ogc163
Superstar
For half a century, we've been told that we had to embrace degrowth in order to save our planet. We haven't listened. Around the world, human populations and economies have continued to grow at rates that are virtually unprecedented in the history of our species.
Over that same span, an unexpected and encouraging pattern has emerged: The world's richest countries have learned how to reduce their footprint on Earth. They're polluting less, using less land and water, consuming smaller amounts of important natural resources, and doing better in many other ways. Some of these trends are also now visible in less affluent countries.
However, many in the degrowth movement seem to have trouble taking yes for an answer. The claims I just made are widely resisted or ignored. Some say they’ve been debunked. Of course, debate over empirical claims like these is normal and healthy. Our impact on our planet is hugely important. But something less healthy is at work here. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some voices in the conversation about the environment seem wedded to the idea that degrowth is necessary, and they are unwilling or unable to walk away from it, no matter the evidence.
But evidence remains a powerful way to persuade the persuadable. The one thing everyone agrees on is that the last 50 years have been a period of growth, not degrowth. In fact, growth has never been faster, except for the 25-year rebuilding period after World War II. The population and economic growth rates of the past half-century are remarkably fast by historical standards. Between 1800 and 1945, for example, the world’s economy grew less than 1.5 percent per year, on average. Between 1970 and 2019, that average increased to almost 3.5 percent.
It's natural to assume that, as this growth continued, every nation’s planetary footprint would only increase. After all, as people become more numerous and prosperous they consume more, and producing all the goods and services they consume uses up resources, takes over ecosystems, and generates pollution. The logic seems ironclad that our gains have to be the environment’s losses.
Easing Pollution, Not Exporting It
In some important areas, however, a very different pattern emerged after 1970: Growth continued, but environmental harm decreased. This decoupling occurred first with pollution, and first in the rich world. In the US, for example, aggregate levels of six common air pollutants have declined by 77 percent, even as gross domestic product increased by 285 percent and population by 60 percent. In the UK, annual tonnage of particulate emissions dropped by more than 75 percent between 1970 and 2016, and of the main polluting chemicals by about 85 percent. Similar gains are common across the highest-income countries.
How were these reductions achieved? The two possibilities are cleanup and offshoring. Either rich countries figured out how to reduce their “air pollution per dollar” so much that overall pollution went down even as their economies grew, or they sent so much of their dirty production overseas that the air at home got cleaner. The first of these paths reduces the total burden of human-caused pollution; the second just rearranges it.
The evidence is overwhelming that rich countries cleaned up their air pollution much more than they outsourced it. For one, a great deal of air pollution comes from highway vehicles and power plants, and rich countries haven’t outsourced driving and generating electricity to low-income ones. In fact, high-income countries haven't even offshored most of their industry. The US and UK both manufacture more than they did 50 years ago (at least until the Covid-19 pandemic sharply reduced output), and Germany has been a net exporter since 2000 while continuing to drive down air pollution. The rest of the world has been exporting its manufacturing pollution to Germany (to use degrowthers’ phrasing), yet Germans are breathing cleaner air than they were 20 years ago.
Rich countries have reduced their air pollution not by embracing degrowth or offshoring, but instead by enacting and enforcing smart regulation. As economists Joseph Shapiro and Reed Walker concluded in a 2018 study about the US, “changes in environmental regulation, rather than changes in productivity and trade, account for most of the emissions reductions.” Research about the cleanup of US waters also concludes that well-designed and enforced regulations have successfully reduced pollution.
It is true that the US and other rich countries now import lots of products from China and other nations with higher pollution levels. But if there were no international trade at all, and rich countries had to rely exclusively on their domestic industries to make everything they consume, they’d still have much cleaner air and water than they did 50 years ago. As a 2004 Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy study summarized: “We find no evidence that domestic production of pollution-intensive goods in the US is being replaced by imports from overseas.”
The rich world’s success at decoupling growth from pollution is an inconvenient fact for degrowthers. Even more inconvenient is China's recent success at doing the same. China’s export-led, manufacturing-heavy economy has been growing at meteoric rates, but between 2013 and 2017 air pollution in densely populated areas declined by more than 30 percent. Here again the government mandated and monitored pollution declines and so decoupled growth from an important category of environmental harm.
Prosperity Bends the Curve
China's progress with air pollution is heartening, but it's not surprising to most economists. It's a clear example of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in action. Named for the economist Simon Kuznets, EKC posits a relationship between a country's affluence and the condition of its environment. As GDP per capita rises from an initial low level, so too does environmental damage; but as affluence continues to increase, the harms level off and then start to decline. The EKC is clearly visible in the pollution histories of today's rich countries, and it's now taking shape in China and elsewhere.
