Degrowth vs a Green New Deal

new left review 112

july aug 2018

robert pollin

DE-GROWTH VS

A GREEN NEW DEAL

Debating Green Strategy—4

limate change necessarily presents a profound political

challenge in the present historical era, for the simple reason

that we are courting ecological disaster by not advancing a

viable global climate-stabilization project.

There are no certain-

ties about what will transpire if we allow the average global temperature

to continue rising. But as a basis for action, we only need to understand

that there is a non-trivial possibility that the continuation of life on earth

as we know it is at stake. Climate change therefore poses perhaps the

ultimate ‘what is to be done’ question. There is no shortage of proposals

for action, including, of course, the plan to do nothing at all advanced by

Trump and his acolytes. In recent numbers of nlr, Herman Daly and

Benjamin Kunkel have discussed a programme for a sustainable ‘steady-

state’ economy, and Troy Vettese has proposed re-wilding as a means

for natural geo-engineering. In this contribution, I examine and com-

pare two dramatically divergent approaches developed by analysts and

activists on the left. The ﬁrst is what I variously call ‘egalitarian green

growth’ or a ‘green new deal’.

The second has been termed ‘degrowth’

by its proponents.

Versions of degrowth have been developed in recent work by Tim Jackson,

Juliet Schor and Peter Victor. A recent collection, Degrowth: A Vocabulary

for a New Era, offers a good representation of the range of thinking

among degrowth proponents. As the editors put it: ‘The foundational

theses of degrowth are that growth is uneconomic and unjust, that it is

ecologically unsustainable and that it will never be enough.’

As is evident

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from the ﬁfty-one distinctly themed chapters in their collection, degrowth

addresses a much broader range of questions than climate change alone.

In fact, as I will discuss, a major weakness of the degrowth literature

is that, in concerning itself with such broad themes, it gives very little

detailed attention to developing an effective climate-stabilization project.

This deﬁciency was noted by Herman Daly himself, without question a

major intellectual progenitor of the degrowth movement, in his recent

nlr interview. Daly said he was ‘favourably inclined’ toward degrowth,

but nevertheless demurred that he was ‘still waiting for them to get

beyond the slogan and develop something a little more concrete.’

Let’s dispose of some red herrings at the outset. First, I share virtually

all the values and concerns of degrowth advocates. I agree that uncon-

trolled economic growth produces serious environmental damage, along

with increases in the supply of goods and services that households,

businesses and governments consume. I also agree that a signiﬁcant

share of what is produced and consumed in the current global-capitalist

economy is wasteful, especially most of what high-income people

I am grateful to John O’Neill at Manchester University for generously bringing me

up to date on the degrowth literature, despite our differences on this question; Mark

Lawrence of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, for shar-

ing his current research ﬁndings on co

removal proposals; and especially to Mara

Prentiss at Harvard for patiently instructing me on the land-use requirements for

building a 100 per cent renewable energy economy. The Review of Radical Political

Economics plans to publish a shorter version of this article in a forthcoming forum.

My approach is developed in Pollin, Greening the Global Economy, Cambridge

ma 2015. Underlying the results in that monograph are two more detailed stud-

ies: Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz and Bracken Hendricks, Green

Growth, Center for American Progress, 2014; and Pollin, Garrett-Peltier, Heintz

and Shouvik Chakraborty, Global Green Growth, un Industrial Development

Organization and Global Green Growth Institute, 2015. Further country-speciﬁc

studies are Pollin and Chakraborty, ‘An Egalitarian Green Growth Program for

India’, Economic and Political Weekly, L, 42, 10/17/15, pp. 38–51; Pollin, Garrett-

Peltier and Chakraborty, ‘An Egalitarian Clean Energy Investment Program for

Spain, 2015, Political Economy Research Institute Working Paper no. 390; and

Amanda Page-Hoongrajok, Chakraborty and Pollin, ‘Austerity vs Green Growth for

Puerto Rico,’ Challenge, 2017, 60:6, pp. 543–73. Unless otherwise indicated, the

research ﬁndings that I report here can be found in these references.

Giacomo D’Alisa, Frederico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth: A Vocabulary

for a New Era, London 2015, p. 6.

Herman Daly, ‘Ecologies of Scale: Interview by Benjamin Kunkel’, nlr 109,

Jan–Feb 2018, p. 102.

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consume. It is obvious that growth per se, as an economic category,

makes no reference to the distribution of the costs and beneﬁts of an

expanding economy. As for Gross Domestic Product as a statistical con-

struct, aiming to measure economic growth, there is no disputing that

it fails to account for the production of environmental bads, as well as

consumer goods. It does not account for unpaid labor, most of which

is performed by women, and gdp per capita tells us nothing about the

distribution of income or wealth.

One further general point. Introducing his nlr interview with Daly,

Benjamin Kunkel states that ‘ﬁdelity to gdp growth amounts to the reli-

gion of the modern world.’

A large number of degrowth proponents

express similar views. This perspective makes the critical error of ignor-

ing the reality of neoliberalism in the contemporary world. Neoliberalism

became the predominant economic-policy model with the military coup

of Pinochet in Chile in 1973, and the elections of Thatcher in 1979 and

Reagan in 1980. It has been clear for decades that, under neoliberalism,

the real religion is maximizing proﬁts for business in order to deliver

maximum incomes and wealth for the rich. The ﬁnancialization of the

global economy under Wall Street’s ﬁrm direction has been central to

the neoliberal project. As is well known, the concentration of income

and wealth in the advanced economies has proceeded apace under neo-

liberalism even while average economic growth has fallen to less than

half the rate that was sustained during the initial postwar ‘golden age

of capitalism’ that ended in the mid-1970s. If economic growth were

really the ‘religion of the modern world’, then its high priests would

be concentrating on how to put capitalism back on the leash that pre-

vailed during the ‘golden age’ rather than on consolidating the victories

achieved under neoliberalism.

