DEGROWTH
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Interest rates and the need for growth
Degrowth and its impact on the economy
The myth of dematerialised growth based solely on services
Degrowth, a simple redistribution of wealth ?
Why degrowth won't happen by choice but by force
Technology and innovation is not the solution
Degrowth would be the end of women's empowerment
Globalisation and unlimited resource extraction
- Introduction
From ancient times until around 1800, population and economic growth were stagnant, remaining close to zero. All the economic growth of the last 200 years has brought an increase in overall wealth and standard of living, an increase in purchasing power, and an increase in population from 1 to 8 billions, but also an increase in area and material footprint, an increase in soil and air pollution, an increase in energy and fresh water consumption, overfishing, an increase in debt, in carbon emissions, a loss of biodiversity, and an increase in the extraction of materials from the ground with more toxic chemical releases and industrial tailings.
We are polluting and damaging the planet with toxic chemicals, deforestation and carbon emissions, and consuming fossil fuels at a frenetic pace, ignoring the fact that there is a finite amount available. It's like being in a deserted area for 10 days with only 3 litres of water. On the first day you drink 1 litre as if water were unlimited, on the second day you drink 1 litre again because you have got used to it, as if there were no tomorrow, because it feels better at the moment to drink when you are thirsty than to have the discipline of restrictions. On the 3rd day, after drinking 80cl, you realise that you only have one small glass of 20cl water left for the next 7 days. We are rapidly approaching this situation.
This growth is unsustainable for the future of humanity and other parts of the planet. The only solution is degrowth, either willing degrowth through choice and anticipation, or forced degrowth through resource depletion or population collapse.
Over the last 40 years, the world has had about 3% GDP growth per year, 1% fossil fuel consumption growth and 2% material consumption growth. These figures correlate very well.
A 2% growth rate means a doubling every 35 years (every generation), an 8-fold increase every century. You do not need to be an expert in any field to assume that an 8-fold increase in oil production, copper production and fresh water consumption is absolutely impossible with declining ore grades from mines, declining EROI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) of remaining oil and gas resources and accelerating global warming. We will have to stop growing at some point in this century, by design or by nature, by choice or by force.
- Why we do have growth
People in industrialised societies want a high standard of living, so they need to use energy and burn stuff to make goods, move stuff around, light and heat places, eat, etc... reducing our energy consumption is reducing our quality of life: this will not happen by choice as long as cheap and abundant energy is available on this planet. Zero carbon or degrowth is doomed to failure by design, by the principle of human nature to accumulate, to get more stuff, to become more comfortable, and to never be satisfied with what we have.
People want growth: as an adult, you don't want to continue living like a student: nobody wants to continue living in a small room with flatmates when they are 50, taking the bus every day instead of driving their own car, sleeping in a single tiny bed, going camping for a week in a modest tent, or eating plain rice or cheap pasta every day at home. Everybody wants their life to become more elaborate, more fancy, more comfortable. We all want growth in living standards.
From an economic or thermodynamic perspective, the more energy people dissipate, the happier they are. Dissipating energy can take many forms: eating processed food such as pizza or sausages instead of raw or cooked food; doing activities such as jet skiing or karting for fun; driving a car for 5 km instead of cycling or walking; a couple living in an 80 m² property instead of a 40 m² property; and so on. Everyone wants to be happy and have a better standard of living, especially people from energy-deprived developing countries, which account for about 50% of the world's population. You can't blame people for aspiring to a better life, so it's inevitable that people will consume more energy over time if they can afford it. This is why average energy consumption per capita will continue to grow over the next few decades, pushing economic growth, fossil fuel consumption, environmental pollution and climate change further. It's simply a law of nature. Wishing otherwise or expecting a different outcome is simply futile.
Figure 1 below shows that the growth in living standards per capita is reflected in the average energy consumption per capita worldwide. This has steadily increased year after year. The more energy a person consumes, the more he or she can move around, produce, consume, modify and alter things to suit his or her needs and process things for his or her convenience. In other words, the better his or her standard of living. Energy is life.
Figure 1: World average energy consumption per capita
Businesses and companies absolutely need growth to survive financially and retain shareholders and investment. Take a successful bakery with one oven. If the owner decides to buy a second oven to bake more bread and increase turnover, the owner will go into debt and will have to increase his future income by more than the interest rate of the loan. There are no businesses that start out ready to produce and make money from day one. All businesses go through phases of creation, planning, development, construction, production ramp-up before they start generating revenue and profit. How can a company survive all this time between starting and making a profit? Simply by borrowing money from investors who spend money with the expectation of a future return. If the business tends to generate less revenue over time, how can the business continue to service the debt of its original loan from investors? Every business needs growth or investors will walk away or the business simply runs out of cash flow. If a company had an open policy of cutting everyone's pay by just 2% a year every year, that company would never attract or retain anyone and would very quickly go bankrupt. The salaries must go up over time, spendings increase, and so the revenues must increase too. Growth is not negociable for businesses.
Most governments in the industrialised world have a debt to GDP ratio of over 80% and growing almost every year, that's why governments absolutely need growth to maintain and service their debt, which is increasing every year due to the ageing population and the high cost of the welfare system associated with a growing retired population and a shrinking working population.
A government or politician promoting lower living standards, fewer social services, less purchasing power and a harder life would not get a single vote or would provoke mass protests and riots. Governments want to be endorsed and appreciated to get re-elected, so they promote all sorts of policies for a better life, and go into more debt to make these plans a reality. Governments have no incentive for degrowth on a large national scale.
We see that from all sides, individuals, businesses and governments, all want growth. Growth is both a desire and a necessity.
- Interest rates and the need for growth
The modern financial system needs interest rates: Interest rates to reward capital saving and borrowing rates to finance new investment, interest rates to reward the risk of investment, interest rates to incentivise lenders and carefully select the allocation of borrowers. By moving these financial rates up or down, you can greatly influence how much credit is made in the world, and thus the rate of economic output (GDP) on the one hand, and inflation on the other. If the financial rate were zero, you would have zero interest on saving money and a potentially infinite amount of new borrowed money for investment, spending money on worthless business, creating instant inflation if credit were free. If the interest rate was 300% per annum, you would have no borrowing, no credit for investment, no growth, and every incentive to save money, no investment, only running businesses going on and no emerging entrepreneurs and innovation, thus drastically reducing economic output. That's why you need a rate, mostly in the range of 2% to 6%, to find the right balance that incentivises both savers and borrowers-investors and promote a healthy economy, and a relative price stability, important for any activity planning.
The growth rate of an economy is directly related to the energy and material consumption, the physical material world always grows with economic output. There is no decoupling. You cannot grow your standard of living and your economy without growing your energy and material consumption. Yes, if you are an extremely wealthy economy like Europe or North America, with already all the goods you need to live happily, you tend to grow more services than goods, which are less coupled to energy and material (still coupled, but at a lower ratio than goods). But for the majority of people on this planet, growth in living standards is first and foremost growth in goods, and therefore directly linked to energy and material.
Figure 2 below shows that population, the economy, energy and materials consumption, carbon emissions and ecological footprint are all interlinked and increased together drastically since the 1950s. When people desire a better standard of living, energy and material consumption increases, which grows the economy but also the environmental impact. Reducing pollution, carbon emissions and environmental degradation would necessarily mean reducing energy and materials consumed per capita, which would lead to economic degrowth and a loss of living standards, comfort and public services. All measures are associated and linked. It is not possible to reduce environmental pollution while maintaining growth everywhere else.
Figure 2: You can't have growth without overshoot
Because original investment of private businesses and money printing into existance was made out of debt, the system is forced to grow. Even if we didn't degrow, but just stayed flat with a GDP of +0% year after year, the institutions, governments and private companies would eventually go bankrupt. That's why growth is inevitable and absolutely necessary in our system, and why we continue to consume more energy and mine more materials with more environmental damage.
