This is chapter 1 of my book, based upon my dissertation. I published the introduction earlier. As I work through the different chapters I will publish them here and welcome any feedback.
Fossil Fuels as The Escape From Ecological Limits
The scale and complexity of any organism, whether it is an individual or a combination of many organisms (e.g. a bacteria, an ant hill or a human society), is dependent upon the supply of energy to that organism; increases in scale and complexity tend to require increases in energy inputs (Tainter 1988; Zotin & Pokrovskii 2018; Smil 2019). Following from this, economic growth and development require that energy and other resources be extracted from the environment to manufacture goods, provide services, and create capital; “The central role of energy is substantiated by both theory and data” (Brown et. al 2011, p. 19). Prior to the industrial revolution, and the exploitation of fossil fuels, human societies were limited by their ability to harness the energy of the sun through photosynthesis for food and animal feed, conversion of that energy to heat through fire, and to a much lesser extent watermills and windmills (Hall & Klitgaard 2012; Smil 2017). The history of human civilization prior to the eighteenth century is one of repeated developments of complex societies, followed by repeated collapses of those societies. Morris (2011) developed an index of social development and noted that only three civilizations could be identified as reaching the low 40s on his index: those of the Roman Empire, the Song Dynasty, and modern civilization. About six hundred years separate the first two, and five hundred years the latter two. Morris notes:
If someone from Rome or Song China had been transplanted to eighteenth century London or Beijing he or she would certainly have had many surprises ... Yet more, in fact much more would have seemed familiar ... Most important of all, though, the visitors from the past would have noticed that although social development was moving higher than ever, the ways people were pushing it up hardly differed from how Romans and Song Chinese had pushed it up. (Ibid., p. 482).
This quickly changed with the exploitation of coal from the late eighteenth-century, “A long-term perspective shows virtually no growth of major economies before 1750, and accelerated growth in the frontier (that is the richest Western) economies, in the UK after 1750 and the US a century later” (Smil 2019, sources of economic growth para. 13). By “about 1870 [humans] used more fossil fuel energy each year than the annual global production from all photosynthesis” (McNeill & Engelke 2014, p. 9). In the twentieth century human energy use increased by a factor of eight and has continued to increase in the twenty-first century. Oil, and then natural gas, was increasingly added to coal usage as the twentieth century progressed. These fossil fuels represent the cumulative energy produced by hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis, removing the energy constraint that had limited the scale and complexity of human civilizations; “growth since the industrial revolution has been driven largely by the increased stock of capital and the adequate supply of useful energy due to the discovery and exploitation of relatively inexpensive fossil fuels” (Ayres & Voudouris 2014, p. 27). The resultant phenomenal scale, and historically atypical nature, of energy usage in modern societies is a little-discussed fact within the dominant social discourses.
The Immateriality of the Mainstream Social Sciences
Instead of accepting the dependence of human progress upon increasing draws of resources from the Earth System, the social science and societal common sense treats human society as fundamentally separate from the natural world, or even capable of subsuming the ecology of which it is but a part; reversing the objective relationship between the Earth System and human society. This post-materialist view has been predominant within mainstream economics from at least the beginning of the twentieth century and is also prevalent within mainstream sociology. During the very period that fossil fuels and other materials were being utilized in increasingly prodigious amounts, the social sciences have moved away from an acceptance of any biophysical limits and any integration with the natural sciences. Post-modernism, through its rejection of an objective natural reality and empiricism has provided extensive metaphysical theoretical foundations for the view of human society as a self-referential entity independent of objective external limits. Although post-modernist scholars have provided many excellent insights into the cultural production of knowledge and biases inherent within processes of cultural production, such scholarship has tended to render biophysical realities invisible as all observations of “objective physical reality” are treated as mere cultural productions rather than observations of an external physical reality. These observations may be imperfect due to the actions of the human senses and culture, but to treat them as being without validity or as a basis of “truth” may be seen as throwing out the good with the bad. Within such scholarship there also tends to be a lack of interrogation into the materiality of class relations and the ownership and control of the means of physical and cultural production (Wood & Foster 1997). An exception to the above is US environmental sociology, which argues for the integration of natural science and social science scholarship together with an appreciation of class dynamics; epitomized by the work of Foster (2000, 2010, 2020, 2022). As discussed in the introduction, a historical materialist perspective allows for the integration of cultural and material considerations; one lacking in mainstream economics, eco-modernism, and technocratic and culturally focused conceptualizations of such things as green growth, sustainable development, natural capitalism, and ecological capitalism.
