Can Our Standard of Living Keep Growing Forever?
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
And, if Not, Must Societies Impoverish Themselves to Stop Climate Change?
For more than two centuries, our standard of living, measured by our national income, has been the defining measure of economic success, associated with rising incomes, expanding opportunities, and proliferating comforts. But just as much, it has been a measure of the planet’s human-caused ecological degradation—what with a vast vortex of plastic waste clogging the Pacific Ocean, the expansion of Earth-warming carbon dioxide and methane, the startling decline of certain animal and plant populations worldwide, and microplastics sprinkled liberally from the Arctic to the deep ocean to the human brain.
Needless to say, as climate change accelerates and planetary limits become increasingly visible, the assumption that national incomes can rise endlessly is being seriously questioned.
This tension sits at the heart of a growing debate: Can the economy keep expanding on a finite planet?
On one side sit the “degrowth” thinkers, who argue that saving the biosphere means wealthy nations must intentionally scale back their industrial output and consumption. This would mean taking the radical step of deliberately reducing countries’ national income or gross domestic product (GDP). This theory says that material consumption, especially in everything related to fossil fuels, heavy industry, aviation, and fast fashion, would have to fall for a healthy planetary ecology to be sustained.
In contrast, so-called “green growth” advocates insist that human ingenuity, powered by fast-paced technological innovation, total electrification, and smart market incentives, can break the link between economic success and ecological destruction. In their view, societies can decouple prosperity from environmental harm, allowing economies to continue growing while emissions actually fall.
The Case for Degrowth: Embracing Less by Design
The core philosophy of degrowth began decades ago by scholars, according to Degrowth.info, which allies with the Research and Degrowth International and other organizations.
The concept of degrowth starts with a simple ecological fact: The Earth is a closed system with strict physical boundaries. Degrowth scholars argue that treating endless economic expansion as a non-negotiable goal is completely incompatible with a stable planet. Today, an organization called Earth Overshoot Day even tracks to the day when “humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.” In 2025, the overshoot day was July 24.
The Trap of Total Growth
Critics of conventional GDP accounting argue that growth statistics often fail to distinguish between activities that improve human well-being and activities that merely generate economic transactions.
“Growth is a sort of absolute number,” pointed out Kate Aronoff, a staff writer with The New Republic, during a panel discussion on climate and capitalism at Columbia University. “If there’s an oil spill, growth [GDP] goes up because people need to clean it up. We must think a little bit about what the content of growth is.”
Many economists have argued that GDP alone is an incomplete measure of societal progress.
Environmental disasters, pollution cleanup efforts, and climate-related reconstruction can all contribute to GDP even while reflecting ecological damage and social costs. For this reason, many economists have argued that GDP alone is an incomplete measure of societal progress.
Degrowth advocates point out that historically, making things more efficient rarely cuts down on total resource use. Economists call this the “rebound effect” or Jevons paradox, an established macroeconomic principle detailing how microeconomic resource efficiency improvements can inadvertently expand overall consumption. When technology makes a resource cheaper and more efficient to use, society usually ends up using far more of it in the long run. Think of fuel-efficient planes: As flying got cheaper, the explosion of global flights completely wiped out any environmental benefit from better engines.
Targeting Excess, Not Well-being
It is vital to understand that degrowth isn’t about forcing society into a miserable, chaotic recession. Instead, it is envisioned as a planned, democratic reduction of energy and material use especially in wealthy nations. The strategy targets structurally wasteful, high-carbon industries rather than cutting things that make people genuinely happy. Proponents argue society should intentionally shrink sectors like:
fast fashion and electronics, which are built with planned obsolescence
industrial, grain-fed meat production
private aviation and oversized, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles.
“Certain parts of the economy need to grow, and certain parts need to shrink.”
