Dear future candidates,
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
The provincial elections are approaching and I am worried. Without waiting for your programs, I don’t think I’m taking a big risk in predicting that you’ll articulate them around growth, that you’ll promise green, solidarity, or that you won’t even bother. However, after pandemic management having reduced us to the status of workers, nearly six months of a brutal war upsetting our last certainties, and nearly half a century of “sustainable development” having failed to keep its promises, we can wondering how this discourse continues to be a bearer of hope. Rather than rushing to put on our old boots, perhaps it would be better to stop for a moment and ask yourself if a “return to normal”, supposing it possible, is in fact desirable.
Already, a growing number of studies dispute the possibility of limiting global warming while continuing to grow our economies. Without controls, the efficiencies promised by technological innovation would actually contribute to the problem by increasing production and consumption. Since energy demand is growing faster than our ability to substitute fossil fuels with renewables, we continue to emit more and more greenhouse gases.1.
Our growing use of natural resources also has serious consequences in terms of biodiversity, soil degradation and chemical pollution, despite the large share occupied by service activities, calling into question our ability to “dematerialize” the economy.2. In short, seeking to reduce our ecological impact by aiming for growth is a bit like running backwards on a treadmill at the airport: it’s a great strategy for missing our flight.
Appropriation
That said, perhaps the most indecent cost of our insatiable appetite is not environmental, but social. In order to satisfy it, the rich countries have appropriated, since 1990, the equivalent of 242,000 billion US dollars in labor and raw materials from so-called “developing” countries, while exporting a large part of the environmental damage there. It is 80 times the international aid provided to these countries, enough to challenge our so-called generosity and to shed light on the mechanisms of exploitation supporting our ways of life.
Consuming responsibly will not change anything, because our economic system is based on the existence of such inequalities: to extract a profit, someone has to lose on the exchange. Despite the adage that by making the pie bigger everyone can have a better slice, only 2% of the global wealth produced since the mid-1990s has gone to the bottom 50%, while the top 1% accounted for 38%.
This puts our participation in this great race into perspective. The increase in productivity, which could have translated into shorter working hours and a better life for all, has instead evaporated in the form of profits to a limited number of individuals, while the prevalence of diseases such as depression is on the rise, and more and more people are struggling to make ends meet. Is this the kind of society we want? What meaning do our lives have if we remain condemned to be cogs in a system that only seeks to obtain more and more, to the detriment of what really matters – the construction of a livable, just and truly democratic world?
At this pivotal moment, my concern is that none of you muster the courage to propose a social contract that allows us to look to the future with a little more confidence. During the last federal elections, Noémi Bureau-Civil advocated degrowth. Who among you would dare such pragmatism?