Returning to climate change, it is in fact absolutely imperative that some

categories of economic activity should now grow massively—those asso-

ciated with the production and distribution of clean energy. Concurrently,

the global fossil-fuel industry needs to contract massively—that is, to ‘de-

grow’ relentlessly over the next forty or ﬁfty years until it has virtually

Benjamin Kunkel, ‘Introduction to Daly’, nlr 109, Jan–Feb 2018, p. 80.

This ‘unleashing’ of capitalism through the ascendance of neoliberalism is pow-

erfully documented in the late Andrew Glyn’s (aptly titled) Capitalism Unleashed,

Oxford 2006.

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shut down. In my view, addressing these matters in terms of their specif-

ics is more constructive in addressing climate change than presenting

broad generalities about the nature of economic growth, positive or neg-

ative. I develop these points in what follows.

Absolute decoupling

To make real progress on climate stabilization, the single most critical

project is to cut the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas dramati-

cally and without delay. The reason why this is so crucial is because

producing and consuming energy from fossil fuel is responsible for

generating about 70 per cent of the greenhouse-gas emissions that

are causing climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions from burn-

ing coal, oil and natural gas alone produce about 66 per cent of all

greenhouse-gas emissions, with another 2 per cent caused mainly by

methane leakages during extraction. The most recent worldwide data

from the International Energy Agency (iea) indicate that global co

emissions were around 32 billion tons in 2015.

The reports of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc), which provide

conservative benchmarks for what is required to stabilize the average

global temperature at no more than 2

Celsius above the pre-industrial

average, suggest that global co

emissions need to fall by about 40 per

cent within twenty years, to 20 billion tons per year, and by 80 per cent

as of 2050, to 7 billion tons.

The global economy is nowhere near on track to meet these goals.

Overall global emissions rose by 43 per cent between 2000 and 2015,

from 23 to 32 billion tons per year, as economies throughout the world

continued to burn increasing amounts of oil, coal and natural gas to

produce energy. According to the iea’s 2017 forecasting model, if cur-

rent global policies remain on a steady trajectory through 2040, global

emissions will rise to 43 billion tons per year. The iea also presents

what it terms a ‘New Policies’ forecast for 2040, with the global ‘new

policies’ corresponding closely to the agreements reached at the un-

sponsored 2015 Paris Climate Summit. Coming out of the conference,

International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2017, oecd/iea, pp. 650–1.

The ipcc presents its benchmarks in terms of ranges and probabilities, but this

would be a fair summary of its Fourth Assessment Report (2007) and Fifth Assessment

Report (2014), both available from the ipcc website.

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all 196 countries formally recognized the grave dangers posed by cli-

mate change and committed to substantially lowering their emissions.

Nevertheless, the iea estimates that, under its New Policies scenario,

global co

emissions will still rise to 36 billion tons per year as of 2040.

Moreover, the iea’s forecast takes no account of the fact that the Paris

commitments were non-binding on the signatory governments, nor

that the United States under Trump has renounced the agreement.

In short, there is at present nothing close to an international project

in place capable of moving the global economy onto a viable climate-

stabilization path.

People still need to consume energy—to light, heat and cool buildings; to

power cars, buses, trains and planes; to operate computers and industrial

machinery, among other uses. As such, to make progress toward climate

stabilization requires a viable alternative to the existing fossil-fuel infra-

structure for meeting the world’s energy needs. Energy consumption,

and economic activity more generally, therefore need to be absolutely

decoupled from the consumption of fossil fuels—that is, fossil-fuel con-

sumption will need to fall steadily and dramatically in absolute terms,

even while people must still be able to consume energy resources to meet

their various demands. The more modest goal of relative decoupling—

through which fossil-fuel consumption and co

emissions continue

to increase, but at a slower rate than gdp growth—is therefore not a

solution. Economies can continue to grow—and even grow rapidly, as

in China and India—while still advancing a viable climate-stabilization

project, as long as the growth process is absolutely decoupled from

fossil-fuel consumption. In fact, between 2000 and 2014, twenty-one

countries, including the us, Germany, the uk, Spain and Sweden, all

managed to absolutely decouple gdp growth from co

emissions—that

is, gdp in these countries expanded over this fourteen-year period, while

These projections refer only to net increases in co

emissions through the

on going combustion of fossil fuels. The climate-stabilization project becomes more

challenging still once we recognize that a signiﬁcant share of the accumulated stock

of co

in the atmosphere will need to be removed—that is, the co

removal rate

will need to exceed gross emissions, at least by 2050. For careful discussions on

this issue, see Mark Lawrence et al., ‘Evaluating Climate Geoengineering Proposals

in the Context of the Paris Agreement Temperature Goals’, 2018, forthcoming from

Nature Communications; and Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, ‘Beyond “Dangerous”

Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World’, Philosophical Transactions of

the Royal Society, vol. 369, no. 1934, January 2011, pp. 20–44.

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emissions fell.

This is a positive development, but only a small

step in the right direction.

Basics of a green new deal

The core feature of the Green New Deal needs to be a worldwide pro-

gramme to invest between 1.5 and 2 per cent of global gdp every year

to raise energy-efﬁciency standards and expand clean renewable-energy

supplies. Through this investment programme, it becomes realistic to

drive down global co

emissions relative to today by 40 per cent within

twenty years, while also supporting rising living standards and expanding

job opportunities. co

emissions could be eliminated altogether in forty

to ﬁfty years through continuing this clean-energy investment project at

roughly the same rate of about 1.5–2 per cent of global gdp per year. It

is critical to recognize that, within this framework, a higher economic-

growth rate will also accelerate the rate at which clean energy supplants

fossil fuels, since higher levels of gdp will correspondingly mean a

higher level of investment being channeled into clean-energy projects.

