This paper is the first of a series of 3, which aims to introduce my PhD. The goal of this research is to explain how capitalism is reproduced and transformed in climate mitigation scenarios for the EU.

In Part 1, I explain why the current organization of the world economy can be said unsustainable, and what I mean by that. Part 2 examines how the economic system is depicted in recent and popular scenarios, and concludes that almost none of them question the current economic instutions. Part 3 lists the potential explanations to this surprising state of things, which constitute some of the hypotheses for my research.

I did not use a systematic method to collect and code the publications I read. This is because the representation of economic institutions in energy and climate scenarios has very rarely been studied before, and thus no normalized vocabulary was available to create queries in research databases.

What's the problem with climate mitigation scenarios and sustainability?

Climate mitigation scenarios are documents that explain how a region (city, country, world, etc.) might lower its GHG emissions in order to avoid more climate change. They are often designed by economists, engineers and other researchers, who use models1 to assess the consequences of policies for energy, emissions, incomes, etc. They are used by pretty much all governments in the world, and many other agencies, institutes, think-tanks, to take decisions or produce recommendations on public policies. As such, climate mitigation scenarios provide useful information if we want our economies to be sustainable.2

So, you would expect climate mitigation scenarios to care about sustainability, at least I did when I started this PhD. As I will show in future articles, this is a very sociologically naive view of the real functions of climate mitigation scenarios. But it is worth taking seriously, for 2 main reasons. First, because research papers, official reports and public narratives frame climate mitigation scenarios as a matter of sustainability. If you read any scenario report by an international agency or a government, you will find words such as "green", "clean" or "sustainable development". Second, I think sustainability is a very important thing to avoid further deaths, suffering and inequalities, so I think the people designing scenarios should be held accountable if they actually do not provide any help for that.3

What do I mean by sustainability?

Sustainability is quite easy to define qualitatively: it is a situation where human activities do not impact their environment faster than it can regenerate. "Impacts" can be using water, chopping wood, throwing plastics, burning fossil fuels, adding nitrogen to a soil, etc. Regeneration can be any process that counteracts these effects: trees growing back, waste being degraded, carbon being stored in the soil, etc. So, for example, emitting more carbon than trees can absorb is "unsustainable", which is why governments care so much about "net zero" these days. Of course, there most likely will always be some human activities that use non-renewable resources, such as metals, so it is not very useful to define sustainability only through this impact/regeneration couple. This is why the notion of "damages" is relevant: how much the impacts does or will do wrong to humans and society (Pottier 2016 explains the origins of this notion in economics, and also its misuse).

So there we have it! A society is sustainable if its activities will not cause significant damage to humans, through environmental impacts that are more intense than what can be regenerated. And a scenario is sustainable if it allows to create a sustainable society. As you might have guessed, pretty much every word I used reveals intractable problems when one tries to apply them to a specific case. This is especially the case if one wants to quantify sustainability, as researchers like to do.

Thresholds, budgets, conflicts of definition and distribution

Here are some of the questions one can ask when defining sustainability:

  • Which environmental pressures should be taken into account? Which of them have the greatest impact on human well-being?
  • Does one consider that the degradation of the environment can be partly compensated by technology? (a problem highlighted by Dietz and Neumayer 2007)
  • Which indicators should be used to measure well-being in a society?
  • Should one consider that the current level of well-being is satisfactory?4
  • Should indicators be taken separately, or combined? If so, how? (Global Footprint Network research team 2020 argue that multi-dimensional indices are too arbitrary)
  • Beyond which thresholds are environmental pressures considered to endanger lives and well-being?
  • Once environmental thresholds are quantified for the planet, who is responsible for preventing them to be exceeded? How does one distribute the quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, extracted material, water pollution?
  • How to take into account the different responsibilities and capacities of regions and social categories to reduce environmental pressures?
  • And above all, should one dedicate their whole life to collect and analyze gigantic datasets, while the world is literally on fire, before being able to say anything about sustainability?

None of these questions can be settled scientifically, any possible answer implies a political choice. This is especially the case since "sustainability" sounds like a good thing, so different groups want to define it according to their concerns. Of course, this does not mean that "sustainability" cannot be studied scientifically, as long as what is meant and measured by that is clear.

