I recently participated in a panel put together by Boise State’s Hazard and Climate Resilience Institute as part of their Resource Nexus for Sustainability Grand Challenge. Together with 3 other economists (including the moderator), we met virtually to talk about the role of economics as a discipline for advancing the social goal of sustainability put in the context of the climate crisis. The name of the event was “Can economics help save the world?” (I’ll add the link to the video when it’s available.)
The discussion was pleasant, I think. Although to be honest, I can’t say I truly remember what went on. It was very dynamic and “real-time” in the sense that we tried addressing participant’s questions as they appeared in the chat–thus serving for a kind of authentically and beautifully chaotic episode of collective consciousness.
In preparation for the event, a few questions were distributed for panelists to organize their ideas around central topics chosen by the moderator. These questions were not easy and my answers to them kept evolving through the couple of weeks we had to prepare for the event.
So much of what I wanted to say may not have come across the way I wanted to or may not have been said simply by the very non-curated nature of live events. I want to post my evolving thoughts around these questions because the process of discovering those answers was truly edifying and spurred what felt like a moment of self-actualization. I’ll post them one at a time to keep things tractable, but I’ll add links to other reflections at the bottom of each commentary.
Without further ado, please join me in the discovery of some quite provocative questions put together for us by someone who genuinely was seeking to find new ideas and host a fun but illuminating discussion.
Q6: Is “green” growth possible? What are your views on the concept of a circular economy?
How not to use strong words? Green growth is an impossible fairy tale idea and it is also undesirable. We might as well call that green colonialism, green imperialism, green exploitation, green displacement and possible genocide of indigenous peoples, or green destruction of the environment.
Besides big words, I have a few concrete things to say. First, green growth is impossible. There’s no empirical evidence that we can achieve it. It relies on this thing called absolute decoupling which means, separating economic production from environmental resource use. It’s far stricter than efficiency, it means can we produce more stuff in absolute terms using less stuff in absolute terms, and that’s impossible, it goes against the first law of thermodynamics: the law of energy conservation*.
Second, pursuing “green growth” goals is undesirable because, given that we cannot decouple economic production from ecological resource extraction, “green growth” really means “green colonialism.” It will rely on extractive industries in the Global South or in the lands of indigenous communities.
I am from the country where the most environmental defenders are killed in the world. These are little guys against the large corporate interests driven by greed and justified/supported by energy transition policies in the Global North. I don’t think there’s going to be a green growth without widespread violations of human rights. There are geopolitical processes that take countries to exploit faster: like paying back debts. Debts that are determined in currencies not controlled by the local country. If we are going to measure the impacts of green growth, we need to look at the process of creating things green technologies. If the price reflects all those violations, you’ll see they’d be infinitely expensive.
* There’s the whole conservation of energy/ energy balance principle. The first law of thermodynamics. In a closed system, whatever resources we use, must end up somewhere and much of that is waste (because of the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy is produced when energy is used). We cannot grow forever, we’d be producing infinite waste—and in any case, we live in a closed system with limited resources. Even if we are super-efficient, where are we going to get the physical stuff to keep growing? The global South? The indigenous lands? That’s neocolonialism. And anyway, who said that growing forever is actually what we should be doing? What are we going to do when we reach 100% green technologies? 0-carbon emitting technologies? We are going to keep burning trees to open lands for soy and cattle, we are going to keep using industrial agriculture and continue depleting the Earth’s soils, we are going to have a green fleet with which to continue overexploiting the oceans. We are not going to solve anything in the end. Green growth cannot tackle the heart of the problem: our obsession with profit.
Why not all waste is recycled you ask? It’s because of the second law of thermodynamics. The whole entropy thing, the second law: as you put energy in a system, entropy is created: the things we produce, generate waste. You need to put energy to keep things organized, you need to add energy to recycle things and clean things and remove pollution. Creating civilization required energy. Fossil fuels prove that energy but create entropy: generate heat and cause climate change. Entropy increases.
laura villegas ortiz 