In 2016, global clean-energy investment was about $300 billion, or 0.4

per cent of global gdp. Thus, the increase in investments will need to

be in the range of 1–1.5 per cent of global gdp—about $1 trillion at the

current global gdp of $80 trillion, then rising in step with global growth

thereafter—to achieve a 40 per cent emissions reduction within twenty

years. The consumption of oil, coal and natural gas will also need to

fall by about 35 per cent over this same twenty-year period—an aver-

age rate of decline of 2.2 per cent per year. Pursuing this same basic

investment pattern beyond the initial 20-year programme, along with

the continued contraction of fossil-fuel consumption, could realistically

achieve a zero-emissions standard within roughly the next ﬁfty years.

Of course, both privately owned fossil-fuel companies, such as Exxon-

Mobil and Chevron, and publicly owned companies like Saudi Aramco

and Gazprom have massive interests at stake in preventing reductions

in fossil-fuel consumption; they also wield enormous political power.

These powerful vested interests will have to be defeated.

Investments aimed at raising energy-efﬁciency standards and expanding

the supply of clean renewable energy will also generate tens of millions

of new jobs in all regions of the world. In general, building a green

Nate Aden, ‘The Roads to Decoupling: 21 Countries Are Reducing Carbon

Emissions While Growing gdp’, World Resources Institute blog, 5 April 2016.

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economy entails more labour-intensive activities than maintaining the

world’s current fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure. At the same

time, unavoidably, workers and communities whose livelihoods depend

on the fossil-fuel industry will lose out in the clean-energy transition.

Unless strong policies are advanced to support these workers, they will

face layoffs, falling incomes and declining public-sector budgets to sup-

port schools, health clinics and public safety. It follows that the global

green-growth project must commit to providing generous transitional

support for workers and communities tied to the fossil-fuel industry.

There are major variations in the emissions produced by burning oil,

coal and natural gas. To produce a given amount of energy, natural gas

will generate about 40 per cent fewer emissions than coal, and 15 per

cent less than oil. It is therefore widely argued that natural gas can be

a ‘bridge fuel’ to a clean-energy future, through switching to it from

coal. Such claims do not withstand scrutiny. At best, an implausibly

large 50 per cent global fuel switch to natural gas would reduce emis-

sions by only 8 per cent. But even this calculation does not take account

of the methane gas that leaks into the atmosphere when natural gas

is extracted through fracking. Recent research has shown that when

more than about 5 per cent of the gas extracted by fracking leaks into

the atmosphere, the impact eliminates any environmental beneﬁt from

burning natural gas relative to coal. Various studies have reported a

wide range of estimates as to what leakage rates have actually been in

the United States, as fracking operations have grown rapidly. A recent

survey puts that range between 0.18 and 11.7 per cent for different

sites in North Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and

Pennsylvania. It would be reasonable to assume that if fracking expands

on a large scale in regions outside the us, it is likely that leakage rates

will fall closer to the higher-end ﬁgures of 12 per cent, at least until

serious controls could be established. This then would diminish, if not

eliminate altogether, any emission-reduction beneﬁts from a coal-to-

natural gas fuel switch.

Ramon Alvarez et al., ‘Greater Focus Needed on Methane Leakage from Natural

Gas Infrastructure’, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (pnas),

2012; Joe Romm, ‘Methane Leaks Wipe Out any Climate Beneﬁt of Fracking,

Satellite Observations Conﬁrm,’ Think Progress, 2014; Robert Howarth, ‘Methane

Emissions and Climactic Warming Risk from Hydraulic Fracturing and Shale Gas

Development: Implications for Policy’, Energy and Emission Control Technologies,

2015:3, pp. 45–54; and J. Peischl et al. ‘Quantifying atmospheric methane emis-

sions from oil and natural gas production in the Bakken shale region of North

Dakota.’ Journal of Geophysical Research, 2016, pp. 6101–11.

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For some analysts, ‘clean energy’ includes nuclear power and carbon cap-

ture and sequestration (ccs) technologies. Nuclear power does generate

electricity without producing co

emissions. But it also creates major

environmental and public-safety concerns, which have only intensiﬁed

since the March 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in

Japan. Similarly ccs presents hazards. These technologies aim to capture

emitted carbon and transport it, usually through pipelines, to subsurface

geological formations, where it would be stored permanently. But such

technologies have not been proven at a commercial scale. The dangers of

carbon leakage from ﬂawed transportation and storage systems will only

increase if ccs technologies are commercialized and operating under

an incentive structure where maintaining safety standards will reduce

proﬁts. An appropriately cautious clean-energy transition programme

requires investment in technologies that are well understood, already

operating at large-scale and, without question, safe.

Thus, the ﬁrst critical project for a global green-growth programme is to

dramatically raise energy-efﬁciency levels—that is, using less energy to

achieve the same, or higher, levels of energy service through the adoption

of improved technologies and practices. Examples include insulating

buildings more effectively to stabilize indoor temperatures, driving

more fuel-efﬁcient cars—or, better yet, relying on well-functioning

public-transport systems—and reducing the amount of energy wasted

through generating and transmitting electricity, and through operating

industrial machinery. Expanding energy-efﬁciency investment supports

rising living standards because, by deﬁnition, it saves money for energy

consumers. A major study by the us Academy of Sciences found that,

for the us economy, ‘energy-efﬁcient technologies . . . exist today, or are

expected to be developed in the normal course of business, that could

potentially save 30 per cent of the energy used in the us economy while

also saving money.’ Similarly, a McKinsey study focused on developing

countries found that, using existing technologies only, energy-efﬁciency

investments could generate savings in energy costs in the range of 10

per cent of total gdp, for all low- and middle-income countries. In Energy

Revolution: The Physics and Promise of Efﬁcient Technology, Mara Prentiss

argues further that such estimates understate the realistic savings poten-

tial of energy-efﬁciency investments.

