This text is taken from our newsletter “Le Courrier de l’économie” of June 13, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
In the 1970s, a team of researchers working at MIT, Boston, published an important work on the question of the myth of infinite and perpetual growth (The Limits to Growth—Club of Rome). Fifty years later, we see that the race of states, particularly Quebec and Canada, towards a constant increase in GDP remains a daily reality. […] How to get out of this dynamic? How to manage a decrease, on a global scale, which would ensure that we would live in harmony with the true capacity of the Earth which hosts us? And to avoid chaos, famines and wars in search of natural resources from neighboring countries, shouldn’t we start now? asks Me Alain M. Gaulin.
Little equation. Simply put, GDP is the sum of consumer spending, government spending, private investment and the external sector (exports minus imports). If we associate decline and GDP, we see that there can be both a green transition and an increase in GDP (if the consumer buys an electric car rather than a combustion engine one, if he eats organic food, if governments direct their spending towards decarbonization, if companies invest in productivity gains and the reduction of their carbon footprint, etc.).
Moreover, earlier projections of inevitable downsizing tended to underestimate technological innovation and efficiency gains. A convincing example is the continual displacement of the achievement of peak oil, with all these discoveries of new sources of supply always more expensive to exploit or with the rise of oil and shale gas.
Voluntary degrowth is therefore a concept that challenges us in our overconsumption and in our consumption choices. It refers more to GDP per capita and invites each individual to reduce their GHG emissions balance from a fixed starting point. However, if it were possible to obtain a reduction of a certain percentage of this carbon footprint per person, this possibility remains if two people form a couple. But if this household decides to have one or more children, the percentage of each must increase in order to compensate. We are therefore talking here about a realism that is difficult to demonstrate and that must be put into a global perspective.
Voluntary decrease thus becomes a concept that comes up against the exponential increase in population from a state of overpopulation. And the required percentage mentioned earlier is likely to be rather out of reach. Its starting point today is the UN estimates published in December 2020 that, to meet the global warming target of the Paris agreement, it would be necessary to reduce GHG emissions by 7.6% per year, each year, from 2020 until 2030. A target which would be, by far, an underestimate of the efforts to be made, according to the projections of Jean-Marc Jancovici. Last September, the French engineer, consultant and energy and climate specialist stated that, to respect the desired limit of increase far below 2°C, read 1.5°C, emissions must be divided by three by 2050, a decline of 5% per year for the next 30 years. “In other words, we would need an additional COVID-19 every year for 30 years to meet the objectives of the Paris agreement,” he explained.
Degrowth also calls on the Earth’s biocapacity, which we are also exceeding at an exponential rate. According to environmental NGO WWF and think tank Global Footprint Network, the Overshoot Day from which humanity consumes more resources than the Earth can regenerate in a year was July 29 last year. Not to mention the accelerated depletion of non-renewable resources. On this basis alone, logic dictates that degrowth is inevitable anyway.
It has already been written that, according to a base scenario forecasting a rise of 2°C in 2050 and 3°C in 2100 in the absence of mitigation measures, and using the UN projections of a population exceeding 10 billion, the growth rate of fossil fuel intensity would cause the negative effect to dominate, reducing world GDP by 21% in 2100. Other studies quantify the potential effects over a closer.
In short, a long answer to conclude on a certain unrealism of voluntary decrease. And to invite reflection rather on a change of choice and behavior, individual and collective, accompanied by an approach borrowing from the circular economy.