3 frameworks for sustainability assessment have encountered some success:

  • Planetary boundaries (Richardson et al. 2023): 9 environmental pressure levels over which there is a large risk of "abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems" (Rockström et al. 2009). They include climate change, erosion of biodiversity, changes in land use, ocean acidification, etc. 7 of the 9 are currently exceeded, in that sense the world economy is currently unsustainable. Here, sustainability is defined as a continental-scale problem, which is a political choice. For example, Bringezu (2015) highlights that mining will rarely affect the living conditions on an entire continent, but certainly does on a local level.

  • The ecological footprint, which quantifies the surfaces of land and ocean theoretically required to reproduce the resources consumed and absorb the waste and pollution produced by a given economy (Borucke et al. 2013). It can be compared with biocapacity, which quantifies the land and ocean surfaces available on the planet, in order to measure "overconsumption". According to the Footprint network's calculations, the world economy has been in deficit since 1970, and the EU well before that.5 This method only takes into account the environmental pressures that can easily be converted into hectares, which excludes chemical pollution, toxicity, eutrophication, soil erosion, water consumption, etc.

  • Doughnut economics, which aims to combine maximum environmental pressure thresholds with minimum human well-being thresholds. Planetary boundaries are often used as the "ecological ceiling", and because they are often represented in a circle, the combination with "social foundations" draws a doughnut. This is not a quantification method per se, as the indicators to be used are rarely defined. A variant is to aim for a low ecological footprint with a high human development index.

    Doughnut economics allows to explicitly include human well-being, while with other approaches, the death of most of the world population could count as a sustainable scenario6, as well as a low pressure but deeply unequal society. Frequently used well-being indicators include life expectancy, literacy, (Steinberger and Roberts 2010) the human development index (Steinberger and Roberts 2010 ; Ala-Mantila et al. 2023), the Gini coefficient (d'Alessandro et al. 2020), etc.

Other fields of research have tried to establish a threshold for specific environmental pressures. For climate change, the IPCC recommends limiting global warming to 1.5°C, which like any threshold is a political choice and has been contested (Morena 2023). Many researchers have tried to define a threshold for material consumption (Bringezu 2014 ; Bringezu 2015 ; Dittrich and al. 2012 ; Schmidt-Bleek 1993 ; Schmidt-Bleek 2000 ; UNEP and International Resource Panel 2011 ; UNEP 2014), because it is tightly associated with most environmental pressures (Voet et al. 2005 ; Dittrich et al. 2012 ; Giljum et al. 2014). In my opinion, these attempts are a complete failure, for reasons I will not elaborate.7

Whatever your favorite indicator is, I think we can all agree that looking at a lot of them is important. If you have the tools, it's actually very easy to build a scenario that quickly puts an end to global warming, by massively developing renewable energies, electric cars, hydrogen appliances and carbon dioxyde removal. But these scenarios8 imply a colossal acceleration of mining (Pitron 2018 ; IEA 2022 ; Vidal and d'Hugues 2022) and strong risks regarding planetary boundaries, biodiversity and food supply (Deprez et al. 2024). Plus, their techno-economic feasibility might seem doubtful (Keyßer and Lenzen 2021 ; Floyd et al. 2020). On the other hand, one could imagine scenarios that rapidly reduce material use, but which do not allow wind turbines, solar panels and electric appliances to be built quickly enough to replace carbon-intensive machines.9

So, what can I do with all of this? Am I going to settle the debates on all thresholds, from water pollution to recycling rates? Am I going to quantify how different climate mitigation scenarios perform on these frameworks? Certainly not. First, because the results would be laughingly bad, as I have no training in earth systems science or ecological economics. Second, because the information provided by existing research is sufficient to know that the current world economy is not sustainable, and that things keep getting worse. In that sense, any scenario that can with good confidence reduce many environmental pressures10 while improving human wellbeing11 is a good step towards sustainability. This is the approach chosen by Parrique et al. (2019), with the supplementary condition that you do it quickly enough (you know, not in 70 years, when half of the planet will be a desert).

