One of the assignments of the APPG is to challenge Parliament—and the Government—to evaluate their assumptions about the limits to economic growth. In that vein, the chair of the APPG, Caroline Lucas MP, recently submitted a written question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS): “To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to his UN speech of 6 March 2020, whether his statement that green growth is absolutely possible is based on evidence (a) that absolute decoupling of gross domestic product growth from greenhouse gas emissions has occurred in relation to (a) consumption-based emissions incorporating the overseas impacts of UK economic activity and (b) the UK’s equitable contribution to the 1.5 degree temperature goal of the Paris climate agreement.”
In his reply, current Minister of State (BEIS), Kwasi Kwarteng, wrote that in his view: “Green Growth is absolutely possible. Between 1990 and 2018, the UK reduced emissions by 43% while growing our economy by 75% – decarbonising our economy faster than any other G20 country since 2000. The latest statistics show that UK emissions on a consumption basis (including emissions embedded in imports) also fell by 21 per cent between 2007 and 2017. Last year, the UK became the first major economy to legislate to achieve net zero emissions. This will continue to enable us to meet our climate change obligations, including those made under the Paris Agreement, and – as stated by the Committee on Climate Change – goes beyond the reduction needed globally to hold the expected rise in global average temperature to well below 2°C.”
As research carried out by the Centre for the Understanidng of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP)—e.g. published in Science last year—shows, decoupling GDP from the flow of emissions is not the same as decoupling economic activity from the stocks of environmental and material resources on which future prosperity depends: “The highest rate of decoupling ever achieved by the world’s advanced economies was a little under 3%, in the years immediately following the oil crises of the 1970s. The average rate of decline across the world at the moment is less than 1%. In the case of a rich country like the United Kingdom, sufficient absolute decoupling would mean a decline in the nation’s carbon footprint at a rate in excess of 20% each year, with a net zero target that might need to be as early as 2030.”
The larger the economy becomes, the more difficult it is to decouple that growth from its material impacts. To meet the stated climate targets, “proponents of ‘green growth’ must show that it is possible to effectively eliminate carbon emissions from developed economies in the space of little more than a decade with no impact at all on economic expansion.—None of this is to suggest”, to further quote the Science article, “that decoupling itself is either unnecessary or impossible. On the contrary, decoupling wellbeing from material throughput is vital if societies are to deliver a more sustainable prosperity—for people and for the planet.”
Links
- Unraveling the claims for and against green growth | Science Article by Prof Tim Jackson and Prof Peter Victor, November 2019.
- If you are interested in the wellbeing economy agenda, please see our policy briefings, including the recently published paper on Wellbeing Matters—Tackling growth dependency.
- Zero Carbon Sooner—The case for an early zero carbon target for the UK