This is different from the normal person who lives within their monthly budget: If your current income covers your rent, food, energy bills and other expenses, you do not need to grow as a person. You could keep your current salary and lifestyle forever. But if the price of goods and services rise 5% per year but your incoe stagnate at 0%, at some point you will go broke.
For the government and for most private companies, they have invested with debt, with money they didn't have, so now the governments and businesses need not only to maintain their sales or tax revenue, a percentage based on GDP, but actually they need to grow their revenue, governments need GDP growth to service the debt, and the private company needs sales profit growth to service the debt of investors.
This has led to an ultra-financialised world in which the money supply and debt have grown exponentially to the growth of the economy and to the growth of energy supply, as shown in Figure 3 below, leading to greater wealth inequalities, assets price inflation and obvious risks of never being able to service the debt with real production of goods and services.
Figure 3: Growth of money supply compared to the physical economy
As Figure 3 above shows that there are 10 times more financial assets in the world than the value created in the world measured in GDP. This ratio of 10:1 has remained constant since 2010.
There is a total addition of 300 trillion dollars' worth of debt, insurance and financial products since 2008, spread across government, household and business debt, while the world GDP has grown about 30 trillion dollars. This means that there are 10 units of debt and intermediary money in the system for every one unit of economic output produced each year. This is why any economic downturn or sustained recession is so damaging, because for every announced GDP decrease of 1 billion dollars or 1%, the actual financial losses in the system would be 10 times greater.
Money has to flow to keep up with the interest rate, and so energy consumption and environmental damage increase, as does overall growth. The entire modern financial system is based on interest and debt, so the system must grow indefinitely to survive.
- Degrowth and its impact on the economy
There are 3 types of economic growth or 3 possible drivers at national level:
1. Domestic consumption, people buying things.
2. Exports, selling to other countries.
3. Public investment, such as building public infrastructure.
For the first type, you need a strong middle class and a young adult population (25 to 45 years old). That's the US, or it's starting to be India.
For the second type, you need cheap energy and a large industrial factory base. That's Russia or Germany of the last 20 years.
For the third type, you need public financing (debt) and the state has more control over it, but you have diminishing returns over time because you can't control consumption patterns. That's China over the last 20 years.
If everyone in the western world reduced their spending and consumption by, say, 20%, that would mean 20% less government tax and revenue, and that would mean 20% less to spend on education, public schools, public hospitals, public infrastructure like roads and buses, social services like unemployment, health and pensions. While some people are willing to spend less on their own consumption, no one is willing to get less social privileges and public services. But you cannot have one without the other. You cannot reduce the size of the economy without reducing the size of public services. This is a myth spread by the Greens and the far left and other utopian groups, that you can live simply and minimalistically and still maintain the same level of public spending. That's impossible. Where will the state money come from?
Figure 4: Typical budget spending and revenues in the USA in 2024
Figure 4 above shows a typical government budget. The difference between revenues and spending, the deficit, grows slowly every year, and the government must borrow money via new debt to cover the deficit. Pension benefits and healthcare spending are expected to grow rapidly due to an ageing population. Defence and military spending are expected to increase in the coming decades due to rising geopolitical instability. Interest on debt is expected to increase rapidly in the coming years due to inflation, new debt and higher interest rates. Spending on infrastructure and the electricity grid is also expected to grow. Overall, therefore, spending is only going to increase in the coming decades. The government's only options are to increase revenue through growth in activities and consumption, or to let inflation grow the nominal value of revenue. A government cannot allow the economy to shrink, that would be national suicide. Degrowth of the economy combined with growth in public spending, a situation that is rapidly emerging in Europe, would be fatal for the economy, financial stability, public services, and social stability.
If the economy is shrinking, how are you going to service the national debt, which is constant or increasing every year? The government has to try to grow the economy at all costs in order to service the debt and to maintain its level of health care, pension and other welfare support. With a rapidly ageing population, the government has to go further into debt in order to just maintain the public spending system. Governments have no incentive to degrowth, to the contrary. Governments know that after 2 consecutive years of strong degrowth, international financing becomes extremely complicated and expensive, leading to massive budget cuts and unpopularity, so the politicians of the world have no incentive at all to degrowth the economy.
GDP is a very distorted and bias measure. War and weapons, drug and food addiction, accidents, disease tend to increase GDP. Public function employees are counted and added to GDP. GDP is manipulated and is not a good measure of economic growth and prosperity. Instead, we should focus on government tax revenue and annual national budget revenue, which is a better measure and indicator of the level of public services in our society.
If we look at this "new GDP" as the national budget revenue that comes from taxes, if you have a sustained period of degrowth, you have less consumption, less transactions, less spending, all of which leads to less tax revenue for the state, and therefore less public spending on infrastructure, hospitals, education, health care and pensions. Degrowth not only reduces the amount of luxury 5-star hotels and golf courses, it also reduces the quality of public education and health care. You cannot have one without the other. While many people want a degrowth of luxury 5-star hotels, literally no one wants a degrowth of public services.
Degrowth, sufficiency or frugality is financially and economically unsustainable for more than 2 years as a country or as a society. Every time a crisis like Covid-19 happens, governments rush into debt to spend on massive economic stimulus because nobody can afford sustained degrowth.
At the current rate of public debt growth in most industrialised countries, and with interest rates around 3% to 4%, the proportion of a government's budget devoted to debt servicing alone is expected to more than double by 2030 compared with 2020. This means less money will be available to spend on public infrastructure and the welfare system at a time when the ageing population will need plenty of health care. Don't be surprised if, in 2030, the far right and the far left are in power in every country, basically claiming that they want to restore the good quality of life we had before the Covid-19 era, "the good old time". The quality of public services will certainly deteriorate very significantly over the next 3 decades, and there is no policy to correct this. To think that one politician or one decision can change the polycrisis and the mess we are in is simply to ignore reality.
Increased consumption of cheap and abundant fossil fuels is the only way out of public debt and an ageing population. Growth is essential for humanity. Growth wasn't necessary 300 years ago, but then we didn't have a pension system, we didn't have a large proportion of the population over 60, we didn't have this massive national debt, we didn't have 70% of the population living in cities where nobody has land to grow food. Growth is now an imperative for our society today. If growth does not happen organically, which is a given due to demographics, it will have to be created by faking it and manipulating statistics: printing money, false inflation based on distorted CPI basket calculation, loss of purchasing power, growth only for the richest 5% who carry the average but not for the median man.
- The myth of dematerialised growth based solely on services
The idea that we can decouple our growth from material and energy is a luxury distortion in our privileged world: As a wealthy person from the Western world, I can certainly grow from now on only on service and not on material and energy. But that's because I live with 4 times the material standard of the average person, I already consume so many resources in my daily life and provoke so many environmental externalities that if everyone on earth lived like me, we would need 5 planets earth of carrying capacity to support our way of life. Growing through services alone without a material footprint is a myth of wealthy people when we already have all the materials, goods and services. But for 90% of the population, the growth they want is material, is basic needs, it is food, shelter, energy, public infrastructure.
See below on Figure 5 the average peak power consumed per capita on each continent.
Figure 5: Average peak power consumed per person per continent
If every African had the standard of living of a North American, we would triple our global energy consumption. Remember that energy consumption is linear and proportional to GDP per capita, average wealth, fossil fuel consumption and carbon footprint. On the other hand, if every North American and European lived like the average Asian, we would divide our global fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions by 50%. My point here is that from the perspective of a middle-class European or American, I already have all the goods and comforts I need, so it is easy for me to say that from now on we can only grow in immaterial services. I don't even need to grow from now on because I have the upper hand of comfort and physical abundance around me. Even if I were to shrink my total consumption by 20%, it wouldn't change my daily life that much. But if I am an average Vietnamese or an average Congolese, I would want more material goods, more infrastructure, a bigger house, more roads, more food, more stuff, so I would definitely want more goods and services to get a better life, which requires massive physical and economic growth in my country.
