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Are you interested in the possibility of green growth instead of degrowth for better urban futures?
Our debate today works with the article titled Green growth or degrowth? Possible outcomes for climate and society from 2025, by Phoenix Eskridge-Aldama, Aden Stern, Anna Vaughn, and Diana Stuart, published in the Highlights of Sustainability journal.
This is a great preparation to our next interview with Josh Dorfman in episode 420 talking about the need for people’s need to be open to the idea of green growth.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see whether we can talk about growth with green solutions for the better future instead of the degrowth idea. This article investigates the ongoing debate between green growth and degrowth as competing strategies for addressing the climate crisis and enhance wellbeing.
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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: In 2023, the world built more renewable energy capacity than ever before in human history.
Speaker 2: Right. It was a massive 50% expansion.
Speaker 1: A 50% expansion. So global fossil fuel emissions naturally went down, right?
Speaker 2: No, actually they went up by 1.1%. That brutal irony forces us to ask a pretty terrifying question.
Speaker 1: Exactly. We are looking at a fundamental collision course. Can we innovate our way out of the climate crisis by maintaining economic growth while aggressively adopting clean technology?
Speaker 2: Or as I would argue, must we purposefully contract our economies to survive with planetary boundaries?
Speaker 1: That is the tension at the heart of the 2025 Paper by Eskridge Alama and colleagues.
Speaker 2: Yes, their paper Green growth or degrowth Possible Outcomes for Climate and Society.
Speaker 1: We are looking at the hard math they have compiled today I will lay out my position right up front. Technological innovation and the absolute decoupling of emissions from gross domestic product provide the most pragmatic, rapidly deployable path to global sustainability.
Speaker 2: And my position is that physics simply demands a planned, equitable contraction of overproduction and over consumption in wealthy countries. While infinite growth on a finite planet is just a mathematical impossibility,
Speaker 1: let us define the mechanics of green growth first. The core premise is that economic expansion and environmental sustainability are completely compatible
Speaker 2: through technological shifts. You mean.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. We achieve this through structural shifts, deploying renewable energy at scale, and driving radical market efficiency. Think of economic growth like the engine of a vehicle.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: To stop emitting exhaust, you do not destroy the engine. You swap it for an electric one that allows you to keep moving forward. You use the engine of economic expansion to fund the multi-trillion dollar mitigation efforts required by institutions like the UN and the World Bank.
Speaker 2: I hear that, but I come at it from a very different way to push back with my own analogy. Green Girls’ focus on efficiency is basically like bailing water out of a sinking boat with a slightly larger bucket.
Speaker 1: A larger bucket,
Speaker 2: yeah, a slightly larger bucket while completely refusing to plug the hole in the hole. Degrowth is systematically misunderstood. People hear the word and immediately think of a chaotic recession,
Speaker 1: right? An economic crash,
Speaker 2: exactly. But a recession is an unplanned collapse within a system that fundamentally requires growth to function. Degrowth is a planned deliberate reduction of energy and resource use.
Speaker 1: But it still shrinks the economy.
Speaker 2: It shrinks what does not matter. It is specifically designed to enhance human wellbeing over GDP. It prioritizes sufficiency over efficiency. We have to cap consumption.
Speaker 1: Let us move from the theoretical definitions directly to the empirical evidence because that deliberate reduction ignores that green growth is actually working.
Speaker 2: Working. How So
Speaker 1: Ridge Alamas team looked at the data. There are 32 different countries that have already achieved what we call absolute decoupling based on production emissions.
Speaker 2: Maybe we should quickly define absolute decoupling for the listener.
Speaker 1: Sure. It means the gross domestic product of those 32 countries went up. While their total carbon emissions actually went down
Speaker 2: mostly in the global north,
Speaker 1: yes. But they successfully broke the historical link between getting richer and polluting more, and they did this primarily by aggressively greening their electrical grids and electrifying industry. The technological blueprints exist is my point. If we let the market scale these solutions. With enough political will, competitive renewable energy costs make a global transition viable, and we do not have to purposefully contract the economy.
