This piece is not going to be my usual point-by-point debunking. First, I’ve been doing plenty of that already (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) and there is nothing special in Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World (2024) that would warrant a specific response. After listening to her interview with Rachel Donald on the Mongabay podcast, it is evident that the author’s understanding of degrowth is insufficient to engage in a constructive debate.[1] In the book, degrowth is only discussed once, in a 2,5-page long section where it is described as one idea that “won’t fix our problems.” According to her, this is because (a) growth is gradually decoupling from environmental pressures (the usual green growth hypothesis), and (b) because degrowth is socially untenable in a world where there is not enough income to eradicate poverty via redistribution alone (a hackneyed misinterpretation of degrowth, originally from a 2017 blog post by Branko Milanović).
My main reason for engaging with Hannah Ritchie’s book is a bit more subtle. In the conclusion, the author worries about how much energy is wasted fighting among environmentalists of different stripes, and that’s something I’m increasingly concerned about. Degrowthers, eco-modernists, collapsologists, ecofeminists, Transition Towners, survivalists, ecosocialists, green new dealers, etc. Everyone is convinced to have found the best solution. They’re like the super-heroes of The Avengers, except that they don’t fight together but against each other.[2] While there is value in healthy debate, these feuds too often degenerate into egocentric cockfights that damage the popularity of the very idea of sustainability.
Before being all nice and compromising, I just want to state for the record that there are a few arguments in the book that I find deeply problematic, sometimes scientifically inaccurate, sometimes politically naïve, or just unconvincing. But I won’t address them here, at least not the ones that do not directly relate to degrowth. My mission instead is to show that the concept of degrowth (which is unfortunately misrepresented in the book) could in fact fix the very problem that Hannah Ritchie wants to solve.[3]
Degrowth is ecologically unnecessary
Hannah Ritchie’s first argument is that degrowth is not necessary because high-income countries are currently managing to lower their ecological footprint while growing their GDP.
“[N]ew technologies are allowing us to decouple a good and comfortable life from an environmentally destructive one. […] In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertiliser use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer. The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply not true” (p.33, italics in original).
“Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy. It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong. Countries have slashed air pollution while growing their economies at the same time. Lower pollution, better health and a stronger economy? That sounds like the perfect sales pitch to me” (p.48, italics in original)
Before searching for agreement, let’s state two major disagreements. The first one has to do with the very definition of economic growth. One could debate whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a good proxy for “a good and comfortable life” or a “strong economy,” and whether its growth should be systematically considered an enrichment (see, for example, this paper estimating “wasted GDP” in the United States, or another measuring the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare for EU-15). Second, I would be curious to see actual studies (and not only the raw, unanalysed numbers from Our World in Data she uses throughout the book) showing proof that the environmental pressures she mentions are actually “all falling,” especially at times when GDP soars. Indeed, studies reviewing the scientific literature show that there is no absolute decoupling concerning material footprints (e.g., 1, 2), which is perhaps the most impactful environmental indicator since it accounts for more than 90% of damages on human health and biodiversity.
But let us admit for now that Hannah Ritchie is right and that GDP is indeed decoupling from all environmental pressures. The real question, as she herself writes, is “whether we can decouple these impacts fast enough” (p.35).[4] In the Mongabay podcast, she admits that the observed rates of decoupling are far from sufficient. A prime example is greenhouse gases. A 2023 study led by Jefim Vogel shows that only eleven countries[5] in the world have experienced an absolute decoupling of GDP and consumption-based greenhouse gases. Concerning the pace of emission reductions, these frontrunners would on average take more than 220 years to achieve near carbon neutrality, emitting 27 times their remaining 1.5°C fair-shares in the process. (This is only one study but there are many more, the consensual view being that the observed rates of decoupling are nowhere near the kinds of emission cuts we need to mitigate climate change.)