Also, if we talk about services like internet, home delivery, getting a haircut, signing an insurance policy, pick any service, those services are actually material, consumption, pollution and environmental damage. Internet is data centres, semiconductors, copper and fibre optic cables, all materials that need mining, processing and generate pollution. Your haircut needs a chair, a sisor, lights. Your insurance needs internet, people in an office, data centres. Home delivery needs a bike, a car or truck and fuel to deliver it to you. It is all material and energy. There is no decoupling of growth in living standards from material growth.
The only way to decouple growth from material is through inflation, currency debasement, loss of purchasing power. If everything doubled in price overnight, GDP would double overnight, your salary would double, but you wouldn't actually get more goods and services. That is the only solution, and that is the most likely scenario we are heading towards: hyperinflation to inflate the debt away.
- Degrowth, a simple redistribution of wealth ?
Once your basic needs have been met, money is not necessary for happiness. In the Western world, there is a lot of overconsumption and an abundance of goods and services. People would be just as happy, if not happier, if these did not exist. At a national level, this can be measured by comparing the quantity of energy consumed per person — a proxy for GDP per capita — with the Human Development Index (HDI) value. The HDI measures a country's life expectancy, enrolment in higher education, and standard of living or income per capita. Figure 6 below shows that people experience a significant improvement in their standard of living when energy consumption per capita is between 10 and 100 GJ (the green arrow), but above 100 GJ, the marginal gain is insignificant and does not significantly improve a country's standard of living (the red arrow).
Figure 6: Energy consumed and standards of living
So why can't the most advanced economies reduce their GDP per capita — and therefore their energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and toxic waste generation — while maintaining roughly the same standard of living? The answer is that GDP growth and energy consumption are required to finance the system and its debt, particularly in the public sector. This is because GDP is a proxy for public spending on pensions, healthcare, servicing debt, education, infrastructure, and so on. A decline in GDP would simply mean less public money available to fund the social benefits that people now expect. Governments want to avoid protest and social unrest, and the only way to maintain current public spending and debt costs is through GDP growth.
The other degrowth argument is that we can maintain our level of public services simply by taxing more of the world's wealth, or taxing more of the huge profits of big business. Again, a feel-good story in our heads that is unworkable in reality.
The upper middle class are the people who pay the most taxes. Once you get into the upper class with high incomes or high assets holding, you tend to have a financial adviser who knows all the best tricks and financial engineering to help you pay less tax.
The same goes for big multinationals. The Meta, Google and Amazon of the world know how to orchestrate legal tax evasion, how to move money around and pretend that they didn't make any income in country A because they spent it all on country B, but in country B the tax system is more favourable and they can avoid tax altogether by reinvesting in some holdings, research or whatever, pretending that they didn't make any earnings at all, so in the end these big companies don't pay the taxes that they should to the states in the countries where they operate.
For individual high earners or large asset holders, even if they were forced to pay taxes in the country where they do business, those people would move to a more favorable country. This is happening in many European countries with ageing populations, such as Italy or France: Wealth is taxed more and more to support a broken social system, and these rich people move out of France and Italy to Malta, Luxembourg, Switzerland or Dubai, so that in the end the state loses all of that person's tax revenue, producing the opposite effect of what was intended in the first place.
Billionaires are worth billions because they own shares in companies worth billions. You can't tax them because it's unrealised gain, they don't have the billions in cash, they own the equivalent of billions. But if Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter, he goes to the banks and says "lend me 40 billions because I want to buy Twitter and you can have my Tesla shares as collateral". The banks do lend him the money and he spends 40 billions to buy Twitter. So his Tesla shares are worth billions for business purposes, he can use the Tesla shares to buy something and use his net worth to make more money, but his Tesla shares are worth zero to the government if we want to tax him on his wealth. That's the world we live in, where the rich can legally get away without being taxed, but still get richer beyond anything the average person could do. Billionaires will always have an army of financial advisers to find the loopholes in the system. This is a lost fight.
- Nobody really wants degrowth
Degrowth is not just degrowth in the oil and gas industry, degrowth in the entertainment industry, degrowth in mining and manufacturing, degrowth in the military. Degrowth is also degrowth in education, degrowth in health services, degrowth in pensions, degrowth in road maintenance. If you degrow the economy, you degrow the tax revenues and thus the government spending budget for public transport, health care, pensions, hospitals. The "good" and the "bad" go together, you cannot degrow only one side and maintain spending on the other.
Degrowth is also a no-go for investors.
If I offered to lend you money, say $10,000, and I told you that next year your money would be worth $9,000, and the year after $8,000, and so on, would you lend me money? No, of course not.
But if I told you I had a great business idea and if you lent me $10,000 now, your money would be worth $11,000 next year and $12,000 the year after that, you would definitely consider it.
And if both options exist at the same time, believe me, 100% of investors will put their money in the 2nd case, where wealth grows over time, not declines over time.
A world of degrowth means no investment, and without investment you have no maintenance, no business creation, no houses built, you ruin a country, simply.
Something people don't understand about economic growth: No citizen or business really cares about economic growth or GDP. Growth only matters because it reflects the tax money collected and spent by governments: when the economy grows, governments collect and spend more, providing better public infrastructure, education, pensions and healthcare. Citizens are happy, there is less tension, animosity and social unrest, and political leaders get approval and are re-elected. That's why growth ultimately matters as a statistic: Not because it means more stuff produced and sold, but because it means more tax revenue. Growth, or at least stagnation, is also necessary to service public debt because, in a shrinking economy, the proportion of spending on servicing the debt increases, resulting in less spending on improving citizens' quality of life. Whether a private company grows or goes bankrupt, only its employees, investors and customers care; the rest of the world would not notice. If the economy of a country shrinks over several years, the government would need to spend less on public infrastructure and social welfare, and every citizen would feel the pain, which would lead to massive protests from all citizens. Everyone would be affected. Countries would also need to borrow money to service previous debt because the economy's revenue would no longer be sufficient. This would force countries to print money and face hyperinflation or bankruptcy. This is why growth is essential for countries and governments, as well as for private businesses and the financial system, in order to repay investment debt to banks and investors.
Some will suggest if we can't degrow, but we don't want to continue to grow to avoid climate catastrophe, what about the status quo, neither grow nor degrow, just stabilise the economy and the environmental impact.
Well, that's the privilege of a bunch of rich people from the US and Europe. It's easy to say you can go on living without growth if your current standard of living is excellent, but the average Vietnamese, Congolese or Guatamalan absolutely wants and needs growth. They need more things and more services and more purchasing power to improve their quality of life, they want to move from a bicycle to a motorbike and then from a motorbike to a private car. Nobody should be against poor people wanting a decent standard of living. To pretend that the world could stop growing is arrogant, ignorant of the living conditions of most people on earth, lacking in empathy and simply not going to happen. India and Africa are going to grow in the coming decades, and that's good for them, and no one and no ideology should want to stop them growing.
At the end of the day, nobody really wants degrowth.
People instinctively want growth, want more, want what their peers have, and this drives demand for more consumption.
We also need growth for economic reasons: We need growth to pay off private corporate debt from investors, growth to service the national public debt, we need growth to pay for the growing needs of health care and state pension systems, we need growth to pay off investments in public infrastructure.