“For example, a degrowth economic model would likely look to cut down beef production,” Matt Orsagh, cofounder of RISE Sustainable Investment Consultancy, told a 2024 Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. “If beef production and consumption significantly declined, the result would prove beneficial to climate change mitigation (less methane and CO2 from beef transport), water resources (beef production is very water intensive), [and] land use (many acres of forests are cleared for cattle grazing), and [would] result in less nitrogen and phosphorus leaking into our waterways (pesticides on crops to feed cattle have nasty consequences).”
At the March 2026 Columbia University forum, Aronoff said, “I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the entire economy has to degrow. Rather, certain parts of the economy need to grow, and certain parts need to shrink. We need fewer fossil fuels, for instance.”
Degrowth advocates generally argue for selectively reducing activities that generate large environmental costs while expanding sectors that improve human welfare, such as renewable energy, public transportation, education, healthcare, and ecosystem restoration. Their goal is to reduce material and energy throughput in the economy while maintaining or improving quality of life.
The Case for Green Growth: Reinventing Prosperity
On the other side, green growth advocates argue that halting economic expansion is a political dead end and completely unnecessary. They view the climate crisis not as a fatal flaw of growth itself, but as a system design error, a failure of market pricing and technology that can be engineered away.
The Reality of Absolute Decoupling
The cornerstone of the green growth argument is “absolute decoupling.” This is the holy grail of green economics: a state where a country’s GDP continues to climb while its total environmental footprint and emissions steadily drop.
“Some countries have reduced their CO2 emissions while increasing their gross domestic product (absolute decoupling).”
Supporters of green growth argue that absolute decoupling is already occurring in several advanced economies.
“Over the past decade,” wrote Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel in Lancet Planetary Health in 2023, “some countries have reduced their CO2 emissions while increasing their gross domestic product (absolute decoupling). Politicians and media have hailed this as green growth.”
While experts still argue over the speed of this shift, the structural data is verified. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, more than 30 advanced nations, including the UK, France, Germany, and the US, have successfully decoupled absolute territorial emissions from GDP expansion. This has been achieved largely by shifting toward digital, service, and knowledge-based economies.
Market Dynamics and Technological Innovation
Advocates of green growth contend that competitive markets can accelerate the deployment of new technologies at unprecedented speed when supported by effective public policy. They point to the dramatic declines in the costs of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage over the past two decades as evidence that innovation, investment, and economies of scale can rapidly transform entire industries.
“For the first time,” said Bloomberg climate reporter Akshat Rathi, “humanity has a plan for how to transform at least one major part of the economy—the energy system—over the next few decades. Reforming capitalism might be the only practical way to get to zero emissions quickly.”
Proponents also argue that government policy can steer private capital toward low-carbon development. Carbon-pricing systems, clean-energy incentives, emissions regulations, and industrial policy have increasingly been used around the world to encourage investment in renewable energy, electrification, and other climate solutions.
“If you look at where [climate] solutions are scaling,” Rathi said, “it’s a combination of people, policy, and technology coming together to make the capitalist system work.”
China, for example, has become one of the world’s largest investors in low-carbon technologies, directing hundreds of billions of dollars annually toward renewable energy, electric vehicles, and related infrastructure—even while keeping 3,100 coal-fired power plants on line and several hundred more in planning or development.
Government policies can reshape the private sector. Structural implementation has progressed to where nearly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are now covered by carbon-pricing systems, though the overall weighted average price globally remains far below target thresholds.
Evaluating the Tensions: Speed, Feasibility, and Justice
To find a realistic path forward, we must look past the slogans and carefully weigh the trade-offs on both sides.
Modern financial systems, labor markets, pension funds, and public budgets have largely been built around expectations of continual economic expansion.
The principal attraction of the degrowth approach is its directness. Rather than waiting for future technological breakthroughs, it seeks immediate reductions in resource extraction, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. Advocates argue that this approach more closely aligns economic activity with ecological limits and shifts attention toward measures of success like public health, community well-being, and ecosystem stability rather than GDP alone.
Its greatest challenge, however, is political and economic feasibility. Modern financial systems, labor markets, pension funds, and public budgets have largely been built around expectations of continual economic expansion, making deliberate contraction difficult to implement without enormous disruption.
