1AC

Degrowth---1AC
The advantage is DEGROWTH:
Continued growth is an unsustainable march towards ecocide. Decoupling growth
from emissions that lock in catastrophic climate change is impossible.
Stuart ’21 [Diana; 2021; Associate Professor in the Sustainable Communities Program and in the
School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University; Ryan Gunderson; Assistant Professor
of Sociology and Social Justice Studies in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology and Affiliate of
the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at Miami University; Brian Petersen; Associate
Professor in the Geography, Planning and Recreation Department at Northern Arizona University; The
Degrowth Alternative, A Path to Address our Environmental Crisis? p. 1-33]
1 Addressing our environmental crisis

The words “crisis” and “emergency” are increasingly used by scientists and in the media to describe the state of our environment. For example,
in 2019 an article representing the views of 11,000 scientists was published in BioScience, titled “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate
Emergency” (Ripple et al. 2019). Also, in 2019, the “Call it a Climate Crisis” campaign urged media organizations to use the words “climate
crisis” instead of “climate change,” resulting in a widespread increase in the use of the term.

The terms “ecological crisis” and “biodiversity crisis” are also now commonly used by conservation scientists
and in the media. For example, a letter representing almost 100 scientists was published in October of 2018 titled: “Facts about our
ecological crisis are incon-trovertible” (Green et al. 2018). A year later, a “bleak” United Nations report on biodiversity and ecosystem services
(IPBES 2019a) resulted in scientists publicly calling for rapid funding and intervention to address the “biodiversity crisis” (Malcom et al. 2019).

Are we indeed facing multiple environmental crises? General definitions of a “crisis” include a decisive moment or crucial time, a critical phase
that determines all future events, a condition of danger or precarity, threats to primary goals, being affected by serious problems, extreme
trouble, and a time of great difficulty. In addition, according to Venette (2003: 43), a “ crisis
is a process of transformation
where the old system can no longer be maintained.” Evidence suggests that, in terms of all of these different
meanings, we are in a state of environmental crisis, which includes the dual crises of climate change and
biodiversity loss. We briefly present some of the most recent and compelling scientific evidence demonstrating the reality and severity of
these crises below.

Our presentation of the evidence of these crises is brief, as the overall objective of this book is to examine how we can best address them. We
present some of the most authoritative and boldest statements from scientists about the possible and likely impacts if we stay on our current
course. Then we quickly shift to focus on solutions. For reasons we will describe, we are skeptical of popularly proposed solutions to tackle
these crises and instead seek out more far-reaching and transformative alternatives. We focus on a key lever in our system that drives the
speed and direction of our material and energy flows, economic growth, and examine degrowth as an alternative to move us towards a better
and more sustainable future.

Evidence of our climate and biodiversity crises

Mounting evidence indicates that we are in a climate crisis. With

only a little more than 1°C increase in average global
temperatures since preindustrial levels, we are already seeing serious impacts including unprecedented
fires, floods, and hurricanes; and much more severe impacts are projected as warming continues. Steffen
et al. (2018) explain the real possibility of reaching a critical threshold of warming or a global tipping point after
which additional warming would be uncontrollable, resulting in a “Hothouse Earth” scenario. In Nature,
Lenton et al. (2019: 595) state that climate change “is an existential threat to civilization,” explaining that “the evidence
from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and
urgency of the situation are acute.”

Climate impacts are already unfolding and the crisis will amplify with increasing climate-related
disasters, melting ice, and rising sea levels. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report Global
Warming of 1.5°C contains much bolder language than previous reports to stress the significant difference in impacts between a 1.5°C and a 2°C
increase in average global temperatures and the need for immediate, unprecedented, and far-reaching action. In addition, a 2019 report in the
Lancet details how climate change is already impacting human health globally and warns of devastating health impacts as warming continues
(Watts et al. 2019). Lastly, Ripple et al. (2019: 1), representing the Alliance of World Scientists, identify “disturbing” and “worrisome” vital signs
of climate impacts that they state “clearly and unequivocally” illustrates we are in a “climate emergency.”

Although the climate crisis contributes to biodiversity loss (Thomas et al. 2004), it is considered a separate, yet related,
crisis. Conservation biologists pointed out years ago that we are in the midst of the sixth global mass extinction event,
driven by humans (Barnosky et al. 2011), also referred to as the “extinction tsunami” (Lovejoy 2017) or “biological
annihilation” (Ceballos et al. 2017). Recent indicators of a biodiversity crisis include half of all vertebrate
populations in decline (Ceballos et al. 2017), a global extinction rate of approximately 200 species each day
(Green et al. 2018), the loss of 29% of birds in North America since 1970 (Rosenberg et al. 2019), and 1 million species (25%) facing extinction
globally (IPBES 2019a). A comprehensive report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
(IPBES 2019a) concludes that humans are driving global changes in plant and animal life that are
unprecedented in history.

The biodiversity crisis will increasingly impact human societies. While many people overlook human
dependency on other species, scientists continue to argue that at current rates we will alter the natural world in
ways that threaten not only human well-being but also human existence (Ceballos et al. 2015). The concept of
ecosystem services has been used for decades to emphasize the ways that humans benefit from and
depend on ecosystems (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) and projections of global change reveal the
potential severity of social impacts from biodiversity loss. The IPBES media release (2019b) states that species loss
has accelerated to rates that “constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the
world.” The United Nations biodiversity chief warns of ecological thresholds and tipping points that could result in a
cascade of extinctions, collapse, and social impacts (Conley 2019).
If a crisis is a decisive moment, crucial time, or a critical phase that determines future events, then, according to scientists, we are in a state of
environmental crisis. If a crisis is a condition of danger or precarity that poses serious problems, extreme trouble, and great difficulty, then the
science again indicates we are in a climate and ecological crisis. In addition to scientists, an increasing number of other people now recognize
these serious threats. For example, United States (US) public opinion polls reveal that more than a quarter of Americans consider climate
change a “crisis” with a further 36% defining it as a “serious problem” (CBS News 2019). In addition, 60% of Americans polled think government
should do something to address global warming and 70% believe environmental protection is more important than economic growth (Marlon
et al. 2019). In the United Kingdom (UK), 85% of citizens are concerned about climate change, 52% are very concerned, and 55% think the UK
should bring emissions to net zero before 2050 targets (Dickman and Skinner 2019).

If we define a crisis as “a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained” (Venette 2003: 43), we also see
mounting evidence that we are in a state of crisis. According to scientists, the
status quo can no longer be maintained and
instead “rapid and far-reaching changes are needed in all aspects of society” (IPCC 2018). Lenton et al. (2019: 595)
explain that “[n]o amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.”
Ripple et al. (2019: 3, 4) and the Alliance of World Scientist state that to “secure a sustainable future, we must change how
we live” and “[t]he good news is that such trans-formative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-
being than does business as usual.” If we are indeed in a state of crisis, where the old system must be replaced, what kind of new system do we
need? What changes are necessary to minimize ecological and social impacts?

What kind of change is needed?

There is a vast amount of scientific evidence supporting the reality and seriousness of both the climate and biodiversity crises. We presented
only a small portion of this evidence and every week more is produced by scientists across the globe. Instead of going any further into the
science supporting the realities of these crises, this book focuses on what changes are needed to address them. In other words, if we accept
that we are indeed facing an unprecedented environmental crisis, how can society respond in ways that are effective and just?

There are many proposed solutions to address our environmental crisis. As we will discuss in Chapter 2, popularly discussed solutions include
individual behavior changes, market-based schemes, techno-logical innovations and efficiency gains, renewable energy creation,1 and
geoengineering. But will these be enough? Do they represent the “far-reaching” changes in all aspects of society called for by scientists? Do
they represent the “transformative change” that scientists call for? In Chapter 2, we present evidence demonstrating the inadequacy of popular
proposed solutions. We also illustrate exactly why these pro-posed solutions will not be sufficient—because they are not transformative or far-
reaching and, most critically, they fail to address the root driver of these problematic environmental conditions.

Many scientists now agree that a system prioritizing economic growth is a root driver of both the climate
and biodiversity crises. Green et al. (2018: 1), representing nearly 100 scientists, argue that governments have betrayed us
“in failing to acknowledge that infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources is non-viable.”
Steffen et al. (2018: 5–6) state that “[t]he present dominant socioeco-nomic system, however, is based on high-carbon economic growth and
exploitative resource use” and we need “changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values.” The IPBES summary report
(2019a: 10) similarly explains:

A key component of sustainable pathways is the evolution of global financial and economic systems to
build a global sustainable economy, steering away from the current, limited paradigm of
economic growth… It would also entail a shift beyond standard economic indicators such as gross domestic product to include
those able to capture more holistic, long-term views of economics and quality of life.

Lastly, Ripple et al. (2019: 4) state that:

Excessive extraction of materials and overexploitation of ecosystems, driven by economic

growth, must be quickly curtailed to maintain long-term sustainability of the biosphere … Our goals
need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence to-ward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by
prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality.

Why are these scientists focusing so much on GDP? GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product and represents the market value of all goods and
services produced in a specific time period. GDP was created as an indicator during World War II, aimed to assess productive capa-bilities for
the war effort. Increasing GDP annually was then widely adopted as a global economic goal, with average yearly increases in the US of around
3%. That means every year more and more goods are produced and services offered.

However, producing
an ever-increasing amount of goods and services each year continues to require an
increasing amount of materials and energy. It therefore makes sense that a GDP growth of 1% equals a 0.6% growth in material
use (Wiedmann et al. 2015) and a 1% increase in GDP equals a 0.5–0.7% increase in carbon emissions (Burke et al. 2015). It also makes sense
that the most notable carbon emissions reductions have occurred during economic recession due to a
reduction in production and consumption (Feng et al. 2015). Based on their analyses of carbon budgets, Anderson and Bows
(2011) find that overall reductions in economic growth are necessary to effectively address climate change.

In terms of biodiversity loss, the production of goods drives higher rates of extraction and use of resources impacting land use, habitat, hunting/harvesting, pollution, invasive

species, and climate change— all major drivers of extinction (Ceballos et al. 2017; IPBES 2019a; Otero et al. 2020). The production of beef, soybeans, and biofuels
(Rudell et al. 2009) drives deforestation in the tropics, the leading cause of terrestrial extinction (Sodhi et al. 2009). In addition, globalized trade has resulted in the proliferation
of invasive species (Mooney and Hobbs 2000; Otero et al. 2020). Czech et al. (2012) and Sol’s (2019) analyses reveal a strong positive association between GDP growth and
species endangerment. In a 2020 review, Otero et al. il-lustrate how economic growth increases resource use, trade, land use change, climate change, and invasive species—all
contributing to bio-diversity loss. As the United Nations biodiversity chief Paşca Palmer explains, this means that to address the biodiversity crisis, “[w]e need a transformation in
the way we consume and produce” (Conley 2019). Scientists increasingly agree that to address climate change and biodi-versity loss we need to rethink and even recreate our
economic system. Questioning economic growth The science illustrates that it is not GDP growth that results in in-creased carbon emissions and species extinction, but the
increase in material and energy use associated with economic growth. Thus, many people have turned to the idea of decoupling to address this problematic relationship.
Decoupling, in absolute terms, would mean creating a production system where economic growth could increase without increasing environmental impacts. Yet, as we will
detail in Chapter 3, absolute decoupling remains elusive in terms of resource use and much too slow in terms of reducing carbon emissions (Hickel and Kallis 2019; Schor and
Jorgenson 2019). Those who continue to defend decoupling and the idea of “green growth” largely rely upon data that fails to take into account imported goods and system
complexities beyond national borders (see Knight and Schor 2014; Schor and Jorgenson 2019). What the evidence shows is that absolute decoupling for materials is likely
impossible and that absolute decoupling of carbon emissions is nowhere near the rates necessary (Hickel and Kallis 2019). What decoupling does provide is a useful concept to
rationalize the continuation of GDP growth and wealth accumulation for a relatively small portion of the population: in 2017, the wealthiest 1% of individuals held 82% of all
global wealth (Oxfam 2018). A small subset of the population has greatly benefited from a system that prioritizes eco-nomic growth, but this system is now increasingly putting
all people in danger. Given that decoupling as a solution remains elusive in reality, reliance on the idea is a risky approach as our environmental crisis continues to escalate
(Schor and Jorgenson 2019). A key idea in this debate is biophysical limits. Scientists and economists have long disputed the existence of biophysical or planetary limits. If we
assume there are no limits, then we can continue to prioritize never-ending economic growth and the extraction, production, and consumption to support that growth. If we
believe that there are limits, however, then we need to modify our social systems in ways that stay within these limits or we end up in “ecological overshoot” or exceeding safe
“planetary boundaries” (Rockstrom 2009).

Ecological economists, scientists, and environmentalists increasingly argue that our current use of natural resources and
energy already surpasses the Earth’s biophysical limits (e.g., Jackson 2009; Daly 2013). According to Rockstrom (2009), we
have already surpassed boundaries related to the nitrogen cycle, biodiversity, and climate (Steffen et al.
2015). Based on the ecological footprint concept, Earth Overshoot Day represents the day each year that humanity uses more resources and
services than can be regenerated in a year. Every year that day comes earlier. As explained by Pope Francis (EOD 2019):
 The fact that has shocked me the most is the Overshoot Day: by July 29th, we used up all the regenerative resources of 2019. From
July 30 we started to consume more resources than the planet can regenerate in a year. It’s very serious. It’s a global emergency.

Schmelzer (2015) argues that the cause of overshoot is economic growth and “increasing levels of material production run up
to the ecological limits of a finite planet.” Scientists also agree that never-ending economic growth on a finite planet is
“non-viable” (Green et al. 2018). While we are not yet seeing global resource shortages in line with neo-Malthusian projections, the climate
and biodiversity crises represent warning signs of the non-viability of our current trajectory.

If we accept that we must live within biophysical limits, we then need

to reduce production and consumption levels in
places where people are over-producing and over-consuming, namely wealthy countries. In these wealthy countries, the
goal of increasing GDP has resulted in increased marketing and the production of unnecessary and purposefully short-lived goods (Hickel
2019a). As material production has continued to increase in these countries, advertising encourages people to buy more additional goods and
credit cards and debt enable these purchases. Yet data
continues to show that after basic human needs are met,
additional material goods do not increase happiness and/or well-being (Easterlin et al. 2010). Despite technological
innovations and productivity gains, work time has increased to produce more and more goods per person (Circle Economy 2020). Rauch (2000)
estimated that if we lived off of the productivity from a 40-hour work week in 1975 we would only need to work 23 hours per week, and if we
lived off of 1950 productivity levels we would only need to work 11 hours per week. We are working more to produce more and have more, but
we are not any happier and we are heading deeper into crises.

Does prioritizing economic growth make sense? Kallis (2015a) argues that the idea of never-ending economic growth is “absurd” and explains,
“if the Egyptians had started with one cubic metre of stuff and grew it by 4.5% per year, by the end of their 3,000-year civilization, they would
have occupied 2.5 billion solar systems.” In
terms of entropy law, researchers have quantitatively illustrated the
“thermodynamic impossibility” of never-ending economic growth and deemed it irresponsible to
continue on the current trajectory (Earp and Romeiro 2015: 643). Even with a reasonable assumption of
technological innovation and the substitution of resources, their analysis indicates a catastrophic
outcome if we maintain the status quo.
The possibly catastrophic outcomes bring into question the moral implications of economic growth. Given the uncertainties of future
technological and economic developments, is it moral to assume we will find ways to continue to support economic growth? If
we follow
the precautionary principle, the appropriate approach would be to assume that there are biophysical
limits and unknown thresholds and to act accordingly to reduce the risk of surpassing them. If we act, we
could also change our system in ways that could be socially beneficial. Even if the risks of these crises are overstated, we
could still benefit from changing our system in the ways necessary to address them. Therefore, the risks associated with
assuming there are versus there are no biophysical limits are substantially different and have vast moral implications.
If, despite the increasing evidence, world leaders continue to act as if there are no biophysical limits and prioritize economic growth before addressing our environmental crisis, the projected impacts would be unequally
experienced and result in clear injustice in terms of racial, economic, intergenerational, and inter-species justice. The rise of a youth climate change movement has brought new attention to the intergenerational injustice of these
crises and activists are calling out the immorality of the economic growth paradigm. For example, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg spoke to the United Nations, stating:

People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all they can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare
you!

If we listen to the scientists and acknowledge the improbability of “science fiction” level technology saving us from the environmental crisis (Earp and Romeiro 2015: 649), then continuing with the status quo becomes clearly
immoral. Mounting evidence more than justifies deeply questioning economic growth and examining alternative paths forward.

Degrowth for a better future?

We, the authors, are three social scientists who have been studying environmental issues for many years, especially issues related to climate change, biodiversity conservation, and agriculture. After studying social and ecological
impacts and identifying the causes and drivers of these impacts, we were left questioning the adequacy of dominantly proposed solutions and seeking more effective alternatives. Upon being convinced by the evidence that the
economic growth imperative is a key driver of the problems we study, we stumbled upon a whole body of literature and scholarship presenting another way forward: degrowth.

We approach degrowth from a position of great concern over how to justly address our climate and biodiversity crises. We are convinced that a system prioritizing economic growth is a key driver of these crises, so we seek to
understand how we can change our society to move away from growth. Degrowth is a planned downscaling of pro-duction and consumption in wealthy, overconsuming countries to transition to a steady-state economy that exists
within biophysical limits and can be sustained. It is living with enough and reproducing that level of enough, not producing more and more for the sake of GDP growth. It is working less, producing less, and consuming less
unnecessary things. Degrowth also has the potential to substantially increase equality, health, and well-being. There are also legitimate questions and concerns about degrowth, including the use of the term “degrowth,” which we
will discuss later in this book.

Degrowth does not aim to decrease GDP but abandons it as a societal goal and aims to reduce the material and energy throughput pushing us over biophysical limits. In this way, it would alleviate many of the stressors causing the
climate and biodiversity crises. It would also present an opportunity to restructure society around new goals aimed at improving social and ecological well-being. Jackson (2009) argues that due to ecological limits it is not a matter
of if the economy will contract but when. With degrowth, we can choose a transition to a more sustainable system rather than wait for the climate and biodiversity crises to trigger possible economic and social collapse.

In the following chapters, we examine how a degrowth transition could address our climate and biodiversity crises. We transparently take a normative position: protecting current and future generations of humans and other
species is important and a worthy reason to re-think our social and economic system. In Chapter 2, we summarize evidence showing that mainstream solutions to these crises are insufficient. In Chapter 3, we present evidence that
challenges the economic growth paradigm and illustrates the problems in continuing with the status quo. Chapter 4 describes degrowth, including key principles, policy proposals, and associated lifestyle changes. Chapter 5
discusses some of the primary critiques of degrowth. Our final chapter examines how a degrowth transition might actually come about and the challenges and opportunities moving forward.
Our overall goal in this book is to examine degrowth as a way to minimize the impacts associated with our environmental crisis and to offer a more just future. While we will present substantial evidence that supports a degrowth
transition, we will also at times take critical positions and question certain proposals and ideas. Our overall examination focuses on what might result in the best possible future. We are indeed in a clear state of crisis: it is a decisive
moment and a crucial time in history, we face serious dangers and challenges ahead, our decisions today will have far-reaching impacts into the future, and our current system can no longer be maintained. In this book, we ex-
amine degrowth as an alternative to address this crisis and support a better future. Gills and Morgan (2019: 13), argue “We need to start thinking about degrowth as responsible and not radical. We need to start thinking of it as the
realistic option.” This book aims to further the consideration of degrowth as a viable alternative and to examine how it could be used to create a more sustainable and just future.

[[CHAPTER 1 NOTE OMITTED]]

[[CHAPTER 2 BEGINS]]
2 Beyond false solutions

A primary reason to consider degrowth as a response to the climate and biodiversity crises is the mounting
evidence illustrating that other proposed solutions will either be insufficient or too risky and therefore represent
“false solutions.” While some current solutions do indeed offer positive contributions, they remain insufficient because the
economic growth imperative undermines their potential. Solutions that ignore the relationship between the system that
drives economic growth and our environmental crisis leave the primary driver intact.

The false solutions we examine here include individual behavioral changes (without changing the social systems in which
individual behaviors are structured), market-based solutions through carbon pricing, improving energy and carbon
efficiency (without pursuing total reductions in energy consumption), expanding renewable energy (but not simultaneously
reducing fossil fuel use and total energy consumption), and lastly geoengineering (which is too risky). The first two mainstream
solutions are common in both climate change and biodiversity efforts while the last three are specific to climate change. Some of these
solutions overlap. For example, many suggested individual behavioral changes are “market-based solutions” in that they recommend changes
in consumptive habits, assuming that this will influence market dynamics in environmentally beneficial ways.

We have purposefully chosen the straightforward and polemical term “false solutions” because alone these solutions are empty promises. They
are “false” either because they are (1) inadequate or (2) too risky and (3) divert attention and funding away from adequate, more just, and less
risky solutions. By “inadequate,” we mean the solution is characterized by one or more of the following:

Too slow or small in impact to meet prominent emissions reductions targets.

Too slow or small in impact to dramatically slow or halt biodiversity loss.

Paradoxically increases environmental pressure (as in the case of the “Jevons paradox”).

