I
Our author, Jason Hickel, recounts how Darwin was laughed off stage when he first presented his evidence of evolution. Hickel observes ‘Sometimes scientific evidence conflicts with the dominant world view of a civilisation’ and of course he thinks he has exactly that kind of evidence (p.25). I will focus most of the essay on reviewing the chapter on the technological solution to climate change. I go through all the evidence and add a lot more that has been published, supplemented by conversations with various professors. And that’s the key that turns the lock on this whole body of research. I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at degrowth (what a stupid name) if it wasn’t for the fact I can’t see past the evidence that technology alone is not going to save us. Something else needs to give. It could be a far cry from a total inversion of the system that Hickel calls for, but the evidence is clear we do need to do drastically more to cut emissions.
An economic anthropologist, Hickel retells 500 years of history in one chapter, and 70 years of history in another. In the latter chapters, Hickel provides an edifice of research that gives hope to the future instead of ecological collapse. Most readers will already have been persuaded or inoculated to this vaguely Marxist retelling of history, however it is refreshed by the anthropological insights regarding our relationship to nature. Most readers may eye-roll or sweetly smile at the compelling evidence that we are healthier and happier and more democratic when ecological; I don’t know.
This blog and its affiliates have long been asking for a test, a crisis of faith. There is an unquestioned assumption in our society and once you see it, you truly see how it is everywhere hiding in plain sight: Growthism; the notion that growth of any kind is good. Whether the assumption is wrong is down to the evidence, but even just realising how prolific growth is in public conversation everywhere should be cause for the philosopher's re-examination of it. Growthism ends up looking rather like another name for Moloch in (nearly) everyone’s favourite SSC essay M_editations on Moloch._ Scott was confounded that some lines in the poem could relate to capitalism. With Hickel’s retelling of our relationship with nature through an anthropologist’s eye we will see how some more of those lines make sense. For example:
“Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!”
The whole book is very well argued, often taking turns between positions on an issue and then adding evidence. The various chapters kaleidoscope into a crisis of faith. Only this time the stakes are much higher “this time we don’t have the luxury of pretending the science doesn’t exist. The time, it’s a matter of life and death”. Yet the paradigm shift required is not yielding to the scores of empirical evidence, not even to scientific consensus; science is being subjugated to capital. Rationality is in an “incomprehensible prison”:
“Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb”
The first line, it’s obvious. The system is eating itself. But the second line, and I’ve not heard this interpretation before, is a pun, I believe. “Whose ear is a smoking tomb” (i.e. death); or deaf. Moloch is deaf to the evidence all around it, do we need to be deaf too?
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II
Hickel supposedly presents us with that rarest of things in anti-capitalist diatribes, an anti-capitalist polemic with a solution. “How Degrowth will save the world” is the subtitle to Hickel’s book Less is More. Unfortunately, it is quite short on steps on how Degrowth will save the world but it is a brilliant and novel take on why we need something different from our current model of growth-addicted capitalism. Whilst it has only 5 to 13 recommendations for how to change capitalism to be more friendly it does do a fantastic job of explaining how we got so addicted, and best of all is the section that demonstrates with ‘rock-solid’ evidence that technology cannot save us. Seen through this schema that chapter alone is an incredibly important contribution to the literature on the causes of ecological collapse. It is also the best book on the topic that dispels all the usual myths about the movement: the extreme technophobia and asceticism; the embrace of poverty and recession; the jolly march back to subsistence farming, living in caves and iPod nanos. And replaces those myths with well researched arguments that are influencing many fields.
Degrowth is a dumb name. Hickel defines degrowth in a way that is incompatible with capitalism. I think a form of capitalism could incorporate all of Hickel’s points, removing ‘growthism’, as he calls it, and respecting planetary boundaries. Wage labour and private property would still be intact. Markets and trade, even the development of technology, have nothing to do with capitalism and have been around for thousands of years, so they’d stay. Japan is going this route right now with no plan for GDP growth and only a plan to grow the green sectors[49]. If you thought Degrowth was a dumb name, I’m not even going to tell you what it's called in Japan, and I especially hope Republicans never find out. Anyways, degrowth is surging in popularity (and misunderstandings) so I wanted to get at the core of why so many serious ecological scholars think it has value: that all revolve around the viability of the technological solutions, have I said that already? And for many, justice too. Hickel is a core proponent of this movement which is growing. Papers written about Green Growth and Degrowth used to come at a ratio of ten to one, now it’s only two to one. The IPCC finally mentioned Degrowth in the 2022 mitigation report[50] (For example,“High potential for mitigation lies in... cutting emissions of those whose basic needs are already met“ p.514). Anyway, Degrowth is a dumb name.
I want to propose that the name is so ugly and stupid that I want to stop calling it that. That it won’t go anywhere with that name. A 400-page strategy book on Degrowth has come up with ‘social-ecological transformation’; catchy right? I am not creative so instead I want to give both sides ugly names so that we can focus on the arguments and evidence rather than being switched off by the stupid things we’ve heard of in the media regarding both sides. Green Growth is a lovely name. Green, we need it. Growth, we’re addicted to it. Green Growth, yes, please! So, Degrowth should reclaim its turf on Green Growth because that’s what it is. It is the ‘well-being economy’. It is democratic, differentiated growth, as Hickel explains.
So, I have it in my mind that there is a spectrum I want to use for this essay. On the left, is Green Growth with degrowth tendencies. It is exclusive Green Growth. On the right is Green Growth with capitalistic tendencies which is inclusive Green Growth. It is just regular capitalism, with a few constraints and incentives tacked on to make it more green, depending on the context. Critics would say that Green Capitalism is a ‘contradiction in terms’ but that’s beyond the scope of this review. Whether those bits tacked on are enough to keep us within planetary boundaries is a major hurdle for inclusive Green Growth. Some governments (like Japan mentioned above) are rolling out what seems to be something of a central position, balancing Capitalist and Degrowth tendencies, a real sweet spot with optimal compatibility for the two ostensible opposites. Sometimes the way Hickel defines ‘degrowth’ makes it incompatible with capitalism, so maybe exclusive green growth can be the compatible version of it.
Hickel’s definition is “social and ecological project that seeks to intentionally reduce economic activity and resource consumption in order to achieve ecological sustainability and social justice”. However it is incomplete until you contextualise it. For example, for much of the Global South ‘social justice’ would mean an increase in economic activity and Hickel is in full support of it. The aim is increasing people’s well-being.
