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ABSTRACT
The notion of green growth has emerged as a dominant policy response to climate change and ecological breakdown. Green growth theory asserts that continued economic expansion is compatible with our planet’s ecology, as technological change and substitution will allow us to absolutely decouple GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions. This claim is now assumed in national and international policy, including in the Sustainable Development Goals. But empirical evidence on resource use and carbon emissions does not support green growth theory. Examining relevant studies on historical trends and model-based projections, we find that: (1) there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth, and (2) absolute decoupling from carbon emissions is highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5°C or 2°C, even under optimistic policy conditions. We conclude that green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies.
Acknowledgement
Kallis's research benefited from support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under the “María de Maeztu” Unit of Excellence (MDM-2015-0552) and the COSMOS (CSO2017-88212-R) grant.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on Contributors
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He writes on global inequality, political economy and ecology.
Giorgos Kallis is an ICREA professor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology at the Autononomous University of Barcelona, an ecological economist and political ecologist writing on limits to growth.
Notes
1 Steffen et al. (Citation2015) have identified biosphere integrity and climate change as the core planetary boundaries meriting most concern.
2 Wiedmann et al. (Citation2015) come up with a similar figure, 70 billion metric tons in 2008.
3 This trend was driven primarily by growth in industrial and construction materials, primarily in Asia. It is not clear, however, how much of this material use has been consumed domestically and how much has been exported for consumption abroad.
4 The UNEP model suggests that decoupling can be achieved at a max rate of 1 per cent per year. Therefore GDP growth would have to be less than 1 per cent per year in order for resource use to be reduced.
5 Even while CO2 emissions had plateaued, methane emissions were growing, by more than 30 per cent between 2002 and 2014 (Turner et al. Citation2016).
6 The trend looks somewhat more promising if we use PPP dollars instead of constant USD, but PPP calculations are unreliable and tend to overstate the purchasing power of poor countries.
7 ‘Climate Scoreboard’, Climate Interactive.
8 Another 9 scenarios include some BECCS, but not to the point of achieving negative emissions.
9 PWC Low Carbon Economy Index 2017.
10 150 GW were installed in 2017; the IRENA scenario requires that 350 GW be installed per year on average to 2050. This is feasible with existing growth rates (from 2016 to 2018 solar and wind capacity grew by 8 per cent per year), but IRENA do not specify the trajectory necessary for 2°C. Jacobson and Delucchi (Citation2011) indicate that 700 GW need to be added per year to 2030–4.6 times the existing rate. This requires a growth rate of 25 per cent per year on existing rates.
11 Global energy intensity improved by 1.3 per cent per year from 2000 to 2010, and 1.8 per cent per year from 2010 to 2015.
12 Jacobson and Delucchi (Citation2011) claim that global energy demand will decline by 36 per cent (relative to business as usual by 2050) as fossil fuels are replaced by wind and solar, which means that demand in 2050 will be less than demand in 2012.
13 This is the figure that Anderson used in various public talks in 2018. In 2019 he confirmed a range of 10–15 per cent per year, inpersonal correspondence.
14 Using the equation: Rate of necessary decoupling = GDP growth rate/(1 – Rate of necessary emissions reductions).
15 Decoupling slowed from an average of 2.3 per cent per year in the first half of the period to an average of 1.6 per cent in the second half, according to the World Bank, Databank, CO2 emissions (kg per 2010 US$ GDP).
16 Personal correspondence, 2018. Also, it is worth noting that Grubler et al state that LED does not incorporate rebound effects; they acknowledge that this is a relevant shortcoming of the work.
17 For a detailed discussion of this question, see Ekins (Citation2012).