At a recent event at the EU Parliament, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tipped her hat to the degrowth movement. Giving the opening remarks at the Beyond Growth Conference on May 17th, she referred to the Club of Rome’s 1973 report, The Limits of Growth, when she said:
I today want to concentrate on one point that the report got right beyond any doubt: The clear message that a growth model centred on fossil fuels is simply obsolete.
Though willing to admit that fossil fuels could no longer serve as the main means of economic propulsion, von der Leyen was not, the news outlet Euractiv noted, ready to unseat GDP growth as a primary indicator of the health of European society, even in front of a receptive audience.
As a counterpoint, she said, “We know that our children’s future depends not only on GDP indicators but on the foundations of the world we build for them,” and touted the Green Deal, “decarbonisation,” and the move to a “circular,” “social market economy” as the brave and necessary step the last generation didn’t, but should have, taken.
Referring to long-standing critiques of GDP growth models, she concluded,
Economic growth is not an end in itself. That growth must not destroy its own foundations. That growth must serve people and future generations. This is exactly what you will discuss today and during the next two days.
Indeed, answers to the question of whether the world can stand unlimited GDP growth, or whether technological solutions can be found to make production efficient enough to outpace resource use perpetually, have been tossed about for 50 years. In other words, those who think unlimited expansion is possible are opposed by members of the degrowth movement who advocate for shrinking production and consumption, and, ultimately, the modern economy.
Degrowthers want to slow down the global social or economic ‘metabolism’—that is, the rate at which goods and services are made, sold, and transported around the world—by prioritising production for the purpose of fulfilling human needs instead of growing GDP.
Like many decentralised movements, the degrowth movement includes a wide range of thought, from anti-natalism and materialist ecology, to Christian humanist social theory exemplified in European traditions, such as the commons.
‘Degrowth’ is controversial among conservatives. The pro-capitalist conservative who thinks primarily in terms of ‘opposites’—the personal freedoms of capitalist societies versus the murderous oppression of communism—will likely associate the degrowth movement as inimical to capitalist outcomes. The capitalist-critical conservative, however, sees possibilities for technological progress and personal freedoms that lie beyond market-driven economics, finding inspiration in European traditions that have been supplanted by industrialisation.
Despite the gains in efficiency made within capitalism, many conservatives remain sceptical of the possibility of endless economic growth, particularly given that God is infinite and his creatures, including petroleum and other minerals, are not. As degrowth physicist Antonio Turiel repeats like a mantra, “you cannot have infinite growth in a finite world.”
Gains in efficiencies notwithstanding, as long as use outpaces the earth’s natural renewal processes, the raw materials essential to constant GDP growth will eventually run out and—again, gains in efficiency notwithstanding—certain on-the-ground realities would indicate that market-based production is disproportionately high, if not also immoral.
The mini-mountain of unused fast fashion sitting in the Chilean desert, which represented a percent of GDP before becoming rubbish, is enough to make one wonder if, indeed, we aren’t squandering our inheritance. The European Conservative writer Carlos Perona Calvete shows how needs are created to be filled with goods and services that improve GDP more than the human condition:
Where once we didn’t need sensors in our fridge or drones checking for changes in pedestrian density on our street, now these spaces represent a dollar (or euro, or renminbi) sign for someone. … This is especially the case given a general rush to apply high-tech to low-tech activities, rather than being limited to appropriate contexts to avoid overreliance and, indeed, energy consumption.
Such insight rings true, unless the waste sitting in the desert is actually an offering to the ever GDP-increasing god of ‘The Economy’—a necessary sacrifice appropriate to what the conservative English historian Christoper Dawson referred to as the technological age of industrial capitalism; a fitting totem to inspire more perfect consumers, needed to keep ‘The Economy’ healthy.
Still, as Sven Larson recently pointed out in this publication, it is concerning that degrowth has been gaining traction in the halls of power, such as the EU. There, the arguments in favour of degrowth could be used for creating a totalitarian, interventionist, communist-esque society, but with ecologists pulling the strings.