Sustainability of the dominated

The above is still not enough to assess whether a pathway is sustainable or not, because it does not allow me to pick a side in debates on thresholds and quantification conventions (as in "how do I measure GHG emissions?"). As I mentioned, defining, measuring and using an indicator creates areas of political contestation, as documented by the sociology of quantification (Desrosières 2010) and classifications (Bowker and Star 2023).

For example, the authoritative effect produced by the net zero emissions targets of the EU (Regulation EU 2021) and other regions hides the fact that for other actors, the scenarios that achieve them are unsustainable because this target does not allow to stay below 1.5°C of warming (Spragg Nilsson 2024). Dahan (2007) also explains that some scientists from the South have criticized the reference dates used in climate targets. Indeed, after the Kyoto protocol, this date is often 1990, which naturalizes all the emissions and industrialization that preceded it, even though they almost exclusively benefited countries in the global North. Moreover, almost all of the environmental pressure indicators used by governments in the Global North only concern activities on their territory. However, a large body of research argues that because these indicators do not take imported products into account, they allow rich countries to shift the impacts of their consumption to poor countries (Ala-Mantila et al. 2023 ; Wiedmann et al. 2015 ; Althouse et al. 2023 ; Magalhães et al. 2019). Some researchers therefore prefer to use "footprint" indicators, which take into account the materials, energy, land and impacts incorporated in imported and exported products (Parrique et al. 2019 ; Vadén et al. 2020 ; Vogel and Hickel 2023).

In all of these debates, I would tend to favor the interests of the least privileged populations: the unemployed, precarious, the colonized and formerly colonized, women, racialized people, etc. Thus, I would tend to favor more ambitious climate targets, taking into account emissions before 1990 and footprint indicators. Highlighting political issues raised by the construction of indicators does not mean that they do not reflect any reality (Desrosières 2014 ; Bowker and Star 2023), but allows to understand which actors are favored and which are disadvantaged by a specific framing.

Why biophysical limits to economic growth are irrelevant for sustainability

Prescriptive thresholds, descriptive limits

In the previous sections, I adopted a prescriptive perspective. I explained that the definition of thresholds is a political issue, and I defined a way to "pick a side". But words such as "thresholds" and "boundaries" can also used in a descriptive way, as limits which would in any case be impossible to exceed, outside of any axiological consideration. In language uses, the distinction between threshold (prescriptive) and limit (descriptive) is not so clear. These words are synonymous, and I distinguish them for analysis, as previously done by (Ortiz 2024).

Discourses on limits mainly concern the possibility of infinite economic growth in a world with finite resources and capacities to absorb pollutions. As this issue is one of the main research subjects of my PhD, it is important to clarify that I will not consider biophysical limits when assessing sustainability.

The media enthusiasm surrounding the publication of the Limits to Growth report in 1972 (Andersson 2018) is probably at the origin of much of this discourse. The notion of limit is often used in debates on the availability of oil (Ortiz 2024), metals (Pitron 2018), construction materials (Magalhães 2024), on the energy return on investment (EROI) of different energy sources (Palmer 2018 ; Floyd and al. 2020). Each of these limits are real: there are a finite amount of fossil fuels, metals, land, and water on Earth, and it is theoretically possible to deplete them (more precisely: turn them into unusable materials). There are also physical limits to the energy efficiency that certain devices can have, temperature limits beyond which human life (and thus economic activity) is impossible, soil erosion levels after which food production becomes very hard, etc.

If economic growth continues, there will indeed be a point in the future where it is stopped and reversed (Meadows, Meadows, and Randers 2022).12 However, I'm interested in a more specific question: are these limits likely to make the world economy return to sustainable levels of production by themselves, before catastrophic consequences of ecological crises multiply?

There will be no mass shortage due to physical scarcity in the near future

McGlade and Ekins (2015) demonstrate that to remain under 2°C of global warming, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and 80% of coal reserves must not be exploited. However, even 2°C of global warming is considered by many researchers to have very dangerous consequences on human societies, and the figures for staying below 1.5°C would be much higer. Governments and companies can overshoot these thresholds, and they indeed are on the path to do it. In 2023, governments announced in their transition plans that they planned to extract more than double the volume of fossil fuels compatible with the target of 1.5°C. There has not been any significant evolution of these commitments for several years (SEI et al. 2023). In addition, the study by McGlade and Elkins is only about reserves, which corresponds to the deposits that can be profitably exploited today. But this frontier is constantly moving, with the evolution of technologies and the discovery of new deposits. In fact, it was published before Russia discovered enormous resources of oil and gas under the Antarctic (Burgel 2024), which represent double the known reserves in the Middle East.

