– Excerpted from Growth, Degrowth, and Green Growth: A Conversation with Peter Victor, Posted with permission from © Post Carbon Institute 2024 –
– Excerpt produced by Bart Hawkins Kreps –
Recently Peter Victor spoke with Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, for their Deep Dive series Moving Beyond Growth. Below are excerpts from that discussion, reprinted with the kind permission of Post Carbon Institute.
Richard Heinberg: First, thanks for taking the time for this conversation, and thanks also for your book, Escape from Overshoot. It’s an excellent book on a subject that literally everyone needs to know about—humanity’s dilemma of overconsumption and overpopulation, and what we can do about it. Why did you decide to adopt that title and framing?
Peter Victor: I’m glad that you like the book. It is based on several decades of working on the economy and the environment as an academic, consultant, and public servant. I chose overshoot as the framing for the book because of the overwhelming evidence that humans are exceeding the capacity of the planet to support us and many other species. This is well-described as overshoot.
Richard Heinberg: What, for you, are the growing edges of post-growth or degrowth thinking?
Peter Victor: For me, in particular, the growing edges of post-growth or degrowth thinking relate to the rapid expansion of interest in ecological macroeconomics—that is, economics of the whole economy incorporating the environment in which economies are embedded. Research in this area is attracting substantial funding from government sources, especially in Europe. Post-growth and degrowth agendas stand a better chance of being widely adopted if we can show positive outcomes for wellbeing, or, at least, better outcomes than if we, especially in rich countries, continue the mindless pursuit of economic growth.
Richard Heinberg: How far into overshoot are we? How much degrowth do you think we need in order to escape overshoot and approach sustainability?
Peter Victor: This sounds like a question calling for a quantitative answer, so I will try to give one. The only quantitative measure of overshoot that I know is the ecological footprint and its size in comparison to biocapacity. In 2023 global ecological footprint was 75% greater than global biocapacity. In other words, it would have taken the biocapacity of 1.75 planets to support the ecological footprint of the global population sustainably, which is one answer to how far into overshoot we are. If we do the same calculation at the national level for the USA, we find that in 2023 the ecological footprint of the USA was twice its biocapacity. And if everyone in the world consumed at the average level of Americans in 2023 it would require the biocapacity of 5 planets to support them. Of course, these are estimates, but they are based on data from international agencies and analyzed in a systematic way by the Ecological Footprint Initiative at York University and the Global Footprint Network in the USA.
These global and national estimates of overshoot provide an indication of the amount of degrowth required to escape from overshoot. But be clear. It is the physical size of economies that must be reduced to escape from overshoot, and this is the primary target of degrowth. Reductions in ecological footprint and other measures of the physical size of economies will have implications for gross domestic product (GDP), the standard monetary measure of the size of economies. But reductions in GDP are a side effect of physical degrowth, not its central focus.
Richard Heinberg: Can green-growth messaging help us escape from overshoot? Is it better than nothing, or does it tend to further bury the message we all really need to hear, which is about overshoot and degrowth? Do you see any way to resolve the contradiction?
Peter Victor: The first step towards resolving this contradiction is to recognize that green growth is about increasing GDP while reducing environmental impacts, particularly climate change, whereas degrowth is about reducing the physical size of the economy. Green growth uses a monetary measure of the size of the economy. Degrowth uses one or more physical measures such as the ecological footprint, material and energy flows, land use changes, and the full set of planetary boundaries. …
I’d love to see environmental organizations and governments saying and doing things that are consistent with the biophysical realities we face. Based on my work on managing without growth and escape from overshoot, our best path is to meet needs and pursue wellbeing in a smaller economy. This path deserves far more attention at this moment in history.