Environmentalists vs. Economic Growth

By Andrew Follett

Saturday, January 06, 2024

 

Nature has historically been one of the most read, cited, and prestigious academic journals, which makes its collapse into shallow and unscientific ideological advocacy deeply disappointing.

 

“To build a better world, stop chasing economic growth,” reads the title of a recent Nature article by University College London ecological economics professor Robert Costanza. The article’s subhead asserts, “The year 2024 must be a turning point for shifting policies away from gross domestic product and towards sustainable well-being.”

 

The article notes that the environmental movement dedicated to “overcoming our addiction to GDP growth” is gaining momentum, with last year’s “Beyond Growth” conference at the European Parliament, sponsored by the European Commission and the Club of Rome, attracting more than 2,500 participants in person and an additional 2,000 online.

 

“People often fear that such transformations will require sacrifices,” opines Costanza. He never denies that such sacrifices would result from his preferred policy agenda, instead reiterating his likening of support for economic growth to an addiction by saying, “In the short term, change is difficult, and addictions are powerful.”

 

Costanza advocates extreme environmental policy reforms “regardless of the effects on GDP [gross domestic product],” characterizing as an “outdated paradigm” the idea that “efforts to address climate and other environmental and social problems must not interfere with growth.”

 

This is far from the first degrowth-focused article Nature has chosen to run, with multiple articles devoted to the topic in 2023, including an open letter calling for degrowth in Europe last May signed by 400 “experts,” amusingly housed on the extremist environmental organization Friends of the Earth’s website. Late 2022 produced a particularly disturbing episode in the academics-turned-activists-advocating-degrowth genre, with an article that made explicit precisely what is meant by “degrowth.”

 

“Researchers in ecological economics call for a different approach — degrowth,” environmental science professor Jason Hickel wrote in that Nature article. “Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being. . . . It frees up energy and materials for low- and middle-income countries in which growth might still be needed for development.”

 

In other words, the goal of degrowth advocates is to control . . . everything, . . . and they’re not even trying to hide it, explicitly calling for the world to learn from “the experiences of countries that have had to adapt to low-growth conditions — such as Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union.” Cuba is currently in a deep economic crisis with a 34 percent inflation rate alongside major food and fuel shortages. Yet this misery is what degrowth advocates want to emulate.

 

“No country currently meets the basic needs of its residents sustainably,” Hickel and his co-authors continue. “Affluent economies use more than their fair share of resources, whereas lower-income countries are likely to need to use more.” Students of the 20th century might find these command-and control methods familiar.

 

“In our view, the question is no longer whether growth will run into limits, but rather how we can enable societies to prosper without growth, to ensure a just and ecological future,” the Nature article continued.

 

There are currently more than 8 billion living humans on Earth, with the global population likely hitting 10 billion this century. Degrowthers consider this a problem.

 

Degrowth types have been consistently repeating overpopulation claims since at least 1798, when the world’s population was a tenth of today’s. “Economist” Thomas Malthus was the original prophet of doom, claiming that agricultural production would increase only linearly while population would grow exponentially, causing massive famines as the earth ran out of resources.

 

Malthus has been repeatedly proven wrong by events, as has every one of his fellow prophets of doom, as the supply of calories per human has skyrocketed due to improving technology and better farming methods. Humanity wasn’t just able to support its rising population but actually increased the skyrocketing living standards of the average human. Every mouth to feed, quite literally, comes with two hands to grow.

 

Human beings are fundamentally the root of all resources, not just consumers of them as degrowthers falsely claim in their endlessly disproven list of claims. The fear that humanity will run out of this or that resource has been constant since Malthus’s time, with Nature’s rival Scientific American predicting in 1919 that only 20 years of oil remained. Over 100 years later, oil is still with us, and stocks of proven oil reserves continue to rise. This is because as the price of a resource increases, the incentive to find more of it or develop substitutes or recycle it increases.

 

Hickel and his co-authors go on to blame classic left-wing scapegoats such as “developers, landlords and financiers” for a global housing shortage, which they claim should be solved by “alternative approaches [that] include public or cooperative housing, and a financial system that prioritizes housing as a basic need rather than as an opportunity for profit.”

 

This is scientifically illiterate, as merely labeling something “a basic need” doesn’t repeal the economic laws of scarcity. Attempts by many blue states and left-wing governments to pursue those “alternative approaches” have been spectacularly backfiring for decades, exacerbating housing shortages by both discouraging new construction and convincing landlords not to rent out property. The clear consensus of 93 percent of U.S. economists left, right, and center is that these policies don’t work and probably make shortages worse.

 

Naturally, the Nature article authors ignore any consensus they don’t like, “because those in power have ideologies rooted in mainstream neoclassical economics, and tend to have limited exposure to researchers who explore economics from other angles.” Not that their denial of facts should surprise anyone, given that the outlet states outright that it prevents science it finds ideologically objectionable from being published. Nature isn’t alone, as other scientific journals and funding agencies are adjusting research and publication policies to favor progressive views.

 

The idea that economic growth will result in environmental catastrophe is strongly reminiscent of the endless predictions of rising human population triggering an eco-apocalypse that are now in their third century of being consistently wrong. These predicted cataclysms never happen and are always excuses to enact disastrous policies that pointlessly diminish human liberty, because they fundamentally misunderstand that humans are not microbes in a petri dish.

 

Economic growth is good for humanity. Degrowth would punish humanity.