Also consider air pollution death rates around the world. As the invaluable website Our World in Data puts it, “Rates have typically fallen across high-income countries: almost everywhere in Europe, but also in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and South Korea and other countries. But rates have also fallen across upper-middle income countries too, including China and Brazil. In low and lower-middle income countries, rates have increased over this period.”
The EKC is a direct refutation of a core idea of degrowth: that environmental harms must always rise as populations and economies do. It's not surprising that today's degrowth advocates rarely discuss the large reductions in air and water pollution that have accompanied higher prosperity in so many places around the world. Instead, degrowthers now focus heavily on one kind of pollution: greenhouse gas emissions.
The claims made are familiar ones: that any apparent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries are due to offshoring rather than actual decarbonization. Thanks to the Global Carbon Project, we can see if this is the case. GCP has calculated “consumption-based emissions” for many countries going back to 1990, taking into account imports and exports, yielding the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in all the goods and services consumed in each country each year.
For several of the world's richest countries, including Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and the US, graphs of consumption-based carbon emissions follow the familiar EKC. The US, for example, has 22reduced its total (not per capita) consumption-based CO2 emissions by more than 13 percent since 2007.
These reductions are not mainly due to enhanced regulation. Instead, they've come about because of a combination of tech progress and market forces. Solar and wind power have become much cheaper in recent years and have displaced coal for electricity generation. Natural gas, which when burned emits fewer greenhouse gases per unit of energy than does coal (even after taking methane leakage into account), has also become much cheaper and more abundant in the US as a result of the fracking revolution.
To ensure that these greenhouse gas declines continue to spread and accelerate, we should apply the lessons we've learned from previous pollution reduction success. In particular, we should make it expensive to emit carbon, then watch the emitters work hard to reduce this expense. The best way to do this is with a carbon dividend, which is a tax on carbon emissions where the revenues are not kept by the government but instead are rebated to people as a dividend. William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics in part for his work on the carbon dividend, and an open letter advocating its implementation in the US has been signed by more than 3,500 economists. It's an idea whose time has come.
How We Learned to Lighten Up
Tech progress and price pressure aren't just leading to the demise of coal. They're also causing us to exploit the planet less in many other important ways, even as growth continues. In other words, EKCs are not just about pollution any more.
A good place to start examining this broad phenomenon of getting more from less is US agriculture, where we have decades of data on both outputs—crop tonnage—and the key inputs of cropland, water, and fertilizer. Domestic crop tonnage has risen steadily over the years and in 2015 was more than 55 percent higher than in 1980. Over that same period, though, total water used for irrigation declined by 18 percent, total cropland by more than 7 percent. That is, over that 35-year period, US crop agriculture increased its output by more than half while giving an area of land larger than Indiana back to nature and eventually using a Lake Champlain less water each year. This was not accomplished by increasing fertilizer use; total US fertilizer consumption in 2014 (the most recent year for which data are available) was within 2 percent of its 1980 level.
The three main fertilizers of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus (NKP) are an interesting case study. Their total US consumption (once other uses in addition to agriculture are taken into account) has declined by 23 percent since 1980, according to the United States Geological Survey. Yet some within the degrowth movement find ways to argue that these declines are also an illusion. These materials thus serve to clearly illustrate the differences in methodology, evidence, and worldview between ecomodernists like myself and degrowthers.
The USGS tracks annual domestic production, imports, and exports of NKP and uses these figures to calculate “apparent consumption” each year. Consumption of each of the three resources has declined by 16 percent or more from their peaks, which occurred no later than 1998. This seems like a clear and convincing example of dematerialization—getting more output from fewer material inputs.
As I argue in my book More From Less, dematerialization doesn’t happen for any complicated or idiosyncratic reason. It happens because resources cost money that companies would rather not spend, and tech progress keeps opening up new ways to produce more output (like crops) while spending less on material inputs (like fertilizers). Modern digital technologies are so good at helping producers get more from less that they're now allowing the US and other technologically sophisticated countries to use less in total of important materials like NKP.
Forest products provide another clear example of dematerialization in the US. Total annual domestic consumption of paper and paperboard peaked in 1999, and of timber in 2002. Both totals have since declined by more than 20 percent. Could these be mirages caused by offshoring that’s not properly captured? That’s highly unlikely, as the country is now onshoring more than it’s offshoring. The US has been a net exporter of forest products since 2009 and is now the world’s largest exporter of these materials.
Is the US economy also dematerializing its use of metals? Probably, but it’s hard to say for sure. The USGS tallies do show dematerialization in steel, aluminum, copper, and other important metals. But these figures don’t include the metals contained in imports of finished goods like cars and computers. America is a net importer of manufactured goods, so it could be that we’re using more metal year after year, but that much of this consumption is “hidden” from official statistics because of imports of heavy, complex products. However, my estimates indicate that this is extremely unlikely and that the country is in fact now reducing its overall consumption of metals.