One of the false solutions, solar

geoengineering, may have the potential to adequately address global warming but is simply too
risky to pursue when compared to alternative pathways.
Our other criterion of a false solution, that it diverts attention and funding from adequate solutions, deserves qualification. Some of these solutions, especially individual
behavioral changes and the expansion of renewable energy, are essential for a degrowth transition if combined with the strategies outlined in Chapter 5. For example, changing
the in-dividual behaviors of large groups of people is of critical importance to significantly reduce carbon emissions and slow or halt biodiversity loss. We do not object to
changing individual behaviors, but given the evidence we do not believe that changing individual behaviors within the current social formation will meet ecological goals and are
also skeptical of the assumption that changes in individual behaviors will lead to system-level changes. The following sections summarize the inadequacies and/or risks of these
solutions and provide evidence that they divert funding and attention away from more effective and less risky solutions. Individual behavioral changes The call to “go green”
usually implies changing our lifestyle and every-day routines to address environmental problems, including switching to energy-efficient lightbulbs, weatherproofing homes,
driving less or buying a hybrid car, carpooling, taking shorter showers, and buying “greener” products. Yet increasing evidence shows that individual behavioral changes are
inadequate responses to our environmental crisis and, more importantly, divert attention, and even reduce support for, more effective system-altering responses. We recognize
there are clear benefits to adopting environmentally friendly behaviors. However, as a solution (1) greening one’s lifestyle is inadequate when pursued alone or even when
paired with other false solutions, (2) the focus on individual consumptive practices misunderstands relations between production and consumption and reproduces the social
system that drives biodiversity loss and climate change, and, most importantly, (3) the narrow focus on changing lifestyles in main-stream narratives overlooks the structural
basis of the ecological crisis, thereby diverting attention from more effective and just solutions. While we are unaware of any empirical studies that assess the effectiveness or
ineffectiveness of lifestyle changes on biodiversity conservation, there is evidence of their inadequacy for addressing climate change, also a known driver of biodiversity loss.
Individual- to household-level changes have been estimated to be able to reduce emissions by around 7% (Dietz et al. 2009) to 22% (Jensen 2009) in the US. However, to avoid
catastrophic warming and limit warming to 1.5°C, the US should reach net-zero emissions by 2030 (Climate Action Tracker 2019). Lifestyle changes within the existing system
cannot reduce emissions at the rate and scale necessary to avoid catastrophic warming. It is important to again emphasize that we are not against individual behavioral changes,
we are merely pointing out that they are insufficient, as supporters of this strategy know (Dietz et al. 2009). A second reason individual behavioral changes are a false solution is
due to the focus on changing consumptive behavior. “Going green” often means “shopping green.” However, as Galbraith (1958) and others (Schnaiberg 1980) argued long ago,
production drives consumption, primarily through advertising and the creation of false needs via the culture industry (Marcuse 1964; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). A system
that requires constant growth must keep expanding pro-duction and also increase consumption to create buyers for more and more products. The focus on “greening”
consumption cannot address this relationship because it assumes the relationship is inverted (i.e., that consumption drives production). Relatedly, the marketed “green-ness” of
most green commodities is questionable. For example, food, textile, and woods-products companies who use at least one form of “sustainable sourcing practice” (52%) (e.g.,
third-party organic certification) typically only address one or a few inputs (71%) and rarely address environmental issues (Thorlakson et al. 2018). The third and most important
reason individual behavioral change should be considered a false solution is that this focus diverts attention away from the structural and system-level changes needed to
adequately address our environmental crisis (Brulle and Dunlap 2015). As Szasz argues in Shopping our way to safety (2007), the attempt to protect ourselves from
environmental hazards through shopping leads to “political anesthesia,” or “a false sense of security undercutting political support for reform,” thereby reproducing the existing
social order (Szasz 2007: 202). For example, the option of implementing household actions to reduce emissions makes people less likely to support carbon taxes (Werfel 2017).
Further, there is empirical evidence that individual behavioral changes may have other counterintuitive effects: when re-cycling options are available people increase resource
use (Catlin and Wang 2013) and purchasing “green” products leads to less altruistic actions (Mazar and Zhong 2010). Relatedly, the financial savings gained from reducing one’s
carbon footprint often fund other activities that act to shift the impacts elsewhere (Wapner and Willoughby 2005). Market-based solutions Market-based solutions are common
in both climate change and biodiversity policy. In climate change policy, carbon markets usually consist of cap-and-trade and or carbon offset programs, implemented or under
consideration in many regions from city to interstate levels, including Australia, California, the European Union (EU), New Zealand, Quebec, Canada, and South Korea (Muȗls et
al. 2016). Cap-and-trade programs set emissions limits and freely distribute or auction off “allowances” to emit to companies, who then trade their right to pollute, while carbon
offset programs allow emitters to invest in carbon mitigation projects, many in developing countries, to “offset” their own carbon emissions. The largest and longest continuous
carbon market is the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). Assessments of the EU ETS vary considerably depending on methodological choices (see Martin et al. 2016), ranging
from the argument that most reductions in emissions resulted from other factors such as the global financial crisis and expanded renewable energy (Nicolas et al. 2014) to a 2.4–
4.7% reduction in total emissions from 2005 to 2007 along with slight decreases in emission intensity during Phase II (2008–2012) (see Muȗls et al. 2016: 5). A more favorable
recent study estimates a ~10% decrease in emissions between 2005 and 2012 in four participating countries (France, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK) at a firm-level,
specifically when comparing the emissions of non-ETS installations to ETS installations (e.g., power stations). In other words, even the most favorable assessment does not
analyze all countries, merely compares dirtier installations to slightly less (a tenth less) dirty installations and does not analyze the ETS’s im-pact on total emissions
(Dechezleprêtre et al. 2018). Along with insufficient reductions in emissions, carbon markets have led to paradoxical and even scandalous outcomes, including accidentally
incentivizing firms involved in a carbon offset scheme to produce more of a highly potent greenhouse gas byproduct (HFC-23) in order to destroy it to gain emissions credits to
sell to polluters (for review, see Klein 2014). Coupled with their negligible impacts, a more important reason that carbon markets should be understood as false solutions is they
reproduce the system that drives climate change and divert attention from alternative social solutions (e.g., Lohmann 2005, 2010; Foster et al. 2009; Stuart et al. 2019). This is
not only a theoretical argument. Lohmann (2005) shows how the Kyoto Protocol’s emphasis on emissions trading, pushed by the US who ironically did not ratify the treaty,
redirected attention in the form of intellectual and financial resources from alternative policies and social changes that have the potential to actually significantly reduce
emissions. Criticisms of the Protocol in favor of strong policies were scorned as a “do-nothing” stance. Similarly, a corporate watchdog non-profit makes the case that the mere
existence of the EU ETS continues to undermine the ability of new emissions regulations to take hold (Corporate Europe Obser-vatory 2015). Market-based solutions are also
common in biodiversity conservation, from biodiversity offsets—where the degradation of habitats, species, ecosystem functions, etc. in one location are “offset” in an-other
location (Bull et al. 2013)—to ecotourism, where ecologically minded tourists supposedly create incentives for residents to engage in nature conservation (Duffy 2008). Not only
is the actual effectiveness of “neoliberal conservation” dubious, the underlying problem with these approaches is they reproduce and expand the system that drives biodiversity
loss (Igoe and Brockington 2007; Brockington and Duffy 2010; Igoe et al. 2010; Büscher et al. 2012). The destruction of nature due to profit accumulation is interpreted as a new
accumulation strategy, which has contradictory outcomes. Robertson’s (2004, 2006) analysis of wetland mitigation banking serves as an excellent illustration. A “No Net Loss to
Wetlands” policy was put in place under the George H.W. Bush administration, with the aim of total wetland acreage remaining constant by “offsetting” degraded wetlands in
different geographical areas. The policy allowed developers to buy “wetland mitigation credits” from owners of an undeveloped wetland or companies who restore degraded
wetlands (“wetland mitigation banks”). A developer who fills a wetland to build condos, for example, can buy wetland credits from an off-site mitigation bank. Quantifying and
commensurating the “value” lost at the development site and the “value” gained at the mitigation banking site created a contradiction. Mitigation banks measured their value-
gained as “bundles” of “ecological functions” while acreage was the proxy measure for bundles of ecological functions at the development site. The mitigation banks began to
opportunistically ex-ploit created ecological functions (i.e., superfluous fabricated markets) which clashed with the mitigation permit market’s need for quantitative abstraction
(Robertson 2004). While individual behavior changes and market-based solutions are common in climate and biodiversity conservation, the next three false solutions—efficiency
gains, renewable energy without rapid reductions in fossil fuel use, and geoengineering—are all specific to climate policy—yet as stated earlier, climate change also drives
biodiversity loss. Energy and carbon efficiency Because of its ubiquity in climate policy, it may strike the reader as strange to label improving energy efficiency (energy use per
dollar) and carbon efficiency (emissions per dollar) as “false solutions.” The goals of improving efficiency or, put differently, reducing carbon in-tensity, are so widespread in
climate change discourse that they are taken for granted. However, there is a fundamental limitation of this approach: the Jevons paradox.

The Jevons paradox—named after the economist William Stanley Jevons for his finding that improved efficiency of steam engines in-
creased total coal consumption (Clark and Foster 2001)—refers to a commonly found association between increased
resource use despite improved efficiency (e.g., Alcott 2005; Sorrell 2007; Polimini et al. 2008; York et al. 2009, 2011; York 2010;
Clement 2011; York and Mc-Gee 2016). The Jevons paradox is a paradox because the usual assumption is that improvements in efficiency will
decrease total resource use because fewer resources are used per economic unit. To be clear, not all “rebound effects”—when the benefits of
efficiency gains are partially or fully consumed by changes in resource use—are “backfires,” rebound effects above 100% (Santarius 2012).
Further, the Jevons paradox refers to an association between improved efficiency and increased emissions, which is not necessarily a causal
association (York and McGee 2016). However, causal
drivers have been identified, including improvements in
efficiency reducing prices per economic unit, which increases the use of the given resource or
investment in the use of other resources (for review, see Santarius 2012; York and McGee 2016).

Regardless of the magnitude of the rebound effect and the causal drivers of the Jevons paradox, it is clear that
improving efficiency is an inadequate route to tackle climate change for the simple reason that, in general,
global carbon efficiency has improved while total emissions increased (York 2010). Nations with higher
levels of efficiency generally have higher rates of CO2 emissions, electricity consumption, and energy
use (York and McGee 2016). In the US, individual state emissions increase in general despite improving carbon intensity by around 30%
(Clement 2011).

The data are clear that improving energy and carbon efficiency is associated with counterintuitive results. Then why is a reliance on efficiency
still so common in climate policy? One reason is that it ap-peals to economic interests. Following the US’s non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol
despite getting what they wanted (carbon markets) (see above), the George W. Bush administration then turned to carbon in-tensity as a more
economically friendly climate change strategy, one that allows for and even encourages continued economic growth and does not restrict
future emissions (i.e., does not impose any real cap) (Roberts and Parks 2006: 142ff). This approach appeals to economic interests and
reproduces and expands rather than challenges the driv-ers of climate change precisely because economic growth and emis-sions are linked
(see Chapter 3). For the latter reason, coupled with the problem of the Jevons paradox, improving efficiency in the current system remains a
false solution.
Renewable energy without reducing fossil fuel use and total energy consumption

To be clear at the outset of this section, we support the development of renewable energy (see Gunderson et al. 2018c). A massive expansion
of renewable energy, especially in wind and solar, is a prerequisite to a sustainable society that supports relatively large-scale human organi-
zations. While renewables have their own negative environmental im-pacts that are often ignored (Zehner 2012), these impacts are negligible
compared to the continued use of fossil fuels. Renewable energy is a false solution only when it is promoted without also (1) promoting re-
ductions in fossil fuels and (2) reductions in total energy consumption. We discuss each point below.

Calls for the expansion of renewables often assume that one new unit of renewable energy will displace
one unit of fossil fuel-based energy. However, this is not the case. Only a “very modest” displacement of
fossil fuel-generated energy sources with renewable energy sources occurred in the last five decades in most countries (York
2012). The problem is made clear by York and Bell (2019): fossil fuel development has steadily increased despite the
comparably slight expansion of renewables. In fact, without simultaneously reducing fossil fuel development, renewable energy
development may contribute to increases in energy use by increasing supply, thereby spurring demand
(Zehner 2012; York 2016). As long as the call to expand renewables does not explicitly tackle the problem of the simultaneous expansion of
fossil fuels and renewables, renewables will remain a false solution.

A second common oversight in the climate policy emphasis on expanding renewable energy is the fact that renewables
have much lower energy return on energy invested (EROEI) ratios (e.g., 60:1 for coal compared to 18:1 for
wind and 6:1 for solar) (Hall et al. 2014). This means that the amount of usable energy output (energy return)
relative to the energy that went into procuring that energy (energy invested) is much lower for
renewables than fossil fuels. Further, renewables have lower power densities, meaning that they take up more
space than fossil fuel sources (e.g., wind and solar require around 90–100 times more area than natural gas) (van Zalk and Behrens
2018; for summary, see Leiden University 2018).

Neither lower EROEI ratios nor lower power densities are reasons to avoid transitioning to renewables. However, for these reasons and others,
it is unlikely that a nearly 100% renewable energy supply is possible in a constantly growing economy
and, instead, would require reductions in total energy use and a smaller overall economy (Trainer 2007;
Kallis 2017; Hickel 2019a; see Chapter 5). To clarify, rapidly developing renewables is critical, yet to be an effective solution it must also be
accompanied by simultaneous and significant reductions in fossil fuel development and overall reductions in energy consumption.

Geoengineering

“Geoengineering” or “climate engineering” refers to “a broad set of methods and technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system
in order to alleviate impacts of climate change” (Boucher et al. 2013). There
are two broad categories of geoengineering
strategies: (1) Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) or “carbon geoengineering,” strategies to remove CO2 from the
atmosphere or at sources of fossil fuel combustion1 and sequestering it underground or under the ocean (U.S. National Research Council
2015a) and (2) Solar Radiation Management (SRM) or “solar geoengineering,” strategies to redirect incoming solar
radiation back into space (U.S. National Research Council 2015b). These strategies are appealing to many as they are framed as “quick-
fix,” easy, and cheap solutions to the climate crisis (Gunderson et al. 2018b, 2019).

While we do not review all carbon and solar geoengineering strategies here (e.g., The Royal Society 2009; U.S. National Research Coun-cil
2015a, 2015b; Zhang et al. 2015), we focus on the two most widely discussed techniques from each category: bioenergy with carbon capture
and storage (BECCS), a form of carbon geoengineering, and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a form of solar geoengineering. We make the
case that BECCSis currently too ineffective to be considered a viable climate change strategy, at least in the short term,
and SAI is far too risky to be considered a viable response. We then argue that geoengineering diverts attention and
resources away from more effective and safer alternatives.
BECCS is a carbon geoengineering strategy based on burning crops for power generation (“bioenergy”), such as big trees, and, while burning
them in power stations, capturing and storing the carbon emissions (“with carbon capture and storage”) (Fridahl 2017). The ap-proach is
appealing because plants are carbon sinks, which reduces atmospheric CO2 and CCS would prevent the carbon released when burning these
plants from reentering the atmosphere. In theory, the outcome would be negative emissions (Pour et al. 2017). The
bulk of empirical
evidence is from separate bioenergy and CCS facilities and a single ethanol-based BECCS demonstration
plant (Anderson and Peters 2016; Turner et al. 2018). In other words, the technology remains largely unproven (see Fuss et al.
2014).

Another major barrier facing BECCS is locating suitable land area to grow biomass crops—requiring acreage
up to three times the size of India to meet climate goals (Anderson 2015; for other barriers, see Baik et al. 2018; Turner et
al. 2018). This much area used for growing bioenergy crops may compete with land used for food crops
(National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018). For these reasons and others, BECCS has been called a “dangerous
distraction” (Fuss et al. 2014) and “high-stakes gamble” (Anderson and Peters 2016: 183) that diverts attention away from tested and effective
mitigation strategies.

SAI, the most prominently discussed solar geoengineering strategy due to its low cost, is a proposal to inject sulfur
particles into the stratosphere to redirect incoming solar radiation back into space (Keith 2013; U.S. National Research
Council 2015b). It is the only strategy we categorize as a “false solution” on the grounds that it is far too risky. Risks include unknown
impacts on weather, plants, and clouds; the potential for droughts and famine; potential to exacerbate
the ozone hole; an increase in acid rain and air pollution; problems emanating from potential commercial
control and military use; and, most frighteningly, the possibility for a “termination effect,” where, if SAI
cannot be maintained after being implemented, temperatures could increase rapidly due to a build-up of
background emissions (see Robock 2008a, 2008b; Robock et al. 2009, 2010; Boucher et al. 2013; Ferraro et al. 2014).

In addition to its serious risks, which could permanently alter global cycles, SAI is also a false solution because it
diverts attention away from more effective and just responses. While solar geoengineering scientists push for increasing
mitigation efforts and are usually cautious about their support for geoengineering (Reynolds et al. 2016), there is good reason to anticipate that
SAI may be implemented in order to reproduce the current social priorities and system that drives climate change (Gunderson et al. 2019). Not
only are economic justifications for SAI common (e.g., that it is much cheaper than reducing emissions), which will appeal to those with the
power to implement climate policy, but there is some evidence of support for SAI from the elite (e.g., Bill Gates), fossil fuel industry
representatives, and even climate denialist organizations (e.g., the Heartland Institute) (Hamilton 2013; Gunderson et al. 2019). SAI could very
well rationalize the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels (Gunderson et al. 2019).

While individual geoengineering strategies must be evaluated separately and we find some forms of carbon geoengineering to have some potential to reduce carbon concentrations if
embedded in different social conditions (see Stuart et al. 2020), geoengineering currently is broadly labeled a false solution here due to its reliance on untested technology and, in the case of
SAI, association with unjustifiable risks. Further, geoengineering strategies divert attention and resources away from effective and just climate change solutions.

Addressing systemic contradictions

This chapter argues that commonly discussed solutions to biodiversity loss and climate change are “false solutions” in the sense that they are inadequate and divert attention away from more
effective and just solutions or, in the case of SAI, are far too risky and divert attention away from more just and less risky solutions. We conclude with a brief explanation as to why these
approaches are likely to continue to be inadequate.

Mainstream climate policy leaves the current social priorities and system unquestioned or assumes its unchangeability and/or desirability. However, as we explain in Chapter 3, it is the basic
structures and dynamics of our current social and economic system—prioritizing economic growth—that drives climate change and biodiversity loss. These solutions will remain inadequate
because their implementation does not transform but, instead, reproduces the social order that accelerates our environmental crisis. The problem with reproducing rather than transforming
the contemporary model of society is that it also reproduces fundamental social-ecological contradictions that are intrinsic to the dynamics of this model. In Chapter 5, we further examine
these contradictions and how growth relates to capitalism as well as socialism.

Failing to get at the engine that keeps driving us deeper into crisis undermines the potential of solutions. For example, efficiency and renewable energy have the potential to reduce total
emissions, but in an economy that must grow the result is an overall increase in energy use and emissions. As we examine in later chapters, in a system that does not require increasing levels
of production and consumption, these solutions can play a key role in addressing our environmental crisis. However, a prerequisite to their effective implementation is abandon-ing the
economic growth imperative that continues to constrain their potential.

[[CHAPTER 2 NOTE OMITTED]]

[[CHAPTER 3 BEGINS]]
3 The case against economic growth

As mainstream solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises are increasingly deemed insufficient and leading scientists continue to identify
economic growth as a key driver of these crises, it seems plausible that society may reconsider prioritizing economic growth. However, there
remains substantial social and political resistance to the notion that growth is harmful. Economic growth as something desirable and “good” for
society has been normalized to the degree that many people cannot imagine a world with different priorities. The underlying belief that a
prosperous society must always have increasing wealth accumulation supports a system with ever increasing levels of production, sales, and
consumption. The assumption is that this production-consumption engine must keep going or else the whole system will breakdown. Yet the
data reveals that the vast majority of wealth created from this system continues to go to a small portion of the population, while the ongoing
production-consumption engine is driving us all further into environmental crisis and toward possible social collapse.

As stated by Hickel and Kallis (2019: 15), “As scientists we should not let political expediency shape our view of facts. We should assess the facts
and then draw conclusions, rather than start with palatable conclusions and ignore inconvenient facts.” For those faithful to the idea of never-
ending economic growth, we present three key reasons to question these convictions. First, evidence
from the past and present
suggests that life with less or no economic growth can be prosperous in terms of social and ecological
well-being and that prioritizing GDP growth can actually reduce measures of standards of living and social
well-being. Therefore, we should deeply question the assumption that GDP growth is a requirement for a thriving society.

Second, there is substantial evidence illustrating that GDP is positively correlated with material and energy
use, carbon emissions, environmental degradation, and species extinction. The dominant solution to address this
problematic relationship is “decoupling” economic growth from environmental harm (via green growth), yet research shows that
there is no evidence of the necessary decoupling in material resource use and no evidence supporting
that the decoupling of carbon emissions can be accomplished at the rate necessary to meet the IPCC’s
1.5°C or 2°C targets (Hickel and Kallis 2019; Parrique et al. 2019; Schor and Jorgenson 2019).

Beyond the empirical evidence, a third argument focuses on the moral implications of increasing GDP growth when the known risks of doing so
are great and there are no existing solutions to sufficiently address these risks. The likely
impacts to current and future
generations of humans and other species are severe and irreversible. We discuss the moral implications of relying on
the unproven idea of rapid decoupling and promoting the ideology of green growth. Should we err on the side caution, even when it goes
against indoctrinated ideas of progress?