Degrowthers themselves have long warned of this possibility. In 1982, degrowth philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich warned in his book Gender that the transformation of the shared resources of Europe’s traditional commons into the productive resources of the modern economy would itself bring about big government that would eventually become an “oligarchic, undemocratic and authoritarian expertocracy governed by ecologists.” The scientist Antonio Turiel, too, warns of a creeping “ecofascism.”
“That’s the trick of the thing,” Turiel warned in a talk to a small group of highly uninfluential people last January in the out-of-the-way Spanish city of León. “The middle class will disappear.”
Turiel is a physicist at the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar, part of the national science research agency, author of the book Petrocalipsis and the blog crashoil.blogspot.
According to Turiel, fossil fuels and uranium, the two principal motors of industry, are either already half spent or about to be, and the proposed replacements—wind, solar, hydrogen—are simply not efficient enough to replace them. In fact, he sees no technological solution on the horizon to what physicists call the diminished energy return on investment. To summarise, though oil is still flowing, and natural gas and coal are still being extracted in large quantities, the unfortunate reality is that due to exponential growth in production in the last 50 years, we have already blown through the best quality, easiest to access, and therefore, most energy-rich and efficient fossil fuels and uranium. Turiel points out that while fracking has kept oil production up in the U.S., it signifies in itself that conventional oil wells are running dry. That is, we have used up in a matter of decades resources formed by momentous geological processes whose petroleum deposits will be renewed only God knows when. Even fracking, which Turiel also points out taps wells of oil that are mere puddles compared to conventional drilling, is slowing down as wells are running dry. Indeed, a couple of years ago, a recent retiree from the petroleum industry who had spent his career looking for new oil deposits to exploit, told me that all of the easy-to-get oil had already been extracted. He was not banking the global economy’s future on petroleum.
As the evidence suggests, market-driven economics encourages production to continually push beyond its own gains in efficiencies, hence the huge pile of clothes in the desert. In the same vein, as farmers say, “the best cure for good prices is good prices.”
Turiel points out that production of diesel, one of the most energy-potent fuels and essential to global industry, fell off a cliff in 2019, even before logistical problems related to the COVID pandemic came into play, and has become more expensive than gasoline. According to Turiel, it indicates a structural problem: the better quality crude required to make diesel is simply harder to come by these days. Practically speaking, the higher diesel prices are already causing a crisis in the trucking sector that has caused intermittent strikes along with a labour shortage.
But wind and solar are comparatively weak sources of energy and hydrogen technologies are even less efficient: less energy means less growth. They will not be able to replace diesel to refloat the transportation sector or other industries. Degrowth is coming, one way or another, he says.
He also pointed out in his presentation that while von der Leyen still preaches that perpetual growth can and will be achieved, what she proposes in practice—a circular economy of growth decoupled from natural-resource use, along with replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and hydrogen—is impossible (a point some economists also agree with). If the masses don’t wake up and acknowledge the validity of the degrowth movement, Turiel warns they will face the oppression of a Brussels-imposed “eco-fascism” and “neo-feudalism.”
Perhaps the example of the Netherlands is the clearest. Faced with choosing between cutting back on farming, urban housing, or transportation to avoid poisoning soil and water with the excess minerals produced by one of the most intense economies in the world, the Dutch government, supported by the European Commission, has unilaterally chosen farmers as the sacrificial victims.
To avoid the same fate, Spain’s would-be victims are heeding Turiel’s call.
At the end of April, a few weeks prior to von der Leyen’s address at the degrowth conference, a small group gathered in the public library of Astorga, a small town near León. Founded by the Romans just about the time of the Incarnation, the town is currently undergoing its own process of degrowth, a slow but steady decline brought on by globalisation and the fourth industrial revolution. Every meaningful ‘economic activity’ and able-bodied ‘human resource’ had been sucked into increasingly larger cities.