When looking at the determinants of economic growth, mainstream economists see such growth as a function of labour, capital and technology, as with the widely used Cobb-Douglas production function. Little or no role is given to natural resources, including energy, with technology being assumed as being responsible for the majority of economic growth that cannot be accounted for by labor and capital. When reviewing the economic literature for the explanation of the residual economic growth once the inputs of labor and capital had been removed, Ayres & Warr (2009, p. 159) note “The unexplained residual is usually attributed to a homogeneous stock of technological ‘knowledge’ that grows (by assumption) smoothly and automatically, due to factors outside the economy”. Such assumptions are repeated through many highly influential economic texts. Although Denison (1968, p.5), “tries to give explicit consideration to the largest possible number of factors affecting growth” no reference to energy can be found in the book index. In the extremely brief chapter on “Land and Natural Resources” (Ibid., pp. 180-186), fossil fuel energy is included with all other minerals production (e.g. iron ore, copper etc.) and counted in US$ rather than in units of energy. Solow (2000, p. xii). states that, “the permanent rate of growth of output per unit of labor … depends entirely on the rate of technological progress in the broadest sense”. Samuelson and Scott (1966, p. 780) can note “inventions which helped to drain swamps or to grow more food on the same acres of land” without taking any account of the increases in energy usage required by those inventions (and the availability of natural gas for the production of cheap and plentiful nitrogen fertilizers). They then surmise that “facts suggest the hypothesis that capital accumulation is second to technical change in explaining rising productivity” (Ibid., p. 791); again, no mention of the increased usage of energy required to utilize that technical change. This fits within what Dunlap and Catton referred to as the “Human Exemptionalist Paradigm” (HEP), that views humanity as exempt from environmental limits due to the unlimited possibilities of human technology (Dunlap & Catton 1994).
The position of mainstream economics with respect to energy has not changed substantially in over half a century, with even the work in the sub-field of Resource Economics not altering the assumptions held across the discipline, as Stern (2011, p. 26) notes “Resource economists have developed models that incorporate the role of resources, including energy, in the growth process, but these ideas remain isolated in the resource economics field”; a position supported by other researchers such as Ayres & Warr (2009). Mainstream economists continue to assume “that there are only two important ‘factors of production’ and that energy and other natural resource inputs contribute very little to the economy” (Ayres & Voudouris 2014, p. 16). This viewpoint has become widely embedded within popular culture with authors such as Simon (1981, 1996) and Naam (2013) popularizing the ability of human technology to drive economic growth irrespective of exogenous factors such as the availability of energy. Smil has pointed out that although “civilization is the product of incessant large-scale combustion of coals, oils, and natural gases … for many decades, the fundamental link between the rising use of energies and the growing complexity and greater affluence of human societies was overlooked by both the public and the policymakers” (Smil 2010, introduction para. 1).
The empirical research of Ayres and Voudouris (2014) contradicts the dominant discoursal common sense that assumes infinite growth independent of energy and material limits, pointing to a fundamental and irrevocable causal relationship between energy, especially cheap fossil fuel energy, and economic growth since the industrial revolution. This conclusion is supported by the work of Hall & Klitgaard (2012), Ayres & Warr (2009), Ayres et. al. (2013) and Smil (2010, 2017, 2017a). “In contrast to the neoclassical economic model … The real economic system can be viewed as a complex process that converts raw materials (and energy) into useful materials and final services. Evidently materials and energy do play a central role in this model of economic growth” (Ayres & Warr 2009, p. xviii). In addition, reductions in energy costs are seen as having offset the increased energy required for the extraction of rapidly declining mineral ore grades due to depletion (Bardi 2014), “By using larger and larger amounts of available energy we can sift copper out from poorer and poorer ores … But the energy cost of mining low-content ores increases very fast” (Georgescu-Roegen 2011, p. 67). Greater energy usage is therefore linked directly to greater social welfare and general notions of progress (Hall & Klitgaard 2012; Smil 2017); supported by the exponential growth in energy usage in the post-WW2 period as the global economy entered a still continuing phase of exponential growth (McNeill & Engelke 2014).
