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Europe Daily Bulletin No. 13125

21 February 2023
Contents Publication in full By article 32 / 32
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No. 077

Ralentir ou périr

Timothée Parrique, researcher in ecological economics at the University of Lund in Sweden, sets out to explode the dogma of unstoppable growth. It is also the myth of limitless economic growth in a world in which resources are destined to run out. The growth of human activities necessarily exhausts the world in which we live and on which we depend. We are hurtling towards apocalypse and the finance gurus, harking the false prophets of GDP, are urging us to go even faster. We need more, more, always more. More accumulation of capital, more consumption, more productivity… More work and for longer. We are witnessing a crisis of the biosphere. We can see its effects, but, taken in by popular neoliberal opinion, we have lost the ability to gauge the urgent need to do something about it. We make do with banning a certain pesticide here,single-use plastic glasses or cotton buds there, even though staggering quantities of micro-plastics are building up everywhere, even in our own bodies. And mesmerised as we are, we have even lost the ability to grasp that there are some French citizens who still dare to oppose the social regression that consists of a pensions reform dictated by accounting software that leave no room for human considerations.

Parrique’s work has the merit of highlighting the harmful effects of growth for mankind and the environment. He proposes options to break out of this mindset, making the case for a model of de-growth based on reducing the eco-systemic footprint and satisfying basic needs. It would be delightful to be able to believe in a happy society of this kind, based on the common good, volunteer work and sharing, but the history of humanity features many unfortunate chapters of this kind of experiment, all of which have produced utopias that are destined to failure. And although he tries hard to guard against it, his radical narrative takes on elements of totalitarianism from time to time, such as when he argues in favour of banning meat. He no doubt feels that he avoids this kind of criticism by introducing many levels of collective negotiation, to promote participation while going a long way to breathe new life into our old democracies, but he forgets that the nature of a totalitarian system lies not so much in the structure of governance and the concentration of powers as in the interference of the system in all spheres of public and private life and the restrictions it places upon individual liberties.

The Earth is overheating, societies are burning out and GDP is becoming a kind of ‘countdown to the end of the world’. This countdown is particularly to be feared as it is exponential: the greater the size of the economy, the faster it grows. A growth rate of 2% a year will double the size of the economy every 35 years. We are on board a bus travelling at full speed yet accelerating towards a cliff top and we hail every kilometre per hour faster we go as progress. It is ludicrous. Maximising growth is tantamount to pressing the accelerator in the certain knowledge that we will eventually perish in a full social and ecological collapse”, writes Parrique (our translation throughout).

All voluntary activity (in the case of France, this represents 20 million volunteers active in sport, culture, the environment, humanitarian affairs, etc.: Ed), without which our society would be paralysed, is excluded from GDP”, the author states in his criticism of this aggregate that excludes an entire range of economic (in that they meet a need) and social activities. The same applies to the value of production of the public sphere, which continues to be “greatly underestimated”: “health, education and public transports are accounted for in GDP, but only at the level of some of their costs in accountancy terms (mainly salaries)”. GDP draws no distinction between what is desirable and what is harmful: “a grossly overpaid trader, who speculates on food, ‘produces” more in GDP terms than a primary school assistant on the minimum wage. The voluntary work of activists scrambling to protect a forest has no accountancy value, while the salaried jobs of the people who come to cut it down constitute value creation within the meaning of national accountancy. A private and more expensive education system, like that of the United States, will represent a greater contribution to GDP than a comparatively cheaper but far more efficient public system, such as that of Finland”. And although the latest IPCC report stresses that GDP is established “without deducting the exhaustion and degradation of natural resources”, this does not match up to reality: “forest fires will even ultimately increase GDP with the expenses incurred in putting them out. Although the environmental heritage is impoverished as a result, added value will have been created via the wages of the firefighters and sales of fuels for their trucks”.

The so-called ‘green’ growth celebrated by governments and international agencies has never in fact been anything of the kind. The truth is that (…) the impression of a significant uncoupling of GDP and the ecological burden is an illusion for at least five reasons: only carbon is discussed; imports are not included in calculations; the decoupling is often only temporary; the orders of magnitude are by no means sufficient; it is not taken into account that this greening is partially explained by low rates of GDP growth”, Parrique explains. In reality, there is no miracle solution: “we can decarbonise the economy with low-carbon energies, electric vehicles, bio-fuels, but at the cost of impact elsewhere. The construction of wind farms affects soils, bio-fuels encourage deforestation, the production of solar panels of a capacity of 1 MW requires nearly 3000 tonnes of water, the construction of a dam destroys habitat rich in biodiversity, the construction of an electronic car takes six times more materials than an internal-combustion car and renewable energies call for ten times more metal per kilowatt-hour than their fossil-based counterparts”. The author also observes that a study of February 2022 June that just 1% of the experts working for the German Federal Environment Agency still believe in green growth. The latest IPCC report, moreover, describes green growth as a “misleading” and “wrong-headed” strategy, which is “based partly on faith”.

