Matthias Schmelzer writes about the importance of degrowth vis-a-vis “green growth” in a new article “‘Green Growth’ Won’t Prevent Climate Collapse. ‘Degrowth’ Might” in World Politics Review:
The most fundamental problem with the dominant approaches to climate change mitigation, such as green growth, is that they conceive of technological innovation, commercial activity and the tweaking of market rules as win-win solutions. However, these approaches fall short of delivering the fast emissions reductions necessary to halt climate breakdown.
In fact, they often create new social and ecological crises by merely shifting the problems—from carbon emissions to a biodiversity crisis, from the Global North to the Global South, and from energy production to land destruction. For example, the mining of rare minerals used in the manufacture of electric vehicles, the land-hungry production of biofuels to power aviation, and the production of hydrogen in African countries to power European industries, have all created new environmental problems or exacerbated existing ones.