Much later in the essay, I’ll throw out some unscientific observations that I think reflect the reality on the ground. What Green Growth in the USA and in the EU might look like, and what inclusive Green Growth could be at risk of becoming everywhere. How the USA has no chance in hell of getting anywhere close to exclusive Green Growth, and how we can make use of that fact. And how the EU has unique existential risks that compel even the elites to engage with exclusive Green Growth to some extent. Lastly how inclusive Green growth seems to be a kind of temporarily sheathed ‘red growth’: eco-apartheids, neo-colonialisms, resource wars, walls, mass migrations and fascism(s), even climate Mao(s). Scared, angry people plus scared, displaced ‘Other’ people - if there ever was a formula in the social sciences this was it - just like two plus two makes four, this makes fascism. We’ve seen it before, we’re seeing it already, and unfortunately, we will be seeing a lot more of it.
Hickel and many of his camp have given up speaking to elites and are forming social movements. I think elites would do well to listen to their critique, not only because it will affect them but also because, even if they don’t want to cede everything to them, allowing their vision to grow will do the best at keeping social movements positive, constructive and, democratic. It is the best pressure valve on uglier forms of capitalism and far-right movements.
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III
I was always a fan of those books as a child where you could pick and skip ahead to different chapters and circle back around to get a different experience. I’ll do exactly that and start with the chapter ‘Will technology save us?’
Nearly every review of this book that I could find skips over the chapter on technology. You can’t even find the basic buzzwords like ‘decoupling’ or ‘CCS’ (Carbon Capture and Storage). If technology can save us, then everything else can wait. It's an ugly view because technology doesn’t get created or deployed in a vacuum and so this tactic has huge potential for misuse given the paradigm we exist in. It has been rebranded as ‘green growth’ (of the inclusive kind, meaning all growth, in all forms of consumption). And indeed it is already being misused by fossil capital. I was once, ashamed to admit it, ready to ‘bite the bullet’: planet first, ethics and global injustices later. I’m not talking about green-lighting colonisation or birth control of the people in the Global South (Mr. Gates has got that covered; ‘family planning philanthropy’ - “degrowthers” really need to take note of the importance of branding). I am talking about the fact that ecological collapse takes primary concern over all other relatively ‘lesser’ issues. It is an attractive view for most readers of this article. If technology can solve ecological collapse, we must go for it and try to be as mindful of ethics as possible in the way forward. But that all gets set aside because technology can’t save us, as the evidence is clear. Not alone, anyway. It will play a crucial role, as all exclusive green growthers believe, but it can’t be everything. (And when I say ‘us', I do mean rich people too. I think the rich have got it into their heads that ‘shits pretty bad but I’m gonna be cool’. More on that later.)
Hickel opens the chapter with a quote from Rex Tillerson who said ‘climate change is an engineering problem’. That keeps us within our current paradigm of growthism (as Hickel calls it) and an economic system that is not necessarily a problem if it’s claims are supported by evidence and therefore ultimately solve the task at hand: halting or reversing ecological collapse. Which it doesn’t. In isolation it could solve the climate change crisis (usually these people misunderstand climate change as the emissions crisis which is why you start to hear about 'ecological collapse' more often). But in conjunction with the other ‘cascading’ and intersecting crises that make up the wider ecological crisis, calling it rhetoric is almost too charitable. It wildly misses the point, it is simply a misunderstanding. Hickel notes in an earlier chapter how this tendency to think of crises in reductionist terms is part of the problem with our way of thinking. What about biodiversity loss? Nitrogen cycle? Ocean acidification? How the engineering has a significant material impact that interacts with multiple other parts of the ecosystem?
The thing to notice as we delve into this chapter, which Hickel points out many times, is that we are talking about technological solutions to the emissions and energy problems. As we’ve mentioned before, the emissions and energy problem is connected to the wider ecological collapse and so any solutions to these problems need to be mindful of that wider problem. Even exclusive green growth is going to unavoidably contribute hugely to ecological collapse. Not only that though, Hickel points out that even facing the problem on its own terms, technology doesn’t actually deliver the solutions to the emissions crisis. It cannot do that so long as we remain in the growth paradigm, at least not based on current evidence.
Hickel provides an example of the clean energy transition. Since 2000 we have added 8 gigawatts of clean energy power infrastructure which is a great feat in and of itself. Yet, despite this addition of 8 gigawatts of clean energy, over the same period, we have added 48 gigawatts of energy demand in our global economy due to growth. So whilst that means that 8 gigawatts now might be clean, we are still net 40 gigawatts of dirty power. This doesn’t of course have to be the case but the problem is that there is little evidence that this won’t be the case. Perhaps, let us assume, clean energy keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, as is seen in the evidence, and we do end up getting nearly entirely renewable energy. What, Hickel asks, will we do with that energy?
The problem with compound growth is that it is truly huge when you think about it. With a 3% compound growth of the global economy we double in size that economy every 23 years. Every 23 years we have an economy double the size accompanied by a near doubling in material demands (Unless significant decoupling is possible, more on that later). When it comes to things like the clean energy transition it means that we can render nearly meaningless the progress that we do make.“It is like digging a pit whilst throwing some soil back in” Hickel writes. It just isn’t working. ‘That means adding an economy the size of Britain’s to the world economy next year’.
The first problem is that in the time that we are transitioning, we are likely to continue to emit a huge amount of CO2e along the way, and if we are not reducing emissions drastically then we are going to need another solution. (Let’s not forget that we are zoned in on the emissions problem, we still don’t have a solution to the transgression of other planetary boundaries, like the biodiversity crisis) This is where Carbon Capture and Storage technologies come into play. Hickel recounts the history of these technologies and how they were explicitly created as a ‘speculative risk management’ technology[51]. Yet, for a while now, they have been the dominant assumption in our transition plan. Hickel explains that 101 of 116 pathways rely on them as the dominant assumption in the IPCC (p.247 ebook). So they are an essential piece of technology. But all the more stress is placed on them because we won’t relinquish our obsession with wasteful ‘growth’.
