Accelerationist possibilities in an ecosocialist degrowth scenario

I want to make a brief intervention here to highlight an aspect of degrowth climate mitigation strategy that has so far been inadequately developed. It is widely understood that scaling down less-necessary forms of production can contribute substantially to decarbonization, in two direct and obvious ways. First, it directly reduces emissions in addition to what can be achieved through efficiency improvements and renewable energy deployment. Second, it reduces total energy demand and therefore makes it possible to decarbonize the energy system much more quickly, because it is not necessary to install as much new infrastructure, and the process of doing it involves less extraction and emissions. These are powerful benefits.

But there are several other benefits to a degrowth scenario that are less widely understood and are worth considering.

Here’s the main thing. If high-income countries are to decarbonize fast enough to stay within their fair-share of Paris-compliant carbon budgets, then urgent climate mitigation tasks – like building renewable energy capacity, insulating buildings, expanding public transit, innovating and distributing more efficient technologies, regenerating land, etc – need to happen very quickly. This “green production” requires mobilizing massive amounts of labour, factories, materials, engineering talent, and so on. In a growth-oriented scenario, this is difficult to do because our productive capacities are already devoted to other activities (activities that are organized around profit and which may not contribute to social and ecological objectives). So we need to either compete with existing forms of production (for labour, materials, energy etc, which can drive prices up), or otherwise increase total productive capacity (i.e., grow the economy). This cannot be done at just any desired speed. Under these conditions, there are very real physical limits to how fast we can decarbonize.

Scaling down less-necessary production solves this problem, not only because of the two benefits indicated above, but also because it liberates productive capacities (factories, labour, materials) which can then be remobilized to do the production and innovation required for rapid decarbonization. For example, factories that are presently devoted to producing SUVs can produce solar panels instead. Engineers that are presently developing private jets can work on innovating more efficient trains and wind turbines instead. Labour that is presently employed by fast fashion firms can be liberated to train and contribute to installing renewable capacity, insulating buildings, or a wide range of other necessary objectives depending on their interests, through a public job