A significant proportion of the advances in human technology can be seen as both dependent upon concentrated energy availability (e.g. coal to heat water into a gas within an atmospheric engine) and facilitating increased usage of that energy (atmospheric engine water pumps used in coal mines) in a synergistic fashion. The later usage of diesel (derived from oil) and electric (using electricity from coal-fired electricity generating stations) engines in coal mining were later refinements. Technology becomes not simply a substitute for energy usage, but both dependent upon greater energy availability and a facilitator of greater energy usage. The internal combustion engine was dependent upon the availability of an energy-dense liquid fuel (oil) and facilitated an exponential increase in the use of that fuel; “while the worldwide car sales were less then 100,000 vehicles in 1908, they were more than 73 million in 2017, roughly a 700-fold increase” (Smil 2019, figures of merit para. 12), with significant possibilities for future growth outside the richer nations. The technology and capital investments that brought the provision of electricity were also dependent upon the availability of fossil fuels (coal and then natural gas) and produced an exponential growth in the usage of those fuels. Such social and economic phenomena fit with the Jevons Paradox or rebound effect (Jevons 1865; Polimeni et. al. 2008) that states that technological change that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used leads to an increase in the consumption of that resource.
This is seen at the global level, with reductions in energy use per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) of 1.6% per year since 2000 (Enerdata 2019) being offset by a GDP growth rate of over 3%, resulting in continued increases in energy usage. Even with gains in energy efficiency (a relative decoupling of energy usage and GDP growth), trend economic growth rates are still dependent upon increasing energy supplies. The same trend is seen for the U.S. economy from 1950 to 2005, during which “the energy efficiency of the economy nearly doubled … which had the effect of increasing the aggregate consumption of commercial energy in the US by almost three times!” (Polimeni et. al., p. 84). These findings parallel the findings of Ayres et. al. (2013) who propose that there is a high output elasticity with respect to energy in modern industrialized economies; i.e. significant reductions/increases in energy throughput will produce significant reductions/increases in economic output. With the rate of energy system decarbonization being negligible since 2000 (Enerdata 2019a), as the growth in renewable energy was more than offset by the growth in overall energy consumption, economic growth has been predominantly facilitated through an increased consumption of fossil fuels. Smil (2010 & 2017) has detailed how decarbonization of the energy supply may not be the “frictionless” process assumed in policy models and may be limited by complex social, economic and technical considerations. This is echoed by climate scientist Steffen, who considers that it will take at least 30 years and more likely 40-60 years, to attain a net zero emissions global energy system (Moses 2020).
European environmental sociology that fits within the contemporary post-WW2 modernist and functionalist sociological mainstream (e.g. Giddens, Latour and Urry) proposes the probability of a decoupling of economic growth and general resource usage through an ecological modernization inherent to a reflexive market economy (Beck 1992; Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994; Beck, Bonss & Lau 2003; Beck 2007; Mol, Sonnenfeld & Spaargaren 2009). The intellectual heritage of ecological modernization is the failed modernization theory of the post-WW2 period (Rostow 1960) that enshrined Western liberal capitalism as the epitome of civilizational development that all nations should aspire through a deterministic process. As Foster notes “Looking at today’s ecological modernization theory, it would be hard to miss the close family resemblance to earlier post–Second World War modernization theory” (Foster 2012, p. 216). As noted previously, there has been no decoupling of economic growth and resource usage observed at the global level, nor for the US from 1950 to 2005. With respect to individual nations, a positive correlation between resource usage and economic growth has been observed across 186 countries when including the embedded resource utilization of net imports (Wiedman et. al., 2015). Research identifying absolute decoupling in some advanced industrial nations tends to utilize national production measures that ignore the effects of net imports. With the general globalization of supply chains, and therefore the possible off shoring of energy and other resource-intensive activities from richer to poorer nations, such exclusion undermines the validity of these reports. In essence:
absolute decoupling measured by DMC [a production-based indicator of resource usage], at the individual country level, may not indicate that resource use is actually decreasing with increasing income. It may just indicate that more material extraction has been off-shored. Developed nations experience an increase in imports of semifinished and finished products and a change in economic structure toward service economies, which add high value to the GDP. These trends make developed countries look more resource-efficient, but they actually remain deeply anchored to a material foundation underneath. (Ibid., p. 6275)
The sheer scale of the offshoring of resource extraction activities is shown by the estimation that “41% (29 Gt) of total global resource extraction was associated with international trade flows in 2008” (Ibid., p. 6275); rendering domestic production-based measures of resource usage, including energy, as unreliable indicators. Going further, Ward et. al. (2016), conclude on the basis of simple modeling that “decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits … growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use” (Ibid., p. 10).