Relying on these “might work… but if not, it’s game over. Once you jump you can’t change your mind”. Is it rational to close out our other options? Once we bet on these we really are stuck. There is a back story, Hickel writes. In the early 2000s, IPCC modelers realised that the emissions reductions required were incompatible with continued economic growth (p129-130). But leaders kept saying that the only way to reduce poverty was through growth, that it would be a ‘tough sell’ at international negotiations, especially for key nations like the United States. Of course, we know there are many ways to reduce poverty they are just not palatable, let’s say, to our current structure. What’s really at stake is the economic system that justifies the status quo. Anyway, rather than see if there was another path between global ecology and economic system change, the IPCC modelers incorporated this ‘fact’ into their models. They "created new political facts, such that ambitious mitigation targets cannot seemingly be achieved without NETs” rather than through planned reductions in emissions (Beck 2018). The power of the modelers to make worlds is so totalitarian and undemocratic, even Stalin might be impressed. So, when it came to the Paris accord the added pledges come nowhere close to keeping under 1.5, not even under 2. How does that make sense? Hickel unreasonably asks how that could be the case …
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IV
“Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums.”
Ok, so Ginsberg didn’t write this one but Scott did. It encapsulates the shackled framework and magical thinking that is attached to the CCS technology (and its application to smokestacks…).
Scientists have been warning about these technologies since the very beginning, Hickel writes. The numbers were small at first but now there is a widespread critique of our reliance on these technologies and Hickel says the evidence against them is ‘rock-solid’. In 2014, fifteen scientists wrote a letter critiquing them. In 2015, another forty wrote a letter. Now they are even criticised in one IPCC report whilst still being heavily relied upon in another. You’ve probably heard of them by now and that is actually what is even more worrying. If I am not wrong, you will have heard of Carbon Capture and Storage in the context of perhaps the Inflation Reductions Act or, in general, to do with abating the fossil fuel industry. This is where CCS is attached to the smokestack of a plant. Hickel’s book does not even discuss this kind of CCS in detail. That is because in academia and in the IPCC reports, the CCS technology was deemed far too new and ‘speculative’ at the time (2019) that they were not even included in the IPCC report in any major pathways.
Growth has pushed us over the edge so quickly that we now not only rely on the risky BECCS but now the IPCC includes NETs (Negative emissions technologies) which are other forms of Carbon Capture and Storage. “BECCS bears additional risks for biodiversity, livelihoods, and intertemporal carbon balances.” (Creutzig et al 2021). But Carbon Capture and Storage bear so many risks extending to so many sectors, primarily to do with extending the social license for extending and even expanding the fossil fuel industry (Keyßer et al 2021).
There are so many grand claims from corporate brochures and policymakers but keeping with Hickel’s method let us take a look at the evidence to get an idea of why he did not even mention them in his book, published in 2019. I do this because I am sure that it is CCS and not BECCS that the average reader will have heard of. When it comes to issues with the CCS suite of technologies (including BECCS) many papers highlight different issues. I’ll pick just a few. There is a concern about their feasibility: “since negative emissions technologies are still at an infant stage of development, conventional mitigation technologies should remain focused upon within climate policy...” (Fawzy et al 2020). The side effects of the technology: “the removal of CO2 by these technologies could lead to a significant increase in other environmental impacts.” (Jeswani et al., 2022). The ethics “this land [where the technologies are to be deployed] is often assumed to be in the Global South.” (Jaschke and Biermann, 2022). Preventing meaningful change: “[N]egative emissions will... help to shore up the socioeconomic status-quo, or indeed undermine ambitious climate action.” (Carton et al., 2020). A ‘dangerous distraction’ was the headline of an MIT Professor’s article in the NYT - someone who used to be a big believer in the technology and one of the first privately funded companies in the space. A paper by Otto et al., (2021) mirrors this sentiment “NETs are... a Trojan horse; serving to delay decarbonization efforts... and foster misplaced hope in future GHG removal technologies.”. These are all reviews of the mainstream CCS and NETs technologies, not even getting into the outrageous geo-engineering projects that Hickel also spends little time on in his book. They are all very dangerous distractions. There are even concerns that the whole project doesn’t have its intended outcome: “The findings of this study imply that offsetting positive CO2 emissions with negative emissions of the same magnitude could result in a different climate outcome than avoiding the CO2 emissions.” (Zickfield et al 2021).
(Geo-engineering technologies, a professor recently pointed out to me, will probably be implemented by the Global South despite the risks due to the unequal risks they face from climate change. Hickel writes that 92% of the emissions overshoot are from 19% of the population. Yet, the effects are unequally distributed in the Global South)
These are the more common forms of CCS that you will find discussed in the media and they are all mainly associated with the fossil fuel industry. When it comes to even more experimental technology like Direct Air Capture (DAC) even CCS advocates like Howard Herzog say that some purveyors of the technology are ‘snake-oil salesman’ (MIT). And he really is a hard-core advocate even saying “fossil fuels are not the problem but the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere”[52] - of course that’s strictly true but it does give you insight into how he thinks of the problem. One of the reasons for this is that the concentration of CO2 is orders of magnitude less in ambient air than in flue gas coming out of a smokestack, so the amount of energy required to suck the CO2 of the air is incredibly more resource intensive and expensive. So if Herzog is disparaging DACs I think they probably really are B.S. Herzog co-authored one of the two papers in 2011 that were seen as a death knell for the DAC industry (MIT). Since then, DAC and all the other forms of CCS have been incredibly popular in the media. Indeed, we have even become dependent on them in the IPCC but that does not change the fact that they are highly speculative and that there is little empirical support. So why have we become so inundated with information about CCS and yet academia, Hickel and the IPCC speak so disparagingly about them?
Hickel writes about how BECCS has become a dangerous distraction from the focus of reducing emissions. What other CCSs have become is an even further level of obfuscation not just for reducing emissions but for maintaining our reliance on fossil fuels. It has been called a “hopelessly uncompetitive greenwashing campaign for the fossil fuel industry” and indeed, the fact you have heard of CCS and not BECCS, which is the dominant assumption in the IPCC just goes to show how well that campaign is going. Nearly every piece of academia reviewing CCS (until the money took over the discussion and research) stressed that: “We cannot allow abatable fossil fuels to exist alongside our valuable effort in taking legacy emissions out of the atmosphere.” It would be a waste.
“Removing legacy carbon emissions should remain a public good and not be co-opted by fossil fuel interests. Ultimately, carbon dioxide removal is too important to get wrong, as it is necessary to keep our climate and planet safe.”[53] Even CCS advocates don’t want it to be used alongside fossil fuels. A professor I spoke to recently criticised Herzog for writing a book on CCS without discussing its costs and impacts. i.e. what problems, like indirectly green-lighting fossil fuel, might pop up if we uncritically engage with this technology.