National Academy of Sciences, ‘Real Prospects for Energy Efﬁciency in the

United States’, 2010; McKinsey & Co., ‘Energy Efﬁciency: A Compelling Global

Resource’, 2010; Mara Prentiss, Energy Revolution: The Physics and Promise of

Efﬁcient Technology, Harvard 2015, passim.

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Raising energy-efﬁciency levels will generate ‘rebound effects’—that

is, increased energy consumption resulting from lower energy costs.

But such rebound effects are likely to be modest within the context

of a global project focused on reducing co

emissions and stabiliz-

ing the climate. Among other factors, energy-consumption levels in

advanced economies are close to saturation point in the use of home

appliances and lighting—we are not likely to clean dishes more fre-

quently because we have a more efﬁcient dishwasher. The evidence

shows that consumers in advanced economies are more likely to heat

and cool their homes and drive their cars when they have access to

more efﬁcient equipment—but again, these increased consumption

levels are usually modest. Average rebound effects are likely to be sig-

niﬁcantly larger in developing economies. It is critical, however, that

all energy-efﬁciency gains be accompanied by complementary policies

(as discussed below), including setting a price on carbon emissions

to discourage fossil-fuel consumption. Most signiﬁcantly, expanding

the supply of clean renewable energy will allow for higher levels of

energy consumption without leading to increases in co

emissions.

It is important to recognize, ﬁnally, that different countries operate at

widely varying levels of energy efﬁciency. For example, Germany pres-

ently operates at an efﬁciency level roughly 50 per cent higher than

that of the United States. Brazil is at more than twice the efﬁciency

level of South Korea and nearly three times that of South Africa. There

is no evidence that large rebound effects have emerged as a result of

these high efﬁciency standards in Germany and Brazil.

As for renewable energy, the International Renewable Energy Agency

(irena) estimated in 2018 that, in all regions of the world, average costs

of generating electricity with clean, renewable energy sources—wind,

hydro, geo-thermal, low-emissions bioenergy—are now roughly at parity

with fossil fuels.

This is without factoring in the environmental costs of

burning oil, coal and natural gas. Solar-energy costs remain somewhat

higher on average but, according to irena, as a global-weighted average,

solar photovoltaic costs fell by over 70 per cent between 2010 and 2017.

Average solar photovoltaic costs are likely to fall to parity with fossil fuels

as an electricity source within ﬁve years. Adnan Amin of irena sum-

marizes the global cost trajectory: ‘By 2020, all mainstream renewable

power generation technologies can be expected to provide average costs

at the lower end of the fossil-fuel cost range. In addition, several solar pv

irena, Renewable Capacity Statistics, Abu Dhabi 2018.

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and wind power projects will provide some of the lowest-cost electricity

from any source’.

Land-use requirements

In the last number of nlr, Troy Vettese argued that it would be unreal-

istic to expect that a global renewable-energy infrastructure could be the

foundation for a viable climate-stabilization project because, at present

consumption levels, it would take up enormous amounts of the earth’s

land surface. Vettese writes: ‘A fully renewable system will probably

occupy a hundred times more land than a fossil-fuel powered one. In the

case of the us, between 25 and 50 per cent of its territory, and in cloudy,

densely populated countries such as the uk and Germany, all of the

national territory might have to be covered in wind turbines, solar pan-

els and biofuel crops to maintain current levels of energy production.’

The primary focus of Vettese’s article is not renewable energy and land

use. Instead he presents an extended case for what he terms ‘natural

geo-engineering’ as a climate solution, with global ‘afforestation’ being

the main driver. This involves increasing forest cover or density in previ-

ously non-forested or deforested areas, with ‘reforestation’—the more

commonly used term—as one component. The case Vettese makes for

afforestation is valuable, but it is undermined by his initial discussion on

renewables and land use.

Vettese provides virtually no evidence to support his claims on the

land-use requirements for renewables. In fact, his claims cannot be

supported, as a review of the relevant evidence makes amply clear. A

critical contribution here is Mara Prentiss’s Energy Revolution, which

offers a rigorous account. Focusing on the us economy to illustrate the

main issues, Prentiss shows that, relying on existing solar technologies,

the us could meet its entire energy consumption needs through solar

energy alone, while utilizing just 0.8 per cent of the total us land area.

The ﬁgures I am citing from the 2018 irena study are for ‘Levelized Costs of

Electricity’, which include: levelized capital costs; ﬁxed operations and mainte-

nance; variable operations and maintenance, including fuel costs; transmission;

and the capacity factor for the equipment in use. irena reports lcoe ﬁgures on a

national, regional, and global basis.

Troy Vettese, ‘To Freeze the Thames’, nlr 111, May–June 2018, p. 66. Vettese

goes on to argue that energy consumption must therefore be cut to 2,000 watts per

capita per day, in a programme that would marry E. O. Wilson’s ‘half-earthing’ with

‘egalitarian eco-austerity’.

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If we allow that energy-efﬁcient investment, as described above, can cut

us per capita energy consumption by roughly 50 per cent over twenty

years, this would then mean that solar energy could supply 100 per cent

of us energy demand through utilizing 0.4 per cent of the country’s total

landmass. Moreover, with the us as a high-efﬁciency economy, more

than half of the necessary surface area could be provided through locat-

ing solar panels on rooftops and parking lots throughout the country.

this is taken into account, solar-energy sources using existing technolo-

gies could supply 100 per cent of us energy demand while consuming

somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent of additional us land area.

