Decouple from Carbon or Degrow the Economy
The world is burning, and the choice we face is increasingly clear.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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Every week – or, at least, every week for the last few months – I promise myself I’ll write a short Sunday instalment. Just one thought, I tell myself. Just one! And then – you know the rest.
So this week, I’m sticking to my promise. I have a single thought to share.
On Friday, US government scientists announced that July was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded; modern records stretch back to 1879. The global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.9C higher than the 20th-century average of 15.8C.
That news comes in the wake of the recent IPCC report, which said that human burning of fossil fuels has heated the planet to temperatures not seen for 125,000 years.
We’re all familiar with the spectre that haunts this moment. It is that of collapse. Not the literal end of the human story, but collapse into a kind of permanent afterworld.
Standing as we are in the shadow of that spectre, we face a choice.
There are some who believe the answer to global heating must come via new technologies. Under this view, our mission is to accelerate technological advance, and especially clean energy technologies, such that we emerge into a new world in which economic growth is decoupled from carbon.
This approach draws on ideas deep within modernity. That we humans can, by force of our reason, reshape the world to our own ends.
According to others, such a decoupling is impossible. Instead, they say, we must do something that runs against all our instincts as moderns: accept new limits. We in the Global North should work to make our economies smaller. Only in this way can we halt our journey towards planetary collapse.
The reality of global heating has exhausted the old conservative vs progressive framework that we use to structure our politics. The idea that we shouldn’t act on climate is most often found among those with what we call conservative political values. But the term has become darkly paradoxical: such inaction will conserve little of the natural world, or our historical inheritance.
One thread that runs through New World Same Humans is the search for a new structure. A framework that replaces conservative vs progressive, and makes sense of the moment we find ourselves in.
Increasingly, I wonder if the answer lies in decouple vs degrow.
You could argue for a strategy that sees us do a bit of both. Keep working on clean energy, and impose some modest limits. But even that is to devise a third way within the overarching polarity that is: decouple or degrow.
Where do you stand? As for me, I’ll admit that I don’t know which path we should take. All I’m sure about – at least, as sure as I can be – is that this is the question we must ask, and it has become unavoidable.
Decouple, or degrow? Technological acceleration and endless frontiers of growth, or the acceptance of new limits, and lives in the Global North that are likely to be smaller, less materially abundant, less global.
A complex question. And one I want to explore in the months ahead. But for now, I’ve already strained the limits of my promise: a single thought.
Thanks for reading; I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday,
David.