Climate Scientists Increasingly Favor Destroying the Economy

By Andrew Follett

Friday, September 29, 2023

 

Almost three-quarters of self-identified “climate policy researchers” want to stop economic growth in the name of battling global warming or feel neutral about that proposition, according to a recent survey by the scientific journal Nature Sustainability.

 

The survey asked 764 “climate policy researchers” if they preferred “green growth,” meaning they believe the economy can continue to grow while greenhouse-gas emissions are reduced, “agrowth,” meaning the researcher is essentially agnostic on economic growth, or “degrowth,” meaning they want economic growth in high-income countries to end.

 

A mere 27 percent of respondents stated that “green growth” is preferable, with 73 percent of respondents stating that economic growth is neutral or bad. The latter two positions represent “scepticism toward the predominant ‘green growth’ paradigm with degrowth representing a more critical view,” according to the researchers conducting the study.

 

“Within the broader post-growth framework, degrowth stands as a pronounced stance, critiquing capitalism and advocating for a deliberate and equitable reduction in material consumption and economic activity in high-income countries to achieve more sustainable and socially just societies,” the paper states. “Degrowth scholars underscore the need to shift the focus from GDP to the physical scale of the economy, concurrently emphasizing the important role of equity, environmental justice and democratic decision-making in facilitating a sustainable transition.”

 

Essentially, degrowth or agrowth means actively eliminating industrial civilization and turning back the clock to an era when humans allegedly had less environmental impact, a literal “return to nature” that often intersects with reducing the human population to supposedly reduce its environmental impact.

 

Respondents in rich areas like the European Union and North America were notably much more opposed to “green growth” than were individuals in poorer areas. Around 58 percent of those surveyed from the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) still desire economic growth, compared with only about 13 percent of European Union researchers and about 15 percent of other OECD researchers.

 

Economists and “hard” natural or applied scientists were also vastly more likely to favor economic growth, while social scientists were the most likely to favor “agrowth” or “degrowth.” Specifically, 37 percent of those in the applied and formal sciences favor “green growth,” as do 34 percent of economists, 28 percent of natural scientists, and 26 percent of those in environmental studies. Only around 15 percent of those in the social sciences still see economic growth as positive, with around 38 percent favoring “degrowth” and around 47 percent indifferent to growth. 

 

The survey asked respondents a series of questions including whether “continued economic growth is essential for improving people’s life satisfaction” and whether “economic growth is necessary to finance environmental protection.” The survey’s authors recruited climate-policy researchers for the study by searching an academic database and emailing individuals who published in relevant fields.

 

Environmentalists have used the illusion of a scientific consensus on global warming as a political weapon against “deniers” for years, and it seems they will soon transition to a new consensus in favor of “degrowth.” Many prominent environmental groups embraced a “degrowth” mind-set for decades before they even considered global warming a concern.

 

In 1974, for example, the Sierra Club adopted a position of opposing the construction of any new nuclear reactors for the reason that they could lead to “unnecessary economic growth.” It’s rather suspicious that the solution to global warming that environmentalists demand is precisely the same as what they wanted to do long before it became a widely held concern. Almost as if it’s a solution in search of a problem.

 

Economic growth greatly improves the lives of everyone in the world. When people earn a higher income, it enables them to exit poverty and gain improved living standards, ultimately improving the environment. Prosperity, not degrowth, is associated with a cleaner environment.

 

Since academics, like the researchers who filled out the survey, share very strong left-wing norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas, and the only way to advance in such a system is to give fealty to progressive ideology.

 

If you ever want to see what an environmental policy designed by the kind of far-left mind-set that is increasingly prevalent in American academia looks like, do a Google search for “Semipalatinsk,” “Aral Sea,” and “Door to Hell.” Are modern-day greens aware of extreme leftism’s record on the environment?

 

It is perhaps no surprise that earlier this month a wildfire researcher, Patrick Brown, admitted that he exaggerated the extent of global warming’s impact on wildfires because he knew Nature would publish only science that embraced an ideologically fashionable worldview. That climate researchers openly admit they must misrepresent the facts so that their research can see the light of day should caution us against embracing consensus narratives.

 

Brown openly states that many climate scientists bow to the pressure from left-wing journal editors and intentionally skew their research to turn up results compatible with a preexisting worldview or political agenda.

 

“This research looked at the effect of warming in isolation but that warming is just one of many important influences on wildfires with others being changes in human ignition patterns and changes in vegetation/fuels,” Brown wrote on Twitter. “So why didn’t I include these obviously relevant factors in my research from the outset? Why did I focus exclusively on the impact of climate change? Well, I wanted the researche [sic] to get as widely disseminated as possible, and thus I wanted it to be published in a high-impact journal.”

 

Nature, which is closely related to Nature Sustainability (both are published by “Nature Portfolio”), bills itself as “the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal” and has published continuously since 1869. It is certainly among the most high-impact and prestigious academic journals. But the journal’s decision to focus on politicized gatekeeping by demanding that science adhere to an ideologically fashionable worldview created by confirmation bias makes the science it publishes inherently suspect and less useful.

 

As scientists increasingly favor destroying the economy, with prestigious journals and much of the climate-policy field aligning around “agrowth” and “degrowth” approaches, anyone concerned about the material well-being of mankind should take notice. We should not let environmental stewardship become code for abandoning economic growth and accepting a large-scale decline in living standards and an increase in economic suffering.