Into the vacuum of this ‘emptied Spain,’ as it has become fashionable to call it, energy companies and speculators—supported by the EU’s Green Deal directives and Next Generation funds—are inserting fields upon fields of solar panels and row after row of windmills to generate the energy needed for von der Leyen’s green, “circular,” social economy. But the locals are resisting, knowing these developments will only further denigrate their rural communities without solving any ecological problems.
Beyond opposition to this or that solar or wind park, they are leveraging their opposition into a wider revolution, a degrowth platform they propose as the true solution to the present energy and ecological problems, bringing dozens of tiny, grassroots groups together under the Manifesto in Defense of the Territory. Their manifesto, available online for anyone to read and sign onto, is clear:
The decision to convert the province of León into a sacrificial zone to generate energy and extract every kind of resource, which will be sent to big cities and industrial centres to continue maintaining impossible “growth” in a world of limited resources is nothing but a flight forward to keep giving power to the present unsustainable way of life, which will also provoke an increase in the unbalance in regional territories and population … and benefit exclusively certain multinationals, not the population.
“The most sensible thing,” it continues, “is to plan for a reduction in unnecessary energy use, guaranteeing the most basic needs, and empowering local production instead of attempting to maintain economic models based on the transport of energy, materials, and products across thousands of kilometres.”
“If we don’t organise we will see impositions from above by the government,” Antonio Gómez Liébana, a retired nurse and member of the movement who has rural roots in the region, told The European Conservative in an interview. “We need a democratic process to decide what we keep.”
According to Turiel, if well managed, the remaining supply of fossil fuels can last for generations to come. Even the basic creature comforts enjoyed in the developed world can be maintained for the entire global population on just 30 to 40% of the current energy produced. Not sustainable, though, is energy production and resource use for pump-and-dump schemes that serve only to expand ‘The Economy.’
Europe thrived for centuries on small-tech and low-tech solutions implemented on a local scale. Degrowthers in León envision a return to such social arrangements.
“We will eventually have to return to local production and consumption,” Liébana said. “Until 1975, the village where my grandfather lived was self-sufficient. He produced 80% of what he consumed.”
That local production even included electricity for local consumption, according to Liébana, using small-scale hydroelectric technology, something done in many Spanish villages.
Perhaps the most important difference, at the moment, between the self-sufficient life in Liébana’s ancestral village—where exploitation of meadow and mountain was limited by the members of the community to the pace of nature’s cycles of renewal precisely to ensure a constant abundance for everyone—and European life today is the absence of technocratic overlords ruling by ecological diktat.
Degrowth Is Growing, From Top and Bottom
At a recent event at the EU Parliament, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tipped her hat to the degrowth movement. Giving the opening remarks at the Beyond Growth Conference on May 17th, she referred to the Club of Rome’s 1973 report, The Limits of Growth, when she said:
Though willing to admit that fossil fuels could no longer serve as the main means of economic propulsion, von der Leyen was not, the news outlet Euractiv noted, ready to unseat GDP growth as a primary indicator of the health of European society, even in front of a receptive audience.
As a counterpoint, she said, “We know that our children’s future depends not only on GDP indicators but on the foundations of the world we build for them,” and touted the Green Deal, “decarbonisation,” and the move to a “circular,” “social market economy” as the brave and necessary step the last generation didn’t, but should have, taken.
Referring to long-standing critiques of GDP growth models, she concluded,
Indeed, answers to the question of whether the world can stand unlimited GDP growth, or whether technological solutions can be found to make production efficient enough to outpace resource use perpetually, have been tossed about for 50 years. In other words, those who think unlimited expansion is possible are opposed by members of the degrowth movement who advocate for shrinking production and consumption, and, ultimately, the modern economy.
Degrowthers want to slow down the global social or economic ‘metabolism’—that is, the rate at which goods and services are made, sold, and transported around the world—by prioritising production for the purpose of fulfilling human needs instead of growing GDP.
Like many decentralised movements, the degrowth movement includes a wide range of thought, from anti-natalism and materialist ecology, to Christian humanist social theory exemplified in European traditions, such as the commons.