We also need growth because our competitors are growing. If a country or a company wants to compete in the marketplace, if competitors are investing, bringing in new technology, attracting capital, resources and labour, then we need to do the same and also invest in new technology, resources, retain our labour and our business, otherwise all the business will go to the competitors. In a globalised world driven by the forces of supply and demand, if your neighbour is growing, you have to grow, otherwise you will decline and die out to the competition.
As human desire is insatiable and human endeavour knows no limits, humanity will always produce and consume more on average per person. Even if basic human needs could be met without labour and for free (for instance with AI robots everywhere), some humans or most humans would still strive for more: shooting for the stars and aiming for a lifestyle akin to that of a king or celebrity. Then, all the minimalists and people satisfied with just the basics would slowly raise the bar on what constitutes the bare minimum. For instance, having an outdoor toilet and shower in a public place is now unthinkable, everyone wants a private bathroom at home. Boiling water for a hot shower would be unthinkable. Spending an hour a day planting seeds and an hour harvesting your daily food, rather than spending 10 minutes in a supermarket or three minutes ordering food on your smartphone, has become unthinkable. Riding horses for transportation would be inconceivable. Basic standards of living will continue to increase; on average, we will produce and consume more per inhabitant. Global population is expected to rise at least until 2060, so overall consumption is going to continue to increase. There cannot be voluntary degrowth in a society. Only temporary degrowth due to conflict and resource scarcity is possible, but this never lasts decades. Stagnation was possible in the past, prior to the industrial revolution, because humans were limited to their sheer force of their bodies and domestic animals, but stagnation is no longer possible because of the discovery of fossil fuels and our economic imperative to grow du service the high level of debt (public, individual and corporate), and because the government must run a budget deficit in an ageing population in order to maintain a social welfare system, which requires economic growth to sustain this public deficit.
Growth is the only path forward.
- Why degrowth won't happen by choice but by force
When ingestion of food to activate human and animal muscles was the only source of energy for human improvement, the world was limited by individual physical ability, so there was no growth for centuries. Even if you were given 10 kg of food for free every day, your body would not be able to process that much. Our needs, desires and capacity to consume were limited by our biology. The only growth came from slight population increase, animal labour and more wood burning, so GDP growth was almost zero for centuries.
Since the discovery of coal, oil and gas, energy consumption has increased by a factor of 200 in the last 3 centuries. As long as there is coal, oil or gas, there will be growth to satisfy the everlasting and insatiable human need to improve our quality of life and standard of living, which comes directly from using energy to transform or move molecules for our convenience.
Humans are fully assisted by machines
All the generational or societal changes that we remember well from the past were moments in history when people got better living standards and comfort by using more fossil fuels:
Slavery ended not because we suddenly got a sweet heart and compassion, but because the industrial revolution, the growing use of coal, made machines practically more powerful, faster and cheaper than the muscular mechanical work of a slave, and so there was no great benefit over time to owning slaves.
The steam engine, railways and the Industrial Revolution in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries massively increased living standards. They offered everyone a stable job in the factory, improved transport and sanitation and boosted agriculture, among other things. This was only possible because of the vast increase in coal consumption.
The mass killing of whales for extraction of their oil, pushed almost to whale extinction in the 19th century, was stopped not because we suddenly cared about animals, but because we discovered petrol and that was a cheaper way to get oil for lubricants and candles than whale fishing.
The Berlin wall came down because the population in the east slowly realised that the population in the west had a much better quality of life because they used more fossil fuels, western technology and a free capitalist market, and so the protests grew over time until there was a spark in 1989 that caused the mass population to rebel.
All previous experiences of radical change, which would give hope for a future without fossil fuels and a new focus on the planet and ecological care, have been in vain in the past. People change by choice for the better, not for the worse. We have two milleniums to prove it.
The best future for biosphere sustainability and planetary boundaries is well known. And it is a world that few people want to be part of:
A world with no paid holidays, hard labour 12 hours a day, 7 days a week to replace most machinery, a return from 3% to 30% of the active population to growing and harvesting food, which means far fewer goods and services available, only 4 T-shirts and 2 trousers to keep for 10 years, no more shopping frenzy, fewer health services, no Netflix, no processed food, no home delivery, eat seasonal and local, even if potatoes, carrots and cabbage are the only food growing in your area, no private car, buy most things second hand and repair things instead of buying new, no public pension scheme, but back to living with the kids, the end of aviation, the end of entertainment, no Disneyland, no theme park, no skiing.
It is not a pleasant prospect at all, it sounds more like a return to middle age. It's a more sustainable life, but no fun, no options. Nobody wants this lifestyle, neither the citizens, nor the politicians, nor the entrepreneurs. If you think you can make a little effort to improve the environmental impact of your life, like not driving your own car, eating organic food and those non-intrusive changes, it is because you are rich enough to be able to limit your consumption without drastically affecting your life. A low-income adult in an average GDP per capita country has no intention of reducing his consumption and every intention of improving his income and standard of living.
People will not consciously choose austerity. Degrowth would lead us into poverty. It would accelerate the debt spiral we are already in, which means it would accelerate one of 3 possible outcomes: World War or civil war, default on international payments, or high long-term inflation or hyperinflation, all options meaning poverty, massive loss of purchasing power, rationing and disruption of the supply chain. Degrowth would lead us to a population of citizens in civil war, social unrest and riots. No one wants degrowth, people want prosperity and more purchasing power, that's why degrowth never happened voluntarily in the past and it will never happen by choice or design in the future.
If we want the 50% poorest of the planet to have a decent material comfort, this means that the 20% of the richest people (Europe and North America, for example) need to reduce their material footprint by 80%. This is not going to happen. If you earn more than $65,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of earners in the world. Do you think a person earning $70k/year with all the lifestyle habits of a $70k/year earner can suddenly live as if he/she was earning $35k/year? Again, not going to happen. and that person is already in the 1% richest in the world and should have plenty of room to reduce and live more simply and minimalistically. How do you ask the median person of this world with 13k$/year to degrow? Yes, if you lined up all the people in the world and ranked them by income, the person in the middle would earn only $13,000 per year. The bottom 50% will definitely not reduce their spending by choice, and it is fair to say that even the bottom 99% of people, who earn less than $65,000 a year, will not choose to reduce their spending or limit their lifestyle any time soon.
Just a 20% degrowth is a hard sell to politicians and citizens in the Western world: Are you prepared to reduce your salary by 20% for the sake of the planet? to travel 20% less? to stop eating processed food and food imported from exotic countries? Maybe, maybe. The majority would say no to a voluntary 20% reduction, some would be willing. Now imagine that, rather than needing 20% degrowth, we actually need 80% to make room for India, non-industrialised Asian countries and Sub-Saharan Africa. An 80% decline would literally be a return to poverty. This will never happen voluntarily.
Even if the population of a community or a country or a village agreed on a degrowth strategy, to live in a minimalist way, the other cities and countries would continue to grow, continue with business as usual. So unless the entire population of 8 billion people agrees together on a degrowth plan, there will be no degrowth.
A simple 20% degrowth would be fatal because of national debt, corporate debt and personal debt. If you earn $2000 a month and spend a third on rent, a third on energy bills and a third on food and necessities, imagine we only degrow by 20% and your new salary is $1600, how are you going to pay the rent? Are you willing to move to a tiny cheaper place, eat plain rice and pasta for meals almost every day? People are willing to give up luxury and extras, but they are not willing to give up basic comfort, a car, heating, hot showers and good food. Again, I use 20% as an example, but we would need 50% to 80% degrowth to get back to the carrying capacity of the planet. This will never happen by choice.
