It's rare for one of the world's top science journals to generate a lot of controversy.
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But the science journal Nature has done exactly that by getting behind the so-called "degrowth" narrative - the idea that we need to stop economic growth to stop climate change.
The journal has been criticised for good reason: the degrowth narrative is internally inconsistent, economically misguided and politically toxic.
First, it mis-defines economic growth. Advocates of degrowth argue that "wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective".
There's a simple problem with this: "creating prosperity" is economic growth.
If your definition of "creating prosperity" involves poor people's incomes going up, then "creating prosperity", by any definition, means economic growth is taking place.
Second, the degrowth narrative misunderstands how economic growth works in practice.
As countries develop, more and more of their economic growth comes from productivity.
Put simply, this means economies do more with less: they learn to generate more economic growth while using fewer resources.
This isn't just theory. We can see this clearly in the data. Back in the 1980s, about half of Australia's economic growth came from productivity. In the 2010s, it was more than 80 per cent.
Or consider the findings from a recent US geological survey. The survey looked at how much water and metals are used in the United States and measured its trade-adjusted carbon emissions over time. It found that all of them are declining.
Economic growth was previously strongly correlated with resource use, but that's increasingly no longer the case.
Third, the degrowth narrative misunderstands how economic growth and poverty reduction interact.
If degrowthers genuinely want economic growth to stay at zero, then this means that more than a billion people around the world will be locked into poverty for the rest of their lives so that rich people can continue to enjoy their current (substantially higher) standard of living.
This is intolerable.
The answer some give to this is that we need redistribution of income.
How radical would this be? They don't say. But economist Bruno Milanovic has crunched the numbers.
Milanovic finds that lifting poor people out of poverty without increasing gross domestic product growth would require the average westerner to cut their income by two-thirds and hand it over to developing countries which, given their size, is primarily China and India.
This is about as politically as it is economically feasible.
It's telling that even the most left-wing politicians in the United States and Australia - from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Adam Bandt and Bob Brown - won't touch this degrowth idea with a 100-foot pole.
The politics of this is simply that toxic.
Does all this mean we don't need to do anything on climate change? Of course not.
The data shows clearly that we are doing more with less, and that's a good thing.
But the data also shows we are not moving anywhere near fast enough.
Our objective, then, is to get carbon emissions down while causing the least possible harm to vulnerable people. This is called called least cost abatement. If it sounds familiar, that's because we've been talking about it for well over 50 years.
Degrowthers are sort of like those people who show up at the end of a conversation and try to rehash everything that's already been discussed. It's like they've been living under a rock for half a century.
The way to achieve least cost abatement is crystal clear: we need an economy-wide price on carbon to force polluters to internalise the cost of their pollution. The problem of achieving this, of course, isn't economics, it's politics.
Pricing carbon has been a political nightmare for both the left and the right.
This is why Australia - and governments around the world, such as the United States - are relying on other measures, such as carbon prices that only apply to some businesses (think of the safeguard mechanism) or regulatory responses (think of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States).
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But we need to move faster. The question, then, is what is more politically feasible: accelerating our measures to generate green growth? Or degrowth where we cut growth altogether, meaning either locking people in poverty or undertaking massive income and wealth redistributions?
Surely it's the former. And this is the fundamental problem with the degrowth narrative. It is so politically toxic that advocating it just creates more backlash against any sensible action on climate change.
And there is plenty we could do to speed up green growth.
We can remove barriers faced by banks and superannuation funds to unleash trillions of dollars of private-sector sustainable investment. We can expand and increase the safeguard mechanism.
We can rapidly increase the adoption of electric vehicles by removing parallel import restrictions.
We can speed up the adoption of solar panels, home insulation and sustainable technologies through data collection so these variables can be incorporated in lending and borrowing decisions.
These are low hanging fruit, and there's plenty more. Let's not jump to the extreme solutions until we've done the obvious ones.
- Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution
Adam Triggs
Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