Wind power does require more land. Prentiss estimates that wind power

could provide 100 per cent of existing us energy demand through using

15 per cent of the country’s land area. Again, assuming investment in

energy efﬁciency lowers per capita energy consumption by half, then

only 7.5 per cent of total us land area would be needed to produce 100

per cent of energy demand through wind power. Further, wind turbines

can be placed on land currently used for agriculture with only minor

losses of agricultural productivity. The turbines would need to be located

on about 17 per cent of the existing farmland to generate 100 per cent

of us energy supply with high efﬁciency. Farmers should welcome this

dual use of their land, since it provides them with a major additional

income source. At present, the states of Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and

South Dakota generate more than 30 per cent of their electricity supply

through wind turbines.

Of course, neither solar nor wind power need to be the sole energy

source, in the us or elsewhere. The most effective renewable-energy

infrastructure would combine solar and wind, along with geothermal,

hydro and clean bioenergy as supplemental sources. Overall land-use

requirements can be minimized through an integrated renewable-

energy infrastructure. For example: roughly half of all us energy supply

could be provided by solar panels on rooftops and parking lots, another

40 per cent by wind turbines mounted on about 7 per cent of us

farmland and the remaining 10 per cent by geothermal, hydro and low-

emissions bioenergy. This is without including contributions from solar

farms in desert areas, solar panels mounted on highways or offshore

wind projects, among other supplemental renewable energy sources.

For a detailed analysis, see the us National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory

study, Rooftop Solar Photovoltaic Technical Potential in the United States, 2016.

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Moreover, it is through combining these sources that we can effectively

address some of the real challenges in building a renewable-energy infra-

structure: intermittency, transmission and storage. Intermittency refers

to the fact that the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow 24

hours a day. Moreover, on average, different geographical areas receive

different levels of sunshine and wind. As such, the solar and wind power

that are generated in the sunnier and windier areas of the us—such as

Southern California, Florida and the Midwest farm belt—will need to be

stored and transmitted at reasonable cost to the less sunny and windy

areas. Investments in advancing storage and transmission technologies

therefore need to be included in the overall clean-energy investment pro-

gramme at roughly 1.5 per cent of annual gdp.

It is true that conditions in the United States are more favourable than

those in some other countries. Germany and the uk, the two countries

cited by Vettese, have population densities seven or eight times greater

than the us and receive less sunlight over the course of a year. As such,

these countries, operating at high efﬁciency levels, would need to use

about 3 per cent of their total land area to generate 100 per cent of their

energy demand through domestically produced solar energy. Wind

power would require a signiﬁcant share of their land area. But here again,

farmlands could be converted to dual use with only minor reductions in

productivity. The uk and Germany could also supplement their solar

and wind supply with domestically produced geothermal, hydro and

clean bioenergy. Using cost-effective storage and transmission technolo-

gies, they could also import energy generated by solar and wind power

in other countries, just as, in the United States, wind power generated

in Iowa could be transmitted to New York City. Any such import require-

ments are likely to be modest. Both the uk and Germany are already net

energy importers in any case. With respect to population density and the

availability of sunlight to harvest, and factoring in likely global energy

consumption levels over the next forty years, average requirements for

renewables are much closer to those in the us than to Germany and the

uk. Overall then, the work by Prentiss and others demonstrates that, in

fact, requirements for land use present no constraint on developing a

global clean-energy infrastructure.

The late David MacKay provided the most detailed arguments on the heavy land-

use requirements associated with renewable energy in his Renewable Energy without

the Hot Air (2009). But, as Prentiss has pointed out (private correspondence), some

of MacKay’s key assumptions—including those on solar conversion rates and

costs—are signiﬁcantly in error.

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Vettese is correct to emphasize the importance of afforestation as a

climate-stabilization project, because forested areas naturally absorb

signiﬁcant amounts of co

. He does not present estimates as to how

much of the co

already accumulated in the atmosphere afforestation

would be able to absorb, nor for how far it could offset newly gener-

ated emissions produced by ongoing fossil-fuel consumption. Recent

analysis by Mark Lawrence and colleagues at the Institute for Advanced

Sustainability Studies in Potsdam concluded that afforestation could

realistically reduce co

levels by between 0.5 and 3.5 billion tons per year

through 2050, with the ﬁgure rising to 4–12 billion tons per year from

2051–2100.

As noted above, current global co

emissions levels are at

32 billion tons per year, and the iea estimates this ﬁgure rising through

2040, even if the Paris Agreement is fully implemented. As such, the

ﬁgures provided by Lawrence demonstrate that afforestation can cer-

tainly serve as a critical complementary intervention within a broader

clean-energy transition programme, because it is a natural and proven

method of absorbing a signiﬁcant share of the accumulated stock of co

in the atmosphere. But afforestation cannot bear the major burden of a

viable climate-stabilization project in the absence of global clean-energy

investments at the scale I have described above—that is, about 1.5 per

cent of global gdp per year until new emissions have been driven to

near-zero within roughly forty years.

Job creation and a just transition

Countries at all levels of development will experience signiﬁcant gains

in job creation through clean-energy investments relative to maintain-

ing their existing fossil-fuel infrastructure. Our research at the Political

Economy Research Institute, cited below, has found this relationship to

hold in Brazil, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, South

Africa, South Korea, Spain and the United States. For a given level of

spending, the percentage increases in job creation range from about 75

per cent in Brazil to 350 per cent in Indonesia. For India, as a speciﬁc

example, we found that increasing clean-energy investments by 1.5 per

cent of gdp every year for twenty years will generate a net increase of

about 10 million jobs per year. This is after factoring in job losses result-

ing from retrenchments in the country’s fossil-fuel industries. There

is no guarantee that the jobs being generated through clean-energy

Lawrence et al., ‘Evaluating Climate Geoengineering Proposals in the Context of

the Paris Agreement Temperature Goals’.