Recycling, again, has its limits: even in the case of the most modular smartphone, just 30% of the materials can be recycled, the author notes, going on to add that in 2018, “the countries of the European Union recycled just 38% of waste from electric and electronic equipment, just 8% more than in 2013”. For single-use plastics, the recycling rate at planetary level fluctuates between 10% and 15% and has done for 30 years, Parrique, stresses, adding that “of the 130 billion tonnes of plastic waste generated in 2019, 35% were incinerated, 31% went into landfill and 19% were discarded directly in nature”. He also explains that improvements in recycling have been more than cancelled out by the increase in replacement rates: by way of example, the expected service life of a computer was eleven years in the 1990s compared to four years today.

Having demonstrated the absurdity of the obsession with growth and the relative pointlessness of decoupling and green growth strategies, the author argues in favour of a transitional managed policy of de-growth: “the monetary segment of production would shrink following the abandonment of some of the harmful or pointless activities that comprise it. The majority of advertising activities, for instance, would go (Parrique does not explain how, if that were the case, activities that are heavily reliant upon it, such as the press and culture, would be paid for: Ed), as would many financial services and a considerable portion of the economy of services, which would end up de-commodified”. In addition to this shrinking of the economy, it would also be slowed down. “We would continue to produce and consume some of our goods, but at a much slower rate and on different terms”. This would be driven, firstly, by frugality (opting no longer to do certain things, such as travelling by aeroplane, buying SUVs, designing financial products, selling pesticides) and, secondly, by abstinence (choosing to limit certain things: keeping the same telephone for longer, holidaying closer to home). Among 380 specific de-growth measures, Parrique cites the following in particular: ceasing “large pointless and imposed projects” (airports, motorways, shopping centres, car parks, new nuclear power stations, football stadium, data centres, certain high-speed railway lines, etc.), the creation of eco-systemic sanctuaries, the introduction of national well-being budgets, a progressive tax on financial wealth adjusted on the basis of carbon footprint, banning certain forms of advertising, extending product guarantees and criminalising built-in obsolescence, closing down airlines and rationing airline tickets (in early July 2022, the Dutch government announced that the number of flights into Amsterdam-Schiphol would be cut by 11% compared to 2019; in January 2022, Switzerland introduced a progressive tax on flights of between 28 and 112 euros depending on the distance and class), reducing working hours and guaranteeing employment, rolling out the use of free software, a tax on road transport, a prohibition on high-frequency trading, dismantling large businesses, including “too big to fail” banks, a requirement of non-profit in strategic sectors such as education, research and health, or limiting salaries to four times the guaranteed minimum income.

In the wake of this transitional de-growth phase, Parrique imagines a post-growth society based on “stationary eco-socialism” ensuring that needs were met and guaranteeing welfare on the basis of responsible planning. “To know what people need, they have to be able to express themselves. We need to be able to discuss together what should be produced and how to do it, thereby extending the democratic process to the economy as a whole (…). The basic idea is there: to unite a direct, deliberative, participative local democracy with a representative democracy at the highest levels, such as the level of the region, country or of a group of countries”, he writes, adding that “at local level, ‘tables de quartier’ (neighbourhood tables) like the ones that have existed in Montréal since the 1960s to devise collective projects between neighbours. At the level of the commune, ‘participative budgets’ in the tradition of those that emerged in Porto Alegre in the 1980s to decide how to divide up the municipal budget. At the level of businesses, multi-stakeholder co-management councils to get local players (workers, users, local authorities, neighbourhood, etc.) involved in the decision-making process of selecting products, production technologies and prices. At the level of the country, regular citizens’ conventions and citizens’ initiative referendums. At international level, transnational assemblies such as the African Union, the European Union and the United Nations”. However, Parrique offers no suggestion as to what the role of the last of these should be.

In this context, “the model of the company with a purpose would replace the concept of the profit-making company”, he states, explaining that “instead of granting the presumption of benevolence to all companies in the name of a so-called ‘freedom of undertaking’, the logic would be turned on its head: in order to exist, a company must have a purpose (and a specific plan to achieve it) that would chime with local and population needs. There would be a dual democratic selectivity of production in terms of end purposes (what do we wish to produce?) and means (how do we wish to produce?). This would not only prevent wasting precious resources to satisfy minority or non-essential needs, but it would also discourage socially and/or ecologically harmful production techniques”. He adds that “to move quickly, we can say that a good way of democratising the economy would be to transform all private companies into cooperatives. Production cooperatives, cooperatives of users, such as procurement cooperatives, and allocation cooperatives, such as credit cooperatives”.

Dismissing de-growth without really making any effort to understand it is tantamount to refusing to participate in one of the most important debates of our time”, Parrique argues, rightly calling for a “rethink of our relationship with the world, with nature, with justice, in the sense of life and well-being”. This debate is necessary and helpful in waking people up from the “fairytale of eternal economic growth”, to borrow a phrase from Greta Thunberg’s speech to the United Nations Climate Action Summit held in New York in September 2019. But this must be done in such a way as to avoid being taken in by different illusions! ( Olivier Jehin)

Timothée Parrique. Ralentir ou périr – L’économie de la décroissance (available in French only). Seuil. ISBN: 978-2-0215-0809-3. 312 pages. €20,00

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