Normally CCS was approached cautiously with the caveat that it was I) more about targeting ‘hard-to-abate’ industries like steel, cement, fertilisers, etc, and II) increasing our current carbon budget and later reversing global warming. It was never about enabling fossil fuel companies to continue going, but that is exactly what we are seeing. One of the many reasons for this is that key problems facing the expansion of the CCS industry from a finance perspective are application heterogeneity and value chain complexity. This gives the false sense of security that investment in fossil CCS is likely to benefit the rest of the CCS industry. Indeed, one professor at Yale I spoke to recently said: “Such technological breakthroughs as allow for much cheaper capture will likely apply pretty much across the board (I believe, but this belief is not backed by technical data).” Well, what does the technical data say?
Energy futures initiative wrote a good report on CCS. The value chain complexity consists of four parts, capture, transport, deep underground injection, and underground maintenance. We can focus on the capture part because it relates the problem with application heterogeneity. The problem is that there is very little transferability between use cases of CCS, they write. Advocates will tell you the technology has been there for decades, someone just needs to pay for it. But it is not quite true. The technology (for a lot of the industries we want it for) is in its infancy and so the costs are incredibly high. What might cost over a billion dollars to fit onto a coal plant has been predicted to only cost 30% less when it comes to the second fitting. What’s more, none of that experience or technology is transferable to a non-fossil fuel application of CCS (nor another fossil fuel application of CCS). The incentives required to get this technology going are sky-high, and that is just accounting for the financial costs. A different professor has told me that CCSs are incredibly fossil-fuel intensive to build and incredibly natural resource intensive to build. So we really ought to wonder why given the sky-high costs and lack of good evidence for their viability, why we are bothering with them at all?
A look at the evidence of whose using them gives us a clue. There are two good CCS databases’ where you can see exactly the trend of what is going on in the industry. The IEA maintains one[54]. Of the current capacity, 70.6% is natural gas processing. Another 16.5 percent is ‘other fuel transformation’ which I can’t see defined there but I can see elsewhere “transformation covers sectors such as refining, biofuels, and merchant hydrogen and ammonia production”[55]. This means that in the figure we care about, where biofuels and hydrogen and ammonia have their own sections, it means that of the ‘such as x, y and z’ where in such phraseology ‘x, y and z’ is assumed to mean the bulk of the available categories (though of course, such as means there probably are any other numbers of categories…) we can infer that the bulk of this further 16.5% is ‘refining’ meaning mostly fossil fuels. Let us make a conservative estimate and say that it is a flat 10% we arrive at the assumption that nearly 80% of CCS projects are currently fossil fuel related. This is not in keeping with the recommendations of the experts and evidence. As a professor, I spoke to said recently, Hickel concurs, we cannot just launch technology into our current paradigm and expect it to save us. It will get hijacked and co-opted. That’s exactly what we see.
Hickel advocates an expansion of democracy into the oversight of technology (amongst other things, like money). If there was ever a good case study for supporting that argument, CCS is it.
The future looks no different. When it comes to investment a full 75%+ of the CCS projects in 2021 were ‘fuels and chemicals’ which when we look at the ratio of current projects, natural gas processing versus all other chemical processing, we can see that the natural gas projects are a full 3:1 so we can expect that the investment portfolio of 168m is not too dissimilar. So really all that is going on in the media is noise and it should be worrying to any reader the extent to which this technology is being misunderstood and mis-packaged. It is not that the science is wrong, it is that the social costs of distinguishing CCS projects for fossil fuel and CCS for non-fossil fuel make a big difference. Remembering that CCS projects for fossil fuel do not bring down the costs for the other ‘hard-to-abate’ industries we need them for like cement, steel, fertiliser, etc.
Remember how far down the rabbit hole we are. We are not talking about the ecological crisis, but just the emissions crisis. We are not talking about the full set of solutions to the emissions crisis (i.e. reductions or removals) but just removals. We are not talking about removals in terms of technological viability, scalability, and financial costings but simply which industry is using them. And that industry (fossil fuel) using them has very little added benefit for the other industries (non-fossil fuels) that we need to use them. So we are not really talking anymore about anything meaningful: we are under the spell of the wizardry and debating the extent to which fossil fuel CCS projects are distracting us from meaningful change (when they could not even enact that change to the degree required if indeed we did accept it!)
The other database that one can check is maintained by the global CCS institute (an impartial observer if ever there was one) and they show[56] that roughly half of all the projects (operating or in construction) are related to natural gas and other fossil fuel-related projects. What this should tell you is that the Inflations Reductions Act is testimony to how corrupted American politics is by fossil capital (via the likes of Joe Manchin). A further thing that’s worrying about what these databases show is the extent to which CCS is actually being used to increase the overall amount of fossil fuel that we have. It is well known in the industry that the oldest use for CCS is what is called Enhanced Oil Recovery (and Enhanced Gas Recovery) which is when O&G companies use CO2 to pump it into the ground to get out more fossil fuel where they otherwise would not have been able to have it. (This is partially what advocates are referring to when they say the technology has been around for decades). So the fact that the majority of CCS is related to fossil fuel is worrying not just because it gives it a social license but also because it literally produces more fossil fuel than without it. Another professor has recently shared with me that around 72% of the carbon captured presently is used for enhanced oil recovery, according to Bloomberg NEF 2022.
Hickel wants us to reimagine the carbon budget as a kind of atmospheric commons. This way we can see that emissions count as a kind of colonialism of the global atmospheric commons. The oil companies are very happy to pursue this path at the expense of the rest of the world, though I never understand what they are really thinking. The US and UK are major supporters of this technological route. There are more ethical and efficient ways to approach the suite of CCS technologies though. The EU has approached the technology slightly differently. They heeded the warnings of the experts and put a cap on the amount that CCS can contribute to carbon emissions removals at the expense of reductions. The EU passed a law that they had to reduce emissions by 55% and would allow a budget of 225 million tons of CO2 to be removed by CCS technology[57] (the budget has since been increased to 310 million tons, but the increase only allows natural sinks). This path harnesses some of the benefits of CCS without allowing it to hijack the conversation. I still think it could go further in distinguishing not just between reductions and removals, but also between removals that justify further fossil fuel industry (unnecessary) and removals for ‘hard-to-abate’ industries.