Magalhães (2024) shows that there have been alerts on a potential depletion of aggregate and sand all throughout the 20th century. But while this was happening in France, local extraction kept increasing during this century. Actually, it is hardly imaginable that sand and aggregate reserves become depleted one day, because they constitute a large part of the ground on Earth. A diminished availability of these materials can only be caused by socio-political dynamics: human use of land, local oppositions, environmental regulations, etc.

Depletion dates for metals are regularly announced in professional reviews (L'Usine Nouvelle 2017) and scientific journals. They can seem frightening, especially since mines should see their productivity decrease, as the most profitable deposits are used first (SystExt 2023). In fact, there are good reasons to believe that productivity in the mining sector has started a structural decrease since the 2000s, despite constant efficiency gains (Humphreys 2020). But these depletion dates underestimate the fact that in a globalized market economy, the prices of goods often vary according to their scarcity. As advantageous reserves become depleted, companies that depend heavily on a metal will be willing to pay more and more to obtain it. This should make new deposits profitable, as well as recycling, which is currently impossible for many metals (Pitron 2018).

In fact, governments and businesses seem above all worried by the possibility to increase metal production quickly enough to build wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars and high-voltage lines EC (2023a). Among the risks weighing on this acceleration, there is of course "social acceptance", that is to say the extent to which people who live near a mining project are likely to accept it. One could call that situation a "limit", but it is unpredictable, changing, and inseparably involves ecological, technical, economic and social factors. It is also not said that if it exists, it intervenes early enough to prevent the harmful consequences of the acceleration of extraction.

Over the course of its history, capitalism has been confronted multiple times to what seemed absolute physical limits. It has always been able to overcome them — often at the expense of increased environmental and social damage — through expropriation (Harvey 2004), new extractive frontiers and technical improvements. The productivity of silviculture and agriculture could have collapsed in 20th century, following the generalization of monocultures. Multiple scientists highlighted this risk, which was accentuated by the metabolic rift due to urbanization (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013). But instead, crop productivity has been greatly multiplied with the help of petroleum (Fressoz 2024) and still seems to be growing (Fuglie and Wang 2013). At the beginning of the 19th century, Europe was almost entirely devoid of forests, because of the ever-increasing needs of the military and industries. The appropriation of colonized land and extraction of coal allowed colonial empires to escape this biophysical limitation (Walker 2020). The end of coal itself has been feared since at least the 19th century (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013), but is still a distant perspective today.

Of course, this does not mean that the reduced availability of energy, land and materials could not slow down or even cancel global economic growth in the decades to come. But this would certainly not be of the scale that is needed, and this reduction does not guarantee that environmental pressures would diminish, while guaranteeing a decent life to everyone. First, because as lower quality deposits are exploited, companies will need more and more energy, chemical products and water to extract them. Second, because the ability to distribute scarce goods gives immense power to the capitalists that control them. They could set very high prices, which would in turn foster inequalities (Ortiz 2024).

Narratives on limits have mainly served the interests of capitalists

All these assertions can seem troubling, because they contradict expert statements that have come from very different sources for decades. This is no coincidence, as narratives on physical limits to growth have at the same time served the interests of capitalists in different sectors, scientific entrepreneurs and green politicians. As stricter environmental laws were implemented to protect french rivers and ecosystems, capitalists from the construction sector used alarming depletion scenarios to prevent further regulation (Magalhães 2024). Since the 70s, oil majors have been financing and promoting reports warning on the depletion of oil, in order to justify the immense price increases that they were imposing on the global population. In the end of the 20th century, they played an active role in providing visibility to the report Limits to growth and scientists close to the Club of Rome (Ortiz 2024). Nuclear scientists and industries also contributed to the narrative on the finiteness of fossil fuels, because it was an opportunity to attract more funding (Fressoz 2024). I suspect a similar process is repeated nowadays with the increasing expertise production and media attention on metals availability for the "energy transition" (IEA 2022), which has already resulted in attacks on environmental law (for example in EC 2023a). More generally, Ortiz (2024) argues that public narratives on physical limits to growth ultimately benefit big oligopolies, which can enforce price increases without being suspected of agreeing on prices.