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investments will provide decent compensation to workers. Nor will

they necessarily deliver improved workplace conditions, stronger union

representation or reduced employment discrimination against women,

minorities or other under-represented groups. But the fact that new

investments will be occurring will create increased leverage for politi-

cal mobilization across the board—for improving job quality, expanded

union coverage and more jobs for under-represented groups.

At the same time, workers and communities throughout the world

whose livelihoods depend on oil, coal and natural gas will lose out in

the clean-energy transition. In order for the global clean energy pro-

ject to succeed, it must provide adequate transitional support for these

workers and communities. Brian Callaci and I have developed a ‘just

transition’ policy framework in some detail for the us economy; and

Heidi Garrett-Peltier, Jeannette Wicks-Lim and I have developed more

detailed approaches around these issues for the us states of New York

and Washington.

Considering the us as a whole, Callaci and I estimate

that a rough high-end cost for such a programme is a relatively modest

$600 million per year, which is less than 0.2 per cent of the 2018 us

Federal budget. This level of funding would provide strong support in

three areas: income, retraining and relocation support for workers facing

retrenchments; guaranteeing the pensions for workers in the affected

industries; and mounting effective transition programmes for what are

now fossil-fuel dependent communities. Comparable programmes will

need to be implemented in other country settings.

Industrial policies and ownership forms

Increasing clean-energy investment by 1.5 per cent of global gdp will

not happen without strong industrial policies. Even though, for example,

Robert Pollin and Brian Callaci, ‘A Just Transition for us Fossil Fuel Industry

Workers’, American Prospect, 2016; Pollin and Callaci, ‘The Economics of Just

Transition: A Framework for Supporting Fossil Fuel-Dependent Workers and

Communities in the United States’, Labor Studies Journal, 2018, pp. 1–46; Pollin,

Garrett-Peltier and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, Clean Energy Investments for New York State,

Political Economy Research Institute (peri), University of Massachusetts Amherst,

2017; Pollin, Garrett-Peltier and Wicks-Lim, A Green New Deal for Washington State,

peri, 2017. Sasha Abramsky reports on the progress of the Green New Deal move-

ment in Washington State in ‘This Washington State Ballot Measure Fights for

Both Jobs and Climate Justice’, The Nation, 20 July 2018.

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energy-efﬁciency investments generally pay for themselves over three

to ﬁve years, and the average costs of producing renewable energy are

at rough parity with fossil fuels, it is still the case that some entities—

public enterprises, private ﬁrms or a combination of both—will have

to advance the initial capital and bear the project risk. Depending on

speciﬁc conditions within each country, industrial policies will be

needed to promote technical innovation and, more broadly, adaptations

of existing clean-energy technology. Governments will need to deploy a

combination of policy instruments, including research and development

support, preferential tax treatment for clean-energy investments and sta-

ble long-term market arrangements through government-procurement

contracts. Clean-energy industrial policies also need to include emission

standards for utilities and transport, and price regulation for both fos-

sil fuel and clean energy. The widely discussed tool of pricing carbon

emissions through either a carbon tax or a cap on permissible emissions

certainly needs to be a major component of the overall industrial-policy

mix. A carbon tax in particular can raise large amounts of revenue that

can then be used to help ﬁnance clean-energy investments as well as

redistributing funds to lower-income households. Germany’s experi-

ence of ﬁnancing is valuable here, since it has been the most successful

advanced economy in developing its clean-energy economy. According

to the International Energy Agency, a major factor in Germany’s suc-

cess is that its state-owned development bank, kfw, ‘plays a crucial role

by providing loans and subsidies for investment in energy efﬁciency

measures in buildings and industry, which have leveraged signiﬁcant

private funds.’

This Germany development banking approach could be

adapted throughout the world.

Another critical measure in supporting clean-energy investments at 1.5

per cent of annual global gdp will be to lower the proﬁtability require-

ments for these investments. This in turn raises the issue of ownership

of newly created energy enterprises and assets. Speciﬁcally: how might

alternative ownership forms—including public ownership, community

ownership and small-scale private companies—play a role in advancing

the clean-energy investment agenda? Throughout the world, the energy

sector has long operated under a variety of ownership structures, includ-

ing public or municipal ownership, and forms of private cooperative

International Energy Agency, Energy Efﬁciency Market Report, 2013: Market Trends

and Medium-Term Prospects, oecd–iea, Paris 2013.

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ownership as well as private corporations. Indeed, in the oil and natural-

gas industry, publicly owned national companies control approximately

90 per cent of the world’s reserves and 75 per cent of production, as well

as many of the oil and gas infrastructure systems. These national cor-

porations include Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, China National Petroleum

Corporation, the National Iranian Oil Company, Petroleos de Venezuela,

Petrobras in Brazil and Petronas in Malaysia. There is no evidence to

suggest that these publicly owned companies are likely to be more

supportive of a clean-energy transition than the private corporations.

National development projects, lucrative careers and political power all

depend on continuing the ﬂow of fossil-fuel revenues. In and of itself,

public ownership is not a solution.

Clean-energy investments will nevertheless create major new opportu-

nities for alternative ownership forms, including various combinations

of smaller-scale public, private and cooperative ownership. For exam-

ple, community-based wind farms have been highly successful for

nearly two decades in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the uk. A major

reason for their success is that they operate with lower proﬁt require-

ments than large-scale private corporations. On this point, my Green

New Deal perspective converges with positions supported by degrowth

proponents. For example, Juliet Schor describes in True Wealth (2011)

what she calls ‘a prima facie case that the emerging green sector will be

and entrepreneurial determination’. Over time, Schor writes, ‘these

entities can become a sizeable sector of low-impact enterprises, which

form the basis of animated local communities and provide livelihood

on a wide scale.’