The measurement issues noted above can be seen in specific national energy usage statistics, with observed slight reductions in absolute energy usage in the richer nations of North America and Japan since 2000 (a trend reversed in the USA in 2018), and the EU28 since 2010, being the result of errors of omission inherent in the production-based measures utilized to arrive at these findings; Japan, the EU28 and the USA display the greatest differences between energy production and energy consumption measures (Kan, Chen & Chen 2019). Significant amounts of energy intensive activities, especially manufacturing, have been offshored to other nations such as China and Mexico. For example, in “Switzerland the energy embodied in imports has increased by 80% between 2001 and 2011” (Moreau & Vuille 2018). With respect to the United States, Smil (2013) details the wholesale transplantation of significant energy-intensive industries, through both foreign competition and corporate offshoring, from the 1970’s onwards. The role of China as a major net exporter of embedded energy is detailed by Xu et. al. (2016), who state that “China’s net embodied energy exports reached the highest level with a volume of 652 MTOE in 2013, which accounts for nearly 30% of China’s total coal and oil consumption. And 91% of China’s total net embodied energy exports are from manufacturing sectors. If net embodied coal & oil exports are considered, China is still an energy exporter” (Ibid., p. 1303). Such empirical issues are missed in “many forms of ecological modernization [that] suffer from an inability to grasp how affluent countries in the core zone are able to improve their environmental conditions through outsourcing the impacts of material extraction and disposal to the periphery” (White, Gareau & Rudy 2017, p. 29). In recent years, the rate of relative energy decoupling has been on an undulating plateau, with the energy intensity of global GDP declining by 1.8% in 2016, 1.2% in 2017, 1.5% in 2018, and 2.1% in 2019; in the latter year 80% of the primary energy mix was still fossil fuels (Enerdata 2020).
The ecological modernization hypothesis is somewhat akin to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) (Stern 2004; Dasgupta, Laplante, Wang & Wheeler 2002) that proposes a decoupling of environmental impacts and economic growth at higher income levels. Both the ecological modernization and the EKC theories are seriously undermined by the analysis of both energy usage and CO2 emissions for the period 1971-2015 by Luzzati, Orsini and Gucciardi (2018, p. 619), who state “for the period 1971 -2001, there was some weak evidence of EKC” but “such a piece of evidence does not hold for the whole period 1971-2015, which includes the new wave of globalization”. Csereklyei and Stern (2015, p. 641) also find that “the most robust driver of growth in energy usage has been economic growth” and that “there is no sign of decoupling of economic growth and the growth of energy use at higher income levels”. Such findings also contradict the propositions put forward by some ecological economists (Daly 1996 & 2014) that qualitative development and quantitative growth can be separated once basic material needs have been met. Historically “all the most important processes of structural transformation that the economic system has experienced, from the creation of a labor market … to the concentration of production in large factories … from colonial exploitation to postwar development policies … ending with consumerism and the financialization of the economy … have been supported and shaped by economic growth” (Bonaiuti 2011, p. 46); growth acts as a lubricant for change within society as the old is devalued and the new developed.
Eco-modernist scholars have identified localized and limited examples of reflexive behavior, but have provided no evidence of such behavior leading to reductions in material and energy throughput at the global or national levels to support their theories, “empirical results from the cases studied are implicitly taken to have a general validity, but the research strategies applied are actually not able to support such claims” (Seippel 2012, p. 299). In addition, European environmental sociology “draws heavily on the sociology of science and science and technology studies” with the result that “natural science arguments are rarely used authoritatively in European environmental sociology” (Lidskog, Mol & Oosterveer 2015, p. 347); empirical analysis is not accepted as an objective measure of theory. Instead of viewing human society and economy as a subset of nature, eco-modernists argue for the incorporation of nature within the economy (Mol 1995 & 1996); human culture and technology being assumed to trump ecology.
This is in contrast to a US environmental sociology founded in the environmentalist heyday of the 1970’s (Catton & Dunlap 1978 & 1978a) that calls for the inclusion of “biophysical variables in sociological analysis” and “is ‘dependent on’ natural science laws, calculations and materialities” (Lidskog, Mol & Oosterveer 2015, p. 346). This is evident in the writings of Catton and Dunlap who state that “Neglect of the ecosystem-dependence of human society has been evident in sociological literature on economic development … which has simply not recognized biogeochemical limits to material progress” and is in the “habit of neglecting laws of other sciences (such as the Principle of Entropy and the Law of Conservation of Energy) – as if human actions were unaffected by them” (Catton & Dunlap 1978, p. 43); a statement that could be directed at eco-modernist scholars four decades later.