‘Degrowth’ is controversial among conservatives. The pro-capitalist conservative who thinks primarily in terms of ‘opposites’—the personal freedoms of capitalist societies versus the murderous oppression of communism—will likely associate the degrowth movement as inimical to capitalist outcomes. The capitalist-critical conservative, however, sees possibilities for technological progress and personal freedoms that lie beyond market-driven economics, finding inspiration in European traditions that have been supplanted by industrialisation.
Despite the gains in efficiency made within capitalism, many conservatives remain sceptical of the possibility of endless economic growth, particularly given that God is infinite and his creatures, including petroleum and other minerals, are not. As degrowth physicist Antonio Turiel repeats like a mantra, “you cannot have infinite growth in a finite world.”
Gains in efficiencies notwithstanding, as long as use outpaces the earth’s natural renewal processes, the raw materials essential to constant GDP growth will eventually run out and—again, gains in efficiency notwithstanding—certain on-the-ground realities would indicate that market-based production is disproportionately high, if not also immoral.
The mini-mountain of unused fast fashion sitting in the Chilean desert, which represented a percent of GDP before becoming rubbish, is enough to make one wonder if, indeed, we aren’t squandering our inheritance. The European Conservative writer Carlos Perona Calvete shows how needs are created to be filled with goods and services that improve GDP more than the human condition:
Such insight rings true, unless the waste sitting in the desert is actually an offering to the ever GDP-increasing god of ‘The Economy’—a necessary sacrifice appropriate to what the conservative English historian Christoper Dawson referred to as the technological age of industrial capitalism; a fitting totem to inspire more perfect consumers, needed to keep ‘The Economy’ healthy.
Still, as Sven Larson recently pointed out in this publication, it is concerning that degrowth has been gaining traction in the halls of power, such as the EU. There, the arguments in favour of degrowth could be used for creating a totalitarian, interventionist, communist-esque society, but with ecologists pulling the strings.
Degrowthers themselves have long warned of this possibility. In 1982, degrowth philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich warned in his book Gender that the transformation of the shared resources of Europe’s traditional commons into the productive resources of the modern economy would itself bring about big government that would eventually become an “oligarchic, undemocratic and authoritarian expertocracy governed by ecologists.” The scientist Antonio Turiel, too, warns of a creeping “ecofascism.”
“That’s the trick of the thing,” Turiel warned in a talk to a small group of highly uninfluential people last January in the out-of-the-way Spanish city of León. “The middle class will disappear.”
Turiel is a physicist at the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar, part of the national science research agency, author of the book Petrocalipsis and the blog crashoil.blogspot.
According to Turiel, fossil fuels and uranium, the two principal motors of industry, are either already half spent or about to be, and the proposed replacements—wind, solar, hydrogen—are simply not efficient enough to replace them. In fact, he sees no technological solution on the horizon to what physicists call the diminished energy return on investment. To summarise, though oil is still flowing, and natural gas and coal are still being extracted in large quantities, the unfortunate reality is that due to exponential growth in production in the last 50 years, we have already blown through the best quality, easiest to access, and therefore, most energy-rich and efficient fossil fuels and uranium. Turiel points out that while fracking has kept oil production up in the U.S., it signifies in itself that conventional oil wells are running dry. That is, we have used up in a matter of decades resources formed by momentous geological processes whose petroleum deposits will be renewed only God knows when. Even fracking, which Turiel also points out taps wells of oil that are mere puddles compared to conventional drilling, is slowing down as wells are running dry. Indeed, a couple of years ago, a recent retiree from the petroleum industry who had spent his career looking for new oil deposits to exploit, told me that all of the easy-to-get oil had already been extracted. He was not banking the global economy’s future on petroleum.
As the evidence suggests, market-driven economics encourages production to continually push beyond its own gains in efficiencies, hence the huge pile of clothes in the desert. In the same vein, as farmers say, “the best cure for good prices is good prices.”