After basic needs are met, most of the best things in life are free: playing with your children, laughing with your friends, sex, spending time with your relatives, taking the dog for a walk, walking in the woods, observing the beauty of mountains, trees and oceans, spending time with good friends and having great conversations, and so on. I truly believe that the entire middle class in Europe could spend 30% less and still be as happy as ever, even happier. But cutting 50% or 80% out of our lifestyles starts to touch our basic needs and psychological safety barriers. That's why frugality or sufficiency, a voluntary drastic reduction in our spending, consumption and lifestyles, will not happen by choice.
At a world growth rate of 3%, the actual average of the last 40 years, you double your economy every 30 years. You also double material and energy consumption, CO2 emissions and chemical pollution. That means an 8-fold increase every century, or a 600-fold increase in 300 years. A 600-fold increase means the oceans would boil and we would generate as much heat on earth as the sun... Obviously we would be long dead and this scenario is not realistic. My point here is that the growing world we have seen since the 1960s is physically impossible to continue as it is for the next 3 centuries. We will face drastic changes in the system, one way or another, by choice or by force. As fossil fuels run out in the coming centuries, as the working population declines and is unable to maintain the economic output of a nation, as servicing the debt becomes unsustainable with less workers and more retirement and health care benefit takers, as the planet burns, heat waves, wild fires, floods and storms everywhere, we will be forced to change, and not for the better, but for the worst. And all this will happen in the next 50 years, not 300 years.
- The limits to growth
"The Limits to Growth" is a famous 1972 publication by the Club of Rome, including Dennis Meadows, which discusses the possibility of exponential economic and population growth in relation to the finite supply of resources. The model was based on a computer simulation of various parameters, such as resources, population and economic output, incorporating retroactive feedback loops. The intention was to demonstrate that a system based on continuous growth would eventually collapse. The original estimation is shown in Figure 7 below:
Figure 7: Projections from "The Limits to Growth" published in 1972
Whether these estimations, dating back 50 years, are accurate or not is irrelevant. The key message is that a system and society based on perpetual growth on a finite planet is bound to collapse at some point. The collapse of each parameter will occur at a different moment in time; the decline of one parameter will trigger the decline of another.
The limitations of capitalism and economics in general with regard to infinite growth will lead to forced and painful degrowth, which will then push civilisation towards collapse. This is due to three flawed assumptions in basic economics.
The first erroneous assumption is that resources are free. If a person or company owns a plot of land, everything on it and within reach is free: if a river flows through it, you can take as much water as you like. If there is sand or stones, you can use it, and you only pay the extraction cost, not the raw material. Soil can be used to grow plants and food free of charge. Any worms or ants on the land are also free; you do not pay anyone to have the rights to collect them or to do what you want with them. If there is copper or gold three metres beneath the surface, you only pay the cost of extracting and processing it; you do not pay for the material itself.
This has led to the assumption that resources are infinite and that no one pays the price for the earth to regenerate those resources. If you cut down a tree, you don't have to plant another tree and care for it for the next 50 years. While energy, and thus money and technology, is the only limiting factor in mineral extraction, other resources such as trees and fresh water are being extracted much faster than the Earth can regenerate them. This will lead to an environmental disaster in the near future.
The second erroneous economic assumption is that waste is free. Economics focuses on the final product — a good or service — and its price and quality. Any waste produced during the transformation process is considered free waste that can be discharged and dumped anywhere for free. CO₂ emissions from burning anything for applications such as cars, ships, steel production or cement are released into the air for free. When one tonne of rock is dug out and crushed to obtain 500 grams of copper, the remaining 999.5 kg is simply dumped nearby. When chemical industries process materials, some waste is dumped in the ground or in rivers, or released as gas into the air. Most of our household waste is landfilled in specific sites. We only pay the community tax for collecting, sorting and transporting waste to landfill sites; then the waste is free. Nobody pays the Earth any compensation, either financial or in the form of planting trees elsewhere to offset the pollution caused by our waste.
Only laws and regulations, which differ greatly from one country to another, impose a virtual tax or cost on waste, and international companies tend to locate their activities where legislation is most favourable to them.
Ultimately, we generate much more waste much faster than the Earth can absorb and dissipate. This will lead to an increasing number of areas where human life is no longer possible because we are surrounded by toxic waste.
The third erroneous economic assumption is that human labour is infinite. Economics requires land, capital and human labour to create activities that add value to society. The principle of economics is that when a business grows, job advertisements are published and people are hired; if a business needs to cut labour costs, people can be fired. It assumes that a pool of qualified and skilled workers is always available in unlimited quantities in any given location. However, this will no longer be true given the declining working population and the increasing complexity and globalisation of our societies. When a specific skill is in demand and there is a shortage of a qualified workforce, salaries and compensation tend to increase in order to attract labour from other fields to fill this specific skill gap. Supply and demand affect compensation, so there is always a sufficient labour force when necessary.
I am not suggesting that we will soon face a 100% employment rate. What I am saying is that if a company with 5,000 employees in South Korea performs a specific laser operation for a highly specialised tool in the semiconductor supply chain and has almost a monopoly on this activity due to the advanced technology and the high level of training required by its employees, how will this company find new workers who are skilled, trained and available in South Korea when the country's working population loses 30% of its workforce in the next 25 years and 4,000 of the current 5,000 employees retire within this timeframe?
The idea of hiring or firing people at any time from an infinite pool only works with a constant or growing working population. But in a declining working population environment, skilled workers will be harder to hire, if not impossible. Take a surgeon, for example. Very few people can exercise this profession. Japan is definitely going to be short of surgeons in the coming decades. Surgery is a highly qualified job that cannot be outsourced or relocated elsewhere. If 30 million people still live in Tokyo in 2050, they will need the same amount of surgeons as today, but the pool of available active surgeons in Tokyo in 2050 will be half of what it is today.
The false assumption of an unlimited skilled workforce, combined with the complexity and specialisation of our supply chains and products, will lead to supply shortages. Relocating the company or the know-how elsewhere is not an option, as it would take years to implement, train people and develop high-end skills, and all developed countries are entering a phase of declining working populations anyway.
As countries industrialise and become richer, with higher living standards, the growth in real GDP per capita tends to slow, as shown in Figure 8 below. One might assume that the G7 countries are entering a phase of natural degrowth that will lead to global degrowth, but the advertised GDP is misleading. In reality, when real GDP stagnates at close to 0% or 1% in rich countries, it is because they are importing more finished products, goods and services that are cheaper to produce elsewhere. This means that real growth is being outsourced to middle-income countries such as China, India and Indonesia, which have growth rates of between 5% and 7%. The lack of growth in one wealthy region is offset by the significant growth of other, less wealthy countries that are developing rapidly. Overall, GDP per capita growth, a proxy for fossil fuel consumption, material consumption, and CO₂ emissions, is still growing at a constant rate of about 3% per year.
Figure 8: Growth of GDP per capita
- Technology and innovation is not the solution
Techno-solutionism is the belief that any social problem can be solved with the right technology. This mindset is prevalent in modern societies, where there is a strong belief in the power of gadgets, algorithms and new technologies to solve problems ranging from climate change to social inequality.
Techno-solutionism is a comforting and reassuring state of mind for people. The stress and anxiety of knowing that we're going to suffer and die in the years ahead is unimaginable and unmanageable for our brains, which seek a peaceful and stress-free outlook. Techno-solutionism is also a good reason to do business and make money.
Techno-solutionism has improved our productivity, our rate of resource extraction and made our lives more comfortable. But techno-solutionism has never done anything good on a large scale, for the planet or for humanity as a whole.
The good side of the coin of technological abundance
In every crisis of the last century, technology and innovation have always meant more debt, more consumption, more pollution, more resource extraction, more energy consumption. Every techno-solution for one part of the world has led to suffering and environmental damage in another part of the world. All degrowth techno-solutions have been silo minded, looking at one aspect without looking at the whole lifecycle footprint.
