Economic Growth and Environmental Limits

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and kind words. As he says, the purpose of Government should surely be to promote happiness and health, yet we have a perverse obsession with GDP growth, which can often go up even when happiness and health are going down. That obsession must end if we are to secure a safe space for humanity, and if we are to live within environmental limits, or planetary boundaries, to use an alternative term.

I will not be surprised if the Minister takes issue with me on that, arguing that the UK has embraced so-called green growth, perhaps citing the clean growth strategy. Leaving aside the fact that there is nothing clean or green about the Government’s support for rampant airport expansion, road building or fossil fuel subsidies, the essential point is that even so-called green growth rests on the assumption that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental harm fully and fast enough. I will make the case this afternoon that that is a false assumption.

Just yesterday, a new report from the European Environmental Bureau exploded the myth of absolute decoupling. The study looked at a range of factors—materials, energy, water, greenhouse gases and so on—and found that there is no empirical evidence for an absolute, permanent, global, substantial or sufficiently rapid decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures, either now or in the future. In other words, it is time to move from efficiency to sufficiency. As the report concludes,

“Although decoupling is useful and necessary, and has occurred at certain times and places, ‘green growth’ cannot reduce resource use on anywhere near the scale required to deal with global environmental breakdown and to keep global warming below the target of 1.5°C”.

The transgression of environmental limits has dangerous consequences for all humanity. That was pushed into the spotlight by the UN global assessment of nature—the so-called Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. If ever there was a mouthful that was designed to make it hard to know what anyone was talking about, that is it; we should call it a report on nature.

Regardless, it found that 75% of all land and almost half of all marine and water ecosystems have been seriously altered by human activity. It found that 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction. That is a horrendous number—significantly greater than at any other time in human history—and poses a severe and direct threat to not only those species but human wellbeing in all regions of the world, especially those least responsible for the damage that is causing it.

The report identifies the growth of the global economy, and specifically the growth of material consumption in affluent nations, as one of the major driving forces behind those trends. It is unambiguous about the need to move away from endless consumption and GDP as a key measure of economic success, stating that we must steer

“away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth”

and

“shift beyond standard economic indicators such as gross domestic product”.

I am keen to emphasise that, although Greens have long been leading the political debate on the environmental and social case for ditching GDP growth as a measure of progress, that argument is finally moving into the mainstream. Cross-party collaboration is incredibly important too, and I am delighted that 20 MPs have signed my early-day motion on the report from the intergovernmental panel. My early-day motion calls on the Government to

“urgently show global leadership in developing and advocating alternatives to GDP and in the transition to economies that, rather than being divisive and degenerative by default, are distributive and regenerative by design.”

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and making many good points. I agree that we need to move beyond GDP. Is she aware that work has already been done on alternative methods of measurement? For instance, the University of Leeds, through the Sustainability Research Institute, has a consumption-based emissions model that would give us an alternative to GDP. We could calculate everything based on emissions, including at source, as well as those used in the UK or other developed countries. Should we not move to that sort of model, rather than a GDP-based model?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The work going on at the University of Leeds is incredibly exciting. It demonstrates that there is a lot of work going on, both in this country and internationally, into researching what alternative indicators might look like. I think what is lacking is a real commitment to move them into the mainstream. In the regular updates on the radio or in the Financial Times, when we hear about GDP growth and how we should be very happy that it has gone up, we could look at those indicators, which might well show that our wellbeing is being severely undermined by environmental damage.

Turning to the climate emergency, the primacy of GDP growth as the overarching priority for the economy is the elephant in the room. To quote Greta Thunberg,

“Our house is on fire”,

and the GDP growth obsession is the obstacle blocking the door to the emergency exit. In April, Greta visited Parliament and spoke about why she and millions of other young people were missing school to strike for the climate. She said very clearly that the way that we measure progress is absurd and archaic:

“People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at…We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases.”

That call to rewrite the economic rulebook is echoed by many others in the climate justice network, including many in the grassroots movements for a green new deal in the UK and the US, and a vastly growing number of academics and economists. The reaction to a tweet by the London Mayor, Sadiq Kahn, one week into the Extinction Rebellion protests was interesting; it illustrates that climate justice is inextricably linked to the transformation of the economic system. To be fair, I am sure he did it without thinking it through that much, but he tweeted:

“My message to all the climate change protestors today is clear: let London return to business as usual.”

That tweet went down so terribly because the new climate justice movement understands that business as usual is killing the planet and destroying our children’s future. The litmus test for adequate climate action is no longer what is considered politically feasible within the current system; it is whether we are transforming the economic system to fit with what is scientifically necessary to keep within 1.5° of global heating, and to reverse the unravelling of the Earth’s life support systems before our eyes.