No. Degrowth is neither viable nor necessary. Reducing genuinely wasteful consumption can help, but widespread degrowth is misguided and harmful. It rests on the misconception that consumption itself is the problem, when the real culprit is the emissions and pollution tied to how we currently produce. We do not have to choose between a healthy economy and a healthy planet, because technology is already driving rapid decarbonization through cleaner, cheaper, more efficient options in energy, transportation, and agriculture, powered by market forces rather than enforced cuts to consumption.

Degrowth also means impoverishment. Shrinking the economy destroys value, stifles innovation, and undermines the very resources needed to deploy clean technologies. Prosperity is the condition that gives societies the energy, resources, and stability to reshape the world in necessary ways, and history shows that economic collapse reliably brings strife and conflict, with concern for the environment among the first casualties of instability. The COVID-19 pandemic, the worst recession in living memory, involved only a temporary 3.5% drop in global output. A permanent reduction on the scale degrowth would require is almost unimaginable.

Even setting the consequences aside, degrowth does not work as a climate solution. Cutting consumption cannot drive emissions to zero, since the only way to do that is to decouple the benefits of production from their harms entirely, and it does nothing about the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Solving the crisis requires actively removing carbon and shifting to clean production.

Fortunately, the same disruptive technologies transforming energy, transportation, and food will make cheap, efficient carbon removal possible at a global scale, and that work grows cheaper still as the emerging labor disruption drives the cost of robotic labor toward zero. By accelerating solar, wind, and batteries (SWB), autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) and Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS), and precision fermentation and cellular agriculture (PFCA), we can build a more prosperous society while dramatically reducing our environmental impact and repairing past damage.

Explore the evidence...

• Our full, dedicated case for why degrowth fails as an environmental strategy is the book The Degrowth Delusion.

• For the argument in short video form, see "Degrowth Says You Need to Be Poorer to Save the Planet. We Say That's Nonsense" and "Degrowth Is a Truly Terrible Idea".

• Why prosperity, rather than austerity, is the precondition for solving environmental problems is covered in Brighter Episode 9, "Why Optimism Matters", and Episode 2, "Mistakes in Conventional Thinking".

• Why active carbon removal is essential, and how it grows more affordable as clean energy and robotic labor costs fall, is detailed in Box 3, "Going Below Zero Emissions" (p.23) of Rethinking Climate Change, with the labor angle in Brighter Episode 14, "What Robots Mean for the Environment", and our humanoid robotics insights.

Witness the transformation

The three disruptions of energy, transportation, and food can eliminate more than 90% of net greenhouse gas emissions within 15 years, using technologies that already exist and win on cost alone. This is the fastest, cheapest, and most complete path to solving climate change, and it is already underway.

The deeper shift goes beyond stopping the damage. The same technologies that mitigate emissions will make it affordable, for the first time in history, to draw down the carbon already in the atmosphere and oceans and to restore ecosystems at scale. We are moving from an extractive system that depletes the planet toward a creation-based system that can heal it.

This is the largest reduction in humanity's ecological footprint in history, and it is a choice. The regions, industries, and communities that recognize it early and act decisively will capture the greatest economic, social, and environmental rewards, and help lead the world toward a restored and abundant planet.

Learn more about the implications of the disruptions of energy, transportation, and food and agriculture in Rethinking Climate Change.