It is in this precise context that degrowth[6] becomes useful. The benefits of a downscaling of production and consumption is that it directly reduces the use of natural resources on top of what can be achieved with eco-innovations. In that sense, the two approaches are not strictly incompatible. Degrowth introduces “avoid” strategies, ways of slowing down certain economic activities like commercial aviation, car and meat production, or advertising. These savings are additional to those achieved via “improve” strategies like carbon compensation, electric cars, and meat alternatives. This is like a diet where you cut down on fat and sugary products (degrowth) while also changing the way you eat, shifting from processed food to homemade meals or taking smaller bites and taking the time to chew the food well before swallowing (green growth). All efficiency gains are welcome, but if they are alone not enough (which is the case today), why not complement them with sufficiency strategies?
Degrowth comes with its own political, social, and economic challenges, which is another discussion altogether, but it has the benefits of being fast, effective, and reversible. It is fast because it impacts footprints today. Closing national flight routes means less planes in the air today, compared to technological improvements in fuel efficiency that unfolds over longer periods of time. Degrowth is an exnovation protocol which consists in phasing out polluting infrastructure in the here and now. Additionally, as Jason Hickel argues, scaling down certain sectors and products could liberate factors of production which could then be remobilised in projects that accelerate the ecological transition. Think of the workers, factory lines, materials and energy being wasted manufacturing gas-guzzling SUVs when they could, if that category of product were to dwindle, focus on designing high-quality, low-emission buses and trains. Said differently, the more exnovation, the faster the innovation.
Degrowth is also effective by design or, one could say, fail-safe. If the most sustainable resource is the ones we can afford not using, there is a real case for minimising production and consumption as much as possible, starting with goods and services that contribute little to overall wellbeing. Compared to uncertain efficiency gains dependant on the speed and composition of technological progress, a reduction in production and consumption directly reduces production and consumption. This is why degrowth is considered a precautionary approach, one that focuses on preventing damage. The reduction in resource use and environmental impact is not an expected result, it is the very objective of its policy design. I’m not saying that this direct, planned downscaling of production and consumption is possible everywhere and for everything (these are the social uncertainties of degrowth). But, when applicable, it has the benefit of being relatively less uncertain than relying on technological progress. As Beth Stratford writes in a piece trying to reconcile the two sides of the growth debate:
“you don’t need to be a degrowth advocate to recognise the risks involved with relying solely on decoupling.”
Finally, degrowth has the advantage of being reversible. Anything we scale back today is something we can possibly resume producing in the future if new, cleaner technology allows it. Today, there are no ways of flying without emitting greenhouse gases, hence the need to fly less if we want to reduce the emissions of aviation. But if, at some point in the future, someone invents a new low-emission, low-material, low-everything plane, then we can sure start again flying more.
Let me do a short recap before switching to Hannah Ritchie’s second criticism of degrowth. If we do away with the question as to whether economic growth is a good indicator of prosperity and whether growth is actually decoupling from all environmental pressures in rich countries, there is room for agreement between degrowth-inspired sufficiency strategies and green growth-inspired efficiency measures. The essential point to grasp here is that the resource-cutting measures advocated in the name of green growth are more likely to be effective in a smaller, non-growing economy compared to a situation where levels of production and consumption constantly increase.
Degrowth is socially untenable
Here is the second reason, according to Hannah Ritchie, why degrowth “won’t fix our problems.” Even if producing and consuming less was ecologically necessary, it would remain socially problematic because the world cannot afford to see its overall level of wealth decrease.
“Degrowth argues that we can redistribute the world’s wealth from the rich to the poor, giving everyone a good and high standard of living with the resources already at our disposal. But the maths doesn’t check out. The world is far too poor to give everyone a high standard of living today through redistribution alone.” […] “If we pooled together all the money and assets – the wealth – of every country and individual in the world, there’s simply not enough to go around. The global economy would have to be at least five times bigger than it is today. Let me say that again: for everyone in the world to live on or close to the poverty line of rich countries, the global economy would need to increase five-fold! A world without any economic growth would remain a very poor one. A world with degrowth would be even worse” (pp.33-34, italics in original).