It remains to be seen whether the EU will heed the other warning which is that CCS should focus on ‘hard-to-abate’ industries such as steel, cement, fertilisers, and even aviation. The reason is, fossil fuels for energy can be mostly replaced, but we do not know a good way to sustainably replace these industries. Just about 20 months ago, Buck, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo warned: “There will be a risk of fossil-fuel companies and others using carbon removal as an imagined way to not shift their business models as long as we don’t have a mainstream plan for ending fossil fuels,” and this is exactly what we have seen happen. The vast majority of media, funding, and deployment of this technology is associated with the fossil fuel industry and it has served as a huge distraction.
Important climate scientists have gone to the media to call it ‘nonsense’ alongside the slew of academic papers. Leckner, the ‘snake-oil salesmen’ and DACs advocate has even said he hears a lot of people making “big promises… people don’t know how to keep”[58]. Another expert has said ‘corporate demands for CCSs outstrip the supply of reliable options by orders of magnitude’. Benson, another expert, says that the scene reminds her of the clean tech boom-bust in the early 2000s. That we should do what we know works in the next decade, not go some ‘imagined way’: “clean up the electricity sector, shift to electricity vehicles, and decarbonise heating, then we can see what role they play”[59].
This brings us to BECCS, the technology that Hickel discusses specifically. All criticisms stand for this technology as well. It is a huge concern in its own right since it is the pathway relied upon in the IPCC reports. It is subject to a lot of similar problems in terms of feasibility and scalability. BECCS is worrying because the space is assumed to be outside of the Global North. It assumes it can use space in the Global South. Not only that but it also competes with the production of food, according to Hickel and the IPCC. But the issues of scalability and feasibility are of orders of magnitude more important when it comes to BECCS, which is why Hickel reports on them. As a point of comparison, the optimism surrounding CCS (excluding BECCS) looks like a waste of time when you consider the scale of BECCS. The EFI report suggests they could have 450 million tons of CO2 capacity by 2035[60]. This is tiny compared to what is expected of the still doubtful BECCS technology. Over the next 80 years, the IPCC has modelled as a median estimate that it will suck out 300 billion tons of CO2. Each year between now and 2100 it is expected to suck up 9 times the optimistic estimate for 2035 for CCS. Hickel explains that the amount of space to do this is multiple times the size of India. Hickel’s well-placed concerns about the issues with this technology were ahead of its time when published in the mainstream. In February 2022 the IPCC released a report that detailed how concerned they were about the reliance on BECCS. The estimates in their landmark report were even more demanding, by 2050 we need to be pulling 8 billion tons of CO2 a year. Their main recommendation, like virtually every other academic consideration, is that we must drastically reduce emissions. Especially for industries like fossil fuels where we know how to live without them for most of their uses.
These debates in academia that Hickel showcases for us highlight the importance of not ceding ground to debates on technology in a paradigm that is controlled by large corporations dependent on growth. Technology struggles to solve the problem of today's economy, why would we add to that problem if we didn’t have to? That’s the crucial insight from degrowth and ecological economics. And it is not to say stop growth altogether, it is just to point out how stupid it is to have a conviction that it must go on without a conversation about what kind of growth can go on. Or why we want it to go on. That’s why degrowth is exclusive differentiated green growth to get to a well-being economy. If that means growing healthcare systems, education systems, and public sanitation, then that’s included in the model.
This looks like it might be an engineering problem, but it is not. It’s a political one, how we democratically decide what we should do. We are structurally dependent on growth - so what does that mean? It doesn’t mean engineering or technology won’t help us, it will. It will be indispensable, Hickel argues. However, to act as if technological solutions can eclipse the work that needs to be done on emissions reduction is a ‘dangerous distraction’ and ‘magical thinking’. And the longer we wait, the more people who will disproportionately bare the burdens of climate change will be forced to leave their homes or reach for more radical technological solutions like outlandish geo-engineering projects. And the only way to stop them, if we think that is the right thing to do, will, in turn, be force. It’s all going to get very ugly, and I want to say very quickly, but when I think about it, it’s all going to get very ugly, very slowly, and that means the window and likelihood of negative outcomes and conflicts becomes all the greater. Climate change is never going to be the ultimate show-down that we have in our cultural imaginary; it is going to be the decades-long Sysphean task of constantly learning to love an increasingly deteriorating world and the people we are brought closer to.
———
V
In the latter part of the chapter Hickel offers a thought experiment that reveals what techno-optimism obscures. Even if we had a 100%-clean-energy system, what would we do with it?
“Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste landfill - all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain”
At this point, Hickel believes we have seen that growthism is pulling us into an ecological disaster that is way deeper than the emissions crisis. However, reading this I am not quite sure people realise the scale of the biodiversity crisis nor what a disaster it is going to be. Academics and climate scientists certainly realise this and that’s why in a debate between Hickel and an inclusive Green Growther there is a moment where everyone in the Oxford audience laughs out loud. At around 24:15[61] Raeworth, an economist, pulls out a planetary boundaries prop and asks the inclusive Green Growther: ‘So what exactly can Green Growth solve?” After some umming and ahhing he explains that inclusive Green Growth can probably solve some of them but ‘the difficult ones’ are the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity. And water cycles. (He also skips her question about material footprint but I will come to that later).
How important exactly are the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity? Very. Firstly they are a planetary boundary so you can expect that they are indispensable but just to be clear they rule at two opposite ends of the spectrum. Biodiversity is an indicator of health for ecosystems. The nitrogen cycle is the micro level of the health of our planet, what is in our proteins and DNA but also what is cycle through all our systems marine, atmospheric, and terrestrial for good health. In sum, not being able to solve these two, is not a ‘solution’ to the problem at all. Hickel massively underplays this hand in this chapter. He does not go on to say that there are effectively no good solutions to biodiversity loss that can be maintained a) under growth and b) with market-based mechanisms. The IPCC report says that one of the highest chances of maintaining biodiversity is keeping industrial systems away from them and keeping indigenous peoples on them is rated as ‘highly likely’ for keeping those systems healthy. I invite the readers to go and review the academic literature for solutions to these problems (and not corporate brochures and magical thinking manuals).
