Is Green Growth Possible?

By Jason Hickel, G. Kallis. New Political Economy, 2019

1,481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df80eb282c979258557be6398a34e185207d98ee

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Citations in the corpus

The Circular Economy at a Crossroads: Technocratic Eco-Modernism or Convivial Technology for Social Revolution? (2020, background): “…can stretch the limits of the law, but only until a certain point – profits increases remain limited by energy availability (Bonaiuti 2018), access to raw materials (Hickel and Kallis 2019), social unrest (Hirsch 1977), and environmental degradation (Kallis, Schneider, and Martinez-Alier 2010).”
Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use: An international analysis of social provisioning (2021, background): “…1967; O’Neill, 2015); the ecological unsustainability of growth (Dietz and O’Neill, 2013; Jackson, 2017; Kallis, 2018, 2019); and the incompatibility of growth with limiting global warming to 1.5 ◦C (Antonakakis et al., 2017; D’Alessandro et al., 2020; Haberl et al., 2020; Hickel and Kallis, 2020).”
Welfare systems without economic growth: A review of the challenges and next steps for the field (2021, background): “5 global warming target set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement (Hickel and Kallis, 2019).”
Industry 4.0: How it is defined from a sociotechnical perspective and how much sustainability it includes – A literature review (2020, background): “0 to a decoupling of growth and resource consumption is also missing (see (Hickel and Kallis, 2019) for a more general critique on that matter).”
Greening extractivism: Environmental discourses and resource governance in the ‘Lithium Triangle’ (2021, neutral): “Mineral extraction has increased steadily over the last decades (Hickel and Kallis, 2019).”
A Green New Deal without growth? (2021, background): “5 °C and 2 °C if the economy keeps growing (Hickel and Kallis, 2019).”
A factor of two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short of Paris-compliant pathways (2020, neutral): “The very high mitigation rates derived in this paper cast signi ﬁ cant doubt on the extent to which carbon price mechanisms and green growth strategies reliant on decoupling of emissions from economic growth (Hickel & Kallis, 2019) can deliver on the Paris Agreement.”
The limits of transport decarbonization under the current growth paradigm (2020, background): “This supports the difficulties that many have observed to decoupling economic, energy and GHG growth [158,159]”
A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping (2020, background): “…tests (Stern 2011, Kalimeris et al 2014), more useful conclusions could be drawn from a sound theoretical understanding of energy conversion chains, their relation to economic activity and the role of efficiency gains and rebound effects (Stern 2011, Hickel and Kallis 2019, Parrique et al 2019).”