In summary, some physical constraints to economic growth might manifest in the decades to come, but will not prevent catastrophic situations linked to ecological crises. Historically, narratives on absolute limits have mainly served the interests of capitalists in the raw materials and energy sectors. No thermodynamic deus ex machina will put an end to the devastation of the planet and the domination of the majority of the population. It is thus much more relevant to assess the damage that could be avoided if harmful production decreased.

However, if one wanted to define limits to economic growth that are more relevant on a shorter timescale, they would be socio-techno-ecological limits. They could be defined as follows: a combination of resource availability and resource needs that is likely to generate revolts and armed conflicts, which would make further production growth impossible. They are of course completely unpredictable.

A definition of unsustainable economic institutions

We now know what is a sustainable society, how to settle debates on indicators when they arise, and also that absolute biophysical limits are not relevant for assessing sustainability. Now let us delve deeper into the solutions that are depicted in the stories told by climate mitigation scenarios.

The field of climate mitigation is surprisingly uniform, and numerous works show that scenarios almost exclusively rely on "techno-economic" policies (Stephenson and Allwood 2023 ; Hirt and Pryck 2023 ; Lage et al. 2023 ; Négawatt 2022b ; Zell-Ziegler, Thema, Best, Wiese, Lage, and al. 2021 ; Zell-Ziegler, Thema, Best, and Wiese 2021 ; Floyd et al. 2020 ; Creutzig and al. 2022). By this is often meant several things:

  • Policies promoting R&D and technological change: development of renewable energies, replacement of inefficient machines, thermal renovation, etc.
  • Policies consistent with the usual recommendations of neoclassical economists, concerned with "optimizing" the allocation of resources through markets: carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, economic incentives, etc.
  • Policies transforming the supply of energy, goods and services, and not their demand (as is the case with sufficiency policies). This framing has gained a lot of momentum since the 2010s, with the emergence of a green investment paradigm (Magalhães 2021), supported by a very large coalition of actors: NGOs, fossil fuel companies, heterodox economists, states, unions, international agencies, central banks, etc.
  • Policies that can fit into the current organization of the economy, which do not require to change the rules.

Although the definitions above are diverse, the category "techno-economic policies" is pretty consistent. The policies contained in scenarios often fit at least 3 of the definitions. Moreover, the people who design them tend to be the same: mainly economists with neoclassical training and engineers acculturated to economics.

Some measures are less common in these scenarios. Among those, there are policies focusing on the reduction and transformation of demand (sufficiency), and those which change the rules of the economy. For example, reducing the standard working time to provide employment for all in order to compensate for a reduction in economic output radically restructures the economy. As I will show later, there is strong evidence that such changes are needed for sustainability. My goal is therefore to understand why these measures are almost never integrated into climate change mitigation scenarios.

More precisely, I am interested in the naturalization of certain economic institutions, which I think are unsustainable.13 In this research, I use the definition of institutions from institutional economics.14 North (1991) defines them as all the "humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction". These constraints can be formal and informal: laws, decrees, regulations, codes of conduct, norms of behavior, taboos, customs, traditions, etc.

I will therefore use the phrase "unsustainable economic institutions" to designate rules concerning extraction, production, exchange, use and elimination that should be redesigned to guarantee the construction of sustainable societies. By this I do not mean that all institutions should necessarily be transformed to achieve sustainability. I only mean that by naturalizing them, one ignores the most important means to avoid the worsening of ecological and social catastrophes.