What’s most shocking about all of the attention we give to the emissions crisis is how it is just one part of the ecological crisis. Biodiversity collapse, for example, would be responsible for ‘multiple bread basket failures’. Hickel is careful to point that out but I think he massively underplays that hand. The biodiversity issue stalks the text but he never brings it to the fore for more than a few sentences: his intro is a yarn about the loss of biodiversity; he mentions how the UN has set up a second panel alongside the IPCC, the IPBES; he tells us in chapter 2 that material footprints account for 80% of the loss of biodiversity; and on the topic of BECCS, he tells us that the competition for space would probably account for a 7% further loss of biodiversity. It all amounts to the fact that he knows that biodiversity is a huge problem. Hickel has a subsection titled ‘out of the frying pan and into the flames’ about these issues but before really labouring the point he shifts into a discussion of decoupling. I would guess that the reason the IPBES exists is that the UN realised how useful it is to have a conference that cannot be co-opted by fossil capital and techno-optimistic and naive policymakers. Only time will show what pseudo-solutions growthists and corporations come up with. The current valuing of whales and valuing of nature is just the beginning of those shenanigans.
The first IPBES report draws on 15,000 studies and the consensus of hundreds of scientists. They write that around one million species are now at risk of extinction, many within decades. The usually muted language of scientists, Hickel writes, has become much stronger. Watson, the chair of IPBES, says it is ‘ominous’. Ceballos et al called it “biological annihilation’ (2017)[62]. Watson again: “Eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food, security, health, and quality of life worldwide.”[63] The way we see living systems is ‘out there’ but that fiction is starting to go up in flames.
Hickel also points out a rather gloomy tension that awaits us as we undergo the green transition. The green transition is going to be an ecological disaster whether we like it or not. The amount of materials required for it is enormous. And all the while we expect to grow. This is where Hickel begins to discuss both the demands of the green transition and the inclusive green growthers magical thinking of ‘decoupling’. Even the green transition is going to be highly destructive, how exactly do we think that we will just dematerialise all our consumption? Hickel laments the accounting trick that led the likes of Obama to suggest that there was a decoupling going on in the Global North. Yes, we have decoupled from material footprint when we use YouTube to make a living, but what do we spend our money on? Material. And the material, since it was imported, was not accounted for in those studies that found decoupling. All the evidence around decoupling has completely… dematerialised.
Decoupling, the kind that inclusive green growthers need, is empirically baseless. In theory, GDP growth and material consumption can be decoupled in absolute terms or relative terms. If it is going to be relative decoupling it needs to be fast enough and sufficient to keep us within planetary boundaries. Hickel provides his own work with Kallis (Hickel and Kallis 2019)[64] to show that there has been no decoupling for material consumption (the metric that is driving ecological destruction). Hickel then goes on to list some very interesting data about how there will be a tendency in at least the green transition (and much worse if all growth continues) where rematerialisation occurs and intensifies due to the decreasing yields of available material. For example, UNEP has found that three times the amount of material has to be extracted per unit of metal than a century ago (p.151). Decoupling according to Hickel is not happening at all as we need it too for undifferentiated growth. Just the growth we need alone for the green transition is already going to be a huge strain.
There is a lot of evidence since the book was published that supports the idea that decoupling has no empirical support. Hubacek et al (2021) found some examples of absolute decoupling (32/116 countries) but that they have been ‘by far not sufficient as overall global emissions have continued to rise’. Vaden et al (2020) reviewing 179 articles found that the ‘evidence does not suggest that decoupling towards ecological sustainability is happening at a global (or even regional scale). Haberl (2020) with 9 other authors did a systematic review of 835 peer-reviewed articles related to decoupling: ‘The analysed literature provides ample evidence that a continuation of past trends will not yield absolute (global) reductions of resource use of GHG emissions). Haberl et al (2020) was part II of a systematic review. Part I (Wiedenhofer et al) had originally reviewed 11,500 scientific papers and found the evidence for decoupling was ‘scarce and scattered’. The European Environmental Bureau (2019) found that the ‘conclusion is both overwhelmingly clear and sobering: not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future.’
Hickel included three studies that showed the same thing. One is from UNEP where carbon is priced at a whopping $573, as well as a 2012 study led by Dittrich that was repeated in 2016 by another team of scientists. These all prove the same thing, decoupling is not happening.
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VI
What we do see, in later chapters, is that decoupling has occurred between GDP and the well-being of people. I’ve seen this before and I am sure we have all heard some variation of it that eventually more income translates only into marginally more happiness (Clark et al 2008[65]). Hickel cites a study by Steinberger et al (2010)[66] that shows how the relationship between GDP and human welfare breaks down after a certain point. Let’s pursue the decoupling that has evidence.
‘Moloch the incomprehensible prison!’
Progress, Hickel argues, does not come from capitalism at all. Not even from GDP. Of course, it releases the potential for it but it has always been social movements that made the difference. Hickel traces the arguments put forward in the 1970s that came to be called the McKeon Thesis and Preston Curve: higher GDP means higher health outcomes. And so policy was built around doing whatever it costs to increase GDP, even slashing public healthcare systems which Global South governments had been establishing. Of course, Hickel means a very particular kind of progress, and won’t see any progress in capitalism. Capitalism has given us a mixed bag, some of it is still definitely progress.
In Chapter 1 Hickel follows some historians in calling capitalism a counter-revolution to the brief period between feudalism and the current economic system. The period of 1350-1500 ‘golden age of the proletariat in Europe’ by a critically acclaimed historian Braudel. Yet we have come to believe that Capitalism is an ‘expression of innate human nature’, he explains. Capitalism didn’t just ‘emerge’ there was no smooth transition, it was created and it has nothing to do with human nature. Hickel wants us to grasp this because it reveals what the ‘deep drivers of the ecological crisis’ are (p.41) The ‘longer history of capitalism… (is) enclosure, colonisation, dispossession, the slave trade … historically growth has always been a process of appropriation: … energy and work from nature and from (certain kinds of) human beings’.
Hickel recounts how this counterrevolution had left peasants in a ‘worse’ position. Now they did not have access to land but instead had to constantly compete and produce more to be desired for leases to land. ‘Artificial scarcity’ is the essential point Hickel says. There was land and plenty for everyone but by having it all enclosed as private property meant that workers were in a terrible state of affairs. And this was all intentional, citing various landowners, philosophers, and politicians on their views: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious” (Arthur Young, an agriculturalist, in 1771). “Hunger is not only a peaceable, silent unremitted pressure, but as the most natural move to industry” (Reverend Townsend, 1786). Even David Hume chimes in: "is always observed, in years of scarcity, if it is not extreme, that the poor labour more, and live better” (p.59).