It is one thing to conclude that all countries—or at least those countries

with either large gdps or populations—should invest about 1.5 per cent

of gdp per year in energy efﬁciency and clean renewable investments.

But it is another matter to determine what standard of fairness should

be applied in allocating the costs of such investments among the vari-

ous people, countries and regions of the globe. What would be a fair

procedure? If the global clean-energy investment project sketched here

Juliet Schor, True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a

Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy, London 2011,

pp. 156–57. More generally, this aspect of the clean-energy investment project is

very much in the spirit of E. F. Schumacher’s classic Small is Beautiful (1973).

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is successful, average per capita co

emissions will fall within twenty

years from its current level of 4.6 tons to 2.3 tons. This corresponds

to a fall in total emissions from 32 to 20 billion tons. Still, at the end

of this 20-year investment cycle, average us emissions will be 5.8 tons

per capita, nearly three times the averages for China and the world as

a whole, and ﬁve times the average for India. At a basic level, this is

unfair—particularly given that, over the past century of the fossil-fuel

era, us emissions have exceeded those in India and China combined

by around 400 per cent. As a standard of fairness, one could, with good

reason, insist that the United States and other rich countries be required

to bring down per capita co

emissions to the same level as low-income

countries. We could also insist that high-income people—regardless

of their countries of residence—be permitted to produce no more co

emissions than anyone else.

There is a solid ethical case for such measures. But there is absolutely

no chance that they will be implemented. Given the climate-stabilization

imperative facing the global economy, we do not have the luxury to waste

time on huge global efforts ﬁghting for unattainable goals. Consider the

us case: on grounds of both ethics and realism, it will be much more

constructive to require that, in addition to bringing its own emissions

down to about 6 tons per capita within twenty years, the us should also

provide large-scale assistance to other countries in ﬁnancing and bring-

ing to scale their own transformative clean-energy projects.

Problems with degrowth

As I emphasized at the outset, degrowth proponents have made valuable

contributions in addressing many of the untenable features of economic

growth. But on the speciﬁc issue of climate change, degrowth does not

provide anything like a viable stabilization framework. Consider some

very simple arithmetic. Following the ipcc, we know that global co

emissions need to fall from their current level of 32 billion tons to 20

billion tons within twenty years. If we assume that, following a degrowth

agenda, global gdp contracts by 10 per cent over the next two decades,

that would entail a reduction of global gdp four times greater than dur-

ing the 2007–09 ﬁnancial crisis and Great Recession. In terms of co

emissions, the net effect of this 10 per cent gdp contraction, considered

on its own, would be to push emissions down by precisely 10 per cent—

that is, from 32 to 29 billion tons. It would not come close to bringing

emissions down to 20 billion tons by 2040.

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Clearly then, even under a degrowth scenario, the overwhelming fac-

tor pushing emissions down will not be a contraction of overall gdp

but massive growth in energy efﬁciency and clean renewable-energy

investments—which, for accounting purposes, will contribute towards

increasing gdp—along with similarly dramatic cuts in fossil-fuel produc-

tion and consumption, which will register as reducing gdp. Moreover,

the immediate effect of any global gdp contraction would be huge job

losses and declining living standards for working people and the poor.

During the Great Recession, global unemployment rose by over 30 mil-

lion. I have not seen a convincing argument from a degrowth advocate

as to how we could avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if gdp

were to fall by twice as much.

These fundamental problems with degrowth are illustrated by the case

of Japan, which has been a slow-growing economy for a generation now,

even while maintaining high per capita incomes. Herman Daly himself

describes Japan as being ‘halfway to becoming a steady-state economy

already, whether they call it that or not.’

Daly is referring to the fact that,

between 1996 and 2015, gdp growth in Japan averaged an anemic 0.7

per cent per year. This compares with an average Japanese growth rate of

4.8 per cent per year for the 30-year period 1966 to 1995. Nevertheless,

as of 2017, Japan remained in the ranks of the large, upper-income

economies, with average gdp per capita at about $40,000. Yet despite

the fact that Japan has been close to a no-growth economy for twenty

years, its co

emissions remain among the highest in the world, at 9.5

tons per capita. This is 40 per cent below the ﬁgure for the United States,

but it is four times higher than the average global level of 2.5 tons per

capita that must be achieved if global emissions are to drop by 40 per

cent by 2040. Moreover, Japan’s per capita emissions have not fallen at

all since the mid-1990s. The reason is straightforward: as of 2015, 92 per

cent of Japan’s total energy consumption comes from burning oil, coal

and natural gas.

Thus, despite ‘being halfway to becoming a steady-state economy’,

Japan has accomplished virtually nothing in advancing a viable

climate-stabilization path. The only way it will make progress is to

replace its existing, predominantly fossil-fuel energy system with a

clean-energy infrastructure. At present, hydro power supplies 5 per cent

of Japan’s total energy needs, and other renewable sources only 3 per

Daly & Kunkel, ‘Ecologies of Scale’, p. 102.

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cent. Overall then, like all large economies—whether they are growing

rapidly or not at all—Japan needs to embrace the Green New Deal.

A green great depression?

The majority of degrowth proponents pay almost no attention to emis-

sion levels. Thus the introduction to a special issue of Ecological Economics

focused on degrowth, edited by leading contemporary degrowthers

Giorgos Kallis, Christian Kerschner and Joan Martinez-Alier, devoted

precisely one paragraph to the issue. This described a proposal for

‘cap-and-share’ which, the authors explained, would involve placing ‘a

declining annual global cap on the tonnage of co

emitted by fossil

fuels’ and ‘allocating a large part of each year’s tonnage to everyone in

the world on an equal per capita basis’.

