Why I Do Not Support "Degrowth"

The idea of "degrowth" has never sat well with me--and it increasingly astonishes me that people who think of themselves as "progressives" can have ever espoused it. The simple reality is that, however little a good many patterns of production and consumption contribute to human well-being or happiness (and indeed, however repugnant we may find aspects of contemporary culture), by and large, a life in which we have more has really been a life in which we live better than we would otherwise do.

No reasonable person comparing the way we live now to the toil, want, dirt, ignorance, violence, insecurity, ill health, mortality of pre-industrial times--when parents buried the great majority of their children long before they reached adulthood--can possibly think the old days were "good old days." No reasonable person considering the world as it is now, with a billion people not having enough to eat, and many billions more lacking adequate shelter, education, medical treatment, and other necessities as a world where the biggest and most common problem is that people have too much. (The billionaires, who number two thousand on a world approaching eight billion, are not the standard here, nor the tiny minority of McMansion-dwelling, SUV-driving bourgeois, and anyone who thinks so only shows how far removed they are from any kind of social reality, and have not earned the right to speak of these matters at all.)

Far from wanting to revert to the harsher conditions of pre-industrial life, what we should want is to extend the benefits of modernity to all, broadly speaking, and deepen them for everyone. A world where everyone has their needs met, and indeed, can think beyond merely meeting need--because, after all, the realm of freedom lies only beyond that of necessity.

Of course, we are living through an ecological crisis, at the root of which is the Industrial Revolution's geometrical intensification of our consumption of our world's finite natural resources, which has reached grossly unsustainable proportions, and as things are, seems likely to get only worse as we suffer the problem's increasingly severe effects. All of that seems to moot the hope of that more prosperous, more comfortable word--until one considers the last, critical part of that preceding sentence "as things are." Why could things not be otherwise? We have technology. We have social knowledge as well. Between the two we could come up with solutions. Yet it is commonplace for writers on these subjects to treat them as if they offer no hope whatsoever.

Is this view based on a thorough assessment of our technological and organizational potentials?

This does not generally seem to be the case--those potentials just about never discussed. It seems to me that the "cowspiracy" crowd is exemplary of the tendency. They make claims (and highly disputable ones at that) about the contribution of livestock- and especially cattle-raising to the very real problem of climate change--and insist that people must give up animal products, rather than asking whether those products can be produced in more sustainable ways. A recent study, for instance, suggests that the addition of a small amount of seaweed to cow feed can virtually eliminate cows' methane emissions, while cellular agriculture raises the prospect of having beef without cows entirely, with even more impressive results--but all of this is commonly ignored in discussion of these matters (as the Cowspiracy missionaries endlessly demonstrate).

To the extent that such possibilities do enter the dialogue, there is a tendency to consider them in the most negative possible terms--as in one BBC report baldly asserting in its title that "Cultured Meat May Make Climate Change Worse." An examination of the article, however, shows that it simply compared estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from cattle to those they projected from the production process required for "alt-meat"--and that the "may" here rested on an understanding of the situation that I will summarize as follows:

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it cycles out of the atmosphere more rapidly. A shift to cultured meat would eliminate the methane emissions, but mean more carbon emissions because of the industrial process. While having less warming effect, their lingering longer in the atmosphere would mean an accumulation over time that could make the larger contribution to the climate change we want to avoid.

That long-run carbon emissions from cultured meat production may offset the benefits gained from the reduction in methane emissions is a more nuanced, qualified, claim than the title seems to me to imply (it did say "may," but I suspect that for most this was secondary to the "make climate change worse"), and the piece's problems do not stop there. Why, for example, should it be the case that cultured meat would mean more carbon emissions? The piece is rather vague on this point. The most that I can say is that it seemed to assume that the cultured meat production process would rely on fossil fuels. However we are in a world beginning to move away from such sources, a movement that anyone slightly concerned for the environment hopes can and will be quickened. One would expect our powering the process through renewables (or nuclear energy) to make a difference. Does the article mention this?

It does not.