Speaker 2: I am sorry, but I just do not buy that. Let me tell you why the decoupling data you are citing completely ignores the biophysical reality of the Jevons paradox. Or what we sometimes call the rebound effect.
Speaker 1: You mean the idea that efficiency breeds more consumption?
Speaker 2: Precisely. Historically, whenever we make a resource cheaper or more efficiently utilized, it paradoxically leads to an overall increase in the total consumption of that resource.
Speaker 1: It does not wipe out all the gains.
Speaker 2: Actually, the research shows this rebound effect can negate up to 50% of all energy efficiency gains. Think about the math here.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Making solar panels incredibly cheap means we have to mine exponentially more lithium, copper, and silver to build them. That drives massive short-term emissions. That is exactly why emissions rose in 2023. We are not replacing fossil fuels. We are just adding renewables on top of fossil fuels to feed an endlessly expanding economy.
Speaker 1: While I am not convinced by that line of reasoning, mostly because it treats the global energy transition as a flat linear process, it is actually an S-curve of technological adoption. So in the initial phase. Adding renewables naturally overlaps with fossil fuel use because global energy demand is still rising. But as battery storage technology and grid infrastructure reach a critical mass, the cost curve eventually flips.
Speaker 2: So the market corrects itself.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Fossil fuels get priced out of the market entirely. We do not need to arbitrarily cap human consumption. We just need to accelerate through the messy middle of this S-curve until clean energy reaches total market dominance.
Speaker 2: But see, you are assuming that continuing to aggressively grow the economy during that messy middle actually benefits society since your side relies so heavily on GDP is the ultimate metric for human progress. We have to ask if it is actually delivering on its social promises.
Speaker 1: I think it objectively has lifted millions out of poverty.
Speaker 2: But at what cost to overall wellbeing? The Scratch Altima paper highlights the Easterlin paradox.
Speaker 1: The stagnation of happiness.
Speaker 2: Yes. Life satisfaction in wealthy nations like the US and the UK has essentially flatlined since the 1950s, and that is despite massive exponential GDP growth over the same period.
Speaker 1: Wealth is not the only driver of happiness.
Speaker 2: No, it is not. The mechanism driving this endless GDP growth is the capitalist treadmill of production. It is a system where companies are structurally forced to manufacture artificial desires,
Speaker 1: like marketing
Speaker 2: worse than just marketing. It is convincing you that you need a new smartphone every 12 months or fast fashion that literally falls apart after three washes. They have to do this just to keep the economy from collapsing, and it concentrates all the wealth in the top 1%.
Speaker 1: So how does Degrowth fix that?
Speaker 2: Degrowth steps off that treadmill entirely. Instead of hoping wealth trickles down from unnecessary production, it implements direct wellbeing policies. We are talking about universal basic income, reduced working hours, and guaranteed public services.
Speaker 1: That is a really interesting point, though I would frame it differently. I fully acknowledge that extreme wealth inequality and planned obsolescence are severe systemic flaws.
Speaker 2: They are the defining flaws of the system,
Speaker 1: but the solution to bad growth is not purposefully shrinking the macroeconomic pie. Have you considered the psychological reality of loss aversion?
Speaker 2: You mean people hating losing things more than they like gaining them?
Speaker 1: Exactly. Human beings feel the pain of a loss far more acutely than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. That is just basic psychology. If you try to force a deliberate reduction in material living standards under some degrowth mandate telling people they cannot fly or they have to drastically cut their consumption, you will face catastrophic public and political resistance.
Speaker 2: Even if it is necessary for survival,
Speaker 1: especially then because people will reject the messenger, you will lose the very political mandate you need to fight climate change in the first place. Frameworks like the Green New Deal prove we can use green growth to fund social inclusion
Speaker 2: by taxing the growth
Speaker 1: right. We can tax it and fund public services without intentionally crashing the economic system that provides everyone’s jobs.
Speaker 2: But the macroeconomic pie you are trying to grow is baked with physical ingredients, minerals, land, water, timber. You cannot decouple material extraction from ecological destruction. Even if you run the mining excavators on 100% solar power, you are still destroying the ecosystem,
Speaker 1: which brings me to the very real downstream effects of trying to shrink that pie. Particularly for the most vulnerable populations. Let us look at the twin problem of global dependencies.