These three arguments are described and supported below. We especially draw from several key recent publications (Hickel and Kallis 2019;
Parrique et al. 2019; Schor and Jorgenson 2019) that more clearly and convincingly support these arguments than any previous evidence. Lastly,
we illustrate how these arguments lead us towards the conclusion that an overall reduction in production and consumption in line with
“degrowth,” is a necessary pathway to best protect current and future generations of humans and
other species from an otherwise catastrophic trajectory.
Do we need economic growth? The economy is generally defined as the production, distribution, and consumption of resources—or the use of material resources to satisfy
human needs or values (Kallis 2018). Economies have existed for thousands of years using systems of reciprocity, sharing, barter, or money as the basis of resource exchange.
We can imagine a society with an economy that does not include the concept of accumulating profit, where resources are exchanged, given, traded, or shared based on need. If
poverty is a lack of profit accumulation, then this society would be deemed poor. But if poverty is a lack of food, shelter, leisure time, health, and well-being, then this could be a
very wealthy society. For thousands of years economies existed without continual accumulation of wealth and material goods, yet for the past 200 years the global economy has
been increasingly geared toward growing levels of accumulation. Our modern economy is defined by this prioritization of never-ending profit and wealth accumulation rather
than the exchange of resources for use (see Chapter 5). This is the ultimate driver of growth, as more goods and services sold increases profit accumulation. Increasing the
production of goods and services may seem justified to meet the needs of a growing population, yet as we detail below, resource use per person has increased. Increased
consumption is necessary for the increased production and sales to support greater levels of profit accumulation. However, this does not mean that wealth is accumulated
equally or that everyone has the resources they need (see Hickel 2017). To support rising levels of profit accumulation, there has been an increase in human productivity as well
as the total goods per person produced and consumed over time. In the past century, global per capita resource use has doubled (Parrique et al. 2019). In addition, global
material use has quadrupled since 1970, growing twice as fast as the human population (Circle Economy 2020). More materials and energy are being used per person over time,
far beyond what is justified based on population growth and human needs. As productivity rates have in-creased, prioritizing growth has mandated that these gains be invested
in further production and profitability. Yet as Schor and Jorgenson (2019: 325) explain, this need not be the case: The optimal rate of growth depends on workers’ preferences
for goods and leisure. If workers want to take their productivity growth in the form of shorter hours, the labor market will equilibrate with fewer hours supplied. We should not
assume a system with increasing levels of accumulation is a “natural” system simply because we are accustomed to it. Although the primary driver of increases in material and
energy throughput is the structural characteristics of our current economic system (see Chapter 5), it is critical that we understand the origins of GDP growth as a social priority
and also question if it should remain a priority. It was not until the 1950s that economic growth in terms of GDP be-came a policy priority for the US and other nations (Victor
2010). The concept of GDP emerged during the Great Depression when Simon Kuznets was asked to create a way to track the productive power of a country. GDP was
specifically used during World War II to assess productivity for the war effort. Yet, after the war ended, policymakers continued to use GDP as a positive indicator based on the
assumption that if people are making and buying goods at an increasing rate, then society is flourishing. However, as quoted in Semuels (2016) even Kuznets doubted the use of
GDP in this way, warning: “[t]he welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” Despite Kuznets’ skepticism, GDP has remained the primary
indicator of social progress and the goal of increasing GDP has driven global policy. Do high levels of GDP growth indicate that a society is flourishing? Increasing evidence
suggests it does not. Despite an average 3% increase in GPD in the US, at least 43 million Americans are still living in poverty, wages have not considerably increased since the
1980s and even with positive GDP growth the median income of households has declined (Semuels 2016). In addition, many countries with lower rates of GDP growth, such as
Scandinavian countries, actually have higher levels of equality, health, education, and well-being. In places where ample resources are available, it makes little sense to focus on
increasing production (and GDP) when remaining problems are related to distribution and the adequate provisioning of social services (Hickel 2019a). A growing number of
economists agree that GDP is a problematic indicator of progress and well-being (e.g., Victor 2010; Daly 2013; Dietz 2015; Stiglitz 2019a,b). GDP does not distinguish between
costs and benefits; it only includes flows of money, not stocks of resources; it fails to include activities with no market value; and it does not provide information on how wealth
is distributed. Critics point out that an event causing significant harm, such as a natural disaster or oil spill, can increase GPD. Increased production does not translate into
increased social well-being. Easterlin et al. (2010), among others, have shown that economic growth that goes beyond satisfying basic needs does not lead to increased
happiness. More evidence supports the position that GDP has actually undermined qualitative goals, such as social and ecological well-being (O’Neill 2012; Stiglitz 2019a).
Alternative indicators, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare and the General Progress Indicator, illustrate how GDP can increase while measures of well-being
decrease. Relatedly, economic growth does not increase human well-being per unit of environmental pressure after a certain level of affluence (Dietz et al. 2012), despite the
fact that mainstream economics views “increasing affluence . . . as essentially equivalent to human well-being” (Dietz 2015: 125). As argued by Nobel award winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz (2009), not only is GDP a poor measure of well-being but “chasing GDP growth results in lower living standards.” Stiglitz has been increasingly vocal about the risks
of using GDP as the primary indicator of progress, calling for alternative indicators that better support social and ecological well-being. Stigltiz (2019b) states that “we need
better tools to assess economic performance and social progress” and explains that his concerns about GDP “have now been brought to the fore with the climate crisis.” Her
further argues “[i]f we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing.” Not only is chasing GDP growth leading us further into environmental crisis, but it also prevents
the flourishing of other positive conceptions of social progress. As explained by Daly (2013: 24), while it is largely believed that “without economic growth all progress is at an
end . . . [o]n the contrary, without growth . . . true progress finally will have a chance.” Economic growth and our environmental crisis Chapter 1 included many examples of
leading scientists identifying GDP growth as a primary driver of the climate and biodiversity crises. While all of the examples given will not be restated here, in both cases,
scientists have found positive correlations between GDP growth and environmental degradation. This makes sense when we acknowledge that increasing production results in
increasing levels of resource use, pollution, and carbon emissions. GDP growth of 1% equals a 0.6% growth in material use (Wiedmann et al. 2015) and a 1% increase in GDP
equals a 0.5–0.7% increase in carbon emissions (Burke et al. 2015). It is not a coincidence that the most notable reductions in carbon emissions have occurred during economic
recessions (Feng et al. 2015; Hickel and Kallis 2019; Parrique et al. 2019). In addition, studies show a strong positive association between GDP growth and species endangerment
(Czech et al. 2012; Sol 2019), as many activities that create wealth result in habitat loss, pollution, deforestation, and other negative impacts to a range of species (Cavlovic et al.
2000). Despite these environmental impacts, GDP growth is defended and maintained as a global priority largely based on the concept of “decoupling” as a remedy to these
problematic relationships. Decoupling refers to the idea that we can create conditions where increases in GDP do not result in negative environmental impacts. Thus, there can
be “green growth.” Promoting green growth through decoupling has been the primary strategy of many global governing bodies to support “progress” and “development” while
addressing our escalating environmental crisis. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) officially adopted decoupling as a goal in 2001 followed by
the European Commission, United Nations Environment Programme, and the World Bank (Parrique et al. 2019). Decoupling also remains a specific target in the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals (see Hickel 2019b). Decoupling depends on the use of green technologies that are more efficient and based on alternative energy sources as well
as a transition away from material goods and towards a service and information-based economy (Hoffman 2016). Jackson (2009) makes the distinction between relative and
absolute decoupling. Relative decoupling refers to reduced environmental impact per unit of economic output, whereas absolute decoupling refers to the overall reduction of
environmental impacts. While relative decoupling (per unit output) can be seen in many cases, increases in total production continue to increase overall environmental
degradation—making absolute decoupling more elusive (Parrique et al. 2019). However, it is absolute decoupling that is necessary to reduce overall environmental impacts
(Jackson 2009). Evidence indicates that decoupling remains largely a theory rather than an empirically proven solution to the climate and biodiversity crises. Daly (2013) explains
that decoupling is limited by the interdependence of production between different economic sectors and by the fact that expanding service and information sectors will not
substantially reduce the use of energy and material goods. In addition, efficiency gains are not indefinite and increasing levels of production to support GDP growth undermine
efficiency gains (Ward et al. 2016). Thus far, the evidence supports these explanations. Cases where absolute decoupling has been identified are often based on territorial
material use or emissions, not on overall consumption which includes materials imported and carbon emissions related to imports (Knight and Schor 2014; Hickel and Kallis
2019; Parrique et al. 2019). In addition, identified decoupling in many cases is temporary and recoupling occurs when conditions change (Hickel and Kallis 2019; Parrique et al.
2019). To effectively address our environmental crisis, decoupling would need to be absolute, permanent, global, and occur at a rate fast enough to meet the IPCC’s 1.5°C target
(IPCC 2018).

More studies are concluding that there is no evidence that global absolute decoupling of material
resource use has occurred or can occur in the future. On average, every 10% rise in GDP has been accompanied with a 6%
increase in material footprint (Wiedmann et al. 2015). Efficiency gains cannot be realized when the material footprint of OECD
nations has increased by 50% between 1990 and 2008—they are “trumped by increases in volume” (Parrique et al. 2019: 23).
As stated by Hoffman (2016: 36), “dematerialized growth remains an illusion.” The material intensity of GDP per
capita increased by 60% between 1900 and 2009 (Bithas and Kalimeris 2018). This evidence supports Hickel and Kallis’ (2019:
7) conclusion that: “green growth theory—in terms of resource use—lacks empirical support.” Resource use has direct
implications for carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, as use of water, forests, energy, and other
resources increase with GDP (Cavlovic et al. 2000; Czech et al. 2012; Sol 2019).
In terms of carbon emissions, there is limited evidence supporting the success of current decoupling efforts and mounting evidence supporting
the conclusion that global decoupling cannot occur at rates fast enough to stay within 1.5°C or 2°C of warming.
Jorgenson and Clark (2012) demonstrate a strong relationship between per capita carbon emissions and GDP per capita in developed nations
that is stable over time. Mardani et al. (2019) illustrate a bidirectional coupling between GDP and carbon emissions. Despite carbon
markets and increases in efficiency and renewable energy sources, Granados and Spash (2019) find that carbon
emissions in the US are still significantly correlated with economic growth. Hickel and Kallis (2019) identify
countries where territorial decoupling has occurred and state that absolute decoupling is technologically possible; however, once import-
related emissions have been included almost no countries have thus far achieved permanent absolute
decoupling (Schor and Jorgenson 2019).

Studies using empirical data illustrate how modest

decoupling in developed nations has been a result of increased
carbon-intensive production in developing nations (Jorgenson and Clark 2012; Knight and Schor 2014; Schor and Jorgenson
2019). In other words, environmental impacts are being exported. Knight and Schor (2014) report:

While we find some reduction in the linkage between economic growth and territorial emissions, once
we account for
high-income countries’ offshoring of emissions, there is no evidence of decoupling.
Based on mounting evidence, Parrique et al. (2019: 24) conclude that there has “never been a global pattern of absolute
decoupling of CO2 from economic growth.”

Even with the possibility of absolute decoupling of carbon emissions through significant investment in energy
efficiency and renewable energy, this decoupling would need to occur at a rate fast enough to keep
warming from passing dangerous critical thresholds (Parri-que et al. 2019). We are currently on a trajectory
for warming of 4.2°C (2.5–5.5°C) by 2100, yet leading scientists argue we need to keep warming below 1.5°C (IPCC 2018). The important
question then becomes: what level and rate of decoupling is necessary to accomplish this goal? Hickel and Kallis (2019: 8) examine this question
in depth and argue:
absolute reductions in carbon emissions are possible to achieve . . . however, the objective is not simply to reduce emissions (a matter of flows), but to keep total emissions from exceeding specific carbon budgets.

This is a matter of achieving absolute decoupling at a fast-enough rate. Hickel and Kallis (2019) explain that the only climate scenarios that keep warming below 2°C rely on BECCS for negative emissions. Yet, as we argued in
Chapter 2, this technology is not yet developed and assumptions about negative emissions remain unproven. Including BECCS in scenarios, however, has allowed for a larger carbon budget and continued support for green growth.

Perhaps more clearly than ever, Hickel and Kallis (2019: 10, 11) explain how absolute decoupling of carbon emissions to stay within 1.5°C or even 2°C targets while sustaining economic growth is not only highly unlikely but likely
impossible:

Without BECCS, global emissions need to fall to net zero by 2050 for 1.5°C, or by 2075 for 2°C. This entails reductions of 6.8 per cent per year and 4 per cent per year, respectively. Theoretically, this can be
accomplished with (a) a rapid shift to 100 per cent renewable energy to eliminate emissions from fossil fuel combustion (Jacobson and Delucchi 2011); plus (b) afforestation and soil regeneration to eliminate
emissions from land use change; plus (c) a shift to alternative industrial processes to eliminate emissions from the production of cement, steel, and plastic.

If we assume global GDP continues to grow at 3 per cent per year (the average from 2010 to 2014), then decoupling must occur at a rate of 10.5 per cent per year for 1.5°C, or 7.3 per cent per year for 2°C. If global
GDP grows at 2.1 per cent per year . . . then de-coupling must occur at 9.6 per cent per year for 1.5°C, or 6.4 per cent per year for 2°C. All of these targets are beyond what existing empirical models indicate is
feasible.

Parrique et al. (2019: 15) agree with this conclusion, finding that if we
need a 45% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030
(IPCC 2018), then “even the decrease of emissions achieved in the most successful national cases of absolute
decoupling are far from being sufficient to keep global warming from passing a critical threshold.” Hickel
(2019a) also argues that even under the most optimistic assumptions, continued GDP growth will push us past
the carbon budgets for both 1.5°C and 2°C targets. This supports Anderson and Bows (2011) earlier work illustrating that the necessary
emissions reductions are incompatible with continued economic growth. Anderson estimates that as of 2019 wealthy nations need to re-duce
emissions by 12% per year to stay within a 2°C target (Hickel and Kallis 2019), yet emissions reductions any greater than 3–4% per year are
incompatible with economic growth (Anderson and Bows 2011).

If we cast aside the unsubstantiated assumption that BECCS can be a highly effective negative emissions technology (see Chapter 2), then we
are left with only one possible way to stay within the IPCC’s (2018) 1.5°C target. Only one scenario in the IPCC special report (2018) did not rely
on BECCS. This scenario was published by Grubler et al. (2018) and stays within 1.5°C of warming through reducing total global energy use by
40% (by 2050), reducing total global material production and consumption by 20%, afforestation projects, and dematerialization through an
increase in sharing material goods and commodities (see Hickel and Kallis 2019). Given a lack of any evidence that BECCS can result in the
projected negative emissions, the Grubler scenario represents a more feasible and realistic approach.

Parrique et al. (2019) make an important point: these findings in no way mean that we should oppose the efficiency gains and a transition to
renewable energy that would support a decoupling strategy. In fact, these are important and even essential to reduce total carbon emissions.
Yet, they are not sufficient to reduce emissions at the rate necessary. This would also require reducing total production and consumption. They
promote “complementing efficiency-oriented policies with sufficiency policies, with a shift in priority and emphasis from the former to the latter
even though both have a role to play” (Parrique et al. 2019: 3). In other words, as we explained in the previous chapter, the potential of our
best technological solutions can only be realized if we simultaneously reduce production and consumption.

The moral implications of green growth

Green growth proponents argue that even though we currently lack concrete evidence that decoupling at
the rate necessary is possible, future technological innovation will be able to rapidly increase the rate
of decoupling. This faith in human technological advancement is widespread, as seen through techno-optimist and eco-modernist
positions (Grunwald 2018). While we agree that there will surely be some advances in technology in the short
and long term that could help to address our environmental crisis, the extent of technological
advancement necessary is significant and cannot be assumed. As Parrique et al. (2019: 51) explain,
relying only on technology to mitigate climate change implies extreme rates of eco-innovation improvements, which current trends
are very far from matching, and which, to our knowledge, have never been witnessed in the history of our species.
In other words, the
pace of technological evolution necessary has no precedent in human history and
therefore cannot be depended upon to address the urgency of the climate crisis.

Parrique et al. (2019: 55) also identify multiple factors that are likely to impede decoupling in the future and
undermine green growth as a solution. These factors include: “(1) Rising energy expenditures, (2) rebound
effects, (3) problem shifting, (4) the underestimated impact of services, (5) the limited potential of recycling
in a growing economy, (6) insufficient and inappropriate technological change, and (7) cost shifting.” They
explain each of these factors and how they undermine decoupling. Given that each of these factors independently could impede
possible decoupling, together they should raise significant skepticism about green growth strategies. Parrique et al.
(2019: 55) state that due to these factors, “the decoupling hypothesis appears highly compromised, if not clearly
unrealistic.”
Given the lack of evidence in support of sufficient decoupling as well as the many obstacles preventing a rapid green growth pathway, Hickel
and Kallis (2019) and Parrique et al. (2019) support a precautionary approach. As
the stakes are extremely high (e.g., possible
ecological and social collapse), and the future remains incredibly uncertain (e.g., are there critical thresholds?
what are they? what are the impacts?), the most responsible and moral pathway is to be cautious. Hickel and Kallis
(2019: 15) explain:

[o]ne may insist that green growth hasn’t occurred because it has not been tried, the fact that it hasn’t been empirically observed till
now then becoming irrelevant. We follow instead a more precau-tionary approach.

The evidence demonstrates a clear positive relationship between GDP growth and our environmental crisis. In addition, there are no
known solutions that can be employed to continue to support economic growth and sufficiently address
this crisis. Therefore, is it moral to rely on unproven or non-existent technological fixes? When leading scientists agree on the drivers of
these crises, why do our political leaders knowingly allow these drivers to continue?

our current political

Throughout human history those in power attempt to retain power. This has been called “elite rigidity” (Geyer and Rihani 2012) or “social reproduction” (Wright 2010). In many ways

system is currently rigid and unchanging in order to protect the individuals and corporations who benefit
most from the current fossil fuel-based, profit-maximizing system (Klein 2015). This is one reason the US has been
demoted to the status of a “flawed democracy” (Economist Intelligence Unit 2019). Green growth is an ideology promoted to protect the current system and conceal the underlying
contradictions leading us further into environmental crises (Gunderson et al. 2018c). However, is it moral to protect the economic interests of the few, through promoting false solutions, while putting all people, eco-systems, and
other species at risk? Youth environmental activists increasingly demand that world leaders protect their future and “put people before profits,” drawing attention to the immorality of continuing with business as usual. The fact
that the current system is unable to respond to a moral imperative that resonates with nearly all humans reveals the need to radically change the system.

The ongoing failure to address our environmental crisis contributes to multiple forms of injustice. Failing to provide a safe climate and environment for future generations of humans results in generational injustice.

Causing widespread species extinction and population collapse is an issue of interspecies injustice and
ecocide. In addition, those who are and will continue to be most impacted by these crises are primarily poor people in the Global South, or the “global majority.” Our environmental crisis will increasingly be experienced
unequally, hurting those who are most vulnerable. Yet it is wealthy countries who are most responsible for this crisis, who continue to overproduce and

overconsume resources, and who need to do the most to urgently change course . As global injustices multiply, false solutions need
to be exposed for what they are: unsubstantiated faith in technological solutions and green growth pathways that protect the current system and benefit the economic interests of the few.

Beyond economic growth

As stated by Hickel and Kallis (2019: 15), “policyshould be made on the basis of robust empirical evidence, rather than on the basis of speculative theoretical
possibilities.” The evidence presented in this chapter makes a strong case that adhering to policies prioritizing economic growth not only limits the effectiveness of

mitigation measures but ultimately undermines efforts to sufficiently address our environmental crisis. Relationships between GDP growth and increasing carbon emissions and biodiversity
loss are clear and there is ample evidence that reducing overall material and energy consumption in wealthy countries would increase the success of efforts to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

Models and projections illustrate how reducing economic growth even slightly increases possible
decoupling and emissions reductions. As Hickel and Kallis (2019: 7) explain in terms of resource use, “[a]s the growth rate
approaches zero, absolute decoupling becomes more feasible, and is likely to last longer.” Lower rates of
production and consumption (resulting in lower GDP), would also allow for more success in climate mitigation efforts. Yet to keep
warming within 1.5°C or 2°C targets substantial reductions are necessary. Schroder and Storm (2018) find that emissions
reduction to limit warming to 2°C can be only accomplished if economic growth is reduced to 0.45% annually. However, a 1.5°C target has not
been shown to be possible without a degrowth scenario (Hickel and Kallis 2019). Grubler et al. (2018) and Van Vuuren et al. (2018) both not
only contain scenarios of keep-ing temperatures within 2°C, but also rely on reducing material and energy throughput. Lastly, Hickel (2019a)
cites additional scenarios that illustrate the feasibility of reaching environmental targets and in-creasing social well-being with degrowth
pathways (i.e., D’Allessandro et al. 2018; Victor 2019).

Given the evidence undermining the reality of effective and fast green growth, we need to rethink economic growth. As stated clearly by Hickel
and Kallis (2019:15), “[i]t
is more plausible that we will be able to achieve the necessary reductions in resource
use and emissions without growth than with growth.” Parrique et al. (2019: 59) similarly argue that in contrast to unproven
negative emissions technologies and green growth strategies, “reducing production and consumption is not an abstract narrative.” We know
that the necessary reductions are possible and even desirable. Ecological economists and others ar-gue that letting go of economic growth as a
priority will allow space for other types of growth to flourish, increasing health, happiness, and environmental (and therefore human)
sustainability (Daly 2013; Stiglitz 2019a,b).

The impact is converging catastrophes that cause extinction---oxygen, disease,

disasters
McKibben ‘19 [Bill; 4/9/19; Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, leader of the
climate group 350.org, Advisory Council Member of the National Center for Science Education, Foreign
Policy inaugural winner of the top 100 most important global thinkers, ; "This Is How Human Extinction
Could Play Out," https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-
change-817310/]

In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans
kept warming, by 2100 they might
become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of
photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely
result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”

A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a

heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the
permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing
nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good
preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed
to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of
the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska.

Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic
activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the
Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create
earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s
Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a
Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic
waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized
landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet
high.

There’s even this: if

we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a
thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent.
“The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills
are what we seem to need most.

I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the
composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of
horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the
physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about
Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.)

But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal
waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts:
everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean.

FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an amazing run since the end of World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough to keep ahead of a fast-rising
population. It’s come at great human cost — displaced peasant farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms of sheer volume, the
Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery managed to push output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be
running into the brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to demonstrate the dire effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and
champagne, but it is cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply most
of the planet’s calories: corn,
wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can
change them, there are limits to those changes. You can move a person from Hanoi to Edmonton, and she might decide to open a
Vietnamese restaurant. But if you move a rice plant, it will die.

A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “ wheat productivity has flatlined as a
direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as
temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable climate without
the underlying factor [of climate change] is less than one in a hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the
expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in standing still, not in moving
forward.” Assuming the same trends continued, yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades,
they reported. In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature — which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now
aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current trajectory will take us — would cut
the crop almost in half. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most widely grown crop.

Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing.
(“You only get one chance to pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the
hardiest crops are susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion humans, is
particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits,
though, and they are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that heat waves affect the “vapor
pressure deficit,” the difference between the water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter weather means
the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the
world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent.

It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in
the human game,
the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,”
things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which
led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab Spring
— Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the
next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their
scenario, corn and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity prices,
civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and
Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.”

At about the same time, a team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even
if you can grow plenty of food,
the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are
vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third
of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17
percent of the world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three thousand trucks. “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one
of the report’s authors.

Five weeks after that, another report raised an even deeper question. What if you can figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you can figure
out how to guarantee its distribution, but the food itself has lost much of its value? The paper, in the journal Environmental
Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount
of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening.
But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals
such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount. In the developing
world, where people rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India
alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk for protein deficiency. The loss
of zinc, essential for maternal and infant health, could endanger 138 million people around the world. In 2018,
rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that
food became less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are
completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.” And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for
instance, but bees do. When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein
content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide.”