The unsustainability of economic growth

Defining green growth

Before talking about the current economic institutions, I have to talk about one of their consequences: economic growth. It is now extremely clear that no society can be sustainable if its economic output is constantly growing. This is an almost unanimous consensus among specialists, and I will summarize the most important analyzes that have been recently carried out on the subject. Hundreds of papers have examined the hypothesis of "green growth", through 2 close but distinct fields of research:

  • The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC): a theory proposed in 1992 in a World Bank report. Specialists on the subject seek to show that economic growth could naturally reduce environmental degradation beyond a certain threshold. Its name is a reference to the Kuznets curve, which represents the same theory for economic inequalities (Menezes, Pottier, and Roth 2023).
  • The decoupling of GDP and environmental pressures: is a more recent and prospective version of the EKC. Its advocates recognize that economic growth may not reduce environmental pressures by itself. But they argue that with the right policies, it is possible to ensure that production continues to increase while reducing environmental pressures.

These 2 fields have experienced phenomenal success over the last 20 years. The number of publications on the EKC is growing by 20% per year, which is 4 times the growth rate of publications in economics (5 or 6%, see Menezes, Pottier, and Roth 2023). In 2023, there were 2000 articles on the subject. The number of articles on decoupling has experienced constant and particularly rapid growth since 2014 (Vadén et al. 2020), reaching nearly 600 articles (Parrique et al. 2019).

Parrique et al. (2019) provide a detailed definition of what would be sufficient decoupling from a sustainability perspective. It must be:

  • Absolute: many studies argue they have found what is called "relative" decoupling. This simply means that environmental pressures are growing less quickly than GDP, which is of course insufficient. The two trends must be opposite, in order to obtain absolute decoupling.
  • Permanent: temporary decouplings are often observed due to a cyclical or structural change, such as an economic crisis or a change in energy supply. But for a society to be sustainable, the decoupling must be definitive, so that environmental pressures do not increase again.
  • Global: it is easy for rich countries to move their environmental impacts outside their national territory through offshoring. One must therefore either study the global economy or take imports into account in their calculations.
  • Fast enough: some studies report absolute decoupling which are too slow to stay under certain thresholds such as 1.5°C of global warming. The decoupling rate must therefore be above thresholds qualified as sustainable.
  • Fair: one cannot expect the same level of decoupling for all countries in the world, because they have different responsibilities for ecological crises and different capacities. The decoupling potential of rich countries must therefore be higher.
  • For different environmental metrics: from a sustainability perspective, it is insufficient to decouple one environmental impact if others are not.
  • Macroeconomic: (mentioned by Vadén et al. 2020) several studies focus only on one economic sector, which does not allow for cross-sector dynamics to be taken into account.

Empirical studies

Numerous literature reviews have been written and continue to be written on the possibility of green growth, and the conclusion is always the same: there is no evidence that a level of decoupling sufficient to remain below commonly recognized sustainability thresholds has ever been achieved in the past, and can be achieved in the future.

Parrique et al. (2019) assess nearly 300 papers on observations of decoupling and its theoretical possibility, regarding the use of raw materials, energy, water, land, greenhouse gases, air pollution, water pollution and biodiversity erosion. For all of these metrics, no paper provides sufficient evidence for the above criteria. The most commonly reported cases of decoupling are when imports are not taken into account. On the contrary, Wiedmann et al. (2015) and Andrieu et al. (2022) show that the richer countries are, the less they are able to improve the material and energy efficiency of their economy. Only GHG emissions, on which international environmental governance has focused for decades, show cases of absolute decoupling when taking into account imports. These decouplings are nevertheless insufficient to remain under 1.5°C of global warming, and are only visible within very precise time limits. Furthermore, the decouplings observed in the 2010s are linked to the economic recession due to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008.

The authors therefore conclude that if the possibility of green growth is often presented as a matter of debate, this is absolutely not what the existing scientific research allows to conclude. In fact, the only disagreements relate to the definition of decoupling and the methods used to measure it.

Menezes, Pottier, and Roth (2023) study 2000 papers published on the EKC since the late 1990s, using natural language processing methods and bibliometric networks. They find that since 1995, half of the papers have found positive results, and the other half negative results. Their semi-automated method fails to account for the crucial methodological differences identified in other reviews, but they conclude that 30 years of research have not been enough to prove the EKC hypothesis. These conclusions are in agreement with literature reviews of several researchers from this field.