One might also point out that besides the direct output of emissions from the production process there are other factors worth considering, not least the implications of cultured meat for land use. Presently over a quarter of the world's ice-free land area is utilized for grazing. Eliminating that use would create enormous potential for, for example, reforestation efforts that could do a great deal to offset our greenhouse gas emissions. Does this come up? No. The article instead acknowledges in the abstract that numerous other environmental factors would have to be considered in a proper appraisal of the environmental impact of the two possibilities, but offers as its only specific example a negative one, namely cultured meat's possible production "of organic or chemical molecule residues" in waste water (apparently considered in isolation from how this stacks up against the considerable water pollution resulting from today's industrial farming).

Taken altogether the piece looks like an exercise in bad science and technology reporting (in which it often seems we are drowning) that can come off as all but intended to quash the hopes reports about the technology may have raised. Were such exercises a rarity I would not take it as significant, but it seems to me that such pieces are quite commonplace, and highly influential, while they raise the question--Why should such a tendency be so widespread?

Alas, at this point we must consider a bit of political history. Optimism about what we can do with technology and organization is the legacy of the Enlightenment, and its argument for the potentials of human reason to understand and master the world. This has taken two forms--the liberal, and the radical, in the classical sense of these terms. The "liberal" conception, exemplified today by Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism, holds that technology will, in a society at least minimally consistent with its ideals of secure property rights and broad latitude for business, automatically make the world a better place. The "radical" conception (which not so long ago did not look so radical) thinks it will take some help from politics--at the very least, a social system where societal decisions are not all based on the individual short-term interest of the rich as they try to get richer and to hell with everything else.

The liberal conception, already looking questionable in the nineteenth century, looks very threadbare today, not just in its results but in its intellectual premises (TANSTAAFM, after all), while the radical conception has been thoroughly persecuted, and marginalized for decades. The resulting vacuum has been filled by ideas that were already reactionary in Victorian times--Malthusianism, Luddism, and the rest--which hardly make them likely to try and seek out those who can picture a different and happier kind of modernity, or "reinvent the wheel" to envision such possibilities on their own.

And so they feel themselves faced with a choice between believing in Silicon Valley's promises of broad sunlit uplands of super-modernity if the billionaires are allowed to continue calling all the shots, which seem none too convincing, or try to picture us not being modern at all, which means going back to what existed before the modern, more or less ("postmodern" all too often meaning "premodern"). Rather than trying to reengineer large, modern systems, they try and picture life without large, modern systems. Trade that car for a bike! Eat beans instead of something you would actually like (especially at the end of that exhausting bike ride)! Let us have composting communal toilets and just one square of toilet paper per visit! Use local currency! And so on and so forth.

Almost at once one anyone alert to the scale of the problem is struck by strain, by desperation, in such pronouncements--such as there always is when someone is trying to make much less suddenly go round, especially when the cost of everything is rising sharply. When we take the approach and its implications as a whole, globally, it appears probable that those who have little will have still less as the world's population continues to rise from seven and a half to ten billion as the climate change already locked in and unchallengeable by anything but large organizations and new technology drives billions of them from their home and rising seas and hotter summers and more extreme weather events wreak havoc with their ability to feed themselves with current methods, let alone the less productive, localist, "organic" kind so beloved by the degrowth crowd. Some, generally the poorest and weakest, will suffer more than others, in cases much more--and it is only the most simple-mindedly secure and entitled who imagine that they will passively starve to death rather than fight to survive. Can anyone imagine that our living in the thermonuclear age would be totally irrelevant in such a scenario?

Never mind the long-term flourishing of the human species and the planet on which we live. This won't get us through the short term, let alone the long, that older spectre of war getting us before the environmental catastrophe does. Fortunately I am unconvinced that the bright-sided optimism of the techno-libertarians and degrowth are the only two choices. In fact, everything I have learned looking at society, history, the technical potentials available to us, and the severity of the crisis at hand (there has already been too much damage to the environment for anyone to take seriously the hope that just doing less will save us), convinces me otherwise--and that it is only the third choice that not only holds out the hope of a world worth living in, but any hope of survival at all.