Over that same span, an unexpected and encouraging pattern has emerged: The world's richest countries have learned how to reduce their footprint on Earth. They're polluting less, using less land and water, consuming smaller amounts of important natural resources, and doing better in many other ways. Some of these trends are also now visible in less affluent countries.
However, many in the degrowth movement seem to have trouble taking yes for an answer. The claims I just made are widely resisted or ignored. Some say they’ve been debunked. Of course, debate over empirical claims like these is normal and healthy. Our impact on our planet is hugely important. But something less healthy is at work here. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some voices in the conversation about the environment seem wedded to the idea that degrowth is necessary, and they are unwilling or unable to walk away from it, no matter the evidence.
But evidence remains a powerful way to persuade the persuadable. The one thing everyone agrees on is that the last 50 years have been a period of growth, not degrowth. In fact, growth has never been faster, except for the 25-year rebuilding period after World War II. The population and economic growth rates of the past half-century are remarkably fast by historical standards. Between 1800 and 1945, for example, the world’s economy grew less than 1.5 percent per year, on average. Between 1970 and 2019, that average increased to almost 3.5 percent.
It's natural to assume that, as this growth continued, every nation’s planetary footprint would only increase. After all, as people become more numerous and prosperous they consume more, and producing all the goods and services they consume uses up resources, takes over ecosystems, and generates pollution. The logic seems ironclad that our gains have to be the environment’s losses.
Easing Pollution, Not Exporting It
In some important areas, however, a very different pattern emerged after 1970: Growth continued, but environmental harm decreased. This decoupling occurred first with pollution, and first in the rich world. In the US, for example, aggregate levels of six common air pollutants have declined by 77 percent, even as gross domestic product increased by 285 percent and population by 60 percent. In the UK, annual tonnage of particulate emissions dropped by more than 75 percent between 1970 and 2016, and of the main polluting chemicals by about 85 percent. Similar gains are common across the highest-income countries.
How were these reductions achieved? The two possibilities are cleanup and offshoring. Either rich countries figured out how to reduce their “air pollution per dollar” so much that overall pollution went down even as their economies grew, or they sent so much of their dirty production overseas that the air at home got cleaner. The first of these paths reduces the total burden of human-caused pollution; the second just rearranges it.
The evidence is overwhelming that rich countries cleaned up their air pollution much more than they outsourced it. For one, a great deal of air pollution comes from highway vehicles and power plants, and rich countries haven’t outsourced driving and generating electricity to low-income ones. In fact, high-income countries haven't even offshored most of their industry. The US and UK both manufacture more than they did 50 years ago (at least until the Covid-19 pandemic sharply reduced output), and Germany has been a net exporter since 2000 while continuing to drive down air pollution. The rest of the world has been exporting its manufacturing pollution to Germany (to use degrowthers’ phrasing), yet Germans are breathing cleaner air than they were 20 years ago.
Rich countries have reduced their air pollution not by embracing degrowth or offshoring, but instead by enacting and enforcing smart regulation. As economists Joseph Shapiro and Reed Walker concluded in a 2018 study about the US, “changes in environmental regulation, rather than changes in productivity and trade, account for most of the emissions reductions.” Research about the cleanup of US waters also concludes that well-designed and enforced regulations have successfully reduced pollution.
It is true that the US and other rich countries now import lots of products from China and other nations with higher pollution levels. But if there were no international trade at all, and rich countries had to rely exclusively on their domestic industries to make everything they consume, they’d still have much cleaner air and water than they did 50 years ago. As a 2004 Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy study summarized: “We find no evidence that domestic production of pollution-intensive goods in the US is being replaced by imports from overseas.”
The rich world’s success at decoupling growth from pollution is an inconvenient fact for degrowthers. Even more inconvenient is China's recent success at doing the same. China’s export-led, manufacturing-heavy economy has been growing at meteoric rates, but between 2013 and 2017 air pollution in densely populated areas declined by more than 30 percent. Here again the government mandated and monitored pollution declines and so decoupled growth from an important category of environmental harm.
Prosperity Bends the Curve
China's progress with air pollution is heartening, but it's not surprising to most economists. It's a clear example of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in action. Named for the economist Simon Kuznets, EKC posits a relationship between a country's affluence and the condition of its environment. As GDP per capita rises from an initial low level, so too does environmental damage; but as affluence continues to increase, the harms level off and then start to decline. The EKC is clearly visible in the pollution histories of today's rich countries, and it's now taking shape in China and elsewhere.
Also consider air pollution death rates around the world. As the invaluable website Our World in Data puts it, “Rates have typically fallen across high-income countries: almost everywhere in Europe, but also in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and South Korea and other countries. But rates have also fallen across upper-middle income countries too, including China and Brazil. In low and lower-middle income countries, rates have increased over this period.”