The ‘enclosure movement’ as it has come to be called in this period meant that life expectancy at birth fell from 43 years at birth in the 1500s to the low 30s in the 1700s in the UK. Hickel contextualises Hobbes’ famous assumption that ‘the state of nature is nasty, brutish and short’ as reflective of this time period in Europe and not the typical state of affairs.
Scott: “Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products.”
The evidence that it is capitalism that provides progress, no matter how entrenched, is surprisingly light. Researchers have begun to see a new picture where it is actual simple sanitation and other public works and public healthcare that give people the higher health outcomes we see in wealthy countries. (It would explain why the US is the only country in the ‘developed’ world that has a falling life expectancy). The researchers looked at the 400-year period of increasing growth and saw that it was only in the 1870s when people got the right to vote and got public works done with public money that health outcomes started to overtake the start of that period. Even the UN has come out and said that the relationship between high GDP and health outcomes is ‘weak’, Hickel writes.
Hickel lists several countries with less GDP but higher health outcomes. Some of them are obvious, like Japan and South Korea with 35% and 50% less GDP per capita income than the US. But much more surprising ones like Costa Rica which has a 20% GDP per capita than the US and beats the US since the 1980s in a period when its growth was not even growing at all (p.177).
Hickel’s list of how to degrow in a way that can present us with positive climate action. The how section of the book is not that long but it does give a lot in a few steps. It suggests 1) ending planned obsolescence; 2) cutting advertising; 3) shifting from ownership to usership; 4) ending food waste; 5) scaling down ecologically destructive industries. I expect some of these would be respected by the readers and I suppose some of them might be completely dismissed. What I want to point out is the fact that the technology plan does not work and so we are going to have to reconsider our complicated feelings about some of these prescriptions or come up with a better plan. But the current plan does not work.
Hickel has some more general ideas which are very good but could be implemented by many different frameworks. The one suggestion he has that is quite special and unique is the section on jobs. Hickel argues, with plenty of empirical support, that we would all become more ecological if we had more time off work. So Hickel argues we should reduce the working week and provide a climate job guarantee. By reducing the working week it will mean that more people can be hired. It is giving the efficiency gains back to labour, instead of capital, and it is fairly reasonable. Researchers have suggested that this will pay a ‘triple dividend’ “and potentially offers a triple dividend to society: reduced unemployment, increased quality of life, and reduced environmental pressures (p.225). Hickel also argues to reduce inequality and de-commodify public goods and expand the commons.
There are a bunch of other suggestions but the other two I liked best besides jobs were the further democratisation of money and technology. These two sectors are so central to our society why can they not have democratic oversight? It would take our supposed commitment to democracy seriously. Hickel cites a study at the end of the chapter about a Harvard-Yale team that could share resources in common and use them now or share them with future generations too. A full 68% percent chose to use their share sustainability taking only as much as could be regenerated so that the future could use the same pool of resources. Hickel takes this as a jumping-off point to say that there is both inherent social and ecological value to democracy.
“Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!
Hickel traces 500 years of history in parallel with our ontological relationship from within nature to outside of it. The final destination was that we became minds distinct from the body, community, and nature; ’individuals'. (It was BP that promoted the idea of personal carbon footprint!) Eventually, the dualist and anti-animist ontology became hegemonic. Hickel analyses the writings of Descartes and Francis Bacon. That Europeans and their descendants began to see themselves as individuals who tended to see themselves as disembodied minds different and set apart from ‘nature’ fits remarkably well with the history that is put forward. There is much support for this portrayal of having a different ontology to most of the rest of the world that is captured by the burgeoning field of Cultural Psychology.
Heine’s Cultural Psychology[67], for example, studies how ‘Westerners’ and the ‘rest’ are born the same (that is not to say with blank slates!) but then develop into slightly different psychologies that present themselves in all sorts of different ways. Physically, socially, emotionally, and politically. An example would be an experiment done on two sets of people. One set is Japanese and the other group is Americans. When both sets are asked to think about themselves and then to think about their mother under a brain scan the results differ. When a Japanese person thinks about themselves and then about their mother, more or less the same part of the brain fires up. When an American thinks about themselves and their mother different parts of the brain fire up. The interpretation of the experiment (and dozens more in the field of cultural psychology) suggests that Westerners have a much more independent way of thinking about the world. The field is relatively modern, so more nuanced distinctions have yet to be made, but the broad idea is that the rest of the world has a way more interdependent way of thinking about the world. There is much research to show that Anglo-Americans sit farther right on this tendency towards individualism, with Americans farthest right of all. Continental Europeans are positioned somewhere between independent and interdependent. Most studies so far have been done comparing East Asians with Westerners and East Asians tend to lean more towards interdependence.
“Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!”
But it didn’t stop at nature-human dualism and individualism. The body-mind dualism was also created during this period. (I never know how much literal or specific agency Hickel is thinking of when he writes about these processes.) The body was undisciplined and unruly and needed to be subdued. Hickel cites sociologist Juliet Schor about holidays and festivals: “The medieval calendar is filled with holidays… England’s too up probably one-third of the year…. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year”. I’ve been shown similar evidence of the interdependent premodern lives of the Japanese: “Wealthy we do not think it will ever become; the love of indolence and pleasure of the people themselves forbid it. The Japanese are a happy race, and being content with little is not likely to achieve much”[68] Idleness began to be prosecuted in England beginning with the 1531 Vagabonds Act. Under Henry VIII 72,000 ‘idle’ people were hanged. State violence was used to whip people into work and competition. The ruling classes were to dominate nature, and the mind was to dominate the body. Inclinations towards bodily pleasure were frowned upon in Christian ideology (p.74). Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the ‘sign of personal moral failing’. This is the kind of analysis that got Foucault so famous.
Hickel wants us to see that there is nothing ‘natural or innate’ about the productivist behaviours we associate with modern humans. It is "the product of five centuries of cultural re-programming" (p.75).
———
VII
So what to make of ‘degrowth’ as a social movement? In three broad and unscientific observations or intuitions.
