A response to Enrique Dans: Decoupling is fake news

Discussions around “degrowth” are blooming everywhere and that’s great news. What is not great is the shamefully low level of academic rigour of many texts that criticise the concept. Never longer than a few paragraphs, often without any numbers or references, these texts are hardly a critique in any meaningful understanding of the term. Enrique Dans’ Degrowth Won’t Take Us Anywhere but Back to the Past (Medium, October 2020) is a good case in point. Full of misunderstandings, shortcuts, and vague claims, the author lowers the quality of the debate to a historical low. Time for rectification. 

Is degrowth a return to the past? 

The first misunderstanding is a classic among fast-readers of the degrowth Wikipedia page (that’s actually the link the author provides when referring to “degrowth theories”). Pointing at Jason Hickel and his book Less is More (2020), Enrique Dans summarises the degrowth argument as such: “the only way to save the planet is to abandon economic growth, reduce production and consumption and basically, go back in time.” Quite what this latter phrase means is not clear to me, and I am not convinced that Enrique Dans knows either. 

The are-you-for-growth-or-a-retrograde? narrative is absurd. The mobilisation of certain elements of the past does not necessarily translate into a complete return to the past. It is possible to encourage artisanal production and guilds, which have developed in the Middle Ages, without ending up with feudalism, chamber pots, and the burning of witches. One should not either idealise the past (the past as a paradise to return to), which would lead to stagnancy, or demonise it (the past as a hell to escape), which would forcefully propel societies forward, whatever the direction of this forward. 

Degrowth is not blindly anti-modern, a call to “do things the way we did before the industrial revolution”; instead, it contains both elements of preservation and elements of revolution. Degrowthers do not see it as a contradiction to embrace certain new technologies and practices such as crypto-currencies like SolarCoin, digital commons like Wikipedia while rejecting others (e.g. artificial superintelligence, geo-engineering, transhumanism, high-frequency trading algorithms, credit default swaps on sovereign debt). This is something Enrique Dans would know if he read the literature. 

Decoupling is fake news 

Then, Enrique Dans unveils a “fundamental flaw in the degrowth argument”: countries that have reduced or halted growth are not performing well in terms of sustainability. For him, the solution to our environmental issues is growth – “decarbonization and efficiency in general are milestones that have been achieved through growth.” It’s a nice story, and it seems reasonable enough, but it just happens to be false. 

Let me start by noting that Enrique Dans conflates degrowth with recession when he implies that degrowth involves “reducing or halting growth.” This is degrowth 101 – no excuses, it’s even explained in the Wikipedia page. Think about it: it is not random that the “Degrowth movement” is not called the “Recession Movement.” These are actually two different things. To set the record straight: unlike an economic crash, degrowth is not an accident, but a planned strategy to reduce environmental pressures, reduce inequality, and improve well-being (see here for more precise definitions).  

Concerning decoupling, let’s be serious: show me numbers. Last time I checked the decoupling literature, several colleagues and I ended up concluding that: “the decoupling literature is a haystack without a needle. Of all the studies reviewed, we have found no trace that would warrant the hopes currently invested into the decoupling strategy” (Decoupling Debunked, 2019). Since then, other people have done the same with similar results (for an exhaustive overview of the decoupling literature, see Wiedenhofer et al., 2020).

In June 2020, a group of sixteen authors conducted the largest literature review on the topic:  835 peer-reviewed articles on the relationship between GDP and resource use/greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the authors’ conclusion: “We conclude that large rapid absolute reductions of resource use and GHG emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates, hence decoupling needs to be complemented by sufficiency-oriented strategies and strict enforcement of absolute reduction targets.” The study is colossal and the evidence solid. If you disagree with that, the burden of proof is on you. (And no, a single reference to McAfee’s book cannot serve as a joker card – actually, his work has been rebutted here, here, and here.)

Technology is no panacea 

Here comes the point in the discussion where one may argue that even though the success of the green growth strategy is nowhere to be seen, the lack of empirical support does not allow to completely dismiss the decoupling hypothesis. Because, you see, decoupling could still happen in the future should we “develop more technology and more innovation to reduce the impact of our activities.” This claim doesn’t hold water and here are four reasons why. 

First, innovation is not in and of itself a good thing for sustainability. Because labour and capital are usually relatively more expensive than natural resources, more technological progress will likely continue to be directed towards labour- and capital-saving innovations, with limited benefits, if any, for resource productivity and a potential rise in absolute impacts due to more production. 

Another issue is that technologies do not only solve environmental problems but also tend to create new ones. Assuming that resource productivity becomes a priority over labour and capital productivity, there is still nothing preventing technological innovations from creating more damage. For example, research into processes of extractions can lead to better ways to locate resources (imaging technologies and data analytics), to extract them (horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and automated drilling operations), and to transport them (Arctic shipping routes). These innovations may target resource use but with a result opposite to the objective of decoupling, that is more extraction. 

The third problem has to do with the replacement of harmful technologies. Indeed, it is not enough for new technologies to emerge (innovation), they must also come to replace the old ones. In reality, such a process is slow and difficult to trigger. Most polluting infrastructures (power plants, buildings and city structures, transport systems) require large investments, which then creates inertia and lock-in. Energy is a good case in point: using more renewable energy is not the same as using less fossil fuels. The history of energy use is not one of substitutions but rather of successive additions of new sources of energy. As new energy sources are discovered, developed, and deployed, the old sources do not decline, instead, total energy use grows with additional layers on the energy mix cake. 

Finally, in light of the past decades of technological change, the rate of improvement that is needed for high-income, high-footprint economies to absolutely decouple appears disproportionate in contrast to past and present rates of technical progress. Relying only on technology to mitigate climate change implies extreme rates of eco-innovation improvements, which current trends are very far from matching (for more, see pp. 96-100 of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without growth, 2016). Add to this, the fact that global carbon intensity improvement has actually been slowing down since the turn of the century, from an average yearly 1.28% between 1960 and 2000 to 0% between 2000 and 2014. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing against innovation in itself. My point is that technological innovation is ambivalent when it comes to addressing environmental issues and that the potential of future technological innovations is most likely too limited, and in any case uncertain. Relying on the belief that technological innovation will bring all necessary solutions to environmental problems appears as an extremely risky and unreasonable bet. This becomes even more problematic when the technology argument is used to dismiss sufficiency-oriented strategies like degrowth.

There is no time to waste 

If we were chatting about chess or the political dynamics of Game of Thrones, I would not be too fussy about scientific rigour. But we are here discussing social-ecological collapse, perhaps one of the most important issues ever faced by our specie. In light of this urgency, articles like Enrique Dans’ Degrowth Won’t Take Us Anywhere but Back to the Past are a triple waste of time: for the author who I’m sure has better things to write about, for degrowth specialists like myself who would rather spend time doing research than addressing basic misunderstandings, and worse of all, for readers who are served a confusing text without scientific substance. While this is a harsh judgment to pass on fellow academics, there is just no more time to be wasted. We academics must do better than that.