This narrative suffers from several problems. First, no one argues that all nations should stop growing. This would be ecologically ineffective because the majority of the world ecological footprint can be traced to a minority of wealthy households. This would also be socially unfair because one should expect regions of the world where needs remain unmet to further develop their productive capacities in order to secure decent living standards, meaning access to adequate housing, enough food, clean energy and water, sufficient healthcare, public transportation, etc.
Her second point is also mistaken: no one argues that the global South should only receive that portion of global income being degrown in the global North. World GDP is not a pie to be divided between humans; it is only an indicator of income flows, one that hides a diversity of different models of provisioning which only have in common the fact that they need energy, materials, and ecosystem services to function. (These misconceptions could have easily been avoided with a cursory reading of the literature on degrowth in relation to the global South – for example, 1, 2, 3, 4.)
The logic of degrowth is actually more sophisticated. One must lower global environmental pressures because we have already breached several planetary boundaries, that’s a fact. But one must do this while eradicating poverty, an objective that is consensual on both sides of the growth debate. This situation brings two conundrums. First problem: the remaining ecological budgets are not large enough to sustain both high-footprint lifestyles in already-rich regions of the world and an energy- and material-intensive process of development in places where needs remain unmet. Second problem: the nature-intensive lifestyles of the global rich exacerbate environmental disasters, which are predominantly suffered by low-income populations. The world’s poorest find themselves constrained both by resource scarcities and ecosystem collapse, making it almost impossible for them to achieve any kind of prosperity. Hence the degrowth credo: reducing resource consumption in affluent parts of the world to free up biophysical budgets for those who need it most while slowing down the ecological damage imposed to those who need it the least.
This applies to very concrete things. Take flying, for example, which causes 2% of global emissions. Only 2-4% of the world population fly internationally and roughly 10% fly at all. In 2018, there were almost 2 billion plane trips; high-income countries accounted for 40% of these trips and 1% of world population (around 70 million people) accounted for half of all these emissions. What these numbers show is that access to flying is unequally distributed in the world. A planned degrowth strategy would impose frequent flyers to fly less in order to reduce the overall number of flights, part of this saved-up carbon budget then becoming available for people needing access to more resources. To be very concrete, I, a rich French citizen, give up my week-end flight to Stockholm so that someone from today’s very poorest may one day have the possibility to visit another country, or just use that carbon-equivalent energy to do something else more essential.
Bottom line: degrowth is a strategy to accelerate the decrease of ecological footprints for the world’s richest, and this in order to leave as much breathing space for poorer populations who may need more energy, land, material, water, etc. in the years to come. Again, this is not conflicting with green growth measures to make economic growth in low- and middle-income countries as biophysically efficient as possible. Actually, it makes it easier: a planned degrowth in the global North would facilitate sustainable development in parts of the world where development is most urgently needed.
***
Perhaps the title of this piece is a bit too provocative. Even if Hannah Richie falls within the usual eco-modernist discourse, she is not obsessed with economic growth. This builds a good basis for agreement. Hannah Ritchie’s main objective is to decouple wellbeing from environmental pressures, which is the very raison d’être of degrowth, a French concept which emerged in 2002 as “décroissance soutenable et conviviale” (convivial and sustainable degrowth; for a history, see The political economy of degrowth, Chapter 5). In fact, the newer generation of degrowth-inspired studies have produced many useful insights as to how to socially prosper with lighter footprints, either looking at food and land systems, urban mobility, forestry, tourism, housing, fashion, and many more (to go further, see this online database of degrowth papers).
The growth question will remain controversial. That’s good if it keeps academics on both sides of the debate on their toes. But not all elements of that controversy are completely polarised. In fact, as the sustainability literature advances, I see more and more points of convergence where, given a bit of semantic compromising from each side, we could join forces in order to find new, better ways of making sustainability mainstream. To quote from Beth Stratford’s insightful text one last time,
“let us reach a truce and build a mass movement to take on the real enemies of environmental justice. The stakes are too high to do anything else.”