The EKC is a direct refutation of a core idea of degrowth: that environmental harms must always rise as populations and economies do. It's not surprising that today's degrowth advocates rarely discuss the large reductions in air and water pollution that have accompanied higher prosperity in so many places around the world. Instead, degrowthers now focus heavily on one kind of pollution: greenhouse gas emissions.
The claims made are familiar ones: that any apparent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries are due to offshoring rather than actual decarbonization. Thanks to the Global Carbon Project, we can see if this is the case. GCP has calculated “consumption-based emissions” for many countries going back to 1990, taking into account imports and exports, yielding the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in all the goods and services consumed in each country each year.
For several of the world's richest countries, including Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and the US, graphs of consumption-based carbon emissions follow the familiar EKC. The US, for example, has 22reduced its total (not per capita) consumption-based CO2 emissions by more than 13 percent since 2007.
These reductions are not mainly due to enhanced regulation. Instead, they've come about because of a combination of tech progress and market forces. Solar and wind power have become much cheaper in recent years and have displaced coal for electricity generation. Natural gas, which when burned emits fewer greenhouse gases per unit of energy than does coal (even after taking methane leakage into account), has also become much cheaper and more abundant in the US as a result of the fracking revolution.
To ensure that these greenhouse gas declines continue to spread and accelerate, we should apply the lessons we've learned from previous pollution reduction success. In particular, we should make it expensive to emit carbon, then watch the emitters work hard to reduce this expense. The best way to do this is with a carbon dividend, which is a tax on carbon emissions where the revenues are not kept by the government but instead are rebated to people as a dividend. William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics in part for his work on the carbon dividend, and an open letter advocating its implementation in the US has been signed by more than 3,500 economists. It's an idea whose time has come.
How We Learned to Lighten Up
Tech progress and price pressure aren't just leading to the demise of coal. They're also causing us to exploit the planet less in many other important ways, even as growth continues. In other words, EKCs are not just about pollution any more.
A good place to start examining this broad phenomenon of getting more from less is US agriculture, where we have decades of data on both outputs—crop tonnage—and the key inputs of cropland, water, and fertilizer. Domestic crop tonnage has risen steadily over the years and in 2015 was more than 55 percent higher than in 1980. Over that same period, though, total water used for irrigation declined by 18 percent, total cropland by more than 7 percent. That is, over that 35-year period, US crop agriculture increased its output by more than half while giving an area of land larger than Indiana back to nature and eventually using a Lake Champlain less water each year. This was not accomplished by increasing fertilizer use; total US fertilizer consumption in 2014 (the most recent year for which data are available) was within 2 percent of its 1980 level.
The three main fertilizers of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus (NKP) are an interesting case study. Their total US consumption (once other uses in addition to agriculture are taken into account) has declined by 23 percent since 1980, according to the United States Geological Survey. Yet some within the degrowth movement find ways to argue that these declines are also an illusion. These materials thus serve to clearly illustrate the differences in methodology, evidence, and worldview between ecomodernists like myself and degrowthers.
The USGS tracks annual domestic production, imports, and exports of NKP and uses these figures to calculate “apparent consumption” each year. Consumption of each of the three resources has declined by 16 percent or more from their peaks, which occurred no later than 1998. This seems like a clear and convincing example of dematerialization—getting more output from fewer material inputs.
As I argue in my book More From Less, dematerialization doesn’t happen for any complicated or idiosyncratic reason. It happens because resources cost money that companies would rather not spend, and tech progress keeps opening up new ways to produce more output (like crops) while spending less on material inputs (like fertilizers). Modern digital technologies are so good at helping producers get more from less that they're now allowing the US and other technologically sophisticated countries to use less in total of important materials like NKP.
Forest products provide another clear example of dematerialization in the US. Total annual domestic consumption of paper and paperboard peaked in 1999, and of timber in 2002. Both totals have since declined by more than 20 percent. Could these be mirages caused by offshoring that’s not properly captured? That’s highly unlikely, as the country is now onshoring more than it’s offshoring. The US has been a net exporter of forest products since 2009 and is now the world’s largest exporter of these materials.
Is the US economy also dematerializing its use of metals? Probably, but it’s hard to say for sure. The USGS tallies do show dematerialization in steel, aluminum, copper, and other important metals. But these figures don’t include the metals contained in imports of finished goods like cars and computers. America is a net importer of manufactured goods, so it could be that we’re using more metal year after year, but that much of this consumption is “hidden” from official statistics because of imports of heavy, complex products. However, my estimates indicate that this is extremely unlikely and that the country is in fact now reducing its overall consumption of metals.
