A reply to Anthony Signorelli’s post “What would it take to degrow the economy?”

Regarding where degrowth might lead us, there is much disagreement. Images generated in DALL-E2 by the author.

This is a response to Anthony Signorelli’s excellent post “What would it take to degrow the economy?” As I tried to get my thoughts together over where I agreed and disagreed with Anthony, I found my response growing, so I decided to post this as a separate article on my own feed and reference it in a comment to Anthony’s post.

Anthony’s essay provides a very good answer to a very important question: “can we really expect humanity, especially those of us residing in the relatively rich Global North, to voluntarily adopt a policy of degrowth in order to avoid climate catastrophe?” And the answer, as Anthony articulates well, is “no, we cannot.” Anthony sees this as a problem for advocates of degrowth. I see it as a problem for our civilization writ large.

What are the consequences of continuing along a path of refusing to acknowledge that degrowth awaits us, whether we choose it or not? The likely climate consequences of our continued pursuit of economic growth are well known: we will continue emitting GHGs, we will continue heating the planet, we will continue experiencing catastrophic climate disasters (possibly including irreversible tipping points), and the global economy will collapse anyway.