The approach in this text integrates both social and natural empirical study utilizing an approach of scientific realism “it is the task of philosophy to create ontologies of society, but in a society with extensive social research such ontologies should be made conditional on the results of the empirical study of society” and whenever “theory and empirical … research run into conflict, it is the metatheory … that needs to be changed” (Heiskala 2011, pp. 15-16). It is accepted that empirical study can be used to validate, or invalidate, social theory; the alternative is the “danger of replacing empirical social research with [ungrounded] metatheory” (Ibid., p.16). Therefore, it is assumed that eco-modernism is an unproven theory that may require changes to match the results of empirical study. Although energy usage and carbon emissions relative to the size of the global economy have been reduced, and there are specific local case studies of absolute reductions, there is no proof of absolute reductions at the national or global levels. It has not been proven that energy and fossil fuel usage can be significantly reduced in the context of a global economy growing at the rates experienced in this century. Such a finding is at odds with the common sense assumptions of continued exponential growth independent of energy supply and pollution limitations. Relative decoupling will be taken as a likely future reality, while absolute decoupling will be treated as an unlikely one.
The Resistance of Eco-Modernism to Empirical Refutation
Even though not supported by empirical research, eco-modernism, and the related theories of Green/Natural/Ecological Capitalism (Hawken, Lovins & Lovins 1999; Lovins & Rocky Mountain Institute 2011; Berghof & Rome 2017) and the concept of Sustainable Development still hold a leading position within the societal discourse on growth and ecology. The belief that economic growth can be delinked from environmental degradation and resource usage was implicitly accepted by the United Nations with its concept of Sustainable Development (WCED 1987), and has also been popularized by the World Bank which stated that “The view that greater economic activity inevitably hurts the environment is based upon static assumptions about technology, tastes and environmental investments” (IBRD 1992). The dominant United Nations climate change discourse also assumes that ecological modernization will take place to decouple economic growth and energy usage and/or carbon emissions; energy systems will transition from fossil fuels to low carbon alternatives, new technologies will capture and sequestrate carbon, and a greater relative, or even an absolute, decoupling of energy usage and economic growth will be achieved (UN IPCC 2018).
The staying power of such concepts, surviving lack of empirical support for more than three decades (and even longer in the case of mainstream economics), may be significantly due to their placement within a much longer utopian discourse of progress and modernism (Harlow, Golub & Allenby 2013). They reflect the political modernization theory that became dominant in the West in the post-WW2 period and that proposed “that a meliorist, rationalizing, benevolent, technocratic state was capable of solving all social and especially economic ills” (Gilman 2003, p. 56). Neoliberalism also seems to have been integrated into these concepts, as Foster notes (2012, p. 220):
the emphasis of ecological modernization theory … seems to be shifting somewhat in recent years from public regulation by government to private authority in the governance of ecological flows [within which] the privatization of formerly public authority is seen as entirely consistent with ecological reform or regulation, since corporations, along with transnational authorities, such as the WTO, are said to be increasingly disposed toward private self-governance and self-regulation of environmental flows through voluntary measures in line with ecological rationality.
Beliefs that a combination of unfettered free markets and human ingenuity are capable of resolving fundamental social issues and limits, a utopian liberalism, emerged toward the end of the 18th century (Polanyi 2001). This utopian liberalism is reflected in the words of Beck (2007, p. 73), who states that, “Under a regime of ‘green capitalism’ composed of transnationally structured ecological enforced markets, ecology no longer represents a hindrance to the economy. Rather, the opposite holds: ecology and climate protection could soon represent a direct route to profits”. As with liberalism, actually existing communism is a modernist child of the Enlightenment and generally shares the belief in the unlimited capabilities of human organization and ingenuity. This is reflected in the major ecological problems created by the actual practice of communism in both Russia (Powell 1971; Kramer 1974) and a China with a previous history of extensive ecological degradation (Shapiro 2001; Economy 2004; Elvin 2004). The discourse of progress and modernity is not just one of capitalism but a “greater problem of industrial civilization” (Polanyi 1968, p. 76), a paradigm that “is still a powerful device in civic debate” (Heiskala 2011, p. 15). To reject it is to reject the two major ideological discourses of the modern industrialized era. It is also to reject a much deeper human societal belief of human supremacism, that “humans are separate from and superior to [every other creature] on the planet” which provides “part of the foundation of much of the culture’s religion, science, economics, philosophy, art, epistemology, and so on” (Jensen 2016, p. 11).
