And its purpose is to separate dewy-eyed ideologues and aspiring Bolshevists from their money.
And its purpose is to separate dewy-eyed ideologues and aspiring Bolshevists from their money.
T he most formidable obstacle blocking climate activists from realizing their goal of a world powered by inefficient and inadequate (but sustainable) sources of electricity is the developing world’s desire to, well, develop.
The industrializing world’s pursuit of rapid economic growth is contingent on the expansion of on-demand power generation of the sort that only fossil fuels and nuclear energy can provide. Add atop that the industrialized world’s need to preserve its own stable economic growth, and you’re left with the consensus that economic expansion is desirable. That’s a source of real consternation among environmental activists, some of whom are now saying the quiet part out loud: Prosperity is the problem.
“Gains in economic growth have too often buoyed the fortunes of the richest instead of lifting all boats,” New York Times book reviewer Jennifer Szalai recently affirmed. “Prosperity even in the most prosperous countries hasn’t been shared.” Those unquestioned assumptions on the left are now running headlong into the logic of climate hysterics, leading some to wonder if “economic growth is desirable at all.”
The alternative to growth isn’t stasis. Rather, it is economic contraction. “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive,” says the anthropologist Jason Hickel.
Imagine the laurels that will rain down on the de-industrializers when the strivers of the world have been emancipated from the burden of being able to provide for their families through labor in productive industries. Instead, the reformers insist, they will languish in a state of decline imposed on them by a wise council of central planners, whose mission is to gradually reduce global standards of living by limiting economic outputs. Quite the utopia they have in store for us.
Degrowth isn’t a new idea, though it has found a new audience among activists imprudent enough to articulate what they actually believe. Radical academics like Hickel insist that the economy can be brought into “balance with the living world” by proscribing the production of things he doesn’t like: “S.U.V.s, weapons, beef, private transportation, advertising, and consumer technologies that are designed to obsolesce,” as Times reporter Spencer Bokat-Lindell summarizes it. Indeed, there is a thriving industry populated by academics, think-tankers, and professional op-ed writers and devoted to the promotion of “degrowth.” Unsurprisingly, though, non-punditry opportunities in this field are decidedly limited.
As the movement’s name strongly suggests, deindustrialization is not a growth industry. As one student of “sustainable development in college” wrote in an unintentionally amusing lament on Reddit, there are decidedly few “career paths” in the degrowth movement. “It’s tough because degrowth is not profitable, by definition, and most jobs are expected to produce some sort of economic value,” read one wry reply.
This is not to say there are no opportunities in the space devoted to limiting opportunities for everyone else. For example, the Spain-based activist conclave Research & Degrowth International currently seeks a candidate who is “passionate and knowledgeable on Degrowth ideologies and principles” to oversee “dialogues” and communicate the “results of EU-funded research on post-growth/wellbeing” to policymakers. The modestly compensated position relies on “EU-funded research,” perhaps because the funds devoted to such a project must be siphoned out of the productive economy via taxation. Where else would the money come from?
If there are fortunes to be made in the degrowth sector, they are exclusive to academia. There, wide-eyed young people are seduced into pursuing degrees related to a field explicitly designed to limit individual productivity and utility. It is fascinating to observe the intellectual contortions advocates for this self-destructive philosophy strike in their effort to con young people into making a career out of enforced privation.
“What does it mean to train people for a career in disrupting the whole idea of careers?” the activists with the nonprofit outfit Grist ask their naïve readers. The question is never answered. Rather, readers are bombarded with the post-modern, polysyllabic jargon that commonly ornaments the nonsense produced by the world’s humanities departments. Research into degrowth is characterized as “un-disciplinary.” Its students learn “skills like group facilitation, how to run a social justice campaign, and how to set up a cooperative,” none of which are profitable enterprises. In the end, the career paths into which degrowth specialists are thrust culminate either in “advocacy work” or “research,” which is to say that students of degrowth are destined either for professional activism or professional study.
Ultimately, students of this framework take the idea of “degrowth” to its logical conclusion, which is, invariably, Leninism. “Slowing the economy will never be accomplished via the altruistic sacrifices of the materially privileged classes, but can only happen as a result of a transfer of power,” reads one degrowth advocate’s sprawling missive. Indeed, the field’s literature assumes that “degrowth might be employed within the context of reform rather than revolution,” he observed, but “there are no historical events that support such optimism.” This is obviously correct. Human nature being what it is, people are unlikely to support a program designed to reduce living standards for themselves and their children. They’ll have to be forced into it kicking and screaming.
Even those who come by their environmentalism honestly and not as a semi-respectable guise through which they can pursue revolutionary activity should be able to recognize that the capitalist enterprise has a far better track record of producing environmental remediation than public works. Energy efficiency, green technologies, and even cleaner fossil-fuel extraction and exploitation techniques can be advanced through governmental incentives, but their widespread adoption is a function of the profit motive. And the profit motive is a product of consumer demand. By contrast, the command economies of the 20th century on which the degrowth program is unconsciously modeled had horrendous environmental track records. Why? Because these societies prioritized rapid industrial growth at the expense of the environment. There’s no getting around growth or the incentives to pursue it.
This is a racket. What lures gullible young ideologues into this field is what it affords its students and practitioners — not money, of course, but the self-importance with which unheeded Cassandras of the apocalypse must satisfy themselves. It’s not a pathway to prosperity or even self-sufficiency. It’s a hustle, the purpose of which is to entrap its targets in fields with no utility outside academia, thereby making itself self-sustaining.
Those who manage to escape the gravitational pull of the university will make it no farther than radical activism, which is increasingly only cosmetically distinct from academic pursuits. If this practice had any other ideological provenance, the progressives who cannot tolerate any economic activity that is even remotely predatory would be calling for investigations into the organizations promoting it. It’s a scam designed to separate dewy-eyed ideologues and aspiring Bolshevists from their money. . . .
. . . On second thought, maybe the degrowth industry isn’t so bad after all.