Green growth, by contrast, works largely within existing economic institutions. Because it promises continued prosperity while reducing environmental impacts, it enjoys considerably broader support from governments, businesses, and investors. Supporters believe that technological innovation, market incentives, and policy reforms can rapidly scale clean-energy solutions and decarbonize economies.
Critics, however, argue that green growth may underestimate the scale of resource use required for continued expansion and may fail to reduce environmental pressures quickly enough if clean technologies merely supplement rather than replace fossil fuel systems.
At the heart of the disagreement lies a deeper question about how societies should measure success.
Degrowth proponents favor indicators focused on human and ecological well-being, while green growth advocates generally retain GDP as a central measure of progress, supplemented by environmental metrics. Both perspectives seek a prosperous future, but they differ fundamentally on whether that future requires consuming less or innovating more.
Both perspectives seek a prosperous future, but they differ fundamentally on whether that future requires consuming less or innovating more.
The Political and Structural Backlash
The most obvious roadblock for the degrowth model is political reality. Modern financial systems, banking, and pension funds are literally hardwired to require constant growth. Efforts to phase out major industries inevitably encounter resistance from workers, businesses, investors, and communities whose livelihoods depend on those sectors.
Environmental advocates note that resistance to environmental regulations is common, regardless of the policy approach adopted. Established industries often lobby against measures that threaten existing business models, as illustrated by debates surrounding European vehicle-emissions standards and other climate regulations.
Automakers, for example, fought back against European Union (EU) climate regulation. During negotiations on the EU’s 2035 car CO₂ rules, lobbying by governments and industry led to key concessions, including allowing CO₂‑neutral synthetic‑fuel vehicles and letting automakers average their fleets’ emissions so higher-emissions carmakers can “borrow” their cleaner peers’ performance.
The Additive Energy Problem
The biggest risk of relying purely on market-driven green growth is that clean energy might just become an addition to our energy system rather than a substitution for fossil fuels.
“We can have tremendous growth in solar, wind, and renewables while continuing to add those resources to a fossil-fuel system that is still expanding,” Aronson warned. “Growth in renewables can be additive rather than substitutive. We have not yet figured out how to avoid that.”
Thus, critics of green growth argue that the critical measure is not how much renewable energy is installed but whether fossil-fuel consumption declines as a result.
Relying entirely on the private sector has clear limits. For example, despite massive federal funding, over 18 major legacy automakers rapidly scaled back, delayed, or outright canceled their domestic electric vehicle lines due to shifting consumer demand, high capital costs, and changing credit incentives.
Critics further contend that some essential climate solutions, such as large-scale public transit systems, regional planning initiatives, and major infrastructure projects, often require sustained public-sector leadership because they may not generate the short-term financial returns typically sought by private investors.
The Hybrid Way Forward: ‘Better’ over ‘Less’
The ongoing debate between degrowth and green growth suggests that the most effective path forward may not fit neatly into either camp. Instead, the most practical path forward is likely a hybrid model.
The most practical path forward is likely a hybrid [degrowth/green growth] model.
This middle ground means aggressively building out the clean-tech infrastructure championed by green growth while simultaneously adopting the targeted resource caps and quality-of-life metrics central to degrowth. It forces us to admit that while sectors like renewable grids, public transit, and healthcare need to grow exponentially, high-pollution and low-utility industries must be intentionally wound down.
Regardless of philosophical differences, most analysts agree that meaningful progress must ultimately be measured by tangible outcomes: declining fossil fuel use, falling greenhouse gas emissions, healthier ecosystems, increasing electrification, and improved human well-being.
Ultimately, the core challenge of the current generation is transitioning from an economy obsessed with “more” to an economy focused on “better.” The survival of the biosphere appears to depend on building economic systems that finally respect the physical boundaries of the planet.
*Jana Perez-Angelo is a Denver-based writer and multidisciplinary creative and digital strategist passionate about brand storytelling and purpose-driven content. Her work has been featured in Relevant Magazine, Medium, and Faithful Life.
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