In addition, the theories of Green/Natural/Ecological Capitalism and the concept of Sustainable Development are conceptually flexible enough to be ontologically defined by beholders with many differing utopian ideals. These theories can also be seen as a mainstream response (including from leading mainstream economists) to the anti-utopian messages arising in the 1970’s from such texts as Limits to Growth (Meadows et. al. 1972) and The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) and US environmental sociology, as well as a general increase in environmental awareness and the identification of the negative impacts of industrial civilization. The comment of the mainstream economist Solow is telling “having, like everyone else, been suckered into the reading of Limits to Growth” and is representative of the approach of many mainstream economists and sociologists to what was seen as the overly pessimistic and anti-modernistic environmental discourses of the 1970’s that challenged some of the common sense assumptions of modern growth-oriented societies (Foster 2012; Parenti 2012). Eco-modernism (and the various strands of sustainable capitalism and development), as with modernism, “is an expression of conformity to dominant institutions, which are seen as the very epitome of modern” (Foster 2012, p. 217) and thus serves as a theoretical and discoursal protection of the status quo against threatening theories and discourses. “It should hardly surprise us that there is very little difference between the language and emphases of today’s ecological modernization theorists, and the earlier stances adopted by post–Second War modernization theorists such as Bell, Lipset, and Nisbet, when entering the limits of growth debate” (Ibid., p. 219). Hickel & Kallis (2020, p. 483) note that eco-modernist discourses are unsupported by “extant empirical evidence” and that:
It seems likely that the insistence on green growth is politically motivated. The assumption is that it is not politically acceptable to question economic growth and that no nation would voluntary limit growth in the name of the climate or environment; therefore, green growth must be true, since the alternative is disaster. (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 483).
Green growth, eco-modernism, acting as part of a hegemonic discourse that supports incremental change and continued economic growth, “false solutions [that] defend the status quo by proposing minor tweaks to the current system rather than rethinking social priorities and reconfiguring socio- economic relationships” (Gunderson et al. 2017, p. 147). Aklin and Mildenberger (2020, p. 5) make the observation that “climate policy involves a dramatic renegotiation of the institutions that structure economic and social activity within each economy … Sharp divisions in the material interests of political and economic stakeholders trigger subsequent distributive conflict over climate policy making”. Without the promise of eco-modernism to reconcile continued economic growth and ecological sustainability, that distributive conflict may be over a static, or even shrinking, economic pie; with the possibility of wealth and income redistribution coming to the fore. Better for societal elites, and especially those heavily dependent upon fossil fuel rents and fossil fuel dependent economic sectors such as automobile manufacturers with extensive internal combustion engine investments, to support the eco-modernist discourse; pushing off the day of reckoning into the future.
Eco-Modernism Refuted by State and Industry Reports
With a new wave of development in nations such as India and Indonesia that are at an energy-intensive stage of development the possibility for any absolute global energy/GDP decoupling, or even acceleration in relative decoupling, may not be possible for decades if at all. The extremely high correlation between increased energy usage and increased social welfare in such low energy usage per capita nations will provide intense pressure toward increases in energy consumption. At the same time, there appears to be little appetite within the industrialized nations for offsetting reductions in energy usage. The still dominant modernist and eco-modernist discourses of human exemptionalism reinforce and support these trends. They also support a predominantly technocratic approach to issues of energy security and environmental pollution that fits well with the rationalist and technocratic approaches of neo-realist and liberal internationalist international relations traditions.
As noted above, this research will assume that there may be a continued relative decoupling of economic growth and energy usage but will reject absolute decoupling as an unreliable hypothesis. If global economic growth is to continue at the over 3% rate achieved in this century the result will tend toward increased energy (and quite possibly fossil fuel) consumption. As societies get wealthier, they may reduce the amount of energy (and other material) required per unit of GDP, but no absolute reduction in usage is achieved:
Whilst the strength of the proportionality between consumption and impact decreases slightly towards higher incomes (measured by so-called elasticities), consumption was found to be a consistently positive driver. In other words, the impact intensity of consumption decreases, but absolute impacts increase towards higher consumption. Absolute decoupling, let alone an inverted-U-type Kuznets relationship, does not occur from a consumption-based accounting perspective. (Wiedman, Lenzen, Keysser & Steinberger 2020)
This assumption is supported by the International Energy Outlook produced by the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), that forecasts an increase of nearly 50% in world energy consumption between 2018 and 2050 in its reference case, “with almost all of the increase occurring in non-OECD countries” (EIA 2019, p. 24); non-OECD countries include China, India, Indonesia and South East Asia. In the EIA’s forecasts, the growth in renewables is unable to offset the growth in energy usage, resulting in continued increases in fossil fuel consumption. The International Energy Administration (IEA) also forecasts increasing fossil fuel use, in this case to 2040. In the New Policies scenario that includes all new policies and targets announced by governments (an optimistic scenario given the mismatch between announcements and actions by many governments [Wilkes, Warren & Parkin 2018; Climate Action Tracker 2019]), the growth in renewables cannot fully offset a growth in global energy usage of over a quarter by 2040 (IEA 2018).
