NEW PUBLICATION!
Can degrowth save the world?
Co-author
@jasonhickel.bsky.social made the case in a book.
How do these ideas stack up in a systems model?
How are such scenarios different from scenarios used in the IPCC?
Let’s find out!
Open-access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09535314.2023.2301443
Can degrowth save the world?
Co-author
@jasonhickel.bsky.social made the case in a book.
How do these ideas stack up in a systems model?
How are such scenarios different from scenarios used in the IPCC?
Let’s find out!
Open-access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09535314.2023.2301443
Comments
While meeting very ambitious targets, stopping economic growth could:
- help limit solar and wind growth by about 40% around 2050 (but still increase 4-fold by 2030!)
- limit long-term material needs
- strongly reduce reliance on bioenergy
- Faster reduction in fossil fuels than almost all IPCC scenarios
- Still fast, but relatively low upscaling of wind and solar
- Much reduced dependency on biomass for energy
We pair these consumption pathways with some “standard” climate policy scenarios, changing the energy system.
We compare a “standard growth” scenario (see figure) to variants with lower growth.
Above, I was highlighting a variant with consumption per capita at slightly higher levels than currently in Australia (the “40k” variant) - which leads to roughly constant GDP per capita in our model.
For that, you need enough energy.
We check this for all scenarios, with (“gini.2p.a”) and without (“constant.gini”) inequality reduction.