Degrowth or Abundance: Which Actually Saves the Planet?

“The empirical record is clear: GDP growth and carbon emissions are historically coupled, and no rich country has achieved the absolute decoupling the climate requires at the speed required. Relative decoupling — lower emissions per unit of GDP — is real but insufficient. The physics of the carbon budget does not care about relative improvements.”

“Degrowth is not poverty — it is redesigning economies around wellbeing, shorter working weeks, and sufficiency rather than accumulation. Scandinavian countries demonstrate high quality of life with substantially lower material throughput than the US. The model exists; what's missing is the political will to pursue it.”

“The clean-energy transition requires massive material throughput: solar panels, wind turbines, grid-scale batteries, EVs, and transmission infrastructure. Only growth-funded investment can deploy these at climate-relevant scale. Degrowth defunds the very industrial capacity needed to decarbonize.”

“Degrowth in rich countries exports misery to poor ones. A contracting global economy cuts off development pathways that lifted billions from poverty and denies the same to billions more. Telling the global poor they cannot aspire to the material living standards of the global rich — in the name of the planet the rich already damaged — is not environmentalism; it is a form of immiseration.”