Eco-economic Decoupling

Eco-economic Decoupling

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-economic_decoupling

Nafeez Ahmed looks at ‘Decoupling’ GDP growth from resource use

What conditions would enable reducing overall use of planet's resources, reducing climate change impacts *and* allow increasing, continued economic growth

Insurge / July 2020

NA / The conventional belief has been most recently articulated in a recent book, More From Less, by Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist the MIT Sloan School of Management. Financial and other data, McAfee argued, shows we can actually easily reduce our material footprint while continuing to grow our economies in a win-win scenario.

Drill down:

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources ― and What Happens Next

by Andrew McAfee

• https://www.amazon.com/dp/1982103574

From critical reviews of More From Less:

This book uses falling US consumption of raw materials, energy and reducing US CO2 production to argue that resource use is decreasing despite ongoing economic growth since 1970.

Most of the consumption data referenced does not account for the fact that a large portion of US manufacturing has moved offshore in that period. Much of the data for raw material consumption is from the U.S. Geological Survey - National Minerals Information Center. I emailed them asking whether their consumption data includes imported finished goods - eg. automobiles and washing machines for steel consumption. They replied that this consumption data definitely would not. Energy consumption and CO2 production only include US based figures, ignoring the huge energy consumption and CO2 production in China which has been off shored with manufacturing our goods.

The core thesis of this book is therefore not backed up by data. I'm sure the author knows this and I think it is intellectually dishonest not to reference this in the book, especially when it is being used as a primary source of techno-optimism by Steven Pinker, Christine Lagarde, Eric Schmidt and Larry Summers.

Decoupling is a topic that has been studied extensively, with one recent overview finding over 1200 peer-reviewed research papers published between 1990 and 2015. As a result, there exists a voluminous body of research that has used better methods and covers far more ground, both theoretically and empirically, than this book. The conclusions of this research stream are fairly clear, as a recent, comprehensive and well-worth-the-read overview of decoupling research (Parrique et al. 2019) shows: while some decoupling is beyond doubt happening, there is no sturdy evidence that could permit us to believe that _necessary_ decoupling is going on.

If we wish to continue our present course and economic growth patterns, we would need to see decoupling that is 1) absolute, 2) deep enough, 3) fast enough, 4) permanent, and 5) global.

This is not what research shows, even though there is evidence that some countries have been able to slightly decrease the use of some resources (albeit even this finding diminishes once we account for the increasing financialization of the economy, as Kovacic et al. 2017 find for the EU-14).

The More From Less book's central message is basically demolished by a single open access article in PNAS (Wiedmann et al. 2015), not to mention other relevant research. Using far more sophisticated methods, informed by past research on the topic, and covering the value chains and countries far more extensively than this book, the Widemann et al. concluded that if the total materials footprint of industrialized countries, USA included, has decoupled at all, the amount of absolute decoupling is insignificant. I cannot find any reference to this rather fundamental piece of research in the book, nor can I find any references to any recent studies that are more critical about decoupling claims. In fact, I cannot find solid evidence, either in references or in the text, that the author is even aware that such research exists. As such, I do not believe that the book's thesis could ever be published in a reputable peer reviewed journal: existing research has already covered this ground repeatedly, with better methods.

In a positive note, the author is very clear that market fundamentalism - letting capitalism run amok - is emphatically NOT an answer to the environmental crises, and that we need a strong state to regulate and control the private interests, repair market failures and price the externalities. There is ample evidence that of all socio-economic systems we have tried so far, this approach - sometimes known as the Nordic model - has the best track record of creating and somewhat equitably distributing wealth. That said, I've already noticed that many proponents of this book haven't noticed these caveats, and instead claim that McAfee suggests unbridled capitalism is "the" answer.

However, despite rather serious flaws in the key argument, I have no doubt that the book will become a bestseller. We humans are so desperate to believe that nothing needs to change.

References

Kovacic, Z., Spano, M., Lo Piano, S. and Sorman, A.H. (2017). Finance, energy and the decoupling: an empirical study. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 1-26.

Parrique T., Barth J., Briens F., C. Kerschner, Kraus-Polk A., Kuokkanen A., Spangenberg J.H. (2019). Decoupling debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability. European Environmental Bureau.

Wiedmann, T. O., Schandl, H., Lenzen, M., Moran, D., Suh, S., West, J., & Kanemoto, K. (2015). The material footprint of nations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(20), 6271–6276.

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