Degrowth needs to fix its image problem for the sake of the planet

The impact of the climate crisis is evident everywhere. Finance ministers are in Washington DC this week for the meeting of the International Monetary Fund in the wake of two devastating hurricanes in the US within a month, while parts of the Sahara have been flooded for the first time in half a century.

- Larry Elliott

Scientists attribute the number of extreme weather events to a planet that continues to get hotter as the result of rising greenhouse gases linked to human activity. Global temperature records are being broken every year and the idea that this can continue indefinitely is a fantasy.

As António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said on World Environment Day in June: "Our planet is trying to tell us something. But we don't seem to be listening."

Even so, the fantasy lives on. Last week, BP announced it was abandoning plans to cut fossil fuel production by 2030 and was cheered on by its shareholders for doing so. Businesses have picked up the message from governments that looking after the planet is currently a lower priority than higher growth - even though those two objectives are clearly incompatible if the growth comes at the cost of ever-higher concentrations of greenhouse gases.

Yet coming up with alternatives to the business-as-usual model is proving hard. Critiques of the status quo that come from the degrowth and post-growth movements have so far had little purchase on the political debate. In part, that's because the idea that more growth is good and less growth is bad is so entrenched. Governments assume that they become more popular when a growing economy raises living standards. Periods of weak activity, which is what most western countries have experienced in the past decade and a half, make governments even more relentless in the pursuit of growth.