Don’t Say No to ‘Slow Growthers,’ Hear Them Out

In his July 28 piece on The Tyee, “Just Say No to Slow Growthers,” Jim Stanford makes the case for why progressives should demand increased economic growth from governments in the face of the persistent economic malaise of our times. He also plays down concerns that further GDP growth in rich countries is a threat to the biosphere by implying that those calling for respect for planetary boundaries see stagnation or recession as solutions to environmental problems.

Those whose research attends to ecological limits are well aware that impoverished people will do what they have to for survival, even if those actions degrade the environment. Likewise, they understand that governments must have the capacity to ensure necessary investments in clean energy, sanitation, housing and public transit are made.

Public dialogue on growth in a world of tightening environmental constraints is long overdue. This past spring, an all-party committee of the U.K. parliament began examining how best to secure prosperity without further degradation of the biosphere, which we think implies limits to growth. Canadians should also question the viability and desirability of ongoing growth. If Stanford’s piece helps initiate such a dialogue here, so much the better.

We can agree on many points with Stanford. Far too many people are unemployed, have precarious employment or aren’t paid a living wage. Far too many lack opportunities for advancement and meaning. It makes no sense to have people who want work sitting idle when so many social needs are unmet. Economic insecurity breeds intolerance and strife.

But not all work is good work: much of the world’s workforce churns out “goods” or supplies services that are detrimental to lasting well-being. We should hardly celebrate GDP growth or employment that is dependent on manufacturing shoddy consumer goods. Indeed, growth has a lacklustre record when it comes to promoting well-being. While GDP growth improved the well-being of the average rich world citizen up until the mid-1970s, since then the benefits are increasingly accruing to the richest 10 per cent.

Stanford attempts to finesse growth’s environmental impacts by suggesting that growth can be focused in human service delivery, green infrastructure and pollution cleanup. Furthermore, he wants to “value the environment and its resources, and regulate both production and consumption decisions to reflect and preserve environmental wealth.” But Stanford doesn’t drill down into the specifics, so a quick review of our environmental predicament is in order.

Levels of carbon dioxide have now reached levels unmatched in the last four million years. The oceans are acidifying and coral reefs are bleaching. We are poisoning the planet with chemicals and allowing the soils that feed us to wash away. Biodiversity loss threatens the resilience of ecosystems we humans live by. From Beijing to Paris, air in our cities is unfit for human lungs.

In most instances, the environmental indicators that measure the accumulating insults to our biosphere are marching in lockstep with GDP growth. This is not a coincidence. The production and consumption of goods and services necessarily involves energy use, the extraction and processing of natural resources, and the generation of wastes. The accounting rules behind the GDP numbers don’t recognize the losses entailed when natural capital stocks are depleted. When a logging company liquidates an old-growth forest, the GDP is boosted by the value of the timber produced, but no deduction is made for the loss of old-growth trees. Leading mainstream economists like Joseph Stiglitz acknowledge it is a defective indicator.

Growth optimists often point to specific instances where levels of pollutants have declined even as GDP has risen. Since much of what the rich world consumes is made in China, in factories still powered by coal, it has been argued that domestic environmental successes accompanying GDP growth in rich countries have been achieved at the cost of increasing pollution in China, rather than by any drop in global pollution.

Following the Paris Agreement, countries are beginning to grapple with the formidable engineering challenge entailed in reducing grams of greenhouse gasses emitted per dollar of GDP, year after year. But though global warming gets all the attention, eco-efficiency has to improve across multiple dimensions, from grams of toxins per dollar of GDP to biodiversity loss per dollar of GDP. It’s a simple equation that economists tend to ignore: if GDP is twice as large, then impact per dollar of GDP must be halved if net environmental impact is not to increase.

Instead of stoking growth and hoping our engineers can keep shrinking the ecological footprint of an ever-growing economy, we advocate for a deliberate and orderly shift towards an economy designed to respect nature’s limits. Just as a highway has guardrails to reduce the risk of accidents, rich world economies need guardrails that stop them from consuming the Earth. Examples of such safeguards include setting up marine protected areas, eliminating harmful subsidies and reforming the tax system so that big businesses can no longer profit by despoiling nature.

With those reforms in place, those parts of the economy that support human well-being can and should prosper. The renewable energy and green building sectors can grow rapidly while coal mining and fracking shrink. The arts scene can thrive, as can caregiving and ecological restoration. Those who work in declining sectors should be helped with retraining. Our efforts should be invested in managing the transition to enhance well-being, address inequality and help ensure people have meaningful livelihoods.

After this transition, we doubt GDP will grow and it may even shrink. Would this stagnant or falling GDP be cause for alarm? No. It would be a healthy sign that a modern society had gotten over its addiction to growth and that a misleading indicator had finally been retired.

We acknowledge that the transition to an economy that does not depend upon GDP growth — and that does not degrade the biosphere — will be challenging. Since the 1950s, our institutions — from government budgets to retirement schemes — have become reliant on perpetual growth. Growth-oriented policies that are naive about the biosphere’s constraints will ultimately lead to nature rebalancing the accounts, but by then, our planet will be hot, degraded and rife with conflict. These are outcomes that we presume Stanford wants to avoid.