Bees help crops, obviously, so that’s scary news. But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop
pests
were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if
we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and
rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn
borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier[,] and warmer temperatures also
speed up their reproduction.” Even fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage from insects
correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a maximum during the warmest periods.”

That outweighs nuclear war

Miller-McDonald ’19 [Samuel; January 4; M.A. in Environmental Management from Yale University,
B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic; The Trouble, “Deathly Salvation,” https://www.the-
trouble.com/content/2019/1/4/deathly-salvation]

A devastating fact of climate collapse is that there may be a silver lining to the mushroom cloud. First, it
should be noted that a nuclear exchange does not inevitably result in apocalyptic loss of life. Nuclear winter—the
idea that firestorms would make the earth uninhabitable—is based on shaky science. There’s no reliable model that can
determine how many megatons would decimate agriculture or make humans extinct. Nations have already
detonated 2,476 nuclear devices.
An exchange that shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction may be the only blade realistically likely to cut the
carbon knot we’re trapped within. It would decimate existing infrastructures, providing an opportunity to build new energy infrastructure and
intervene in the current investments and subsidies keeping fossil fuels alive.

In the near term, emissions would almost certainly rise as militaries are some of the world’s largest emitters. Given what we know of human
history, though, conflict may be the only way to build the mass social cohesion necessary for undertaking the kind of huge, collective action
needed for global sequestration and energy transition. Like the 20th century’s world wars, a nuclear exchange could serve as an economic
2renewables and, uh, nuclear energy. It could shock us into reimagining a less suicidal civilization, one that dethrones the death-cult zealots
who are currently in power. And it may toss particulates into the atmosphere sufficient to block out some of the solar heat helping to drive
global warming. Or it may have the opposite effects. Who knows?

What we do know is that humans

can survive and recover from war, probably even a nuclear one. Humans
cannot recover from runaway climate change. Nuclear war is not an inevitable extinction event; six
degrees of warming is.
US action alone prevents existential climate change---India and China will reduce their
emissions regardless, but the pace and scope of that action is determined by the U.S.
commitment
Curtin ’18 [Joseph; December 3; Senior Fellow at the Institute of International and European Affairs
and member of the Climate Change Advisory Council; IIEA, “The Paris Climate Agreement Versus the
Trump Effect: Countervailing forces for Decarbonisation,” https://www.iiea.com/publication/the-paris-
climate-agreement-versus-the-trump-effect-countervailing-forces-for-decarbonisation/]

The second factor is the potential impact of the Trump Effect on other major players. The
US is not only the preeminent economic,
political, financial, diplomatic and cultural power globally, but also has a unique emissions profile (Text Box 2). While China
has been the largest emitter since 2006, the US is responsible for almost double the accumulated emissions in the
atmosphere; and it is these total concentrations, not annual pollution, that drive today’s climate impacts. American emissions on a per
capita basis are also more than double those of the average European or Chinese, not to mention more than nine times the average Indian.
(Text Box 2).

Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have suggested that evolutionary dynamics hardwire a sense of fairness and
reciprocity into the human psyche.23 Research has uncovered a tendency for parties to step away from
negotiations when commonly held principles of fairness are perceived to have been transgressed,24 and
this applies even for beneficial deals.25 Needless to add, the moral authority of the US to punish defection from the
Paris consensus has also been sacrificed. Withdrawal therefore creates political space for other wealthy
countries to follow suit—if the wealthiest and most powerful of all is not playing ball, they may well ask, then why should they? The
Trump Effect therefore leaves a moral vacuum at the heart of the Agreement, which makes building new global norms around
decarbonisation more challenging.
But has there been a clear Trump Effect in the climate postures of other major players? It has been reported by several media (not least the
New York Times 26 and Washington Post27) that most national governments are falling far short on promises to curb GHGs, creating the
impression of an Agreement in crisis; but we find a more fine-grained and variegated landscape than this reporting suggests.

The EU and China have on several occasions reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris Agreement, most recently in a joint statement released
in July 2018.28 The EU, for its part, is well on target to meet its 2020 goal—in 2016, GHGs were already 22.4 % below 1990
levels (compared to a 20% target), and while the performance of individual Member States is mixed, the majority have made
remarkable progress on decarbonisation since 1990 (Figure 6).
Furthermore, in 2018 the EU passed a highly ambitious package of measures consistent with meeting or even exceeding its 2030 Paris Pledge,
and it will be up to Member States to implement this.29 According to the independent science-based target monitoring body, Carbon Tracker:
“Developments during 2018 in the European Union’s climate and energy policy are steps in the right direction towards re-establishing the EU’s
position as a global leader on climate policy action”.30 Furthermore, the European Union has also moved to require a
reference to the Paris Agreement in all Trade Agreements (the Japan-EU trade deal was the first to carry a Paris Climate
clause),31 32 making it far harder for countries such as Australia to hide from Paris.33

There has been considerable coverage of the fact that Germany may miss its 2020 target.34 For example, Bloomberg News described
“Germany’s failed climate goals” as “a wake-up call for governments everywhere” in one notable headline. However, GHGs
were 28%
below 1990 levels in 2017—if only the rest of the world could fail so successfully! In any case, Germany does not have a Paris pledge,
ipso facto it cannot fail to meet its pledge. It is part of an “EU bubble”—any overshoot in its GHGs must therefore be offset by greater ambition
elsewhere within the EU, via a variety of “flexibility mechanisms”.35 Most importantly, increased coal consumption in Germany creates greater
demand for carbon credits under the EU’s emissions trading scheme, driving up carbon prices, which in turn undermines the medium-term
viability of coal power generation.36 The price of carbon under the scheme breached the all-important €20 per tonne marker in 2018 for the
first time on over a decade. Given the legal and regulatory environment, European
decarbonisation is as inevitable as it is
inescapable for EU Member States, irrespective of the Trump Effect, although the pace of decarbonisation could
be affected (see next section).
The situation in China is murkier. Contrary to reporting, it willmeet both its intensity-based targets for 2020 and is on
track to meet its 2030 Paris pledge. However, it is true that these commitments are not as ambitious as they
might be, and also that GHGs hit a new high in 2017. Some analysts see 2017 as a blip on an otherwise relatively promising trajectory.37
However, Climate Action Tracker rate China’s Paris pledge as “highly insufficient”, and argue that it should be doing far more.

Growth breaks the phosphorus cycle---causes extinction.

Faradji ’16 [Charly; 2/17/16; Doctor of Philosophy Student, Chemistry, University of Bristol; "How the
great phosphorus shortage could leave us short of food," https://phys.org/news/2016-02-great-
phosphorus-shortage-short-food.html]

It's not as well-known as the other issues, but phosphorus

depletion is no less significant. After all, we could live without cars or
unusual species, but if phosphorus ran out we'd have to live without food.

Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for all forms of life. It is a key element in our DNA and all living organisms require daily
phosphorus intake to produce energy. It cannot be replaced and there is no synthetic substitute: without phosphorus,
there is no life.
Our dependence began in the mid-19th century, after farmers noticed spreading phosphorus-rich guano (bird excrement) on their fields led to
impressive improvements in crop yields. Soon after, mines opened up in the US and China to extract phosphate ore – rocks which contain the
useful mineral. This triggered the current use of mineral fertilisers and, without this industrial breakthrough, humanity could only produce half
the food that it does today.

Fertiliser use has quadrupled over the past half century and will continue rising as the population
expands. The growing wealth of developing countries allows people to afford more meat which has a
"phosphorus footprint" 50 times higher than most vegetables. This, together with the increasing usage of biofuels, is
estimated to double the demand for phosphorus fertilisers by 2050.

Today phosphorus is also used in pharmaceuticals, personal care products, flame retardants, catalysts for chemical industries, building
materials, cleaners, detergents and food preservatives.

Phosphorus is not a renewable resource

Reserves are limited and not equally spread over the planet. The only large mines are located in Morocco, Russia, China and the US. Depending
on which scientists you ask, the world's phosphate rock reserves will last for another 35 to 400 years – though the more optimistic assessments
rely on the discovery of new deposits.

It's a big concern for the EU and other countries without their own reserves, and phosphorus depletion could lead to
geopolitical tensions. Back in 2008, when fertiliser prices sharply increased by 600% and directly influenced food prices,
there were violent riots in 40 different developing countries.
Phosphorus also harms the environment. Excessive fertiliser use means it leaches from agricultural lands into rivers and eventually the sea,
leading to so-called dead zones where most fish can't survive. Uninhibited algae growth caused by high levels of phosphorus in water has
already created more than 400 coastal death zones worldwide. Related human poisoning costs US$2.2 billion dollars annually in the US alone.

With the increasing demand for phosphorus leading to massive social and environmental issues, it's time we looked towards more sustainable
and responsible use.

There is still hope

In the past, the phosphorus cycle was closed: crops were eaten by humans and livestock while their faeces were used as
natural fertilisers to grow crops again.
 These days, the cycle is broken. Each year 220m tonnes of phosphate rocks are mined, but only a negligible amount makes it back
into the soil. Crops are transported to cities and the waste is not returned to the fields but to the sewage system, which mainly ends up in the
sea. A cycle has become a linear process.

We could reinvent a modern phosphorus cycle simply by dramatically reducing our consumption. After all,
less than a third of the phosphorus in fertilisers is actually taken up by plants; the rest accumulates in the soil or is washed away. To take one
example, in the Netherlands there is enough phosphorus in the soil today to supply the country with fertiliser for the next 40 years.

Growth ensures cognitive collapse---extinction.

Annunziata ’19 [Marco and Mickey McManus; January 11; former Chief Economist and Head of
Business Innovation Strategy at General Electric; Visiting Research Fellow at Autodesk, Senior Advisor at
BCG; Forbes, “The Great Cognitive Depression,”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcoannunziata/2019/01/11/the-great-cognitive-depression/
#49ed9dc174c1]

We have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of complexity that exists in the world. Mickey McManus’s
book Trillions noted that as early as 2010, the semiconductor industry had reached the point where they were making more transistors than
grains of rice, cheaper. Connectivityhas amplified the global amount of aggregate complexity by enabling it
to break out of any given domain and spread across the world. The rise of the so called “Internet of
Things”—starting with mobile devices and now connected products and vehicles and platforms—is flooding every corner of our
homes, factories, and communities. Everything becomes connected—to everything else and to us.

The global economy has also become inextricably interconnected; our society is more and more
interdependent. Across multiple fields, our knowledge gets deeper and more detailed; we solve old problems and create new ones at
accelerating speed. No matter our walk of life, today we are asked to grasp a widening range of increasingly
complex issues: climate change, energy policy, advances in health care, the likely impact of robotics and
Artificial Intelligence.

All these new sources of complexity are increasing the frequency and amplitude of positive and
negative feedback loops into crashing waves and a torrential flood. There are no signs of this
complexity leveling out, quite the opposite—the waves are getting more erratic and larger and larger.
We are standing on the shores of a trillion-node-network tsunami-like event that has never been seen
before. Worse this isn’t just a rise of passive information, but also a deluge of active machine agents. When trillions of things not
only collect billions of bits of information but also demand our attention and change our environments
dynamically on the fly, our ability to think, make decisions and take actions may be on the verge of
collapse.

The coming together of digital and physical technologies has turned business models upside down and
made it even harder for economic analysis to keep up. The “prosumer” concept of the 1980s is back with a vengeance as
new technologies allow households to produce electricity and sell it back into the grid, and give them access to manufacturing power with
affordable 3D printers. Economists
struggle to explain the collapse in productivity that accompanied the latest
surge in innovations—and that shows compelling inverse correlation to the rise of connected (and
cognitive) devices like mobile phones; their cacophony of explanations ranges from the charge that new digital innovations have
no economic value to the claim that they create massive value delivered for free, and hence not recorded in the official statistics.
Our ability to think and make smart decisions is eroding just as our environment gets more complex
and harder to grasp with our traditional tools.
Stone age tools for cognitive age challenges?

But wait, this is not the first time we face a rise in complexity and have to contend with multiple
disruptions. We’ve faced tough challenges before and built structures to allow us to manage and make
decisions at vast scales. Corporations, cities, markets, and governments are all technologies we’ve devised to manage complexity and
make rational and actionable decisions in a hostile world. Steven Johnson—in his new book Farsighted—points out that we’ve evolved
decision and scenario sciences to cope with increasingly complex issues—from the era of Darwin when he used the
simple “pro/con” list to decide if he should get married (a non-trivial decision) to today’s advanced scenario-planning war games, science fiction
foresight tools and other scalable management techniques.

This time, however, seems different—for a troubling simple reason. This time we face the rise of powerful new
forces that undermine our very ability to react to these challenges and disruptions: our cognition itself
is under attack. These toxic new forces leverage digital technology to exploit our behavioral biases,
pushed by powerful financial incentives.
The early warning signs

What if the structures we had built to protect us against irrational decisions turn out to be rickety
breakwaters laid down on the shore of a once placid sea and provide no protection from a 100-year flood? When the
art and science of decisions-making itself collapses might we face a Great Cognitive Depression?

The early warning signs are troubling to say the least. Authoritarian governments and despots are
enjoying a resurgence. In many democracies, voters faced with complex issues turn to simple answers
and slogans, to the siren call of populism. They dismiss the experts (think of Brexit as a case in point), they look
for scapegoats and easy fixes.

Could these be examples of human cognition reverting to evolutionary shortcuts to cope with complex
threats? Authority bias is a quick way for us to decide things when we are faced with tough choices. If
something is too ambiguous or non-deterministic we follow the authority figure with the most
compelling and simple story, instead of doing the thinking for ourselves.
Social scientists have documented upwards of 200+ cognitive short cuts and biases that evolved to help us cope with danger, make decisions
fast, and conserve our precious cognitive resources to fight another day. But sometimes those shortcuts have lived on far past their “sell by”
date. Sometimes our brains lie to us. Buying behavior in our simian ancestors seem oddly similar to the
ways humans make choices in markets. We believe we are rational actors but time and again we find
out that it is very hard to see the thinking about our thinking. And now it’s getting harder.

Here is where we find a dangerous market failure.

A powerful combination of new technologies and financial incentives is fast overwhelming our old
protective barriers.

Digital innovations are creating value. But this value is not given away for free, as some economists contend.
There is no free lunch.

We all know that digital

platforms are after our data. Sometimes they use it to our advantage, with more personalized offerings;
often they sell it to advertisers. For
them we are a different kind of “prosumer”: not a producer-consumer, but rather a product-consumer.
We are more a commodity than a true customer. You might argue that well, almost everyone realizes this, and we still enter
these transactions of our own free will, so what’s the problem?
But digital
platforms are not just after our data—they crave our unwavering attention. Higher ratings
command higher advertising rates—and the ratings are determined by how much time we spend with
our eyeballs glued to the screen, our attention absorbed by the apps.

Therefore, these
platforms have a financial incentive to hold our attention, and to grab it back whenever it
drifts away—a powerful financial incentive. Hence the game of incessant notifications, of addictive updates on likes and
shares, of instigations to chase followers, friends and connections.

See, the fact that digital platforms grab our data in exchange for their “free” services strikes us as a lesser distortion. The digital platform, be it
Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook, most likely gets more value from my individual data than it gives back to me in services. But the truth is,
my data is much less valuable to me than it is to them, because they can aggregate it with others’, whereas I cannot. And unless I find a way to
get together with millions of other users, in a sort of modern trade union of the digital sheep, I will never have enough bargaining power to
extract more of that value. Because as long as everybody else gives their data away, the marginal value of my data is close to zero. But as I said,
my data is of little value to me, in isolation. Little ventured, little lost in this case.

Cognition is another matter.

Our attention, our cognition, is a very precious resource. We need it to study, to work, to run our daily lives,
to take small and big and life-changing decisions. And it’s a limited resource. We can fool ourselves that we can
multitask. That we have become a lot more productive as we track our Twitter feed and social media messages while we work, answer
emails during conference calls.

Except that we can’t and we don’t. We become less productive, not more. The statistics—as we discussed earlier—bear
this out. It should be no surprise. In this more complex world, we have a lot to study and understand—and we
cannot do it in 20-seconds bursts. When we get distracted, we need over 20 minutes to refocus on the task at hand. In this
more complex and high-tech world, knowledge and understanding have enormous value. The time and
cognition we invest in acquiring knowledge, mastering skills, earning credentials, yields a very high rate of return in terms of career
opportunities, earnings, and personal fulfillment.

Which means that the opportunity cost of every minute we spend looking at a digital ad, “catching up” on various messaging platforms, or
watching a viral video is extremely high.

And the digital drugs we take on a daily basis not only absorb precious time today—they also erode our
ability to concentrate. By pushing us to an obsessive-compulsive habit of constantly checking for something new online, they
gradually destroy our slow-thinking ability (àla Kahneman), our power of concentration. Our attention
spans are shortening, undermining our future productivity as well.

This could easily become a vicious spiral: powerful financial incentives will keep pushing digital
platforms to grab more and more of our attention. And as the Internet of Things becomes more
pervasive, they will have more and more tools at their disposal: soon the mirror in your bathroom and smart dust
around you as you walk down the street will also compete for your attention. At the same time, these companies’ tactics exploit
deep-rooted cognitive biases: we are programmed to pay attention to anything referring to us, to look
for news and new things, and to crave the approval of our community. Left to itself, this is only going to
get worse.

So just
as we enter the most harrowing straits for ourselves and our planet, as we race to rebalance
ever widening gaps between the powerful and the powerless; as we come to grips with extinction level
threats to our way of lives, the structures we’ve erected to make rational decisions are collapsing. While
we have new decision-making and scenario planning methodologies at our disposal, we may not have
much actual brainpower to notice, care or bring our best thinking to the table. The Great Cognitive
Depression is racing towards us and we don’t appear to be taking the early warning signs seriously and
may not even notice before it’s too late. The counterfeit attention-based currency that is flooding our
markets may soon bankrupt our cognitive reserves. Bad money (attention) drives out good, as Gresham’s Law predicts.
We’ve fostered the rise of industries that are rewarded for de-cognition attacks and we have put no incentives or taxes in place to do what
markets can’t or won’t do themselves. It
is as if our human odyssey has been blown off course, pushed by the
rising tide toward the land of the sirens, seduced by deceptive songs, hypnotized and driven towards madness. If
we do nothing we may ultimately wash up on the shores from a watery grave.

Growth locks in industrial agriculture, causing soil erosion.

Isaias Hernandez 2-2-21 Isaias Hernandez is an environmental speaker with years of experience in
intersectional environmental work. Isaias works with businesses, institutions, and organizations to
amplify and empower their environmental missions. Isaias is well-known in his field under the social
moniker, QueerBrownVegan, his independent media platform with a global audience of over 100,000+
followers. Isaias attended the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his Bachelorʼs in
Environmental Science. He is a full-time content creator for QueerBrownVegan, a public speaker, and a
consultant for social impact orgs. [How industrial agriculture created a global environmental injustice,
https://blog.ecosia.org/industrial-agriculture-environmental-injustice/] //WAgustin

For a long time, big

agribusiness has dominated our food system, focusing on economic growth and
corporate gains while ignoring its long-term environmental impact. Big agribusiness was introduced during the 1950s
and 1960s in the United States, seeking to expand the production of food from small-scale local farmers to large corporate businesses.
Agribusiness has heavily altered ecosystems. Modern agriculture contributes to around 10.5% of
greenhouse emissions in the United States. With climate change making headlines around the world, many governments are
measuring the long-term environmental impact their industries are creating.

The term Agribusiness was coined in 1957 by scholars John H. Davis and Ray A Goldberg — they argued that privatizing the agriculture industry
would create positive change rather than allowing the government to control the sector. Agribusiness
is defined as the
production of economic growth through the development of farm crops, including the production,
processing, distribution, and transportation of food. While 70% of the world's food is provided by small-
scale farmers, food production in the US is dominated by agribusiness. In the United States alone, agribusiness,
food, and related industries generate around $1.109 trillion, making it one of the largest sectors of the economy. While
agribusiness has reported making positive contributions to the world such as the production of food, employment, and lower prices for basic
commodities, there are still major concerns about its environmental impact.

Modern commercialized forms of agriculture heavily rely on monocultures, the cultivation of a single crop on a
large tract of land. Monocultures initially increase yields, but also heavily rely on pesticides and insecticides,
and lead to soil degradation. A famous case study looked into the production of corn following corn
blight in the 1970s in North America, which resulted in the destruction of 15% of crops. The disease spread
due to the fact that corn was being grown at a high density, making it easily susceptible to plant diseases. Excessive usage
of pesticides and insecticides has destroyed beneficial insects and bacteria that have promoted plant productivity and has led plants to be more
vulnerable to catching diseases. On top of that, monocultures require
high-intensity water usage for irrigation.
Agribusinesses use extractive methods such as collecting water from nearby lakes, rivers, and reservoirs,
thereby harming these ecosystems. With the rapid development of agribusinesses across the globe, forests
are also being cleared to make room for large monocultures, which alters ecosystems by reducing
species diversity.

While the world produces more food than it consumes, that food still fails to deliver high nutritional
content. The fruits, vegetables, and grains that are eaten today have lost a significant amount of their vitamins and minerals, which raises
questions about the current ways agricultural systems operate. Scientists have noted that there are a multitude of
reasons for this issue such as usage of chemical fertilizers, monocultures, and food processing methods. While
climate change is getting worse every year, scientists have strongly suggested that we should rethink
monoculture practices and address the damage caused by agribusiness industries.

In order to create a system that is healthy for the environment, polyculture, agroecology, and regenerative
agriculture have been suggested to combat the negative effects of monoculture . Long-term effects of
industrialized agriculture are already apparent in low-income Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
communities, whose water and air are contaminated by the chemicals used in agriculture . Our system for
food production is broken and was designed for rapid growth and corporate profits while ignoring
environmental impact, thus creating not only an injustice, but also a long-term problem for the planet.

Soil erosion causes extinction.

Zhang et al. ’20 [Yiyuan; Nanning Reconnaissance & Designing Institute of Pearl River
Water Resources Commission in Guanxi, Naning, Yan Sun, Junbo Xiao, Wenhao Lai,
Min Wei, Junming Wang, “Research Progress on Soil Erosion and Socioeconomic
Correlation,” E3S Web of Conferences, IAECST 2019, https://www.e3s-
conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2020/05/e3sconf_iaecst2020_02031.pdf]
Severe soil erosion can easily lead to natural disasters such as collapse , collapse mound, landslides,
and debris flows. Soil and water loss is generally caused by the destruction of vegetation , leading to

changes in runoff , soil and geological structures are affected, and geological disasters such as
collapse and collapse mound are prone to occur. In the event of heavy rain, even serious natural disasters
such as landslides and debris flows, these serious natural Disasters will not only destroy houses , roads,

power communication facilities, etc., but also damage farmland , ponds, reservoirs and other
water conservancy facilities. It will also severely disrupt river channels and affect shipping . It will also

affect industrial and agricultural production in the river basin, urban safety, and people. The safety
of life and property poses a huge threat[2].

