Energy Climate and Sustainability

13b: Degrowth

work@mishavelthuis.nl

Thu 8 May 2025

Today

Degrowth

Recap

So far …

Conspicuously absent …

Aligned with the status quo

The target of the far-right #1

The target of the far-right #2

But also the target of Hickel…

Similar concerns
with the status quo ...

Mainstream climate policies are madness: local reductions of emissions are undone by increases elsewhere.

This system only serves the elite.

People are hopeless, anxious, long for the past.

Mainstream climate policies are madness: local reductions of emissions are undone by increases elsewhere.

This system serves the elite.

People are hopeless, anxious, long for the past.

... leading to two very
different futures

This is a dog-eat-dog world. There is nothing you can do about that. Let's at least make sure we end up on top. Loosers will lose, the weak will die, what can you do.

Let's make sure our own elites end up on top.

Let's return to a time when men were men, women were women, and minorities knew their place (and knew how to humble and grateful for being allowed to live in our land).

To stop the capitalist rat race to the abyss, we need to step out of it collectively.

We need to disposses the elites because they fuel a machine that destroys the planet.

Let's build (and return to) a more egalitarian, locally rooted self-sufficient society.

Capital is picking
the far-right

Hickel - Why growth-based

ecomodernism is not the way

For starters

But also:
growth does
not improve lives

View Larger Map

Easterlin paradox

Also: positional goods

Growth for innovation?

The wrong indicator?

The right indicator
for the wrong thing

A degrowth
alternative

Equality instead
of growth

For a long time, growth has been an alternative to (the difficulties of) wealth redistribution.

Hickel: then wealth redistribution can also be an alternative to growth.

It will be a better alternative:

It will actually produce welfare.
It will protect the planet.

Hickel: "We are made to choose between human welfare or ecological stability – an impossible choice that nobody wants to face. But when we understand how inequality works, suddenly the choice becomes much easier: between living in a more equitable society, on the one hand, and risking ecological catastrophe on the other. Most people would have little diﬀiculty choosing."

Underlying is of course the idea that the inequality is undeserved: basically the historical differentiation through violence and crime (primitive accumulation) + the reinforcing feedback loops of capitalism.

But the reinforcing feedback loop can maybe work both ways:

Less inequality will improve people's bargaining position, and therefore their ability to fight for more equality?

Equality produces
wellbeing

There is the diminishing marginal utility of money: the more you have, the less an extra euro contributes to your wellbeing. Redistribution creates utility.

Inequality creates:

Lower levels of social trust
Higher levels of crime
Less social mobility

Link: "The happiness literature empirically shows that individuals are happier not necessarily if they live in a country with high economic growth, but most important if they live in cohesive societies, with more equality (not only in terms of income), less poverty, higher social capital, and jobs for everybody."

Link to image on slide.

How? For example a cap on wage ratios (between lowest and highest).

Hickel: "Better yet, we could do it on a national scale, by saying that incomes higher than a given multiple of the national minimum wage would face a 100% tax. Imagine how quickly the income distribution would change."

Hickel about wealth:

"… nobody ‘deserves’ this kind of wealth. It’s not earned, it’s extracted: from underpaid workers, from cheap nature, from rent-seeking, from political capture and so on. Extreme wealth has a corrosive eﬀect on our society, on our political system, and on the living world. We should have a democratic conversation about this: at what point does hoarding become destructive and unacceptable? $100 million? $10 million? $5 million?"

The environmental
cost of inequality

First of all: as we have seen, inequality fuels to the struggle for positional goods that boosts resource usage (and therefore environmental destruction) without improving our quality of life.

But also: euros spent by higher income groups have a higher CO2 intensity. Redistributing that euro to lower income groups means that it is "spent" in a less carbon intensive way.

How Hickel puts it: "The richest 1% emit thirty times more than the poorest 50% of the human population. Why? It’s not only because they consume more stuﬀ than everybody else, but also because the stuﬀ they consume is more energy-intensive: huge houses, big cars, private jets, frequent ﬂights, long-distance holidays, luxury imports, and so on. And if the rich have more money than they can spend, which is virtually always the case, then they invest their excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive."