- How can quality of life and affluence also be reached with considerably lower use of energy and resources?
- How can be prevented that the efficiency gains lead to even more consumption?
- Is beyond the relative decoupling an absolute decoupling of production growth and resource consumption possible and realistic before the background of the global population development?
- Which natural availability limits must be considered for the utilisation of resources and included in the planning for economic processes?
- How is the international race (also of emerging economies) for resources regulated? Do we need specific international resource utilisation agreements?
- How can we succeed in transferring raw materials such as natural and mineral resources into intelligent cycles? Is, for that purpose, a reinvention of our industrial material flows required?
- Which economic opportunities and employment potentials result from a more intelligent and more sustainable way of dealing with resources?
The Little family has not only one, but several laptops, video game consoles, DVD players and LCD TV sets, otherwise disputes about the use would be pre-programmed.
The Little family is aware of the fact that they are making in this way a negative contribution to climate change. Because energy consumption is rising in the Western industrialized nations – in spite of technical efficiency improvements. The reason is the increased use of consumer electronics and of appliances of information and communication technology such as LCD TV sets, DVD players – and they exist often even twice or three times per household.
More and more efficient and larger appliances are also responsible for rising energy consumption.
In order to make their ecological footprint smaller the whole Little family has been dealing for a while with the topic of resource saving. A few months ago father and son replaced two thirds of all bulbs in the house by energy saving lamps, with electronic devices in case of non-use the main power plug was disconnected, if possible. When currently buying a new car Mrs. Little opted for a hybrid vehicle. And since Catherine learned at school that the production of one kilogramme of beef is as much a burden on the climate as a 250 km-drive by car, she has refrained from eating meat. When the Little family is measuring its ecological footprint again half a year later, they are quite surprised. The implemented measures have brought about only a few improvements in the result. In particular the nutritional and the consumer behaviour of the Little family are still responsible for a high resource consumption. The Little family is asking itself whether maybe after all only less consumption brings about improvements? In any case the Little family has cancelled the order of the third TV set at the dealer around the corner.
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Conference on "Degrowth in the Americas"
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De-growth & De-bound effect!
Facing the reality, the limits of the natural world, mainstream economists rely mostly on technological innovations to decouple economic growth from natural resource use. This belief is also the realm of proponents of a colorful palette of economic orientations, such as green new deal, green or brown growth, blue economy, and the like. That is, in other words, the myth of dematerialization of the economy through technological salvation. This abiding debate over the effect of efficiency improvements probably dates back from the work of William Stanley Jevons in The Coal Question: “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” (Jevons, 1865, p75).
In deed, whatever the color of the economic model, through efficiency, the ratio of resource use and environment impact to GDP is decreasing, a decoupling is already occurring, though “at a rate that is insufficient to meet the needs of an equitable and sustainable society” (UNEP, 2011, p74). Put differently, in a growing economy, the decoupling provided by energy- and/or resource-saving technological progress is unlikely to lead us towards sustainability. What is needed is an absolute decoupling, not a relative one. For that purpose, we have to deal with the well known and uncontroversial fact: the Jevons Paradox (or the so-called rebound-effect).
Put differently, if at the first sight technological progress seems to be a good means to tackle the rebound effect, it leads, however, to an increase of resource use and ecological impacts. Mankind shall count on himself to solve this paradox. For this reason, de-growth proponents do not denigrate technology, but they are calling for a uprising of people’s consciousness towards frugal innovation.
Innovations are called frugal if they bring new paths towards less consumption and less production. For instance, convivial tools (Illich 1973), which are not designed to create new needs, but foster autonomy and creativity are frugal innovations. They may lead to a “debound effect” (Schneider, 2010).
If frugal innovations fundamentally consist of bottom-up actions, occurring at the micro-level, there is also the need of top-down adjustments (emanating from institutions) to combine the frugal innovations at all level and therefore challenge any macro rebound effects. An example of the combination of frugal innovation with societal adjustment is about reducing the time spent by production or consumption activities. From the bottom, it consists on developing actions that liberate time from consumption and production activities for social ones. This can be done by voluntarily reducing working-hours, meanwhile enabling work-sharing. At the top, this can be encouraged and sustained by a drastic reduction of legal working hours. Other examples, such as regulation-related, natural resources-related, monetary-related or needs-related frugal innovation/adjustment have been detailed elsewhere (Schneider, 2010).
Thus, to tackle the rebound effect, de-growth stresses the need for frugality (sustainable lifestyle) on the one hand and for societal adjustment on the other. To reach environmental sustainability, people have to be aware that the more does not mean the better – but the better might be combined with the less. For example, all things being equals, if a 18W compact fluorescent bulb replaces a 75W incandescent bulb, the energy saving should be 76%. On the one hand, the user of the fluorescent bulb has to be conscious that this innovation might be used to consume less energy despite the same lighting time he has had hitherto. On the other hand, to avoid the indifference of the user who is then feeling less concerned with turning the light off, there might be the need for the introduction of adapted energy taxes (Binswanger, 2001).
“However, since innovations are orientated towards profit, it is worth noting that the so-called rebound effect is no paradox, but the expected outcome of a profit-driven investment. Technological innovation became the main method for materializing economic growth” (van Griethuysen, 2010, p592).
Binswanger, M. (2001). Technological progress and sustainable development: what about the rebound effect? Ecological Economics, 36, 119–132
Jevons, W.S. (1865). The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.
Schneider, F. (2010). Degrowth of Production and Consumption Capacities for social justice, wellbeing and ecological sustainability. In: Economic De-Growth and Steady-State. Second Conference on Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity.
UNEP. (2011). Decoupling natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth, A Report of the Working Group on Decoupling to the International Resource Panel. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Swilling, M., von Weizsäcker, E.U., Ren, Y., Moriguchi, Y., Crane, W., Krausmann, F., Eisenmenger, N., Giljum, S., Hennicke, P., Romero Lankao, P., Siriban Manalang, A. Tech. rept. United Nations Environment Programme.
Van Griethuysen, P. (2010). Why are we growth-addicted? The hard way towards degrowth in the involutionary western development path. Journal of Cleaner Production, 18, 590–595.
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