Soil and water loss destroys land resources , affects the recycling and use of water resources,
worsens the ecological environment , exacerbates natural disasters , endangers food, water
supply, ecological security, and brings serious harm to the development of the national economy
and the production and life of the people. Part of the development opportunities for improving the living
conditions of agricultural production are lost, exacerbating poverty, especially in the vast karst areas. The unique
geological hydrothermal conditions combined with the effects of soil and water erosion, are extremely prone to
rocky desertification , making Local residents are trapped in rocky desertification poverty[9]. The study
found that soil and water loss has a significant negative effect on agricultural production. The larger the

share of soil and water loss and the deeper the degree of soil and water loss, the greater the

negative impact on agricultural GDP . By estimating the monetary economic loss of soil erosion, it is
found that the economic loss of soil erosion is huge, and the economic loss of nutrient loss caused by

soil erosion is the largest .

Economic and social development has caused a sharp increase in people's demand for the
development and utilization of natural resources, which has exacerbated the occurrence of soil and

water loss . Socio-economic development factors are one of the important driving forces affecting
soil and water loss. With the economic and social development, the population is growing too fast, the
modernization process and the level of urbanization are constantly accelerating, which has led to a sharp increase
in the demand for natural resources such as agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and construction of
for short-term benefits Destroying natural resources and the environment,
infrastructure. People even

causing a large number of new soil erosion . Soil and water loss is affected by five types of factors,
including demographic, economic, technical, policy and institutional factors, and cultural factors. The proportion
of slope farmland, population density, and forest land coverage are the three major socioeconomic factors that
affect soil and water loss[4]; Some scholars have also found through research on autocorrelation that soil and
water loss has agglomeration in spatial distribution, and the spatial variation of soil and water loss intensity on a
small scale is mainly affected by random factors such as human activities[5], but not at the mesoscale. For
the distribution of soil and water loss areas and the distribution of
example, studies have found that

the poor are geographically coupled . Poverty is often associated with excessively rapid population
growth, low educational level of the population, and economic development which cause Man-made soil erosion.
Weak awareness of soil and water conservation in the society, and insufficient funding due to poverty, which
hinders the development of soil and water conservation.

American industrial ag culminates in extinction.

Sanderson ’21 [Matthew R. and Stan Cox; May 17; social scientist at Kansas State University; research
scholar in ecosphere studies at The Land Institute; “Big Agriculture Is Leading to Ecological Collapse,”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/17/big-industrialized-agriculture-climate-change-earth-systems-
ecological-collapse-policy]

Today, there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any point in the past 3.6 million years. On April
5, atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded 420 parts per million—marking nearly the halfway point toward doubling
the carbon dioxide levels measured prior to the Industrial Revolution , a mere 171 years ago. Even amid a
pandemic-induced economic shutdown—during which global annual emissions dropped 7 percent—carbon dioxide and
methane levels set records in 2020. The last time Earth held this much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, sea
levels were nearly 80 feet higher and the planet was 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. The catch: Homo sapiens
did not yet exist.
Change is in the air. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines announced climate change is “at the center of the country’s national
security and foreign policy.” Business-as-usual is no longer a viable strategy as more institutions consider a future that will
look and feel much different. In this context, it is striking to read a recent piece in Foreign Policy arguing “big agriculture is best.”

“Big agriculture is best” cannot be an argument supported by empirical evidence. By now, it is vitally clear that
Earth systems—the atmosphere, oceans, soils, and biosphere—are in various phases of collapse, putting
nearly one-half of the world’s gross domestic product at risk and undermining the planet’s ability to support life. And big,
industrialized agriculture—promoted by U.S. foreign and domestic policy—lies at the heart of the multiple
connected crises we are confronting as a species.

The litany of industrial

agriculture’s toll is long and diverse. Consider the effects of industrial animal agriculture, for example.
As of this writing, animal
agriculture accounts for 14.5 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions annually. It is also the source of 60 percent of all nitrous oxide and 50 percent of all methane
emissions, which have 36 times and 298 times, respectively, the warming potential of carbon dioxide. As industrial
animal agriculture has scaled up, agricultural emissions of methane and nitrous oxide have been going in one direction only: up.

Efforts to scale industrial agriculture are undermining the planet’s capacity to support life at more local
scales too. Consider Brazil, home to the Amazon Rainforest, which makes up 40 percent of all remaining rainforest
and 25 percent of all terrestrial biodiversity on Earth. Forest loss and species extinctions have only
increased as industrial agriculture has scaled up in Brazil. Farmers are burning unprecedented amounts of
forest to expand their operations in pursuit of an industrial model. In August 2019, smoke blocked the sun in
São Paulo, Brazil, 2,000 miles away from the fires in the state of Amazonas.

In India, the pace of agricultural industrialization is hastening as indicated by rising agricultural

production and declining employment in agriculture, which now accounts for less than one-half of India’s workforce. Agriculture
has been scaled with all the tools of the Green Revolution: a high-input farming system comprised of genetically
modified seeds and accompanying synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. As agriculture has industrialized in India,
the use of pesticides and fertilizers has risen as well.

Although it has become more difficult to breathe the air in Brazil, it

has become harder to find clean freshwater in India,
where pesticide contamination is rising. There, the costs of the industrial agriculture model are plainly
ecological and human: Unable to drink the water or pay back the loans they took out to finance their transition to industrial farming, an
alarming number of Indian farmers are drinking pesticides instead. Almost a quarter-million Indian farmers have died by suicide since 2000,
and 10,281 farmers and farm laborers killed themselves in 2019 alone. In Punjab, the country’s breadbasket, environmental destruction
coexists with a raging opioid epidemic ensnaring nearly two-thirds of households in the state.

If the events in Brazil and India sound familiar to U.S. readers, it is because there
are analogous stories in the United States—
where industrial agriculture is rendering entire landscapes uninhabitable. The U.S. Corn Belt, which spans the
region from Ohio to Nebraska, produces 75 percent of the country’s corn, but around 35 percent of the region has completely lost its
topsoil. Industrial agriculture has been pursued with special zeal in Iowa, where there are 25 million hogs and 3 million people. There,
water from the Raccoon River enters the state capital of Des Moines—home to 550,000 people— with nitrates, phosphorus, and
bacteria that have exceeded federal safe water drinking standards.

At a larger scale, nutrient

runoff from industrial agriculture in the U.S. Midwest has created an annual dead zone—
a hypoxic area low in or devoid of oxygen—that is the size of Massachusetts. The ecological consequences of
industrial agriculture manifest alongside a growing human toll. Rural communities are experiencing rising suicide rates,
especially among young people, along with increases in “deaths of despair” from alcohol and drugs—an expanding human dead zone.

Although tragic, these outcomes are neither inevitable nor natural. They are outcomes of U.S. policy choices. Industrialized
agriculture has been a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era. Under the guise of development for all and the mantra of
“feed the world,” the United States has used policy to dump surplus grain in low-income countries—undermining markets for smallholder
farmers—and cultivate foreign markets as importers of high-input, industrial agriculture technologies to scale agriculture. At home, federal
policy since the 1970s has explicitly promoted scaling industrial agriculture through the “get big or get out” imperative.

Society did not arrive at this precipice because agriculture was too small or because industrialized agriculture respected the laws of physics.
Instead, we
are peering into an abyss of systemic socioecological collapse because every effort has been
made to use industrialization to break through all known ecological and human limitations to scaling agriculture.

Industrial agriculture simplifies ecosystems, rendering us more vulnerable to threats. Transformative policies will
be required to pull us back from the edge. As a start, the United States could set an example for the Global North with a 50-
year farm bill.

It drives overuse of pesticides, destroying microbial populations---collapses the

biosphere
A. Madhavi et al. 21, Sri Krishnadevaraya University, “Microbes and Their Role in Bioremediation of
Soil: A Detailed Review,” Advances in Environmental Engineering and Green Technologies, edited by
Junaid Ahmad Malik, IGI Global, 2021, pp. 65–113, DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-7062-
3.ch003
ABSTRACT
Soil is the Earth’s shell and is getting polluted in a number of ways in the present scenario. Human activities are the root cause
of different types of soil pollution, which is an alarming issue and has be- come a major obstacle that needs to be overcome to build a cleaner
environment. The area of polluted soil is widening day by day by virtue of a sharp increase in people from all over the world. It has been
expected that the global population will continue to increase up to 9 billion by 2050, and such prodigious population may be in need of
advanced agricultural and industrial systems, which may inevitably cause soil pollution. Therefore, it is essential to control soil pollution, and
fortunately, the solution for this is microbes that are the real creatures of life on Earth. In fact, microorganisms play a unique role in the
detoxification of polluted soil environments, and in the last several years, this process has been called bioremediation. Remediation of polluted
soils is necessary, and research continues to develop novel, science-based remediation methods.

INTRODUCTION

Soil on the surface of the earth is a diverse natural entity which is home to a large amount of living elements,
including plants, animals and microbes that communicate with each other (Dwivedi, 1997). Soil filters water, decomposes waste,
stores heat and exchanges the gases and therefore have great bearing on environmental balance. As the
life on earth mainly concentrates on the top of soil, hence, it is extremely important to pay attention on pollutants
or hazardous substances affecting predominantly the soil ecosystems. In the past few years an estimated 12.6 million people
have lost their lives worldwide from more than 100 diseases resulting from unhealthy environments such as
contaminated soils (WHO, 2016). The formation of 1 cm top layer of soil requires 100-400 years (Chandra & Singh, 2009). Soil is the
layer of mixture of inorganic and organic material, where inorganic part is composed of fine rock particles produced as a result of weathering
and the organic part is produced by decay of plants and animals. Life is believed to emerge from the soil and is
an integral part of the
environment, ecosystem
and also an important natural resource for plant growth, and is a repository for
biogeochemical cycle. Soil is highly susceptible to environmental transformations (Yu, 2016) and is often the
most important sink for environmental pollution due to its strong binding capacity (Sun et al., 2017). According to Ro- driguez et al. (2018), soil
pollution is defined as the presence of chemicals or substances in the soil that are inappropriate or at an increased concentration than normal
with deleterious effects on any non-target organism. A contaminant is an unwanted substance introduced into the environment. Harmful
effects by contaminants lead to pollution, a process by which a resource (natural or man-made) is rendered unsuit- able for use. Plants, animals
and aquatic life depend on soil for their survival. Plants relay upon soil for anchorage, nutrients, water and even oxygen. The soil influences the
distribution of plant species and provides a habitat for a large number of organisms such as both micro and macro organisms. Soils
are
essential for biodiversity conservation above and below the ground. Huge amount of chemicals employed in day to day lives and excessive
amounts of urban, industrial and agricultural wastes, mining etc., have all led to soil contamination across the planet and also leaving it barren
and deteriorated.

Industrialization and extensive use of chemical compounds such as petroleum products, hydrocarbons
(aliphatic, aromatic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene), chlorinated
hydrocarbons such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene, nitroaromatic compounds,
organophosphorus compounds) pose an alarming threat to crop production, food safety, and for the health of
citizens. Since soil quality is directly linked to food security, human health and sustainable economic and social
progress, soil pollution management is important (Esmaeili et al., 2013; Wan et al., 2018). Biological life prevailing in a gram
of soil includes tiny microbes such as algae, actinomycetes, bacteria, bacteriophages, protozoa, nematodes and fungi. The role of these
organisms is highly complex and form an integral part of cycling the nutrients through the environment and they drive the processes such as
decomposition, mineralization, storage and release of nutrients, breakdown of pollutants before they reach groundwater or surface water,
carbon cycling, carbon sequestration, and soil organic matter transformations, nitrogen cycling (N fixation, denitrification, nitrification).

The biological transformation by the action of microorganisms led to development of abundant nu- trients (Kiflu & Beyene, 2013). Soil microbes
are the principal participants of all the soil biochemical processes. These biochemical processes are devices for soil quality stabilization, soil
organic matter production, hazardous material decomposition, soil structure formation and physiological cycles. Soil degradation by harmful
metals reduces the microbial properties of the soil, such as soil respiration and enzymatic processes. One of the reasons that impact life in soils
is the degradation of soils by highly poisonous materials attributable to multiple anthropogenic activities (Prajapati & Meravi, 2014; Zojiali et al.,
2014; Baishya & Samra, 2014). Elements with high density and high relative atomic weight are inherently poisonous elements, exhibiting
metallic properties such as ductility, malleability, conductiv- ity and specificity of the ligand (Algreen et al., 2012). Especially zinc, cadmium and
copper are the potentially toxic elements that may alter the microbiological equilibrium of soil (Olaniran et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2013; Markowicz
et al., 2016; Shi & Ma, 2017). Finally, soil contaminated by such potentially toxic elements (PTEs) has led to negative impact on the
environment. In the soil microbes are the first to react to PTEs and microbial metabolisms can interfere PTE speciation change (Bolan et al.,
2013).
SOURCES OF SOIL POLLUTION

Agricultural Practices

Agriculture is one of the main pillars of economy and principal productive sectors, and the main land use activity in many countries. Agriculture
is a basic industry, which provides endless power for the development of national economy and it is also the foundation for human survival and
development. Agricultural wastes are those produced by agricultural and livestock practices such as fertilizer containers, agricultural pesticides,
feed, harvest residues, and manure. In soils and sediments, the prolonged application of pesticides persists where they
can directly penetrate the food chain or percolate down to the water table. Not only in farming areas, but
also in schools, parks, highways, houses, buildings and trees, pesticides are used almost everywhere and it is impossible to
find any location where pesticides are not used - from the can of bug spray under the kitchen sink to the aircraft crop dusting acres of farmland.
The farming activities contribute to the soil pollution with harmful substances such as cadmium by the
use of mineral phosphate fertilizers or organic pollutants due to application of pesticides (Kanianska, 2016).
Exploitation of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in crop production brought about soil pollution. Soil
pollution is a result of long-term accumulation and a large number of pollutants accumulated in the soil,
which inturn lead to the extension of pollution, such as ground water pollution. It appears to be difficult to
control soil pollution. Contaminants from agrochemical sources include pesticides, fertilizers and manure. The crop protection products
and fertilizers are chemicals that are manufactured synthetically and broken down into numerous soil components and they gradually
bring down the fertility and quality of the soil (Usman, 2018). Pesticide is a generic term that comprises of all the chemicals
used to kill or control pests either in farming sector or in different settings such as store rooms, human houses and gardens as noted by the
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nation (FAO, 2002). The pesticide formulations were utilized to control, eliminate and in
preventing any pests, which includes rodents, nematodes, weeds, birds, insects and microbes. These chemicals are classified into herbicides,
insecticides, fungicides, nematicides and rodenticides. The annual increase in world- wide pesticides production is 11% from 0.2 million tons in
the 1950s and exceeding 5 million tons by 2000 (Carvalho, 2017). The chemical pesticides applied to farm field in 2012; on an average is around
3.8 million tons (FAO, 2020). About two million people chiefly, livings in the developing economies are at an elevated health risks because of
pesticides utilization (Hicks, 2019). Pesticides cause damage to soil biomass and microorganisms such as bacteria,
fungi, and earthworms. The labile component of organic matter in soil is microbial biomass which plays
a significant role in soil nutrient element cycle (Azam et al., 2003). Quality of the soil is a major factor for the
growth of crop plants and the deciding factor for the availability of plant nutrients. Microorganisms present in
the soil are able to metabolize and degrade plenty of pollutants and pesticides. Healthy levels of soil microbes are essential for preserv- ing soil
structure and soil fertility. The soil fungi, algae, cyanobacteria and actinomycetes are mainly involve in the decomposition of organic residues
and release the nutrients including phosphorus, which enhance plant growth and contribute to the pollution control. The biological
transformation by the ac- tion of microorganisms led to accumulation (develop) of abundant nutrients in the soil (Kiflu & Beyene, 2013).
Pesticides may cause considerable changes in the composition, diversity and basic functioning of important
soil microflora (Ahemad & Khan, 2013; Yousaf et al., 2013; Riah et al., 2014). Soil enzymes help in speedup chemical reactions in soils,
regulate cellular metabolism of soil organisms, participate in the decomposition of organic matter and also play a key role in the formation of
humus. The quality and fertility of soil depend to a great extent on the activity of soil enzymes. Soil enzyme activities (SEA) are sensitive to
management practices (Medeiros et al., 2015).

Extinction
Dr. Bruce E. Tonn 21, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, PhD in Urban and
Regional Planning from Northwestern University, BS in Civil Engineering from Stanford University, Senior
Researcher in the Environmental Sciences Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Anticipation,
Sustainability, Futures and Human Extinction: Ensuring Humanity’s Journey into The Distant Future, p.
33

This second class of existential risks is primarily found in coupled human–natural systems. These could
be seen as extinction-level events in and of themselves, but I think they could be initiating or
contributory events to human extinction (again see the scenario at the end of Chapter 4). Technically,
we also know how to prevent these events or at least how to adapt to them. Here are four to consider:
 (1) Significant loss of biodiversity – It is well documented that human behavior is causing a sixth
mass species extinction on the earth.44 This is due to many factors including destruction of
habitat, spreading of disease (e.g., Chytrid fungus in amphibians), pollution, and climate change.
The risk to humanity is that if too many of the species become extinct, global ecosystems could
crash, disrupting essential balances of species needed to support ecosystem services and maybe
even threatening global balances of oxygen and nitrogen.45

(2) Agricultural systems failure – There are numerous additional potentially catastrophic risks
facing the world’s agricultural systems. For example, the world currently relies upon only about
14 different crops.46 Unanticipated and unchecked microbial infections could wipe out major
portions of the food supply. Soil erosion, extended droughts, fires, and various other natural
disasters could also seriously impact the food supply and cause widespread famine.47 At least
75% of the world’s food is dependent in some way on bees for pollination. Currently, the world’s
bee population is under extreme stress.48 Many worry that a catastrophic collapse of the
world’s bee population could lead to widespread famine and collapse in human population.

Growth-oriented AI ensures extinction---but degrowth solves.

Pueyo ’18 [Salvador; October 1; Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, and Environmental
Sciences, Universitat de Barcelona; Journal of Cleaner Production, “Growth, Degrowth, and the
Challenge of Artificial Superintelligence,” vol. 197, pp. 1731–1736]

The challenges of sustainability and of superintelligence are not independent. The changing 84 fluxes of
energy, matter, and information can be interpreted as different faces of a general acceleration2 85 .
More directly, it is argued below that superintelligence would deeply affect 86 production technologies and also
economic decisions, and could in turn be affected by the 87 socioeconomic and ecological context in which it
develops. Along the lines of Pueyo (2014, p. 88 3454), this paper presents an approach that integrates these topics. It employs insights from
a 89 variety of sources, such as ecological theory and several schools of economic theory. 90 The next section presents a thought experiment, in
which superintelligence emerges after the 91 technical aspects of goal alignment have been resolved, and this occurs specifically in a neoliberal
92 scenario. Neoliberalism
is a major force shaping current policies on a global level, which urges 93
governments to assume as their main role the creation and support of capitalist markets, and to 94 avoid
interfering in their functioning (Mirowski, 2009). Neoliberal policies stand in sharp contrast 95 to degrowth views: the
first are largely rationalized as a way to enhance efficiency and production 96 (Plehwe, 2009), and represent the maximum expression of
capitalist values. 97 The thought experiment illustrates how superintelligence perfectly aligned with capitalist 98 markets
could have very undesirable consequences for humanity and the whole biosphere . It also 99 suggests that
there is little reason to expect that the wealthiest and most powerful people would be 100 exempt from these consequences, which, as argued
below, gives reason for hope. Section 3 raises 101 the possibility of a broad social consensus to respond to this challenge along the lines of
degrowth, 102 thus tackling major technological, environmental, and social problems simultaneously. The 103 uncertainty involved in these
scenarios is vast, but, if
a non-negligible probability is assigned to 104 these two futures, little room is left for
either complacency or resignation. 105 106 2. Thought experiment: Superintelligence in a neoliberal scenario 107 108
Neoliberalism is creating a very special breeding ground for superintelligence, because it strives 109 to
reduce the role of human agency in collective affairs. The neoliberal pioneer Friedrich Hayek 110 argued that the
spontaneous order of markets was preferable over conscious plans, because markets, 111 he thought, have
more capacity than humans to process information (Mirowski, 2009). Neoliberal 112 policies are actively
transferring decisions to markets (Mirowski, 2009), while firms' automated 113 decision systems become an integral part of the
market's information processing machinery 114 (Davenport and Harris, 2005). Neoliberal globalization is locking governments in the role of
mere 115 players competing in the global market (Swank, 2016). Furthermore, automatedgovernance is a 116 foundational
tenet of neoliberal ideology (Plehwe, 2009, p. 23). 117 In the neoliberal scenario, most technological development can
be expected to take place either in the context of firms or in support of firms3 118 . A number of institutionalist (Galbraith,
1985), post119 Keynesian (Lavoie, 2014; and references therein) and evolutionary (Metcalfe, 2008) economists 120 concur that, in capitalist
markets, firms tend to maximize their growth rates (this principle is related 121 but not identical to the neoclassical
assumption that firms maximize profits; Lavoie, 2014). Growth 122 maximization might be interpreted as expressing the goals of
people in key positions, but, from an 123 evolutionary perspective, it is thought to result from a mechanism akin to natural
selection 124 (Metcalfe, 2008). The first interpretation is insufficient if we accept that: (1) in big corporations, the 125 managerial
bureaucracy is a coherent social-psychological system with motives and preferences of 126 its own (Gordon, 1968, p. 639; for an insider view,
see Nace, 2005, pp. 1-10), (2) this system is 127 becoming techno-social-psychological with the progressive incorporation of decision-making
128 algorithms and the increasing opacity of such algorithms (Danaher, 2016), and (3) human mentality 129 and goals are partly
shaped by firms themselves (Galbraith, 1985). 130 The type of AI best suited to participate in firms' decisions in this context is
described in a 131 recent review in Science: AI researchers aim to construct a synthetic homo economicus, the 132 mythical perfectly rational
agent of neoclassical economics. We review progress toward creating 133 this new species of machine, machina economicus (Parkes and
Wellman, 2015, p. 267; a more 134 orthodox denomination would be Machina oeconomica). 135 Firm
growth is thought to rely
critically on retained earnings (Galbraith, 1985; Lavoie, 2014, p. 136 134-141). Therefore, economic selection can be

all firms in an economy can be expressed as: 138 RE=FE(R,L,K)-w⋅L-(i+δ)⋅K-g. (1) 139 Bold symbols represent vectors
generally expected to favor firms in which these are greater. The aggregate retained earnings4 137 RE of

(to indicate multidimensionality). F is an aggregate production 140 function, relying on inputs of various types of natural resources R, labor L
and capital K (including intelligent machines), and being affected by environmental factors5 141 E; w are wages, i are returns to 142 capital
(dividends, interests) paid to households, δ is depreciation and g are the net taxes paid to 143 governments. 144 Increases
in retained
earnings face constraints, such as trade-offs among different parameters of 145 Eq. 1. The present thought
experiment explores the consequences of economic selection in a 146 scenario in which two sets of
constraints are nearly absent: sociopolitical constraints on market 147 dynamics are averted by a
neoliberal institutional setting, while technical constraints are overcome 148 by asymptotically advanced
technology (with extreme AI allowing for extreme technological 149 development also in other fields).
The environmental and the social implications are discussed in 150 turn. Note that this scenario is not defined by some
contingent choice of AIs' goals by their 151 programmers: The goals of maximizing each firm's growth and
retained earnings are assumed to 152 emerge from the collective dynamics of large sets of entities subject to
capitalistic rules of 153 interaction and, therefore, to economic selection.
 PLAN TEXT
The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal
redistribution by adapting a federal job guarantee, financed by fiscal policies designed
to facilitate degrowth.
 Transition---1AC
A job guarantee is crucial to lower growth rates – it allows policies to become aligned
with environmentally sustainable goals, causing aggregate demand and consumption
to fall
B.J. Unti 18; PhD in Economics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, economics
instructor at Bellevue College, “The Job Guarantee and Transformational Degrowth,”
Full Employment and Social Justice: Solidarity and Sustainability,
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-66376-0_3
two alternative paths
Building on the theory of effective demand and modern money theory (MMT), post-Keynesians have proposed
to full employment. The first and most common approach relies on fiscal policy to fill the demand gap. The
second approach calls for direct job creation through an employer of last resort or JG program. Neither policy
was designed to address environmental concerns and indeed both promote growth. However, when compared, it is clear that the JG
offers advantages over demand management policy with respect to both employment and the environment.