Electrifying things is good for Europeans, but it means more air pollution and cancer within 50km of the Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile. Some Chileans have died because of Europe's desire for electrical appliances. A solution somewhere is a problem somewhere else.
Solar panels and electric cars led to less direct carbon emissions to produce electricity and drive, but it also led to more carbon emissions in the supply chain and more material consumption and environmental damage in China. Being 'clean' somewhere comes at the cost of being 'dirty' somewhere else.
Through all the technologies, innovations and solutions of the last few centuries, all these techno-solutions have led to more of the usual large-scale problems. For all the good that the internet did in the 1990s, social media has tied people to their phones even more, created the need for data centres, supercomputers, increase demand in electricity and fresh water, and dehumanised most jobs of personal relationships.
Every time we have faced a crisis, as in 1973 with the oil embargo, the Iraq war in 2000, the attacks of September 11th 2001, the great financial crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the solutions have led us to more, not less. More world oil production and more nuclear reactors, more debt and money printing, more rather than less. "Less" is not an economically viable solution, "less" does not sell, "less" does not appeal to human nature.
All the techno-fixes like AI, solar and wind power, robots, supercomputers, are capital-intensive and resource-consuming solutions that only promote the status quo of the system: growth, extractivism, increasing inequalities, more energy consumption, more environmental damage.
And along the way, the whole system becomes more complex, more efficient but less resilient, heavily dependent on globalised supply chains and just-in-time logistics. Policies are designed to serve the capitalist growth-based economy, so that the techno-fix becomes the solution to the problem, rather than the source of the problem, which it is. Technology is both the poison and the cure.
I believe that new technologies will actually accelerate the great metacrisis. AI will accelerate the deployment of data centres and the consumption of materials and resources. "Renewable" energy will add to the mix, not replace fossil fuels, thus indirectly accelerating pollution and global warming. When technology improves productivity and lowers the price per unit, the rebound effect leads to more consumption.
We are lying to ourselves, our children about the future of the planet. Technology will not solve anything, it will only make global problems worse and coming to us faster.
- The human predicament
A problem is something that has a solution. A predicament is something that only has outcomes. We face several human predicaments.
Here are some predicaments, the 2 sides of the same coin, both leading to disastrous consequences:
If we continue our growing consumption of fossil fuels, we face climate catastrophe.If we stop or even significantly reduce our fossil fuel consumption, we face societal collapse.
Figure 10: The fossil fuel predicament, by Bill Rees
If we continue to give people more benefits, privileges and social rights without duties, our productivity and birth rates will plummet and civilisation will disappear with economic collapse due to debt. If we implement massive restrictive and punitive reforms to the current social system, we face social unrest and protest, loss of credibility and political power, and civil war.
If we maintain our single-minded, growth-oriented, short-term goals of economic capitalism, we will exceed the regenerative capacity of the planet. If we go into a slow and continuous degrowth mode, we will face unmanageable public and private debt, leading to economic collapse and the breakdown of social support systems.
That's why I don't see any solutions but only bad outcomes, and there is nothing that can stop our civilisation collapsing in the next 3 decades, no matter what path we take.
- Virtual human constructs
The way humans see things is funny and strange. We create an imaginary world or mental construct and treat it as reality. But most of our human constructs have a bias and are not reality.
Our so-called civilisation is a set of laws, rules and social norms explicitly designed to override our completely natural behaviour in a large society, such as polygamy, theft, murder, etc.
The economy is a construct where things of exchange are measured in currency, considering that the planet has infinite and free resources (water, minerals, etc...) and without taking into account the externalities of the by-product (waste, chemical residues, carbon emissions). This construct is flawed by design.
Laws and regulations are a human construct that tells you not to cross the road at a red light. Actually, anyone can cross a street at any time. Laws are just a construct that the majority follow, but it's not the true reality. That's why 2 countries can have 2 different laws, sometimes the opposite.
Examples of virtual constructs that are legal in one place but illegal in another include driving on the right or left, tax rates, hedge funds in Muslim countries, the right to have several wives, officially paying in Bitcoin, investing in foreign countries, wearing skirts and voting for politicians.
Religions are a human construct, some beliefs in different religions have caused some people to go to war with others who don't share the same beliefs.
Monogamy is a human social construct. From an evolutionary perspective, we are actually a polygamous or polyamorous species.
The education system is a human construct that imposes standards of content and speed on what a child should learn. This is all a made-up decision that some politicians have agreed upon, but no education is the absolute truth of nature, it is a human constructed system that we think is good for the future of a child in our civilisation, but no child in Europe learns medicinal plants or survival in the woods at school, and that's by choice.
All these constructs are fiction. Human beings have decided to have a human-centred approach where the earth is used as a resource for human purposes. The only universal reality is nature: physics, biology, ecosystems, thermodynamics, these are the only realities of everyone. Any other human construct depends on the culture of the society and can change over time and is a distortion.
From an evolutionary perspective, we are the result of natural selection with our human behavioural traits: To breed, to consume, to spend, to grow, to focus on ourselves and on the short term for survival. We have had to learn hard lessons about saving for the winter. But essentially we don't care about our grandchildren, otherwise we wouldn't behave and consume as much as we do, releasing waste and toxicity into our planet, and incurring unserviceable debt to maintain a social support system for an ageing population.
- Degrowth would be the end of women's empowerment
Women's empowerment was only possible in the 20th century because of the boom in the use of fossil fuels and all the machines that do the work for us, which turned most of the physically demanding jobs and risky tasks, largely done by men, into administrative and managerial jobs that women are just as good at as men and probably better at.
Even today, the few physically demanding jobs are largely held by men: construction work, plumbing, house building, excavator driving, mining and metal industry, etc... And most of the social and caring jobs are mainly done by women: child care, health care, care of the elderly, education, psychologist.
Feminist women should actually embrace the increase in the use of fossil fuels because it has opened up an egalitarian society and given women control of their choices and responsibility through better participation in the labour force. Climate change activists ignore this reality that climate change is a consequence of the use of lots of machines, which has enabled an egalitarian society and so much power for women. You cannot have both a climate neutral society and a women empowered world, unfortunately. People who are both climate activists and feminists cannot have the best of both worlds, because technically you cannot have both. Feminists ignore that if some western countries reduce their fossil fuel consumption and empower women at the same time, this means that all the mining and metal industry and fossil fuel intensive jobs will simply be outsourced to other parts of the world (like China or Africa) and these countries will become places where women are less empowered because most of the jobs are better suited to men.
The massive use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago has led to machines doing the work for us, removing humans from hard labour and putting them into service, social and coordination roles. This has enabled the trend of women's empowerment. Without these machines and fossil fuels, we would still be working seven days a week, twelve hours a day, with no paid holiday, social security or pension, and 60% of jobs would still be in agriculture, as shown in Figure 11 below.
Figure 11: Share of jobs in agriculture since 1400
Global degrowth would not only mean more poverty, it would also mean more physical labour and therefore women's disempowerment and a return to traditional roles with men at work and women at home, dependent on men. In a world without machines, who would cut the wood or lay the bricks to build houses if not men? A world of degrowth in energy consumption would take us back to a primitive world, closer to the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest, with much better physical capacity needed to survive, as it was in the Middle Age. In such a world, where human muscles and animals are the greatest source of energy, the roles of men and women would revert to their traditional roles. Women can only be empowered in a world of high technology, high energy consumption, highly globalised supply chains and largely free of war. Any disruption in growth would be accompanied by a major reversal in women's empowerment.
- Globalisation and unlimited resource extraction
For centuries, 2 opposing sides have argued about the future of the planet and humanity.
