environmental challenges. These very same technologies will also help us achieve our social goals as well, because they are all massively democratizing and will smash existing geographic and socioeconomic barriers to human development. With clean superabundance, we can have prosperity for everyone, everywhere, without ecological harm. Humanity can thrive, and we can heal our planet at the same time.

Both/and

All of which is true, at least in principle. And the evidence compiled by RethinkX shows both what’s possible—and what’s already happening. But the outcomes of all this transformation will totally depend on the values and priorities of those leading the change.

If Vladimir Putin remains in charge of Russia, for example, we will see drones becoming ever-more sophisticated weapons of war, whereas if leading social entrepreneurs like Dr Muhammad Yunus were in the piloting seat we might expect drones to be used for things like the “last mile” delivery of vital vaccines, drugs and other necessities of life.

For me, this isn’t—and shouldn’t be—a matter of either/or. Instead, once again, we must adopt a both/and approach, knowing that vital insights will emerge from all these strands of thinking around growth, value and sustainability. For me, growth and degrowth were always opposite sides, even if intimately linked, of the green growth story. You grew the good industries, while hospicing the bad ones.

But for sheer momentum my vote would be with Adam Dorr’s trajectory—if we can work out how to ensure that our political and business leaders overcome their natural human inclinations and embrace (and invest in) much wider visions of progress. And that, ultimately, brings us back to politics.

Perhaps RethinkX’s next book can demonstrate how new forms of politics (and policy) can guide the coming transformations in directions that serve the interests of all generations, of all forms of life?

John Elkington is Founder & Global Ambassador at Volans. His personal website can be accessed here and his professional one here.

John will be speaking at Blue Earth Summit, see all speakers here.