The demand gap approach seeks a handle on employment via the manipulation of aggregate demand. When
aggregate demand in the private sector is insufficient for full employment, fiscal policy can be enacted to boost demand
(Arestis and Sawyer 2003, 2004). The three essential goals of the demand gap approach are: (1) increasing aggregate
demand, (2) stimulating private investment and (3) increasing productive capacity (Tcherneva 2008, p. 67). This approach
suffers from two obvious weaknesses. On the employment front, it is indirect. If the goal is to increase employment,
why not hire workers directly?8 On the environmental front, the flaw of the demand gap approach is that it aims to achieve full
employment through economic growth. As Tcherneva notes, “this is a proinvestment pro-growth policy” (ibid.).

The JG approach proposed by Minsky (1968), Wray (1998) and Mitchell (1998) represents an alternative path to full
employment. Rather than acting through aggregate demand to stimulate private investment, the JG achieves full employment
by directly hiring workers. This offers three advantages over demand management. First, it eliminates unemployment
immediately. Second, it channels government spending directly to employment. And perhaps most importantly, it can be
used to influence not only the quantity but also the quality of employment.9

With regard
to environmental goals, however, the most important advantage of the JG is that it severs the link
between aggregate demand and employment. As Mitchell and Wray point out, “ELR achieves full employment
without regard to the level of aggregate demand” (2005, p. 236). If employment and aggregate demand can be
decoupled, then it may be possible to decouple employment from economic growth. In other words, a JG might
provide a means for overcoming the existing trade-off between economic and environmental goals.
In the context of Boulding’s model, a JG provides a novel solution to the problem of overproduction. Suppose a situation in which production
and consumption are diverging such that profit expectations are falling.

According to the demand gap approach, there are two possible outcomes: (1) falling production, rising unemployment and possibly a
depression, or (2) rising consumption, increased aggregate demand and stable employment. With
a JG in place, the third option is to
allow production and aggregate demand to fall, while maintaining full employment, thus avoiding a
depression. In this case, both the economic objective of full employment and the environmental goal of reducing output
(throughput) are achieved.
A JG eliminates the negative impact of falling production on the level of employment. If JG workers earn a
lower wage than private sector workers (and workers spend what they get), aggregate demand and consumption
also fall. Of course, a JG as such does not necessarily serve environmental objectives. After all, it will increase
employment and aggregate income, and thus it seems a JG must increase aggregate demand, output (throughput) and
economic growth.10 However, owing to the special nature of JG employment, it may in fact be made consistent
with falling aggregate output and income in the long-run.

In this regard, the most important feature of the JG is that it transcends the conditions of monetary production.
Because JG work is not constrained by money profits, it can be channeled to all kinds of socially beneficial
projects that cannot and will not be undertaken by the private sector.11 This is the basis for the “green jobs” JG
proposal put forward by Forstater (2003, 2004, 2005). However, green jobs represent only one of the possibilities opened up by a
JG, and by itself, a green jobs’ approach is not likely to bring about the required reduction in growth necessary for a
sustainable economy. Another more radical potential opened up by the removal of the profit constrain is that of
reducing productivity. As proposed, a JG will hire off the bottom and “the pool [of JG labor] will tend to contain the least
productive workers” (Wray 1998, p. 139).

And since the object of the program is to provide jobs, JG employment should be more labor-intensive than private
sector employment further reducing productivity. Rather than viewing low productivity as a bad thing, if
environmental sustainability requires reduced growth, low productivity ought to be a policy goal.12
Moreover, it is easy to see how reducing productivity is consistent with improved working conditions since the
simplest ways to achieve lower productivity are slowing down the production process, decreasing the length of the
working day and replacing mechanized mass production with more humane and less alienating forms of craft labor. Finally, while reduced
productivity as a policy goal may be a tough sell, it should not be forgotten that the point of a JG is to improve
peoples’ lives and not to increase output.13

A federal job guarantee aligned with degrowth can shift agricultural and climate policy
to avert existential risk.
Hickel ’21 [Jason; February 23; anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts;
Foreign Policy, “Stimulus Is an Environmental Disaster Waiting to Happen,”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/23/stimulus-is-an-environmental-disaster-waiting-to-happen/]

To keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius without relying on speculative negative emissions technologies, high-income
nations need to be cutting emissions by at least 10 percent per year. There is no scenario in which this is feasible to achieve
while growing the economy at usual rates, given the relationship between growth and energy. For this
reason, scientists—thousands of them—have called on the world’s governments to abandon GDP growth as an objective and focus on human
well-being and ecological stability instead.

But this leaves us with a hard question: What about jobs? How can we possibly hope to address mass unemployment without economic
growth? Fortunately, there’s a straightforward solution. We can fix the problem directly without needing additional growth by introducing a
progressive, public job guarantee program, as proposed by economists like Stephanie Kelton, Pavlina Tcherneva, and a growing chorus of
others. The idea is that anyone who signs up can train to do dignified, socially useful work (the opposite of “bullshit jobs”) and be paid at a living
wage.

This would end unemployment and ensure good livelihoods for all, thus solving the immediate social crisis; but it would also allow us to
mobilize the labor that’s needed for an ecological transition. There’s a lot of work to be done toward this end, and it needs to be done quickly.
We need to ramp up renewable energy capacity by installing solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. We need to
retrofit houses to improve insulation and replace gas boilers. We need to restore degraded ecosystems, plant forests, and
rewild land. We need to expand public transportation networks. And we need to shift to regenerative farming methods to
restore soils and biodiversity, sequester carbon, and provide healthy, local food. All of this requires labor, and it’s
not going to happen on its own. We need a public program run both at a national level (for big projects like railways,
power lines, and national forests) as well as at a decentralized community level (to meet specific local needs).

With a public job guarantee program, we can transform existing unemployment centers from grim places that are designed to humiliate people
into hopeful, life-changing places that give people real skills and empower them to contribute to the most important collective projects of our
generation. By paying a living wage, we can not only put an end to poverty, but we can also set a standard
that the rest of the economy will have to follow. Private firms would have to pay living wages too—and would have to offer
equally enriching work—if they want to retain staff. Why would anyone agree to flip burgers at McDonald’s for
poverty wages when they could make a real living doing something more meaningful and important?

We can also use the job guarantee program to shorten the working week. If we set hours at 30 instead of the usual 40, private employers
would be under pressure to follow suit. Research has shown that shortening working hours is a powerful way to reduce emissions and has a
positive impact on people’s health and quality of life.

This approach would also strengthen the bargaining power of labor and therefore go a long way to reducing
inequality—another major crisis of our age. And reducing inequality helps us further reduce the need for perpetual
economic growth. Politicians say we need growth to improve people’s lives; but the problem isn’t that there’s a deficit of
income, but that it’s all captured at the top. By distributing existing wealth more fairly, high-income nations can
improve people’s lives right now—without any growth at all. A job guarantee program can help us get
there.
This is a much more rational, ecologically coherent way to address the present economic crisis. Trying to grow the economy to create jobs is
effectively busywork. Almost by definition, jobs created this way are in industries we don’t really need to expand, and expanding them, in turn,
creates pressures for needless consumption. A
job guarantee program does the opposite: It mobilizes labor and resources
around things that our communities—and ecology—actually need and which the private sector is unlikely or
unable to provide.

For those who support the idea of a basic income, there’s no reason such a policy could not be integrated in some form alongside a job
guarantee program. But the latter enables us to mobilize labor for an ecological transition, and it has the benefit of
being resoundingly popular. A YouGov survey found that 72 percent of people in Britain support a job guarantee program and even in the
United States, it polls as high as 69 percent. Better yet, it’s not expensive to implement because it partly pays for itself. Drawing on data from
the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Tcherneva reported that rolling out a job guarantee program in the United States would cost only
about 1 to 2 percent of its GDP, and it could be funded with the very same mechanism that governments are presently using to bail out
corporations and prop up stock markets: quantitative easing but this time for people and planet.

Having a job guarantee program would transform how we think about the economy. For too long, we’ve
been locked into believing that all sectors of the economy must grow all the time, regardless of whether
or not we actually need them and how much destruction they might cause. Why? Because jobs. We even find it difficult to
contemplate closing down things like coal mines because of the impact it might have on employment.
Indeed, this is why governments have come under pressure to bail out oil companies and airlines in the
middle of a climate emergency—to prevent the chaos of mass layoffs.

The job guarantee program takes this question off the table. It cuts through the Gordian knot. We know that if
we want to achieve a rapid transition to renewables, high-income nations need to reduce aggregate
energy use. This means having an open, democratic conversation about scaling down ecologically destructive and socially expendable parts
of the economy (things like fossil fuels, SUVs, McMansions, private jets, personal arms, advertising, and planned obsolescence). The job
guarantee program allows us to do this without worrying about the specter of unemployment and ensures
affected workers can retrain for jobs in a better, cleaner, fairer economy without skipping a beat.
In this sense, the job guarantee program is one of the single most
transformative policies that a government could implement. It
would liberate us from the straitjacket of growthism and free us to build an economy that’s organized
around human well-being and ecological regeneration rather than around perpetual expansion.

Aligning a job guarantee with explicit fiscal policy ensures the aff causes enduring
degrowth
Jackson ’17 [Tim; 2017; Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, UK, and
Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), was Economics
Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission for seven years; Prosperity without
Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, second edition, Routledge: New York, NY]
Government as a commitment device None of this is to suggest that governance for prosperity can be reduced to the community management
of common pool resources. David Harvey has suggested that a ‘political praxis’ should strive for conditions under which the ‘opposition
between private property and state power is displaced as far as possible by common rights regimes’. When a Marxist economist begins to talk
about dissolving ‘the class opposition between capital and labour’, there is clearly hope that the old ideological divisions are giving way to more
practical visions of governance.12 But even within a polycentric approach to governance, there is still clearly some role for an effective state –
for example, in establishing ecological limits and supporting common rights regimes; in using its power to
tax and spend to stabilise economic cycles and achieve full employment; and finally in helping to shift the social
logic that has us trapped in the ‘iron cage’ of consumerism (Chapter 6). This last claim is clearly contentious in a modern democracy. Policy
makers are (perhaps rightly) uncomfortable with the idea that they have any role in influencing people’s values and aspirations. But the truth
is that governments intervene constantly in the social logic of consumption, whether they like it or not. One of the most
dramatic ways in which this occurs is through social investment. Where (and how) governments invest has a huge
influence on infrastructure, on technology, on access and ultimately on lifestyle. Health, education and public transport are
archetypically public concerns, in which social investment is demonstrably vital.13 But government also plays a role in shaping
technological innovation, as the Italian-born economist Mariana Mazzucato has pointed out. It’s a common myth, she argues, to suppose
that innovation is best suited to the private sector. On a closer inspection, the reality is very different. Private capital doesn’t like risk and new
technologies are inherently risky. Mazzucato documents example after example where government investment was vital to commercial
success. ‘[E]very technology that makes the iPhone smart and not stupid owes its funding to both basic and applied research funded by the
State’, she points out.14 The influence of the state is not confined to technological innovation. A myriad different signals are
sent
out by the way in which education is structured, by the importance accorded to economic indicators, by
public sector performance indicators, by procurement policies, by the impact of planning guidelines on
public and social spaces, by the influence of wage policy on the work–life balance, by the impact of employment
policy on economic mobility (and hence on family structure and stability), by the presence or absence of product standards (on
durability for example), by the degree of regulation of advertising and the media, and by the support offered to
community initiatives and faith groups. In all these arenas, policy shapes and co-creates the social world. And
the idea that it is legitimate for the state to intervene in changing the social logic of consumerism is far less
problematic than is often portrayed.

US degrowth ensures global policy shift:

Outsized geopolitical influence AND the US is the lone ideological holdout
Brian Czech 21; founder of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State
Economy (CASSE), the leading organization promoting the transition from
unsustainable growth to a new economic paradigm, “Degrowth: A North American
Vision” May 2021, https://steadystate.org/degrowth-a-north-american-vision/
Europeans tend to accept the tenets of socialism more readily than Americans. While the reasons are numerous and
historic, the most overlooked one is that polities approaching or experiencing the limits to growth encounter a greater
need for socialism. Indeed, as limits to growth result in conflict and social strife, laws and institutions are
required to keep the peace. Many of these institutions are or resemble “socialist” developments. In the USA, for
example, we have social security, national forests, and Obamacare.

Whatever the reasons, the main point is that socialism is an especially European thing, reflecting to a large degree the
Marxist legacy in European politics.

In North America, there’s little quarter for Marxist ideology. It’s not a huge loss, either. Das Kapital may have been
paradigm-shifting in the 19th century—kudos to Marx—but it is not essential today for understanding the unsustainability of growth-at-all-costs
capitalism. More importantly, no one needs the haunting-spectre baggage that comes with the Communist Manifesto. Degrowth toward
a steady state economy in the States will have to be accomplished pursuant to the American
Constitution. The Constitution can handle it; it won’t abide a Marxist revolution.
Marx’s monument in Moscow: There for a reason. (Image: CC BY 3.0)

And if we can’t get America on board with de-growth—plus non-Marxist Canada, Brazil, and Australia among others—
how’s that going to work for the rest of the world?
This isn’t to discourage the Degrowth Marxists operating in Europe, but the key phrase is “in Europe.” Europe has that aforementioned history
of economic and political thought, including Marxist thought and debate from the days when it was fresh off the pages of the Manifesto.
Europeans can drink Marxist politics with a firehose. On the other side of the pond, though, and perhaps in the post-Soviet countries of eastern
Europe, advancing a de-growth agenda is difficult enough without bearing the mantle of Marxism.

Profanity and “Propaganda” — No Thank You

In North America there is nothing resembling the European Degrowth movement, and for the reasons sketched above,
probably never will be. The best we can hope for is “de-growth toward a steady state economy” with clear-
eyed focus on the macroeconomic goal; not a bad thing for sustainability purposes at least. The North American steady state would
be a mixed economy with regulated markets handling the allocation of rival and excludable goods such as
coffee cups, socks, and bicycles. Scale, or the size of the economy relative to its sustaining ecosystem, must be determined
through public policy and planning, informed by the best available science in ecological economics such as ecological
footprint accounting.

The plan demonstrates the feasibility of an alternative model

Alperovitz et al. ’16 [Gar; September; Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland,
College Park Department of Government and Politics, former fellow of King's College, Cambridge,
founding Fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics, former Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies,
former Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, served as a Legislative Director in the US House of
Representatives and the US Senate and as a Special Assistant in the US Department of State; “Systemic
Crisis and Systemic Change in the United States in the 21st Century,” http://thenextsystem.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/NSPOberlin-final.pdf]

The good news is that the

inability of traditional politics and policies to address fundamental challenges has fueled
an extraordinary amount of experimentation in communities across the United States and around the world. It
has also generated increasing numbers of sophisticated and thoughtful proposals that build from the bottom
and begin to suggest new systemic possibilities beyond the failed systems of the past and present. It is becoming possible to
bring together and extend elements of innovative thinking and realworld practice in key areas to define the underlying structural building
blocks of a range of alternatives capable of rebuilding the basis for democracy, liberty, equality, sustainability, and community in the United
States in the twenty-first century.

Unbeknownst to many, literally

thousands of onthe-ground efforts have been developing. These include
cooperatives, worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, and many little known municipal,
state, and regional efforts. These emerging economic alternatives suggest different ways in which
capital can be held in common by small and large publics. They include nonprofit community corporations and land trusts
that develop lowincome housing, as well as community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that have over $108 billion in assets under
their management.56 Employee ownership is also on the rise, involving three million more workers than are members of private sector unions.
57 A third of Americans belong to cooperatives, including credit unions that serve 107 million people and manage $1.3 trillion in assets, almost
as much as is managed by Citi. 58

In the public sector, local government economic development programs invest in local businesses, while municipal enterprises build
infrastructure and provide services, raising revenue and creating employment, diversifying the base of locally controlled capital. Public utilities,
together with co-ops, make up nearly 90 percent of all electricity providers and generate over 20 percent of America’s electricity.59 From
California to Alabama, public pension assets are being channeled into job creation and community development.60 Cities and states are looking
to the creation of public banking systems like that of North Dakota. Trusts that allow for public ownership and management of natural
resources provide revenue streams from capital, recalling the unjustly neglected ideas of James Meade.61 From parks and blood banks to
libraries and the internet, commons
management systems can provide an expanding zone of
decommodification to buffer against the market. Public trusts can be extended into additional domains, from dry land to the
electromagnetic spectrum, underwriting public services or issuing a citizen dividend. Community land trusts can ensure affordable housing and
prevent disruptive gentrification and speculative real estate bubbles. New public strategies encompass both democratic public ownership and
new planning capacities and functions.

Even experts working on such matters rarely appreciate the sheer range of activity. Practical
and policy foundations have been
established that offer a solid basis for future expansion. A body of hardwon expertise is now available
in each area, along with support organizations, and technical and other experts who have accumulated
a great deal of direct problem-solving knowledge.

The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if
critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and
only possible, option. Most
of the new projects, ideas, and research efforts have thus gained traction slowly
and with little national attention. But in the wake of the financial crisis, they have proliferated and
earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among advocates on the left. New terms have begun to gain
currency in diverse areas with activist groups and constituencies, an indication that the domination of
traditional thinking may be starting to weaken.

Thus we
encounter the sharing economy, the caring economy, the provisioning economy, the restorative
economy, the regenerative economy, the sustaining economy, the collaborative economy, the solidarity
economy, the gift economy, the resilient economy, the steady state economy, the new economy, and
many, many more. There are calls for a Great Transition, or for a reclamation of the Commons. Creative thinking by researchers and
engaged scholars is also contributing to the ferment, and policies at the state and local level can help move projects to much more powerful
scale and community-wide impact. Larger
scale strategic options that build on what is being learned locally are
beginning to be sketched as the basis for longer-term national strategies.
The press covers very little of this, but the various institutional efforts have begun to develop new strategies that suggest broader possibilities for change. One promising model builds on work in Cleveland, Ohio, where a linked group of workerowned companies has developed, supported
in part by the massive purchasing power of local hospitals and universities. These cooperative firms include a solar installation and weatherization company, an industrial scale ecologically advanced laundry, and a greenhouse capable of producing over three million heads of lettuce and
300,000 pounds of herbs a year.62

This effort, modeled in part on the 74,000-person Mondragón cooperative network in the Basque region of Spain, will create new businesses, as time goes on.63 However, its goal is not simply worker ownership, but the democratization of wealth and sustainable community building in
general in an extremely poor neighborhood of what was once a thriving industrial city. Linked by a community-serving non-profit corporation and a revolving fund, the companies cannot be sold outside the network; they also return ten percent of their profits to help develop additional
worker-owned firms and grow the network. Cities across the United States—and overseas as well—are looking to the Cleveland Model as an inspiration for their own community wealth building efforts.

A critical element of the overall sustainability strategy points to what is essentially a quasi-public community stabilizing planning model. Hospitals and universities in the area currently spend $3 billion a year on goods and services—none, until recently, purchased from the immediately
surrounding neighborhood. The Cleveland Model is supported in part by decisions of these substantially publicly financed institutions to allocate part of their procurement to the worker-coops in support of a larger community-building agenda. The taxpayer funds that support institutions
of this kind thereby do double duty by helping to support the broader community through the new localized purchasing arrangements. The same is true for a range of municipal, state, and other federal policies available to local businesses, including employee-owned firms. Note carefully
that such stabilization also undercuts the growth imperative—and suggests principles that can also be applied at higher levels.
Such approaches cannot claim to provide all the answers. But a
number of exploratory efforts emphasize fundamental
changes in underlying political-economic institutions. Developing detailed and sophisticated alternatives that can be refined
over time is a prerequisite if we are to stimulate a serious and wide-ranging debate around a broader menu of institutional possibilities for
future development than the narrow range of choices commonly discussed. The need for a major change of direction is increasingly obvious.
Efforts to cobble together “solutions” to today’s challenges commonly draw upon the very same institutional arrangements and practices that
gave rise to the problems in the first place. What is required is a self-conscious effort to face the fact that the system itself has to be changed
and a different kind of political economy created.