In the IEA’s eco-modernist Sustainable Development Scenario (IEA 2018) an approximate doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvement offsets economic growth (i.e. zero energy consumption growth with over 3% global economic growth) and increases in electrification and renewables reduce fossil fuel use. It is notable that even in this scenario large-scale implementation of carbon capture, usage and storage technologies is required to meet GHG emission goals. Its assumption of a doubling in energy efficiency is also seriously undercut by the findings of the IEA 2020 report on energy efficiency that found that “Since 2015, global improvements in energy efficiency … have been declining”, which is “especially worrying because energy efficiency delivers more than 40% of the reduction in energy-related greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years in the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario” (IEA 2020, p. 10).
As discussed above, the probability of such an eco-modernist scenario will not be taken as a probable one; the assumptions in this research align significantly with the EIA reference case and IEA New Policies scenario. They also align with short-term (5-year) renewable energy industry association forecasts which see a slow growth of 2.7% per annum in net new global wind energy capacity (GWEC 2019) and a rapid deceleration in the annual growth of net new solar capacity from 12% in 2020 to 6% in 2023 (SolarPower Europe 2019); the latter compares to approximately 25% as recently as 2019.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report 2020 (UNEP 2020) did find that consumption-based measures of GHG emissions, which include embedded-energy imports, have exhibited small reductions for the richer nations since the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). A major reason for this though has been the significantly reduced rates of growth in the EU28, US and Japan after the GFC. Even these reduced rates of growth may have been significantly over-stated for a US that has aggressively utilized statistical changes to reduce the inflation rate (deflator) used to convert nominal into real GDP (therefore inflating its real GDP growth numbers [Williams 2013]), and included its large and growing fee-based financial sector as an economic output rather than as the intermediate cost that it had been previously considered to be (Assa 2017). As Hudson (2013, 2015, 2022) has detailed, the growth of the financial sector may represent more a growth in rentier extractive overhead than an increase in value added activities. In addition, there are significant concerns that the positive GHG emissions effects of coal to natural gas switching in the electricity-generation sector in many rich nations have been substantially over-estimated due to the under-counting of fugitive methane emissions related to natural gas extraction and distribution (McKibben 2016; Howarth 2019; Schneising et al 2020; Wheeler 2021).
Eco-Modernist Doubling Down: Capturing Carbon
After the multi-decadal failure to reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions through the use of renewable energy and increased energy efficiency, attention has increasingly turned to the possibility of CCUS (Carbon Capture Use & Storage), and the direct air capture (DACS) of CO2, even though both are highly speculative technologies on the scales envisaged. In 2030, CCUS facilities are forecast to capture only 151 Mt CO2 versus the required 1150 Mt CO2 capacity in the IEA Net Zero Emissions Scenario (IEA 2022). Judging from historical experience, many planned CCUS facilities may be cancelled (Carrington 2015, Fehrenbacher 2017, Akerboom et al. 2021, Turan 2021, p. 14). It may take decades for DACS to become commercially viable, if it ever does (Realmonte 2019; Gertner 2021). A variation of CCUS is Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), which assumes the large-scale growth of biomass that will be incinerated to produce electricity, with the related CO2 emissions captured and stored. After the inclusion of large-scale BECCS in the assumptions of the majority of the scenarios of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (Pachauri et al. 2014), it quickly became apparent that the scale of land required rendered it infeasible. As Hickel and Kallis (2020, p. 477) note, ‘IPCC modelling teams began including it [BECCS] in their scenarios from 2005, despite having no firm evidence of its feasibility. With the publication of AR5, BECCS was enshrined as a dominant assumption’. As they further note:
First, the viability of power generation with CCS has never been proven to be economically viable or scalable; it would require the construction of 15,000 facilities … Second, the scale of biomass assumed in the AR5 scenarios would require plantations covering land two to three times the size of India, which raises questions about land availability, competition with food production, carbon neutrality, and biodiversity loss … Third, the necessary storage capacity may not exist. (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 478).
Highly speculative technologies included in official forecasts to “square the circle” of continued economic growth and GHG emissions with no support in technological reality or the scale of actual installations. When faced with the empirical failure of eco-modernism, the ruling discourse is bolstered by more eco-modernism through these carbon capture technologies; once again kicking the climate can down the road. Once their failure becomes evident, perhaps further unproven technologies will be called upon such as Solar Radiation Management (SRM).