[1] Here is an extract from the dialogue between Hannah Ritchie and Rachel Donald (from 11 min 20 to 13 min 15):
H.R.: “In rich countries, growth or degrowth, I’m very agnostic…”
[At this moment, Rachel Donald intervenes to clarify what degrowth means.]
R.D.: […] “low and middle-income countries do need to grow their economies in order to raise their standards of wellbeing […] But in order to do this within planetary boundaries, we need to cap the continued expansion of the economic growth of wealthier countries, which has gone far and beyond wellbeing”].
H.R.: “Okay, I’m not strictly advocating degrowth in rich countries. You could say I’m agnostic to growth. There are a range of different metrics that we can focus on and that are more appropriate to focus on. You need global growth but in rich countries, I’m agnostic. If that’s the definition of degrowth, then okay, that’s degrowth.”
R.D.: “It seems a bit surprising to me that you don’t understand the definition of degrowth when you lambasted it in the book as not being a solution.
H.R.: “Hm. No, that’s what I said in the book. I said we need global growth because we need low and middle-income countries to grow and then, in rich countries, there are massive welfare benefits to redistribution, whether you have very strong economic growth or not in these countries does not really matter if you’re focusing on other metrics. […] I don’t believe in this North Star of GDP growth in rich countries as what we should be maximising, growth at all costs. Economic growth is just the increase in value of goods and services within an economy, and if rich countries are doing that in a way that is reducing carbon emissions and becoming more efficient, while their GDP grows, then I’m not against that. My focus is not on whether GDP and rich countries should be falling or rising. Often, degrowth is framed as it has to fall. My point is that it doesn’t have to fall.”
[2] I should say that this is not always the case. For example, the Wellbeing Economy alliance founded by Katherine Trebeck (The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown-Up Economy, 2019) is a good example of an initiative effectively building bridges between different schools of thought. One could also mention the Next System Project, which has united a diversity of critical minds in a broad discussion about system change (see, for example, the commons economy, commoning, economic democracy, participatory economics, or energy democracy). The books Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary (2019) and Degrowth in Movement(s): Exploring Pathways for Transformation (2020) are also good examples of how to build alliance between different epistemic communities.
[3] Beth Stratford has made a similar point in “Green growth vs degrowth: are we missing the point?” (2020): “For some this is a compelling and entertaining debate. But it is not going to be settled in a timeframe that is useful for maintaining a habitable planet. In the meantime, these adversaries are in danger of delivering a major own goal. Because the more time we spend in nerdy (and sometimes venomous) exchanges about decoupling, the less time we have to build the broad-based movement we need to take on the vested interests who benefit from the status quo.” Her main claim is that “there is more that unites than divide us,” and her point about strategic urgency is all the more valid in war-ridden 2024 than it was in 2020 when she published the piece.
[4] Here is the full quote: “Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact. In this book I’ll show that we can reduce our environmental impact and reverse our past damage while becoming better off. The big question here is whether we can decouple these impacts fast enough” (p.35). See also this extract from the chapter on climate change: “this doesn’t mean that rich countries are making reductions anywhere close to fast enough. They can, and should be, making them much faster. But it shows us that reducing emissions is possible. And it does not have to mean tanking the economy at the same time” (p.81, italics in original).
[5] In her TED talk “Are we the last generation – or the first sustainable one?” (April 2023), Hannah Ritchie says that “a long list of countries have increased GDP while reducing their emissions” (04min21, italics added). In the climate change chapter of the book, one section is titled: “Many countries have grown their economies while reducing their emissions – and not because they’re sending their emissions overseas” (p.80, italics added). Saying that a “long list” or “many countries” are experiencing an absolute decoupling of GDP growth from consumption-based emissions is a problematic overstatement.
[6] For a review of the literature on degrowth, see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