Although precisely what “changing the system” means is obviously a matter of debate, certain key points are clear. The new
movements
seek a cooperative, caring and community-nurturing economy that is ecologically sustainable, equitable, and
socially responsible—one that is based on rethinking and democratizing the nature of ownership at every level and, along with this,
challenging the growth paradigm that is the underlying assumption of all conventional policies. In short, these movements seek an
economy that gives true priority to people, place, and planet. Such an economy, so different from our own, requires a new vocabulary, beyond
the narrow choice between “capitalism” and “socialism.”

It’s easy to overestimate the possibilities. Emerging ideas and institutional explorations are limited compared with the power of Wall Street
banks and the other corporate giants of the American economy.

On the other hand, precisely because the existing structures of power have created enormous economic
problems and fueled public anger, the opportunity for a more profound shift exists. Unexpectedly rapid
change is not out of the question. We have already seen how, in moments of crisis, the nationalization of auto giants like
General Motors and Chrysler can suddenly become a reality. Such crises are likely to be repeated in the future, possibly with
more far reaching outcomes over time. When the next financial breakdown occurs, huge injections of public
money may well lead to the breakup or de facto takeover of major financial institutions. At the same time, various forms of larger
institutional experimentation—and pressure for further experimentation—are also clearly in the
cards.

Degrowth tethered to a job guarantee avoids economic collapse

Mark Diesendorf and Rod Taylor 23; Mark Diesendorf is Honorary Associate Professor in the
Environment & Society Group, School of Humanities & Languages at UNSW Sydney. Originally trained as
a physicist, he broadened out into interdisciplinary energy and sustainability research. From 1996 to
2001 he was Professor of Environmental Science and Founding Director of the Institute for Sustainable
Futures at University of Technology Sydney. His previous books include Sustainable Energy Solutions for
Climate Change (2014), Climate Action: A campaign manual for greenhouse solutions (2009),
Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy (2007); and Human Ecology, Human Economy: Ideas for
an ecologically sustainable future (co-editor, 1997). Rod Taylor is a freelance science and technology
writer, journalist and broadcaster. His book, Ten Journeys on a Fragile Planet (2020), has received strong
positive reviews and been the subject of numerous public appearances. He is co-editor of the new book,
Sustainability and the New Economics (Springer, 2022). His weekly science column and other articles
have been published in Fairfax and now Australian Community Media masthead papers for over 13
years. One of his columns was featured in Best Australian Science Writing (2018). He has also written
several pieces broadcast on national radio by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; The Path to a
Sustainable Civilization: Technological, Socioeconomic, and Political Change, “Transforming the
Economic System: Planned Degrowth” 2023, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0663-5

Planned degrowth is not the same as economic collapse, which can result from an ecological disaster,45 the failure of
neoclassical economics in a financial crisis, war, internal conflict, and poor governance, including economic and political exploitation.46 Planned
degrowth, as conceived by many ecological economics practitioners, is a planned program to reduce the use of energy,
materials and land, and to stabilise population, initially in the rich countries. The goal of planned degrowth is a
sustainable, steady state economy. To be truly sustainable, planned degrowth must increase human wellbeing while
protecting and restoring the environment, in other words, to foster sustainable prosperity. Social justice demands that
low-income countries must grow their economies and hence consumption. Therefore, high-income countries must
undergo planned degrowth.

In the saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “The rich must live more simply so that the poor can simply live”. The
following definition of planned degrowth by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel makes these considerations explicit: “Degrowth is a planned
reduction in less-necessary production in rich countries that is socially just and achieved in a democratic manner”.47

We have defined planned degrowth in biophysical terms, because that’s the environmental imperative. Of primary
importance is to develop a strategy to protect our life-support system and facilitate the wellbeing for all people (see
Sect. 7.5). The fate of GDP is of secondary importance.

Within a sustainable degrowth program, some industries will expand— for example, renewable energy, energy
efficiency, electric vehicles, public transport, bicycles, aged care, child care, public health facilities, housing, medical care, public
education and training, the arts, nature conservation, and plantation forestry in appropriate locations—while others will
contract—for example, fossil fuels, road-building, logging of native forests, high-GHG-emission agriculture, tobacco,
armaments for attack rather than defence, advertising and financial services. The net effect must be to reduce biophysical impacts and
this may in turn reduce GDP. In contrast, green growth would allow GDP and hence net biophysical
impacts to increase, albeit not as rapidly as business-as-usual growth.

To what extent does physical degrowth imply monetary degrowth, that is, a reduction in GDP? In the jargon of economics,
to what extent is there decoupling between monetary economic activity and physical economic activity and
hence environmental impact? Several studies have established that on average GDP and biophysical impact are coupled, although
there are exceptions observed over short periods of time in specific locations for particular environmental impacts.48 Clearly, all economic
activity depends on at least some physical activity and hence has some environmental impact. For example, education in a
school requires a building and equipment for teaching and learning. Writing a book nowadays requires a computer, internet connection and a
server. However, the total, life-cycle environmental impacts of school-teaching and bookwriting are generally much less than those of
owning and operating a private jet aircraft. Therefore, while shifting
to ‘greener’ economic activities will result in less
environmental impact (i.e. relative decoupling), there is no absolute decoupling. Therefore, green growth must be
rejected as insufficient. The Sustainable Civilization needs both greener economic activities and planned degrowth.
Environmental economist Peter Victor investigated scenarios for no-growth and monetary degrowth of the Canadian economy, defined in
terms of a reduction in GDP. Creating a macroeconomic model, Victor found that, as expected, simply reducing GDP resulted in increasing
unemployment. However, in scenarios where reducing GDP was combined with other policies—for example, working
time reduction, increased government expenditure on poverty reduction and health care, government investment in
green infrastructure, ending population growth—an economy with reduced GHG emissions, reduced unemployment and reduced
poverty can be achieved.49
An alternative approach was taken by Graham Turner, using a biophysical method, the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework, to model
physical degrowth in the Australian socio-economy.50 Stocks are quantities of physical items, such as land, livestock, people and buildings at a
point in time. Flows are the rates of change over a period, for example, net addition of agricultural land, new computers, births, deaths and
immigration. Although he used an entirely different method, Turner obtained similar results to Victor’s. Simone D’Alessandro and colleagues
constructed a simulation model for planned degrowth in France that combined environmental and radical social justice policies, together with a
reduction in consumption and exports. The environmental policies included greater energy efficiency, renewable energy and a carbon tax. The

social justice policies comprised a job guarantee, working time reduction and a wealth tax. Tey obtained a viable
sustainable economy at the ‘cost’ of substantial levels of public expenditure.51 While cost may be a political problem for
governments that follow the prescriptions of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism, it is not necessarily an economic problem
within the macroeconomics framework of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as discussed in the next section.
A JG ensures a successful transition:
1. PATH DEPENDENCIES. Absent a JG, a transition will manifest in bottom-up
movements that are unable to break the constraints of modern consumption.
Dr. Brandon Unti 20, Professor of Economics at Bellevue College, PhD in Economics and Social Science,
1/1/2020, “Money, Work, and Mass Extinction: Transformational Degrowth and the Job Guarantee,”
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/74003/Unti_umkc_0134D_11584.pdf?
sequence=1, DG = Degrowth, TD = Top-down, BU = Bottom-up

In this chapter, a different feature of the JG is emphasized and elaborated. Here the promise of the JG flows from the unique space it occupies in the dialectical

interplay of structure and agency. The

JG sits between centralized, top-down (TD), government intervention that
addresses macro-level constraints on one hand, and a de-centralized, bottom-up (BU) approach, on the
other hand, that empowers workers vis-à-vis capital, while expanding the realm of individual choice at
the micro-level. For this reason, it should appeal to both sides of the ongoing debate within the DG literature between TD and BU approaches (Cosme,
Santos and O'Neill 2017; Sekulova, Kallis, et al. 2013). These contending approaches may be summarized as follows:

 TD Approach: insists that centralized policies relying on government control and state power are
required to overcome structural constraints and path dependencies built into the institutional architecture of
contemporary capitalism.27

 BU Approach: insists that transformation must stem from the decentralization of power, increasing
autonomy for individuals and communities, and that only voluntary individual initiative can achieve a sustainable and equitable
transition.28

The JGsynthesizes these approaches, making use of the power of the central governments to expand the
array of options available to individuals to “exit” capitalist production and to empower community
autonomy through the re-localization of production and the strengthening of social connections. It is argued that in the
absence of a JG, individual choices (especially for those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy) are constrained by social and
economic institutions that close off possibilities for voluntary down-shifting and BU change.
The organization of the chapter is as follows. Section two considers the how the relationship between structure and agency is manifest in both the roots of crisis we
face and the debate between TD and BU advocates of the DG movement. The third section specifies and elaborates the unique position of the JG as a bridge
between structure and agency that addresses the arguments of both TD and BU advocates. The fourth section
demonstrates how and why this unique positioning of the JG enables it to serve as a platform for the realization of

a variety of key proposals and strategies for achieving degrowth. Here the argument is not that the JG alone can
achieve the diverse goals of DG, but rather that it can serve a vital function in catalyzing, supporting, or unlocking
diverse pathways envisioned by the movement.
II. Structure and Agency: Top-down or Bottom-up

DG takes aim at the triple-crisis (social, economic, and ecological) of our time. In this context, the “economic crisis” should not be narrowly understood in terms of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. By contrast, DG is generally consistent with the notion that “capitalism is the crisis,” or at least that as a historical process, it resembles an endless series of
crises (Buch-Hansen 2018).29 This means the “economic crisis” remains relevant even if the Great Recession appears to be subsiding.

The economic crisis is closely linked to the social crisis. Under this heading fall a number of interrelated phenomena including: (i) growing disparities of income and wealth, (ii) the destruction of traditional social-bonds via the extension of market values into ever more aspects of human existence (iii) the ongoing enclosure of commons in the forms of knowledge, public goods, and
ecosystem services, dispossessing individuals and communities of autonomy (iv) the disappearance of community and attendant relations of reciprocity, and (v) the atomization and alienation of individuals increasingly subject to competition, market relations, and a strict routine of work and spend.30

Finally, the ecological crisis highlights the urgency of DG. Even if existing social and economic institutions are somehow exonerated from their role in the above mentioned crises, there is no doubt that the current economic system directly threatens clearly defined ecological and planetary boundaries (O'Neill, et al. 2018; Magdoff and Foster 2011;Rockström, et al. 2009). If the triple
crisis is to be tackled, it is crucial to begin with an understanding of its causes. This section focuses specifically on the causes of the ecological crisis.

Identifying the drivers of the ecological crisis is necessary if the crisis is to be thwarted and effective policy measures are to be designed and implemented. Most important for present purposes is identifying whether the ecological crisis stems primarily from macro-level, social and economic structures, or alternatively from micro-level factors such as human nature or given consumer
preferences. This, in turn, should shape and direct the construction and implementation of policy.

There are a wide variety of competing explanations for our current environmental predicament. To simplify, these can be divided into two camps differentiated by their roots in contending social ontologies emphasizing either the primacy of individual agency or that of social structures. This basic difference in framing explanations of the crisis leads, in turn, to fundamentally divergent
conceptions of how the crisis can and should be addressed. The tension created by these contending frameworks manifests itself in the DG discourse as an unresolved debate between TD and BU pathways of transition (Boillat, Gerber and Funez-Monzonte 2012; Cosme, Santos and O'Neill 2017; Sekulova, Kallis, et al. 2013; Weiss and Cattaneo 2017).

The DG movement in identifying itself with a critique of, and alternative to, mainstream economics implicitly sides with a structuralist social ontology countering the extreme methodological individualism at the core of neoclassical theory. This is manifest in DG’s explicit rejection of utilitarianism (Romano 2015, 21) and mainstream arguments which hold that price adjustments in the
free market will: (1) bring about an optimal allocation of society’s resources that takes into account social welfare and environmental limits, and (2) spur the technological innovations that will enable us avoid any serious changes to the economic and social status quo (Hawken, Lovins and Lovins 1999; Simon 1981; Schor 2010, 72 -73). From this perspective, rational economic agents
autonomously pursuing their self-interest via the exercise of free choice will deliver us from ecological collapse. The explanation of our current predicament is that “artificial” interference with the “natural” proliferation of markets has hindered the commodification of everything, pre-empting the optimal allocation of resources that will result when the market encompasses all.

Despite the dominance of neoliberal policy since the 1970s, forms of public goods, commons, and non-market activity continue to evade enclosure. And goods and services that have not been assigned property rights and money values remain external to the market, leading to distorted price signals, misallocations and ultimately environmental problems. While those in DG, view
processes like commodification, the extension of markets, and the logic of profit as drivers of ecological crisis (K. Polanyi 2001; Blauwhof 2012; Kallis, Degrowth 2015; Magdoff and Foster 2011; Smith 2010; Sekulova, Kallis, et al. 2013). Neoclassicals view the same processes as the solution. Specifically, the internalization (i.e. commodification) of all resources is viewed as necessary for
prices to serve as accurate signals to market actors. One function of accurate price signals is to shift resources into appropriate channels of innovation that will produce the technology needed to overcome the contradiction between economic growth and environmental limits.31 It is argued this will lead to the dematerialization of growth, allowing capitalist accumulation and growth
to continue unabated despite environmental limits.

Overall the DG movement identifies ceaseless economic growth as the root cause of the ecological crisis. This is in turn begs questions about the drivers of growth and the nature of capitalism. Most (although not all) within DG conclude capitalism of any variety entails a growth imperative. And beyond simply the quantitative imperative of capitalist growth, there is an additional
criticism of the qualitative nature capitalist production that highlights the ways in which the logic of profit leads to the degradation of humans and the environment.

Although DG’s explicit critique of neoclassical economics points to a structuralist social ontology, the movement is a diverse coming together of perspectives that welcomes dialogue and debate. And in many cases, those identified with the movement lean in the direction of individual agency. This is at least implicitly the view of a large contingent that insists on individual,
autonomous, and voluntary pathways of transition (Elgin 2010; Elgin 2013; Deriu 2012; Muraca 2013; Ott 2012). Indeed, in terms of foundational principles and overarching themes the DG discourse has an anti-state/anti-centralization bent. By contrast, it promotes ideals of direct, participatory democracy, de-centralization, self-direction, horizontalism, and autonomy.
Despite these core themes, comprehensive analysis of degrowth policy proposals reveals that a majority actually call for TD initiatives that require some direct control by governments. Overall, these proposals acknowledge the need for high levels of state intervention. Cosme et al. who conduct the analysis note that this marks a contradiction in the discourse (Cosme, Santos and
O'Neill 2017, 327).

The case of Cuba’s rapid transformation following the collapse of the Soviet Union has become a focal point of this tension. While some look to Cuba as an example of how radical changes can be achieved quickly, others disparage the Cuban model as fundamentally at odds with DG due to its authoritarian foundations (Boillat, Gerber and Funez-Monzonte 2012; Borowy 2013;
Sekulova, Kallis, et al. 2013). For instance, while Sekulova et al., admit that Cuba offers an example of how a society can rapidly transition to lower levels of energy use and throughput, they also state that Cuba “is certainly not an example of sustainable degrowth in practice due to its top-down, authoritarian implementation” (2013, 3).

At the center of all these controversies in the DG literature is a contradiction between its
fundamentally structuralist ontological orientation when diagnosing the crisis, and its tacit
commitment to the primacy of individual agency when it comes to addressing it. This commitment to agency is expressed through core
principles of voluntary simplicity, autonomy, decentralization, and an individualistic politics of escape. As indications of the movement’s structuralist orientation
consider the following questions:

 “If
economic growth does not increase well-being, and is uneconomical and antiecological, what is it that
sustains it as a primary national objective?” (Kallis, Kerschner and Martinez-Alier 2012, 178)
 “If money doesn’t make us happy, why do we act as if it does?” (Ahuvia 2008)

 If more consumption doesn’t improve wellbeing, why do we continue to pursue higher levels of consumption? (J. Schor 1998)

 If it’s not fulfilling, “why does the global consumer class consume so much? Are we not free to step out of the rate race and simply consume less?”
(Alexander 2012, 1-2)

These questions raised again and again in the literature, as well

as the answers presented, point to structural forces,
institutions, systemic economic requirements, social norms, and cultural values that generate path
dependencies and lock us into ways of living which are clearly uneconomic, inhumane, and
unsustainable.32 Acknowledgement of these forces is precisely what leads to the call for radical transformations of existing social, political, and economic
institutions. However, many of the same calls cling to BU approaches that rely on individuals voluntarily and

spontaneously rejecting hegemonic social structures and adopting radical lifestyle changes on a
massive scale.

It should be noted that those advocating BU approaches are subject to the same charges of elitism and anti-
egalitarianism that they warn about with regard to TD “technocratic” policies. Many of the proposed
forms of individual “down-shifting” involve or require considerable resources–such as wealth, social
capital, and economic security— that are simply not available to everyone, least of all poor and working people. Kallis
et al. advance this criticism pointing out that many who have downshifted within the existing system are

“people who had a choice between simplicity and meaningless affluence,” while others face a much graver
choice, or none at all (Kallis, Kerschner and Martinez-Alier 2012, 174).

In this sense, calls

for BU approaches, contradict the acknowledged structural constraints that impinge upon
the ability of individuals to voluntarily opt out of the existing paradigm. Forces larger and more
powerful than individuals (especially those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy) enforce compliance with existing
norms through subtle and direct forms of domination. For example, a key element of the voluntary simplicity
model involves the choice to exchange money for time, reducing hours of paid employment and thus
income, consumption and throughput. Additional leisure time gained via the exchange allows
individuals to develop new skills, strengthen social bonds, cultivate community, increase civic
engagement and participate in self-provisioning. The problem is, all of this assumes the choice to
exchange (what must be surplus) income for time is an option. But for many, no such choice exists. First, because
they lack excess income and are trapped in an existing pattern of work by sheer economic necessity, insecurity,
or debt. Second, because workers are often are not in a position to make demands of their employers.

Third, even when that is an option, it may entail costs such as lost benefits or stigmatization among
fellow workers or employers. Access to healthcare currently prevents many who desire additional free time
from shifting to a part-time schedule or retiring. These are only the most urgent, directly felt aspects of structural “lock-in.” Others are
less obvious to individuals, but nonetheless generate powerful influences and dire consequences. One specific example involves consumption patterns.
A massive literature on the topic shows that individuals are not making “rational choices” according to standard
economic models.33 Instead of serving functional or material needs, consumption increasingly serves a
symbolic, communicative, social ends (Baudrillard 1998; Bourdieu 1984; Jackson 2005; Hamilton 2010; Hirsch 1976; Schor 1998; Veblen
1899). For those who exceed a threshold of basic needs, consumption patterns and particular goods are

used to create and re-create social identity (Hamilton 2010). Commodities signify our social position,
communicate our values, and identify us as members of this or that affinity group. As Jackson puts it, “We
consume in order to identify ourselves with a social group, to position ourselves within that group, to distinguish ourselves with
respect to other social groups, to communicate allegiance to certain ideals, and to differentiate ourselves from certain other ideals” (Jackson 2005, 31). In this

case, the choice to reduce one’s consumption of any particular good is not merely a matter of material
austerity. It can have powerful and damaging social effects in a cultural framework that places such a high
emphasis on the symbolic significance and ritualistic display. A reduction of consumption in this context may impact one’s

place or even acceptance within a particular group and may result in loss of identity or a diminished sense of self-worth. As Scheider et
al. note this means, “Environmental appeals to change consumption behavior implicitly ask people not merely

to change their behavior but change their sense of personal identity” (Scneider, Kallis and Marinez-Alier 2010, 514).
An enlightened critic of consumer culture may be able to identify these forces at play and even transcend them, to a degree, by establishing like-minded, anti-
consumerist, peer groups who deliberately socialize and communicate in ways that evade the efforts of mass marketing and the sway dominant culture.
Appeals to individuals to abandon consumer culture constitute a major thread of DG strategy, e.g.
voluntary simplicity (Elgin 2010), downshifting (J. Schor 1998) eco-communities (Cattaneo and Galvada
2010), co-housing (Lietaert 2010), and nowtopians (Carlsson 2008). However, this points back to problems of
privilege, exclusivity, and scale. Inoculating oneself to the ubiquitous advances of consumer culture, if
possible at all, is likely to be more feasible for those with more resources, access to education, and the time to develop a nuanced
cultural critique as well as an understanding of the sophisticated ways in which marketing works on our desires and insecurities.

Finally, there are the ways in which a voluntary reduction in consumption runs into macroeconomic
constraints. If, as proposed, reduced consumption is adopted on a wide enough scale to have a meaningful
impact on the environment, it would likely result in an economic crisis directly threatening
employment, income, and economic security across society. It is surprising how many economists appear to overlook this. It is
again the problem of effective demand and the paradoxical nature of a capitalist economy which
demands that we all keep using things up fast enough to keep ourselves employed.
In sum there is contradictory gulf between the structuralist ontology of the DG discourse on one hand, and its call for BU voluntary changes initiated by individuals
on the other. Here the problem emerges as a catch-22: either
an insignificant number of individuals downshift thus
precluding systemic change, or a significant number downshift leading to economic collapse. As many have
noted, given capitalism, voluntary DG is not an option, “capitalist economies can therefore either grow or collapse: they can never degrow voluntarily” (Kallis,
Kerschner and Martinez-Alier 2012) see also (Blauwhof 2012); (Magdoff and Foster 2011); (Smith 2010).

The way out of this trap is not the abandonment of the founding democratic, voluntary, principles of DG,
and their replacement by an authoritarian regime of TD policies that diminish the space for individual
autonomy and social deliberation. Rather it is some synthetic hybrid of both TD and BU strategies that
reinforce one another. As Cosme et al. explain TD and BU approaches need not be mutually exclusive,
“some proposals classified as top-down may have the goal of indirectly driving bottom-up action. An
example is the proposal to reduce working hours... Although many people might prefer to work fewer
hours this can only happen if institutions are reformed to give them this choice” (2017, 327). Muraca makes a similar
point arguing, “the path towards a more sufficient sober life-style requires a radical change in institutional

and social conditions if it is to be a feasible path for more than a few ascetic heroes” (2013, 153).