Turiel points out that production of diesel, one of the most energy-potent fuels and essential to global industry, fell off a cliff in 2019, even before logistical problems related to the COVID pandemic came into play, and has become more expensive than gasoline. According to Turiel, it indicates a structural problem: the better quality crude required to make diesel is simply harder to come by these days. Practically speaking, the higher diesel prices are already causing a crisis in the trucking sector that has caused intermittent strikes along with a labour shortage.
But wind and solar are comparatively weak sources of energy and hydrogen technologies are even less efficient: less energy means less growth. They will not be able to replace diesel to refloat the transportation sector or other industries. Degrowth is coming, one way or another, he says.
He also pointed out in his presentation that while von der Leyen still preaches that perpetual growth can and will be achieved, what she proposes in practice—a circular economy of growth decoupled from natural-resource use, along with replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and hydrogen—is impossible (a point some economists also agree with). If the masses don’t wake up and acknowledge the validity of the degrowth movement, Turiel warns they will face the oppression of a Brussels-imposed “eco-fascism” and “neo-feudalism.”
Perhaps the example of the Netherlands is the clearest. Faced with choosing between cutting back on farming, urban housing, or transportation to avoid poisoning soil and water with the excess minerals produced by one of the most intense economies in the world, the Dutch government, supported by the European Commission, has unilaterally chosen farmers as the sacrificial victims.
To avoid the same fate, Spain’s would-be victims are heeding Turiel’s call.
At the end of April, a few weeks prior to von der Leyen’s address at the degrowth conference, a small group gathered in the public library of Astorga, a small town near León. Founded by the Romans just about the time of the Incarnation, the town is currently undergoing its own process of degrowth, a slow but steady decline brought on by globalisation and the fourth industrial revolution. Every meaningful ‘economic activity’ and able-bodied ‘human resource’ had been sucked into increasingly larger cities.
Into the vacuum of this ‘emptied Spain,’ as it has become fashionable to call it, energy companies and speculators—supported by the EU’s Green Deal directives and Next Generation funds—are inserting fields upon fields of solar panels and row after row of windmills to generate the energy needed for von der Leyen’s green, “circular,” social economy. But the locals are resisting, knowing these developments will only further denigrate their rural communities without solving any ecological problems.
Beyond opposition to this or that solar or wind park, they are leveraging their opposition into a wider revolution, a degrowth platform they propose as the true solution to the present energy and ecological problems, bringing dozens of tiny, grassroots groups together under the Manifesto in Defense of the Territory. Their manifesto, available online for anyone to read and sign onto, is clear:
“The most sensible thing,” it continues, “is to plan for a reduction in unnecessary energy use, guaranteeing the most basic needs, and empowering local production instead of attempting to maintain economic models based on the transport of energy, materials, and products across thousands of kilometres.”
“If we don’t organise we will see impositions from above by the government,” Antonio Gómez Liébana, a retired nurse and member of the movement who has rural roots in the region, told The European Conservative in an interview. “We need a democratic process to decide what we keep.”
According to Turiel, if well managed, the remaining supply of fossil fuels can last for generations to come. Even the basic creature comforts enjoyed in the developed world can be maintained for the entire global population on just 30 to 40% of the current energy produced. Not sustainable, though, is energy production and resource use for pump-and-dump schemes that serve only to expand ‘The Economy.’
Europe thrived for centuries on small-tech and low-tech solutions implemented on a local scale. Degrowthers in León envision a return to such social arrangements.
“We will eventually have to return to local production and consumption,” Liébana said. “Until 1975, the village where my grandfather lived was self-sufficient. He produced 80% of what he consumed.”
That local production even included electricity for local consumption, according to Liébana, using small-scale hydroelectric technology, something done in many Spanish villages.
Perhaps the most important difference, at the moment, between the self-sufficient life in Liébana’s ancestral village—where exploitation of meadow and mountain was limited by the members of the community to the pace of nature’s cycles of renewal precisely to ensure a constant abundance for everyone—and European life today is the absence of technocratic overlords ruling by ecological diktat.
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