Vadén et al. (2020) assess 170 papers on decoupling published between 1990 and 2019, of which only 97 concern absolute decoupling. They conclude that none of these papers proves decoupling for a sufficient variety of environmental impacts on a sufficiently broad scale.

Vogel and Hickel (2023) analyze the claims of 36 developed countries to decouple GHG emissions and GDP. They assess whether their pace of decoupling is sufficient to have a 50% chance of remaining under 1.5°C or 1.7°C of warming, according to carbon budgets proportional to the share of the country's population in the world population. They conclude that no country's decoupling rate is sufficient to reach zero net emissions in 2050. However, sustainable trajectories would require having achieved this target before 2040. According to the decoupling rate observed between 2013 and 2019, these "leading" decarbonization countries would take between 73 and 369 years to reduce their 2022 emissions by 95%. They would thus consume on average 27 times their carbon budgets. The annual decoupling rates that would be necessary to stay below 1.5°C appear completely unrealistic: Belgium would have to go from less than 5% to 80% in the space of one year. These results apply to different population hypotheses and to different ways of calculating the decoupling of the carbon footprint and GDP. The method is also particularly generous: they do not take into account equity considerations, have an assumption of low economic growth, assume that adequate climate action will begin immediately, and do not take into account emissions from land use and international transport.

Li (2020) explains that with the current annual rate of decline in historical GDP carbon intensity (1.67%), global GDP would need to be reduced by 0.18% per year to meet the 2°C carbon budget. By separating the world into 3 regions — OECD, China, rest of the world — it shows that according to 2 different sharing principles of the carbon budget for 2°C, only one region could maintain slightly positive economic growth.

The study by Cuny and Parrique (2024) is even more generous with the green growth hypothesis, but still finds negative results. It assesses the feasibility of the European Union's GHG emissions reduction targets, which are known to be insufficient to limit global warming to 1.5°C, and which are also expressed in territorial emissions. They observe that to maintain an economic growth rate of +2%, it would be necessary to reduce the energy intensity 2 times faster than for the last 20 years, while reducing the carbon content of energy 4.2 times faster

Finally, Fressoz (2024) provides an extremely detailed historical description of how energy sources depend on each other, and how the increase in consumption of one causes that of others. This also applies to other materials, and Fressoz shows that the difficulty of the "energy transition" lies above all in disembedding the production of materials from fossil fuels. This challenge seems all the more gigantic as materials become more and more embedded over time. Technical innovations regularly make it possible to increase the energy efficiency of the production of goods and services, but these gains come at the cost of a material and logistical complexification of the global economy. Objects include an increasing diversity of materials, and travel ever greater distances in vehicles that use hydrocarbons. This explains why renewable energies do not replace others, and therefore why it is impossible to quickly decarbonize a growing economy.

Theoretical studies

The studies I cited above are based on the extrapolation of historical observations to the future. Defenders of green growth will often argue that decoupling is likely to accelerate thanks to technological innovation which will increase the material-energy efficiency of the economy and reduce its impacts. Several studies have looked into these assertions.

Parrique et al. (2019) argue that it is very unlikely that sufficient decoupling will be observed in the future, for several reasons that are well known to researchers on the subject:

  • The unavoidable increase in the energy intensity of resource extraction.
  • Rebound effects: the compensation of energy or material efficiency gains by the increase in consumption due to falling prices or changes in the structure of the economy.
  • The displacement of ecological problems by technological solutions.
  • The underestimation of the environmental footprint of services.
  • The limited potential of recycling.
  • The concentration of technical progress on sectors which are not useful to reduce the environmental footprint of the economy, and the non-substitution of technologies.
  • The displacement of ecological damage through unequal ecological exchanges.

Hickel and Kallis (2020) summarize the studies carried out with models, which attempt to assess the possibility of decoupling materials and carbon with GDP. Studies on material decoupling conclude that even with material efficiency rates far too high to be realistic, only relative decoupling is observed. Regarding GDP and GHGs, the authors assert that absolute decoupling is possible and already underway in certain regions, but that it would be insufficient to remain under 2°C of global warming. They argue that green growth scenarios compatible with the Paris agreement rely on carbon capture and storage technologies that are dangerous and unlikely to be deployed at scale. Finally, they explain that most scenarios use an economic growth rate of 2 to 3%. If this rate were less than 0.45%, it would be theoretically possible to remain under 2°C of warming by including very aggressive emissions reduction policies from 2020. The target of 1.5°C is unattainable in a growing economy.