Such a hybrid model must take account of the risks and practical difficulties of relying on centralized
power of governments to achieve democratic and socially equitable goals. Indeed, it is reasonable to expect
governments like those in the U.S. today, to make every effort to prevent DG as it is a direct threat to the economic interests they serve (Speth 2012). At the same
time, a
synthetic approach must acknowledge the limitations of a purely BU approach that depends on
the spontaneous cohesion of increasingly atomized individuals around voluntary actions that directly
oppose the dominant norms and institutions that shape their “imaginary” and lived existence. Here a
critical weakness of the BU approach is the amount of time it will take for such a grass-roots
mobilization to reach a scale large enough to achieve system-wide transformation. For this reason, Kallis et al. raise
the question whether bottom-up social processes are “up to the scale and urgency of the challenge” (Kallis, Kerschner and Martinez-Alier 2012, 178).

A synthetic approach actually must confront the challenges presented by both BU and TD approaches at
the same time. After all, truly democratic initiatives that make use of centralized government power will only

materialize as the result of BU political pressure. And, once adopted, they must rely on continuous BU
pressure to restrain the dangerous tendency for centralized power to steer society away from
democratic goals. But if a synthetic policy is subject to the difficulties of both approaches it can also
claim the advantages of both. And the scope, scale, and speed, of the transformation required to face
the ecological crisis demand as much.

Growth increases poverty and hurts health

Jacobs and Podobny 7
(IA and MT, Universal Corporation: Alpha and Beta Division (Australia) and Australian Red Cross: Blood Service, Australia, University of South Australia, Australia, Do all benefit from economic
growth?, http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/36/2/470, 3/21/07, AD: 7/6/09) JC

records that not all American citizens have necessarily benefited

Whilst, economic growth has the potential to reduce poverty, history

from ‘economic growth reducing poverty by the elevation of real incomes’.20 Yates had identified that for American
working class persons, real hourly wages were lower in the 1990s than in 1970s25 and that between 1977 and 1990 the real family income
fell for the poorest 60% of all families but increased by a third for the wealthiest 20% of families .26 These
figures are more recently supported by Dooley and Prause who reveal that American males in the 25th percentile earned less in real terms in 1997 (a year of supposedly ‘good’ economic
times) than their 25th percentile peers did in 1967 (p. 3).27 To further illustrate that employment need not contribute to poverty reduction for all members of society, thereby better health for
all, Figure 1 illustrates the annual income of a full-time worker in America, single with two qualifying children, working at minimum wages and receipt of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) from

although working on a full-time basis, such families have not been able to
1970 till 2004.28 From this graph it is evident that

maintain living above the poverty level, even after receiving the EITC. This reinforces findings by others27,29 that not all
individuals in societies necessarily benefit from economic development, hence not all are able to benefit
from ‘economic status improvement’ as a result of (official) economic growth, consequently such
subpopulations would not experience better health (lower morbidity and mortality rates) as implied by Brenner (p. 1215).20 Given that not all
members of society necessarily benefit from economic growth, it is not surprising that there is widening in life expectancy between socioeconomic groups in
US,30,31 which reconciles the vast literature on socioeconomic status23,32,33 and supports Wilkinson's34 observation that ‘among the rich developed countries, health is indeed related to
relative rather than absolute income, and that, as a consequence, health may not be strongly related to economic growth’ (p. 257). As a result of such environmental factors operating in most
western countries, and given that inadequately employed workers may reflect similar health outcomes as the unemployed,35 future health-economy research should consider utilizing more
comprehensive labour market measures.

Growth necessitates exploitation and horrible living conditions of those marginalized

individuals.
Trainer 02
Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales [Ted, “If you want affluence, prepare for War,” Democracy & Nature: The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy, July, Vol. 8 Issue 2, p. 281-299]

The core elements in the response to the events of 11 September 2001 made by Western media, governments, and general publics was a stunned incredulity that anyone would want to do
such things. As the editors of Monthly Review put it, people respond as if ‘A benevolent democratic and peace loving nation was brutally attacked by insane evil terrorists who hate the US
…’.1 Consequently the acts could only be interpreted as irrational, unjustified, criminal and driven by fanaticism and/or insanity . This response derives from the dominant view of the way the
global economy works. This view assumes a world market economy in which a nation’s fate is rightly determined primarily by its capacity to compete according to the rules of the impartial

Rich nations are assumed to have achieved far higher living standards because they
and efficient global market place.

are further down the path to modernity, a path that all can and will follow, although many Third World
countries are severely handicapped by corruption, difficult environments and lack of resources. Rich countries
are taken to assist poor countries in their struggle to develop, giving aid and loans and bringing foreign investment. Because develop - ment is essentially seen in terms of increasing the
volume of production for sale it is understood that the more poor countries facilitate market forces, trade and investment, financial transfers with rich countries the faster development will

The problems poor countries experience are seen to be either due to difficult circumstances beyond
occur.

their control, such as poor soils, overpopulation , or corruption, or their technical and social
backwardness. The relationship is therefore regarded as being based on mutual benefit, and more commonly as noble in that rich countries are helping poor countries to
develop . This dominant, taken for granted view of the situation is almost entirely invalid. Following are some of the core elements in a more accurate representation of the way the world

Rich countries are taking most of the world’s resource production. Their per capita resource
works.

consumption is about 20 times the average of the poorest half of the world’s people. That they are consuming far more
than their fair share is evident in many measures; for example, to provide a North American lifestyle requires approximately 12 ha of productive land, but the per capital average amount of

The rich squander resources on affluent living standards and frivolous luxuries
productive land on the planet is only 1. 2 ha.

while billions live in poverty. Many of these resources are drawn from the Third World. Much of the productive capacity of the Third World has been allocated to the
production of commodities and manufactured goods for the benefit of the corporations and banks in the rich countries, who own the plantations and factories, and of the people who shop in

Very little of the benefit goes to the poor majority in the Third World. Shirt makers in
rich world supermarkets.

Bangladesh are paid 15 cents an hour. 2 In other words, the development that has taken place is almost totally inappropriate to the needs of most Third World
people. It has been development in the interests of the rich. The crucial point about ‘development ’ is to do with options foregone. It is easy to imagine forms of development that are far
more likely to meet the needs of people, their society and their ecosystems but these are prohibited by conventional /capitalist development. Needs would be most effectively met if people
were able to apply their available resources of land, forest, fisheries, labour, skill and capital to the production of basic items such as food and shelter. This is precisely what normal
conventional /capitalist development prevents, because it ensures that the available resources and the productive capacity are drawn into the most profitable ventures, which means mostly

Compare the capacity of a worker to feed his family on the 15

into producing relatively luxurious items for export to richer people.

cents an hour wage earned in a shirt factory, spent on food imported from a rich country, with the approximately four hours
per week required by a home gardener to produce all the vegetables a family requires.3 The global economy is
therefore an imperial system, one in which there is a net flow of resources and wealth from the poor to the rich and the resources the poor majority of people once had have been taken from

them and now produce mostly for the benefit of the rich few. These unjust distributions and the inappropriate development are primarily due to the market mechanism. Economic
activity and especially development are not determined by reference to the needs of humans, societies and

ecosystems. In the present global economy they are determined mostly by market forces. The inevitable result is that the rich get almost all
of the valuable resources (because they can pay most for them) and that almost all of the development that takes place is development of whatever rich people want
(because that is most profitable, i.e. will return most on invested capital). It is in other words a capitalist economic system and such a system ensures that the few who own most of

the capital (most is now owned by about 1% of the world’s people) will only invest it in venture s that are most likely to maximise
profits, and therefore in ventures which produce for those people with most ‘effective demand’, i.e. rich
people. No other forms of development are undertaken, hence much of the productive capacity of Tuvalu or Haiti lies idle because

people with capital can make more money investing some- where else. More importantly, no other forms of development are
conceivable. The dominant ideology has ensured that ‘development ’ cannot be thought of in any other way than as investing capital in order to increase the capacity to produce for sale in
the market.4 Thus the possibility that development might be seen predominantly as improving the quality of life, security, the environment and social cohesion, or that these things might be
achievable only if the goal of increasing the GDP is rejected, almost never occurs in the development literature, let alone in development practice. Development can only be thought of in
terms of movement along the single dimension to greater levels of business turnover , sales, consumption, exporting, investing and GDP. Thus conventional development is only the kind of

The inevitable
development that results when what is developed is left to be determined by whatever will most enrich those few with capital competing in a market situation.

result is development in the interests of the rich, i. e. those with the capital to invest and those with most purchasing power. The global
economy now works well for perhaps less than 10% of the world’s people, i. e. the upper 40% of the
people in rich counties, plus the tiny Third World elites. Conventional development is, in other words, a form of plunder. It takes
most of the world’s wealth, especially its productive capacity and allocates it to the rich few, and it takes much of this from billions of
people who are so seriously deprived that 1200 million people are malnourished and tens of thousands
die every day. Again the core point is that there are far better options; it is possible to imagine other forms of development in which the resources and the productiv e capacity of
Third World people are fully devoted to production by the people of the things they most urgently need.

Growth causes poverty and resource disparities

Trainer 07
Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales [Ted, “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society”, p. 125-159]

Markets do some things well and in a satisfactory and sustainable society there might be a considerable role for them, but only if carefully controlled. It is easily shown that the
market system is responsible for most of the deprivation and suffering in the world. The basic mechanisms are most
clearly seen when we consider what is happening in the Third World. (For detail see the web addresses in Note 2.) In general the enormous amount of poverty

and suffering in the Third World is not due to lack of resources. There is for instance sufficient food and land to provide for all. The
problem is that these resources are not distributed at all well. Why not? The answer is that this is the way the
market economy inevitably works. The global economy is a market system and in a market scarce things always go mostly to
the rich, e.g. to those who can bid most for them. That's why we in rich countries get most of the oil produced. It is also why more than 500 million tonnes of
grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year, around one-third of total world grain production,
while 1.2 billion people are malnourished and 830 million chronically hungry. Even more important is the fact that the market
system inevitably brings about inappropriate development in the Third World, i.e., development of the wrong industries. It will lead to the development of the most profitable industries, as

development of plantations and factories in the Third World that will produce
distinct from those that are most necessary or appropriate. As a result there has been much

things for local rich people or for export to rich countries. Their cities have freeways and international airports. But there is little or
no development of the industries that are most needed by the poorest 80% of their people. In a market economy
the Third World's productive capacity, its land and labour, are automatically drawn into producing for the benefit
of others. This is most disturbing regarding export crops. In many poor and hungry countries most of the best land is used to grow crops to
export to rich world supermarkets, while the plantation workers are among the world's most deprived
people. These are inevitable consequences of an economic system that produces whatever is most profitable to the few who control capital, as distinct from what is most needed by
people or their ecosystems. The Third World problem will never be solved as long as we allow these economic

principles to determine development and to deliver most of the world's wealth to the rich. Conventional economics basically defines development as economic
growth. Thus what is developed is little more than whatever promises to maximise the profits of those who have capital to invest, i.e., transnational corporations and banks. These

institutions never invest in the production of the things most needed in the Third World, such as cheap
basic food, clean water and housing for the poorest. Their investment puts Third World land and labour into supplying rich-world super markets. The
large amount of productive capacity a poor wuntry has is therefore devoted to enriching others, or left idle. In other words development has been highly inappropriate. Obviously it would be
far better for people in Bangladesh who are paid 15c an hour to make shirts for export if they could put that time and energy into local farms and firms to produce basic necessities for

themselves. Our rich-world affluence and comfort are built on massive global injustice. Look at the labels on the goods we buy. How much
would we pay if the workers who produced them received a satisfactory wage? What would we pay for coffee if most of the land producing it was transferred to growing food for hungry
people? Few people in rich countries seem to understand that they could not have their high "living standards" if the global economy was not enabling them to take far more than their fair

One
share of world wealth and to deprive Third World people. We can go to super markets to buy the coffee from land that should have been producing food for Third World people.

billion people live in appalling conditions primarily because we are taking their wealth and gearing their
land and labour to supplying our supermarkets. (This is not the only causal factor of course.) For these reasons, conventional Third World development
has to be seen as a form of legitimised plunder. (Goldsmith, 1997, Chossudovsky, 1997, Rist, 1997, Schwarz and Schwarz, 1998.) These processes and effects are not accidental or unwitting.

The global economy functions as an

They are the outcome of conscious, deliberate policy. We must recognise that the rich countries have and control an empire.

empire which the rich countries run mostly for their own benefit, resorting to the use of power and
repression when necessary to keep Third World countries to the sorts of policies the rich want. Consider firstly
the brazen hypocrisy of the rich countries. They insist that Third World countries should eliminate subsidies to exporters, yet the rich countries pay hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to
rich world agricultural exporters every year. Rich countries insist on freedom for capital to go where it wishes to invest in the Third World, but there is no question of labour from the Third
World being free to work wherever it likes in the rich countries. They inflict draconian conditions on indebted poor countries but there is no question of these being applied to the most highly
indebted of all countries, the USA. Then there are the "Structural Adjustment Packages" which force Third World governments to give transnational corporations maximum freedom to take

over their economies? Ultimately there is the support of dictatorial and brutal regimes. The rich countries assist client
states in the violent repression of those people who object to the economic injustice enriching us. They
enable and engage in terrorism, they invade and attack and kill thousands of innocent people , in order to ensure
that regimes and regions keep to the sorts of policies that suit the rich countries. This intervention used to be described as countering "communist subversion" but is now more

likely to be masked as "humanitarian intervention" and as countering terrorism.3 Thus reflecting on the Third World problem makes clear how
grossly unsatisfactory and unjust the world market system is. It allows investment, jobs and incomes to flow to where the most profit can be made, ignores the rest, and

allocates the Third World's scarce resources to the rich few. It deprives the majority of a fair share. It draws the productive capacity the poor once had into producing for the rich, it uses

up Third World resources at negligible benefit to Third World people, and it devastates the ecosystems
of the planet, which cannot bid in the market.
Case
Solvency
 JG Solves Degrowth---2AC
1. PROFIT MOTIVE. A JG emphasizes best use-value exchange, capping consumption
and production while simultaneously decreasing aggregate demand.
Dr. Brandon Unti 20, Professor of Economics at Bellevue College, PhD in Economics and Social Science,
1/1/2020, “Money, Work, and Mass Extinction: Transformational Degrowth and the Job Guarantee,”
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/74003/Unti_umkc_0134D_11584.pdf?
sequence=1

Another possibility that emerges with the elimination of the profit motive and a slowing down of production is an
emphasis on quality and durability over quantity and marketability. In other words, JG work can be geared toward
producing the best use-value as opposed to the most exchange-value. Increasing the durability of
output is vital strategy for reducing rates of production and consumption because, by definition, goods of higher
durability are consumed (used up) more slowly. With a falling rate of (physical) consumption, the same stock
of useful goods can be maintained at a lower rate of production. As Boulding (1949) argues, confusion in economic theory
centered on the concepts of income and consumption has led to the belief that welfare is increased by maximizing production and consumption, “There is a very
general assumption in economics that income (or out-go) is the proper measure of economic welfare, and that the more income and out-go we have, the better. In
fact, almost the reverse is the case. Income consists of the value production: out-go is the value of consumption. Both income and out-go are processes involved in
the maintenance of the capital stock…it is the capital stock from which we derive satisfactions, not from additions to it (production) or subtractions from it
(consumption).”15 Thus, “the objective of economic policy should not be to maximize consumption or production, but rather to minimize it, i.e. to enable us to
maintain our capital stock with as little consumption or production as possible” (ibid. 79).16

Facing environmental limits, Boulding is right about what our objectives ought to be. However, the logic of production for profit dictates otherwise. It is true for
instance, that a house that never depreciated would be an improvement for its owner. The problem with producing durable goods in a monetary economy is that if
needs are met unemployment increases. Better to build houses that fall apart each year. But this where the JG comes in. If workers are guaranteed jobs then
increased durability, which lowers throughput, does not threaten employment.

Finally, the JG offers the potential for falling aggregate demand without falling employment. Suppose a JG
is in place and consequently the economy is operating at full employment. When a recession occurs investment,
output and employment in the private sector fall. However, the total volume of employment remains stable. Workers simply shift

from the private to the public sector. If as proposed by JG advocates, the JG wage is lower than the private sector wage, then aggregate
demand falls as the relative size of the JG sector grows.17 And if JG work is less productive than private sector work, aggregate output

also falls. The key here is that full employment is maintained during the recession even as aggregate demand falls. And falling output is consistent with full
employment so long as JG workers are less productive than private sector workers.

Thus far it has merely been shown that falling aggregate demand and output are consistent with full employment under a JG scheme. This will occur during a
recession given the traditional JG assumptions. However, over the cycle a JG may result in higher levels of aggregate demand and economic growth because the fall
of demand and output during a recession is less than it would be in the absence of the JG. Assuming that during the recovery phase of the cycle the JG pool shrinks
to zero, all gains in terms of reduced productivity will vanish and output over the cycle will be higher than would be the case without a JG. Moreover, if the JG
mitigates skill depreciation associated with unemployment and/or raises the productivity of workers re-entering the private sector through job training/placement,
this will further stimulate economic growth.1

Yet it is highly unlikely the private sector will absorb the entire JG pool during the recovery phase of the cycle as the private sector has a very poor track record of
achieving full employment. This implies that some reduction in productivity will be retained over the cycle. However, with respect to ecological limits, the problem is
that the economy will still be growing. And unless economic growth ceases to be a threat to the environment then growth must halt.19 This begs the question of
whether the JG can be used to purse the more radical objective of degrowth.

Elimination of the profit motive through a federal jobs guarantee guarantees the
prioritization of basic need.
Dr. Brandon Unti 20, Professor of Economics at Bellevue College, PhD in Economics and Social Science,
1/1/2020, “Money, Work, and Mass Extinction: Transformational Degrowth and the Job Guarantee,”
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/74003/Unti_umkc_0134D_11584.pdf?
sequence=1
III. A Common Cause: Unemployment and Ecological crisis

In order to address the problems of unemployment and ecological crises it is necessary to understand their
root causes. Marx (2000), Veblen (1965), and Keynes (1964) all identified the root of the economic problem in the
institution of production for a profit or more simply monetary production (Dillard 1980, 1987). This section explains how
and why the causes of the current ecological crisis can be traced to the same source.

The fundamental link between unemployment and ecological crisis is overproduction.5 And, overproduction as
noted by Marx and Keynes in particular, is a monetary phenomenon. Classical theorists denied the possibility of

overproduction on the basis of Say’s Law: supply creates its own demand. However, as Marx points out,
Say’s Law only holds in the context of a barter (i.e. non-monetary) economy. In a situation where individual producers
exchange commodities for commodities (C – C’), supply literally is demand. If money is introduced as a
medium of exchange (C – M – C’) the identity of supply and demand is broken, and the possibility of a crisis
of overproduction or insufficient aggregate demand emerges (Marx 2000).

In a capitalist economy the potential for crisis is inevitably realized because money is both the starting
point and aim of production (M – C – M’). The purpose of production is no longer use value (C’), but rather money profits (M’). Capitalists
own the means of production and therefore control production decisions. They must be willing to throw money into circulation to

hire workers and purchase raw materials if production is to take place. On the other hand, workers own
nothing but their labor power and remain at the mercy of capitalists. Whether or not social needs are being met, workers
cannot set production in motion. What is required is the belief on the part of capitalists that they will be able to realize profits through the future sale of output. If

capitalists’ expectations are grim, they can deny workers access to the means of production and the
result is involuntary unemployment.

Unemployment is the most obvious social contradiction of monetary production. In a society in which production is
geared towards profits (exchange value) and not needs (use value), the satisfaction of needs becomes a curse. Indeed, in a capitalist economy

meeting needs is merely a byproduct of making money profits. And when the system is too productive, profit expectations fall

off, resulting in poverty amidst plenty. This explains why massive quantities of resources are channeled into
the wasteful industry of need production (i.e. marketing and advertising) even as the basic needs of large portions of the population remain
unmet.

It should come as no surprise that an

economic system that operates without regard to human needs fares no better
when it comes to respecting environmental limits. If we ask why people who want to work are denied
employment the answer is simple. It is not profitable to employ them. If we ask why the destruction of
the planet continues unchecked the answer is likewise that it is not profitable to stop. So long as
production aims at the endless accumulation of money profits, the environment remains in serious peril (Blauwhof 2012; Foster 1999;
Harvey 2010; Klein 2014; Kovel 2002; Magdoff and Foster 2011; R. Smith 2010, 2011).

So, why must a capitalist economy always grow? The answer is not that we are failing to produce enough output to meet basic human needs. For example, US GDP
per capita in 2013 15 was over $53,000.6 Rather, the economy must grow so that capitalist can realize profits and workers can secure jobs.

The relationship between profits and employment reflects the fundamental conflict between workers and capitalists in a system of monetary production.
Economic growth is not directly in the interest of the majority of the population—at least not in the industrialized
North.7 Indeed, beyond environmental limits, growth is a threat everyone’s wellbeing. For the working class, growth is desirable only indirectly in so far as it
supports the security of employment. On the other hand, growth is the raison d'etre of the capitalist class. As Marx puts it, “Use value must therefore never be
looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what
[capitalists] aim at” (Marx 1947, 131). This is the basic condition of monetary production and the key to understanding both unemployment and ecological crisis.

Although the theory of effective demand emerges from an analysis of the short run, Keynes identifies the basic relationships between profits, employment and
growth. In
a monetary economy the level of employment depends primarily on the volume of investment;
investment is a function of profit expectations; and profits in the aggregate will only be realized if
investment is sufficient to ensure that the economy is growing.8 If the economy stops growing,
involuntary unemployment rises. To solve the problem of unemployment then, the government must ensure that aggregate demand is always
sufficient to maintain economic growth.
 Framework
Debate as a game is one that operates under a systemic approach that allows us to
conceive of alternative futures. The role of debate should be to conceptualize the best
schema for disrupting systems of Capitalistic structure using modes of Praxis. This
allows us to imagine worlds outside the confines of western sociality without
abandoning the “Real”.

Policy Making- The Affirmative promotes “real” The Weighing of impacts by allowing A future that
could feasibly happen. The Only question should be can it happen If yes than the focus on the debate
needs to be on the impact level while questions of solvency become less and less educational.