On one side are the Malthusians, followers of Thomas Malthus, who believed that the Earth was a finite planet and that we could not increase population, food and material extraction forever, and that humanity would eventually run out of resources.
On the other side are the Cornucopians, from the ancient Greek "horn of plenty" and followers of Adam Smith, who believe that the free market and technology can solve any problem and that resources are plentiful and abundant.
With globalisation, better extraction technologies and the use of fossil fuels, fertilisers and pesticides, humanity has been able to push the limits of food harvesting and resource extraction, be it food, oil and gas or minerals. We have gone from 2 billion to 8 billion people in a century, oil and gas reserves will last until at least the end of the century, and there is always a way to dig deeper or use more energy to extract more minerals. It really does seem that the Cornucopians have won this battle so far.
But because we live in an interconnected world, local resources have become global resources, and so reserves have expanded. Fertiliser is an international business, as is food, which is exported worldwide. Same with oil and gas via tankers and LNG. This has given us more time to exploit the whole planet. Same with waste and tailings, they are now spread around the world, as are plastics, ocean pollution and carbon emissions. If there is no space locally, or if the earth cannot absorb and regenerate locally, we go somewhere else to dump our waste. If one area is deforested, we go to another forest to get wood. If and when humanity reaches a limit of extraction, it will be a global one, worldwide, which will be a threat not only to one people or one nation, but to the whole of humanity, and this has never happened in the past. Romans, Egyptians, Mayans, Incas, Chinese, these were civilisations that lived locally with local resources and local waste management. Now we live globally.
If and when some resource extraction and waste disposal reaches its limit, when it does, it won't just be one nation that collapses or one civilisation that disappears, other civilisations will take over. Because of our interconnectedness and globalised trade and supply chain, all industrialised nations will go down together. And this has never happened in the past, apart from asteroids destroying the planet and the extinction of the dinosaurs. When the regenerative capacity of the planet is exhausted, when the carrying capacity of the planet is exceeded, it is the entire planet that will no longer provide a viable ecosystem for flourishing human life. We will all go down together.
In order to avoid the collapse, the people of social power, such as politicians, billionaires and celebrities, will have to give up their power. Actually all of humanity will have to give up some kind of power and comfort in order to degrow and live with the new earth limitation, but especially the people at the top would have to give up their power and stop this obsession for more growth when they are already in the top 1% of the wealthiest. Unfortunately, as long as resources are available, no one with social power will give up their privilege. As long as there is a drop of juice left in the lemon, the people with social power will continue to squeeze the lemon. They won't give up until humanity is well past the point of no return. The sismic changes the world would need to enter a degrowth will not happen as long as fossil fuels are extractable and the air is breathable. We'll use up all the resources, minerals, fresh water, change the climate, pollute the rivers and oceans everywhere, and when there's nothing left to extract for the status quo of growth, civilisations will collapse, changes will happen, but there will be no good alternative for humanity in a wasted world. Wishing for a bright positive alternative scenario is simply a pipe dream.
Since entering the 2020s, the era of comfort and material expansion is coming to an end. The active population of industrial countries is shrinking without mass immigration, and maintaining good living standards for the large over-60 population is putting a strain on the economy and resources due to the human and financial costs involved in the social welfare. We have entered an era of deglobalisation, where securing resources and competing for debt lending to cover state budget deficits is paramount.
We have entered a period of grid stress, financial fragility and increasing geopolitical conflict. Nations are competing for dwindling resources in order to protect internal stability. The only limiting factor for raw materials is the energy we are willing to invest, and fossil fuels will remain plentiful until the end of the decade. The key issue is who controls the energy supply chain, access to the mining sites, who masters the refining, and the technologies involved in refining minerals, shale oil extraction, AI and chip manufacturing. This is where the post-WW2 geopolitical world order is crumbling: countries are de-dollarising, tensions and trade blocs are emerging, and globalisation is being replaced by friendshoring.
Growth will only happen in the Golliaths of the world, not in the Davids. If your country has a young workforce, vast resources, or key technologies, it can maintain growth; otherwise, all other countries will experience structural decline, an involuntary impoverishment that will shatter established societies and generate supply chain shortages, social unrest, and massive civil protests in the coming decades. Degrowth will happen, but it will be suffered, not chosen.
In his book from 1988, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that more technology is the default solution to society’s problems. Drawing on roughly 4,500 years of history, he claims that civilisations fail for a common reason: complexity becomes too costly to maintain, and the added benefits of new technology diminish over time compared to the maintenance and administrative costs of increasingly complex societies. His core thesis is simple and brutal. Societies are problem-solving organisations. They develop layers of administration, infrastructure, dedicated technologies, specialisation and control in order to manage challenges. Initially, these layers are beneficial. However, over time, the marginal returns decline, while the cost of maintaining past layers increases. Each new solution requires more energy, materials and coordination than the last, while providing fewer benefits due to the existing complex systems and procedures. Eventually, the system becomes fragile, with a larger proportion of its resources going towards maintenance rather than real progress. This applies today in our modern civilizatons to bureaucracy and laws, the social welfare system, the electrical grid, industrial devices and home appliances, and permitting for new construction, to name a few examples.
Although specific triggers vary — resource depletion, invasion, climate shocks and financial breakdown, for example — these are merely excuses, not the underlying cause. The root problem is the increasing cost of maintaining complexity. In that context, collapse is neither mysterious nor immoral. It is an economic adjustment, a forced simplification that occurs when the costs of complexity exceed what society can afford. Collapse is a loss of complexity, not the end of society. However, simplification brings significant losses in living standards, as well as mass protests, social unrest, poverty and suffering for 95% of the population.
Our industrialised civilisation already meets the criteria for collapse: an overextended financial superstructure; rising geopolitical conflict, primarily to secure resources; weakened governance prioritising short-term approval over the long-term benefits of the nation; and a fraying world order with brittle supply chains prone to sudden shortages and ecological overshoot. The final nail in the coffin is the population collapse due to poor demographics, an ageing population and falling birth rates. There are fewer working people, less tax revenue and less innovation to manage more problems and increased spending on an ageing, risk-averse society that is allergic to negative changes and loss of privileges. AI does not arrive as an upgrade in this context. It arrives as an accelerant. While AI could help with productivity and labour shortages, it introduces another layer of complexity that must be mined, refined, built, powered, cooled, financed, secured, defended, administrated and regulated at a time when the underlying infrastructure is already struggling to keep up. Furthermore, AI can not help with the decline in fertility or produce babies and young people; in fact, it will most probably exacerbate the decline in the birth rate.
- Conclusion
Our ancestors took survival seriously. We don’t. Instead, we’ve built a culture of distraction and excess, severed from traditional knowledge and the natural world. Now, the cost is becoming clear: Ecological collapse, social unraveling, and a society drowning in consumption but starving for meaning.
The belief that there is a solution to everything is a typical human trait. Other animals stay within their limits of action and interference, within the limits of what is feasible. Humans seem to have no limits: flying to the moon, colonising Mars, building 1km high skyscrapers, winter domes for skiing in the middle of the desert, 15-storey cruise ships for entertainment, or vertical take-off private planes. Technology seems to be able to provide an answer to all human dreams and man-made problems. The reality is that humans are the problems, and any solution that comes from a human is only there to empower humans.
To solve the climate crisis, environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, the only solution is, sadly and tragically, a drastic reduction in the number of humans on Earth and/or a drastic reduction in life standards, consumerism and overshoot. That's because people always want more, not less, and asking people to want less is not realistic within our superstructure of faith, values of freedom and growth. Unfortunately, humans and solutions to large-scale problems cannot coexist. We do not accept any solution that would drastically reduce our quality of life, we only consider solutions that would allow us to continue our current good lifestyle without sacrificing the bigger picture. Any technological solution by man can only aggravate the problems, and we have a few centuries to justify this thesis. To pretend to have a solution or strategy for the 4 great crisis (dependency on fossil fuels, climate change, debt, and demography) is arrogance, an over-inflated ego and a misunderstanding of the reality of the past.
