Degrowth Handbook - Part V

For anyone who knows me, you’re probably bored of me repeating this statement, but this really is the kicker when it comes to degrowth, and it really does underpin most of what we talk about.

You can’t have unlimited economic growth on a finite planet.

There it is, that’s the thesis. I usually qualify this with- because if exponential (more and more year on year) economic growth uses stuff, and we have limited stuff, eventually we run out of stuff. I want to use today’s article to nail down why this is the case and what it means for how we organise our lives this century and beyond. I will go over the counter-arguments to what I’m about to say- so-called ‘green-growth’ and ‘techno(logical)-optimism’, in a future article, but in the meantime, approach today’s article with an open mind.

Up until the late 20th century, life in Western modernity never really came into contact with the notions of limits. Sure, there were limits on certain people’s freedom and certain people’s access to resources, but in general, the economy and possibilities were assumed limitless, just think about the obscene optimism of garage and trance music. Westerners were told our only limits were our own capabilities, and the oppressed were told by the Soviets that their only limits were their chains. There were, we could say, no external limits. That which was not human was at our disposal (and many humans too). I’m using the language of ‘Westerners’ and ‘Western modernity’ here because these people I’m about to sing the praises of weren’t the first to think of this stuff. Many indigenous worldviews understand and manifest a sustainable society-nature balance1 and have done so effectively for centuries.

These “external” limits to growth were first popularised in Western thought through the lens of the ecological limits to growth2. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was the first to basically say- hold on, all this stuff that we use in “the economy” comes from somewhere, and usually is used, and becomes waste, what does this imply? Georgescu-Roegen’s answer was to apply the law of entropy, a key ingredient of the second law of thermodynamics, to the economic process.

I will explain the law of entropy with an example. A lump of coal when found in the ground can be said to exist in a state of low entropy, it is available/has energy that ...