One observation is that inclusive Green Growth will be corrosive because we have run out of ‘frontiers’ and ‘fixes’ on the ‘outside’ to profit on. Moloch is desperately flailing around looking for options. To take food and farming as an example, you have unelected technocrats on both the left and the right in the Global North suggesting we need to revolutionise these industries. Revolutionise them with technology, of course, which downstream translates to further industrialisation and corporatisation (George Monbiot, in the UK, and Bill Gates, in the USA). Their arguments seem persuasive. Monbiot, in part, is advocating to defend biodiversity and wilderness, for example. It is all under the cloak of rationality. Has anyone asked the farmers what they want? Actually, they have some good arguments[69] (H/t Paul Kingsnorth). One revelation for me is that biodiversity exists in human moulded environments because we’ve been there for centuries (or more), from British farmland to Amazonian ‘cultural forests’, sometimes biodiverse in equal ratios[70]. It's only industrial production that is incompatible with biodiversity. Industrialisation and corporatisation and the technology on which they rely, at the very least need to go through democratic approval. Degrowth argues for exactly that.
Rupert Sheldrake has stated in The Science Delusion:
“Our private relationship to nature presupposes that nature is alive. For a mechanistic scientist, technocrat, economist, or developer, nature is neuter and inanimate. It needs to develop as part of human progress. But often the same people have different attitudes in private. In Western Europe and North America, many people get rich by exploiting nature so that they can buy a place in the countryside to ‘get away from it all’ … This division between public rationalism and private romanticism has been part of the Western way of life for generations, but it is becoming increasingly unsustainable.”
(H/t Paul Kingsnorth)
It shows perfectly what’s going on behind the scenes amongst all this industrialisation and corporatisation. Whilst elites maintain that they’re just trying to organise things better they go and escape ‘to nature’ for a holiday. They apply ‘public rationality, private romanticism’ to our world. We should all get to enjoy the connection to nature. Hickel’s last chapter shows how embedded we are in nature; how it makes us happier. The romanticism of our positive experiences in nature is real. One study I particularly liked was about a ‘tree bath’. A study shows that people who took a winter walk through a barren, leafless, winter forest in Poland were much happier than those who had not. Even barren trees improve our well-being. Or other strange studies that I struggle to believe the strength of the effects where increased greenery in cities can reduce crime or depression. Another reviewer has stated that a huge amount of apparent ‘hippy cliches’ in the book turn out to be true when we review the evidence. I suspect, deep down, we all know that. And removing one of our oldest and deepest interactions ‘with’ nature, food production, is definitely heading in the wrong direction. If Sheldrake’s observation is anything to go by, elites know that too. You’ll have your gloop, and they’ll have their walled tomato garden.
Another observation is related to climate refugees. Most studies (including the UNs) that Hickel and others cite show that 250 million to 1,250 million people will be displaced by climate change. They don’t tend to engage in the unscientific speculation of what those people will do next. And what the effects of those mass migrations will have on the countries where those people flee too. Hickel does not say this at all but I think that the contradictions of our current solutions will lead to a necessary ‘red growth’ of eco-apartheids, border walls, and political upheavals that will shake the social fabric to its core.
It is a depressing thought but I think it is a realistic one. Climate change was never going to be an apocalyptic event; it will be a slow and dark descent into a real struggle. And degrowth values: democracy; local, communal, and decentralised with an emphasis on global justice; caring and social work; integration as well as diversity, multi-pluralism as they put; these kinds of pro-social values are an antidote to this mess. At the very least elites should not be trying to crush these movements because they are set to do a tonne of work that some societies are not willing to pay for. At most, they should be respected for their commitment to democracy and negotiations because as things get more intense, many other social movements will form and they may not be as open-minded.
'Radical flank theory' states that a movement needs a ‘radical flank’ to have a better chance of success. I think the threat of far-right movements like fascism in Europe could act like an unaligned radical flank movement. Europe’s geography, wealth, and open politics (relative to other options) are going to be the destination for a vast amount of climate refugees. The combination of economic austerity, disenchanted people facing hard times, and an easy 'outside' target (the refugee) is as close as you can get to a formula in the social sciences. It produces fascism, as I said at the beginning of the essay. We must be constantly mindful and open to the refugees we produce whilst at the same time noting the structural cause of their dislocation. i.e. capitalism, to fight it with Green Growth situated either centrally or towards the left. Fascism has been and will be an existential threat to elites. Hitler only ever got 34% of the vote and elites had to either totally change their lives or their values, to put it lightly. Degrowth could be the pressure valve on the years of economic strife that people have gone through, and until/if things improve, will continue to go through. It is a lot better than the other options.
Another observation is that we have got to stop waiting on America as a 'climate leader' and frankly using it as an excuse. America can only lead in contradictions on climate policy. Seriously, I think they’re doing the best they can in their current circumstances. Bite the bullet: America is not going to change any time soon. It is structurally impossible for it to be any more left than it already is on the Green Capitalism-Degrowth spectrum, which is still very far right. The rest of us can do much better.
I do not know much about America but it seems to me their democracy is held hostage to corporate and elite interests because of Super PACs, PACs and dark money. It is ironic to me that Democrats demonise the Republicans for the country's problems. This is ironic to me because actually, their democracy is structurally corrupt, at least by most comparisons with Europe. With the prospect of Hilary vs Trump, only 2/3 of the voters turned out - again, terrible compared to France, Germany, or Taiwan. Roughly 1/3 voted for Trump, 1/3 voted for Hilary, and 1/3 did not vote at all. So they have 1/3 that don't care; 1/3 that vote for Trump, whatever that means; and 1/3 that voted for Hilary. What is ironic for me is that under 8 years of Democratic rule, from 2008 to 2016, the democrats oversaw the 'sale' of their democracy to a corporate elite. That is when limits and laws were loosened on PACs, super PACs, and 'dark money' in US politics. The country is a total mess. Green Capitalism with all its contradictions is the best you are ever going to get out of the US until the people take back control of their democracy.)
However, distasteful as it might be to say, America has a huge army. That’s not going to change any time soon. All degrowthers argue that we need to close down the military-industrial complex. But if we bite the bullet on America's inability to change, the rest of the Global North and Global South can exploit this security provision and engage with degrowth to a greater extent than America. After all, they are only 14% of the world's emissions.
It could even have unexpected consequences on America itself. I think they are deeply proud of their role as leaders of the world (huge eye roll for every non-USAer reading this) and if they no longer see themselves as central to the world, they may change in a direction that is more promising anyway.
One thing is for sure, humans are a resourceful bunch. Now we’ve got to decide together what we want that to mean.