The apparently new thinking of "but now we're focused and we're acting, from now on things will change, we'll really getting started now" ignores the past. We've been saying that for at least 20 years!
At COP21 in Paris in 2015, we said "now we really need to get on with it", and the result is that fossil fuel consumption, carbon emissions and temperatures have continued to rise every year since, except for 2020-2021 during the pandemic. Since then, debt has exploded, pollution has increased, freshwater consumption has increased, emissions have increased. We were at the same point 10 years ago as we are today: very aware of the pressing issues, willing to do something, great sense of urgency, international cooperation, "renewable" technologies available, everything was the same as today, and somehow every year we keep believing or pretending that "now we will change the world for the better". Even the birth rate has continued to fall over the last 10 years, exacerbating the social and debt problems that are about to hit us.
In the current system, we are robbing the planet through extractivism and pollution, we are robbing other people by relocating activity to areas where people are paid 1/10th of what Western Europeans and Americans earn, and we are robbing the future and future generations by creating debt to spend now on the welfare system. The current capitalist system is all about the "here and now", neglecting the "somewhere else and later". We maximise our comfort for ourselves, the riches of the western world, and only for the present moment, sacrificing the future.
Any change in the system, such as a post-growth or degrowth movement, would reduce these three privileges (extractivism, outsourcing, living on credit) and would automatically reduce welfare and living standards. The chances of this change happening deliberately are razor thin or close to zero, as the last 70 years of almost uninterrupted global growth have shown. No one wants to live in poverty or deliberately reject an available comfortable system. This is human nature, as I explain in the "Human Psychology and Behaviour" chapter. To believe in a degrowth future is to ignore our past, our ancestors and our human nature.
All the positive trends in the fight against climate change and pollution or social inequalities are overshadowed by the historical persistent trends:
The absolute growth in recycling and reuse is lower than the absolute growth in new material and mineral extraction.
The absolute growth in energy consumed from fossil fuel is higher than that of low-carbon energy sources, including in China, even though China has installed more solar and wind power in 2024 than the rest of the world combined.
The growth of plastics recycling is much slower than the growth of new plastics production.
The growth of public and total debt and money supply (or money creation) is increasing every year, while the working population is starting to decline. As a result, debt is growing faster than GDP.
The growth of obesity due to malnutrition and processed foods, the growth of medical drug use, the growth of mental illness year after year in the developed world is also there and real.
The gap between the top 5% and the bottom 50% is widening every year, even with more social policies and public spending for welfare benefits.
The growth of real inflation felt by a low-income person is faster than the average growth of income.
All the good hopes and trends related to degrowth that are being promoted by some media to make us feel good about our future hide the big picture reality that capitalism, extractivism, pollution and depopulation are an unstoppable trend driven by human endeavour and human psychology and behaviour that will not change any time soon.There is no stopping mechanism or fix for growth until we are physically incapable of further maximising our comfort and standard of living.
When reality scares us, we look for simple 'solutions': Technological changes that do not affect our lifestyle. We seem either unwilling or unable to recognise that many of our problems are directly caused by growth: These include falling ore grade and mine depletion, a lower EROI on oil, climate impact from overshoot in consumption and pollution, and the rising complexity of our supply chains. We are not honest with ourselves and the state of society because we anchor ourself to utopian ideologies that we refuse to challenge and dismantle: There is the ideological belief that wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles (EVs) can power our economies cleanly and fight climate change without us having to restrict our consumerist habits and consumption patterns. Attempting to simplify geopolitics, international economic networks and geopolitical relationships between countries by labelling one country or government as 'good' or 'bad' is an illusion of childish mentality. The belief in Europe that sanctioning Russia for the war in Ukraine will have a more negative effect on Russia than on Europe is an illusion. It is an amateur miscalculation that fails to see the bigger picture, like a chess player only seeing one step ahead instead of several steps ahead. The ideology that we should maintain our generous social welfare from the 1980s to 2000s, at a time when the large cohort of baby boomers were working and when they are now mostly retired, and the following generations of young workers are shrinking rapidly, is a desastrous illusion that will lead to massive poverty and social unrest. Rather than accepting limits and restrictions, we chase stories that allow us to believe that we can maintain everything we like and enjoy in society and solve the rest through innovation,technology and debt. We’ll try almost anything before we’ll be honest with ourselves. Our lifestyle is unsustainable, especially given the coming shrinking workforce caused by declining birth rates of the last 50 years.
For degrowth to happen without social unrest and civil war, we need to move from being clever to being wise. We have been clever and smart for the last 70 years, like creating a social system with an abundance of free help and support at the right time during the reconstruction of the Second World War, like letting the free market best allocate capital globally to get the most efficiency and value for money to produce goods and services, and like promoting technosolutionism, where every problem can be solved by a new technology, but it actually adds to the existing pile of environmental problems and total energy consumption.
Now we ought to be wise and responsible like enforcing a fertility rate of 2.1 with incentives and penalties to ensure the survival of civilisation, imposing a cap on consumption to stop our overshoot, cutting off spending on pensions and health care, stopping the budget deficit to keep the national debt serviceable even though a shrinking working population, and enforcing a limit on our freedom of choices in adult life. Yes, wishing for less freedom is the wise path to our survival: More individual sacrifices and more collective duties. Unfortunately, it will not happen for many reasons: public perception, human reluctance to give up privileges and comfort zones, incentives for business leaders to maintain the status quo and for political leaders to endear themselves with popular and attractive policies, and most of the people in power being 60 and over not willing to surrender their welfare priviledges and wealth to the under 40 population.
Degrowth is a fairy tale and a myth that cannot happen on purpose for three reasons.
Firstly, the financial world exists with a positive interest rate, which is the price of money over time and entices people to save and enterprises to invest wisely. This means that the economy must grow in order to service the debt. Secondly, any money created (7% per year over the last 20 years) was lent into existence via bonds or credit with an interest rate. All the money in circulation today is linked to a loan, sometimes several loans. If the total amount of money in circulation is £100 one year, the economy or the money supply must grow to £103 the following year in order to service the interest rate of 1%, 2% or 3%. Financial growth is necessary for survival.
Secondly, in terms of material resources, we have exhausted the most dense sources in the past and, as time passes, the remaining resources become less dense, according to the 'low-hanging fruit' theory. About a century ago, we needed the energy of 1 litre of oil to drill and dig 100 litres of oil; today, new oil fields require 20 litres of input energy to produce 100 litres. We need to spend more to get the same output, and the same applies to minerals: a century ago, a copper mine had an average ore grade of 4%, whereas now it has 0.7%. This means that, 10 years from now in 2035, in order to produce one tonne of copper, we will need more electricity, fuel and water than we do today to produce the same one tonne of copper. We need material and energy consumption growth just to maintain our current standard and quality of life.
The third reason is demographic: with an ageing population and more people over 55 requiring health and personal care, we will have increased spending on social welfare. This means that we will need more revenue from the economy or more public debt just to maintain current living standards per capita, and our social system will require growth to remain stable. It will also need productivity growth to compensate for the loss of the labour force in the coming decades.
Degrowth is a feel-good story that has no basis in the last two centuries and will remain a fairy tale for decades to come. The only realistic options are civilisational and societal collapse or population collapse.
The good news is that a population collapse is on the horizon, which will force us towards degrowth. Let's take a closer look in the next chapter at the most catastrophic threat to humanity of the last two centuries: The demography.
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- THE LAST DECADE -
December 2025
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