Speaker 2: You mean global supply chains?
Speaker 1: Yes. Highly interconnected supply chains. If you are listening to this in a wealthy nation, what happens to the rest of the world if your country purposefully stops consuming?
Speaker 2: The trade volume drops,
Speaker 1: it collapses. If the global North severely contracts its economy, export revenues in the global south will immediately collapse. You would plunge developing nations into deep poverty.
Speaker 2: That is a known vulnerability in the modelling. Yes.
Speaker 1: It strips them of the exact financial capital they desperately need to adapt to climate impacts. Climate adaptation requires trillions of dollars to build sea walls, develop drought resistant agriculture and relocate vulnerable people. A shrinking global economy simply cannot generate that capital. Green growth uses existing global trade mechanisms to lift developing nations up rather than pulling the economic rug out from under them.
Speaker 2: That is a compelling argument. I will admit. Global economic dependency. Is a highly debated vulnerability within Degrowth scholarship, but have you considered the physical mechanics of ecological space?
Speaker 1: Well define what you mean by ecological space in this context.
Speaker 2: It is the finite physical budget of the planet, so the remaining carbon we can emit the total hectares of arable land, the extractable minerals,
Speaker 1: the planetary boundaries,
Speaker 2: exactly. And Degrowth specifically targets the wealthy global North. Right now, the North extracts immense volumes of resources from the global south just to fuel. Its over consumption,
Speaker 1: but they pay for those resources
Speaker 2: under an asymmetrical system. By systematically contracting our economies in the north, we release that extractive burden. We physically free up the mineral and carbon budgets, the ecological space that the global south needs to build its own sovereign, sustainable infrastructure.
Speaker 1: I see why you think that, but let me give you a different perspective. Freeing up physical ecological space assumes that developing nations have the internal capital to actually utilize that space without participating in global export trade.
Speaker 2: They would need a new framework,
Speaker 1: but they do not have it right now. Dismantling the current structures of global governance and trade without causing a catastrophic development crisis is a massive unresolved hurdle. In Degrowth theory.
Speaker 2: It is a massive hurdle. I will not deny that, but the climate model’s Eskridge, all DAMA analysed paint a pretty stark picture of the alternative. The data demonstrates that ambitious low growth scenarios are the only reliable pathways left to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Green growth essentially requires us to bet the stability of the entire biosphere on unproven carbon capture technologies and unprecedented rates of decoupling.
Speaker 1: It requires optimism, yes,
Speaker 2: but degrowth deals with the physical reality of the present. Sufficiency guarantees, emissions reductions through the basic laws of physics. We just use less
Speaker 1: as we look at both sides. I think where our perspectives clearly aligned is the realization that the current unchecked fossil fuel trajectory is indefensible. The status quo is dead.
Speaker 2: Completely agreed. When you strip away the rhetoric. We fundamentally converge on the fact that feasibility is the ultimate bottleneck for human survival. We just disagree on where the bottleneck is tightest.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Green growth struggles immensely with biophysical feasibility. I mean, can we actually invent and build clean technology fast enough to outpace our own expanding consumption
Speaker 2: while Degrowth struggles immensely with political and institutional feasibility? Specifically the monumental task of convincing a globally interconnected, consumer driven capitalist world to voluntarily stop growing its wealth.
Speaker 1: Navigating this exact tension between our capacity for technological optimism and the rigid boundaries of biophysical reality is arguably the defining challenge of our era.
Speaker 2: There is deep nuance and incredibly complex modelling left to explore in Esri Alma’s research. Viewing the climate crisis through both these macroeconomic lenses is just immensely valuable.
Speaker 1: It really is, and we leave the ultimate conclusion of which pathway is most viable in the hands of the listener. To summarize my position one last time. Green growth leverages existing human behaviours, markets, and technological momentum to transition the globe as quickly as possible without causing immediate economic collapse.
Speaker 2: And to summarize mine, climate models show ambitious low growth scenarios are the only reliable pathways to limit warming without relying on unproven prototype stage technologies.
Speaker 1: It is a lot to think about.
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