The Painful Reality: Steady State/Degrowth vs. State/Ruling Class Legitimacy
With the failure of eco-modernism, the only avenue available to reduce GHG emissions at the required rate proposed by the UN IPCC would be a significant if not a total reduction in global positive GDP growth combined with global-scale war-like efforts to transition to low carbon energy sources and increase energy efficiency. This would require an extremely high level of trust and coordination at the international level, including the possibility of richer nations making a greater contribution (e.g. wealth and technology transfers, negative growth) to make space for poorer nations to improve their populace’s living conditions; a contraction and convergence strategy (Meyer 2000). There would also need to be sanctions available against any “free-riding” nations or non-state actors. With social welfare possibly ceasing to grow above a given level of GDP per capita, after which other factors such as social inequality become central (Wilkinson & Pickett 2009), such “contraction and convergence” may not even be negative for even the richer nations’ general populations (as against the ruling classes of those nations) if managed in an equitable manner.
In the post-WW2 period economic growth became a sine qua non of state legitimacy, even more so from the last decade of the twentieth century as the ideological supports of communism and socialism were removed from the Soviet-bloc, China and India. With the rejection of the ‘License Raj” in India in the early 1990s, the post-Tiananmen Square Chinese state compact of growth without political liberalization, and the recovery of Russia from the disastrous 1990s, approximately half of humanity has been added to the growth equals state legitimacy fold; as long as personal incomes continue to rise, the state can claim its right to govern. Added to this dynamic is the pressure of an international system full of growing economies. To not grow is to rapidly fall behind in economic scale and the resultant relative power; the dynamics of great power competition only add to the intensity of this pressure for continued growth.
In the past few decades, industrialized societies have also become increasingly dependent upon continued economic growth for social, economic and political stability as financial markets, property values, retirement plans, corporate incentives, insurance policies and long-term state budgets have become structurally dependent upon assumptions of unbroken future economic growth (Boyd 2014). The rapid growth of financial markets in relation to the economy in the United States and United Kingdom and many other nations, together with extensive deregulation and globalization, has created a global financial system that has been repeatedly shown to be prone to abrupt non-linear behavior. As a complex social system, the global financial system displays the same bounded resilience that many complex ecological systems display (May, Levin & Sugihara 2008; Boyd 2014). Within certain limits of variability the system can maintain its integrity, utilizing negative feedback and adaptability mechanisms to regulate toward equilibrium, but when those limits are broken positive feedback loops can rapidly move the system to a very different state (Sornette 2002, 2003); such events in the financial markets are referred to as “crashes”. The progressive integration and increasing complexity of global financial markets, together with increases in market concentration, has increased the risk of such cascading systemic collapses (Goldin, Mariathasan, Georg and Vogel 2014). Even just the prospect of a contraction in the economy can have a large negative impact upon the financial markets, possibly creating a positive feedback loop between the financial system and the economy. This is the ledge that state policy makers looked over in 2008 before launching their global multi-trillion-dollar bailout. States will carry out previously unthought of interventions in the economy to forestall the positive feedback loop between falling asset prices and economic contraction; as seen once again during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. With both markets and eco-systems displaying non-linear behavior, and the former existing within the latter, there is also the possibility for the compounding effects of coupled non-linear behavior at different scales.
The structure and dynamics of political, economic and financial systems at national, regional and global scales, together with inter-state competition, preclude an unforced movement away from the growth paradigm. Apart from the huge political economic hurdles of sharing out the costs of such an approach, especially with so much of modern “wealth” dependent upon assumed rates of future economic growth, there is the linkage between relative economic size and geopolitical power detailed by scholars (Anievas 2014; Kennedy 1987). Any contraction in the richer nations to facilitate a convergence of other nations with their levels of per capita wealth would lead to a relative loss of power within the World Order (and within nations), not something that any national elite has been accepting of in history. Are the elites of the richer nations capable of taking a greater share of the costs of climate change mitigation, both within their own nations and with respect to the elites of other nations? Will the general populations of the richer nations accept a fall in living standards as they see the living standards of others rise? The seeming impossibility of an answer of “yes” to these two questions provides the core determinants of why the eco-modernist discourse continues in the face of empirical refutation; the reality that it hides is far too problematic and threatening for the elites that control the dominant societal discourses.
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I’m keen to see how your arguments develop. Thanks