Kallis, Kerschner and Martinez-

Alier recognize that the political economy of such a proposal would be

highly complex; but they do not take it upon themselves to examine any

of these complexities. In the same issue of Ecological Economics Peter

Victor, author of Managing without Growth (2008), did develop a series

of models for evaluating the relationship between economic growth and

emissions for the Canadian economy.

Under Victor’s baseline sce-

nario, Canadian gdp would grow by an average of 2.3 per cent between

2005 and 2035, resulting in a doubling of per capita gdp, while co

emissions would rise by 77 per cent. Victor then presented both low-

growth and degrowth scenarios for the same period. He reports that,

under degrowth, greenhouse-gas emissions would fall by 88 per cent,

relative to the 2035 ‘business-as-usual’ growth scenario. But he also

concludes that Canada’s per capita gdp under degrowth would fall to 26

per cent of the business-as-usual scenario by 2035.

Victor does not ﬂesh out his results with actual data on the Canadian

economy, but it is illuminating to do so. In 2005, Canada’s per capita

gdp was $53,336 (expressed in 2018 Canadian dollars). Thus, under the

business-as-usual scenario, per capita gdp rises to about $107,000 as

Giorgos Kallis, Christian Kerschner and Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘The Economics of

Degrowth’, Ecological Economics, vol. 84, 2012, p. 4. The special issue of Ecological

Economics collected contributions from the second International Conference on

Economic Degrowth, held in Barcelona in 2010.

Peter Victor, ‘Growth, Degrowth and Climate Change: A Scenario Analysis’,

Ecological Economics, vol. 84, 2012, p. 212. Victor’s Managing without Growth: Slower

by Design, not Disaster, Cheltenham 2008, presented his models in a broader

degrowth framework.

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of 2035. Alternatively, under the degrowth scenario, Canada’s per capita

gdp in 2035 would plummet to $28,000. This per capita gdp level for

2035 is 48 per cent below Canada’s actual per capita gdp for 2005. In

other words, under Victor’s degrowth scenario, the emissions reduction

achieved over a 30-year period would be only modestly greater than what

would be achieved under a clean-energy investment programme at 1.5

per cent of annual gdp, but with this fundamental difference: under

the clean-energy investment project, average incomes would roughly

double, while under degrowth, average incomes would experience a

historically unprecedented collapse. Victor doesn’t ask whether an eco-

nomic depression of this magnitude under degrowth, in Canada or

elsewhere, is either economically or politically viable. He doesn’t exam-

ine what impact this loss of gdp would have in funding for health care,

education or, for that matter, environmental protection. Nor does he

explain what policy tools would be deployed to force Canada’s gdp to

halve within thirty years. Victor’s article is further remarkable in that, in

an analysis focused on the relationship between economic growth and

climate change, it includes only one brief mention of renewable energy

and no reference whatsoever to energy efﬁciency.

Perhaps the most inﬂuential contemporary discussion on the eco-

nomics of climate change and degrowth is Tim Jackson’s Prosperity

without Growth.

Jackson begins by emphasizing that a viable climate-

stabilization path requires absolute decoupling between growth and

emissions on a global scale, not merely relative decoupling. This point

is indisputable. Jackson then reviews data for 1965–2015, showing that

absolute decoupling has not occurred either at a global level or among,

respectively, low-, middle- or high-income countries. Again, there is no

disputing this evidence—although, as noted above, several individual

countries did achieve absolute decoupling between gdp growth and co

emissions for 2000–14. In fact, there are only two major issues to debate

with Jackson. The ﬁrst is whether absolute decoupling is a realistic pos-

sibility, moving forward. Jackson is dubious, writing that ‘the evidence

that decoupling offers a coherent escape from the dilemma of growth is,

ultimately, far from convincing. The speed at which resource and emis-

sions efﬁciencies have to improve if we are going to meet carbon targets

are at best heroic, if the economy is growing relentlessly.’

Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet [2009],

London 2017.

Jackson, Prosperity without Growth, p. 87.

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But is it really the case that absolute decoupling requires ‘heroic’

advances in building a clean-energy economy? It is true that absolute

decoupling on a global scale is a highly challenging project. But we can

be fairly precise in measuring the magnitude of the challenge. As dis-

cussed above, it will require an investment level in clean renewables and

energy efﬁciency at about 1.5–2 per cent of global gdp annually. This

amounts to about $1 trillion at today’s global economy level and $1.5

trillion average over the next twenty years. These are large but realistic

investment goals which could be embraced by economies at all levels

of development, in every region of the globe. One reason why this is a

realistic project is that it would support rising average living standards

and expanding job opportunities, in low-income countries in particu-

lar. For nearly forty years now, the gains from economic growth have

persistently favoured the rich. Nevertheless, the prospects for reversing

inequality in all countries will be far greater when the overall economy

is growing than when the rich are ﬁghting everyone else for shares of

a shrinking pie. How sanguine, for example, would we expect afﬂuent

Canadians to be over the prospect of their incomes being cut by half or

more in absolute dollars over the next thirty years? In political terms, the

attempt to implement a degrowth agenda would render the global clean-

energy project utterly unrealistic.

The second issue to raise with Jackson is still more to the point: does

degrowth offer a viable alternative to absolute decoupling as a climate-

stabilization project? As we have seen, the answer is ‘No.’ Jackson

himself provides no substantive discussion to demonstrate otherwise.

Indeed, on the issue of climate stabilization, Jackson offers no basis

for disputing Herman Daly’s charactization of degrowth as a slogan

in search of a programme. Overall, then, if the left is serious about

mounting a viable, global, climate-stabilization project, it should not

be losing time seeking to build an all-purpose, broad-brush degrowth

movement—which, for the reasons outlined, cannot succeed in actually

stabilizing the climate. This is even more emphatically the case when a

fair and workable approach to climate stabilization lies right before us,

by way of the Green New Deal.