Energy consumption and economic output: a symbiotic relationship

As I suggested before, one can easily find scenarios that seem to confirm the green growth hypothesis (for GHGs at least). Besides the use of unrealistic and dangerous levels of carbon capture, they often rely on very optimistic assumptions regarding energy efficiency. These scenarios not only assume high efficiency improvements for technologies each year, but they also misrepresent the role of energy consumption in economic growth.

The Shift Project (2019) highlights that most scenarios by states and international agencies project a decline in the energy intensity of GDP which is not sufficiently justified. Similarly, Brockway et al. (2021) note that most global transition scenarios compatible with the Paris Agreement have energy efficiency rates never before achieved. It seems unlikely that they will occur in the future, while global energy efficiency has been growing less and less quickly since 2017. Several studies explain in detail the lack of realism of these hypotheses.

Brockway et al. (2021) show that global scenarios use models that have an insufficiently complex representation of the economy, failing to take into account macroeconomic rebound effects. These rebound effects occur when, following an increase in the energy efficiency of the production of a good or service, agents pay less for them and can therefore reinvest their money elsewhere, which increases the energy used elsewhere in the economy. The authors assess 33 papers that study the magnitude of macroeconomic rebound effects, and find that macroeconomic rebound effects compensate on average between 58% and 71% of the energy saved. Several studies find a rebound of more than 100%, which means that an efficiency gain in one sector has caused the economy in general to use more energy than before.

Sakai et al. (2019) note that no model used to design transition scenarios represents energy efficiency in the physical sense of the term, that is to say the quantity of energy conserved when it passes from one form to another. They therefore design and test a macroeconomic model which represents this thermodynamic efficiency, and show that it plays a very important role in economic growth. Each gain in energy efficiency activates several causal chains which can increase the production, which requires more energy.

Palmer (2018) applies theories from biophysical economics to the scenarios analyzed by the IPCC group 3. He denounces the inconsistency of projecting a stagnation or reduction of energy consumption with a multiplication by between 3 and 8 of GDP per capita by 2100, because GDP and energy use are strongly linked. He explains that the return on energy investment (EROI) of a system based on renewable energies would be lower than that of a fossil economy, which would certainly lead to a slowdown of economic growth Keyßer and Lenzen (2021).

Therefore, a body of evidence shows that the coupling between GDP and energy consumption is bidirectional. Energy efficiency gains allow the economy to consume more energy (since there are fewer losses), and therefore to grow, which in turn increases energy consumption. The same is probably true of material efficiency, as Fressoz (2024) suggests. These results strongly call into question the interest of measures to improve the efficiency of machines in a market economy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the unsustainability of growth has been the subject of a very solid scientific consensus among specialists for more than 5 years, on the empirical and theoretical levels. It is important to highlight that while many economists would disagree with this statement, those that do are not specialists on this subject. Moreover, economic growth has very powerful supporters in governments, businesses and international bodies, which makes it very difficult to criticize: funding on degrowth is rare, researchers tend to self-censor, it is difficult to build a career on this subject, etc. The fact that the research results are so unequivocal despite the cost of controversy (Latour 1987) considerably reinforces the reliability of this observed consensus.

Moreover, I have only listed arguments regarding the environmental impacts of growth, but a diversity of works also show its weak contribution to social well-being. While it is impossible to decouple GDP from environmental pressures quickly enough, high levels of well-being can be achieved with limited economic output, emissions levels and energy consumption. After a certain threshold, GDP ceases to be correlated with social well-being indicators, and the countries of the Global North have long exceeded this threshold (Hickel et al. 2021). Hickel and Sullivan (2024) find that it is possible to achieve decent living standards for 8.5 billion people with only 30% of the energy and resources currently used. Multiple papers show it is possible to achieve high levels of HDI, life expectancy and literacy with 2000 Watt and 1 tonne of CO2/year per person (Steinberger and Roberts 2010). These indicators also decouple more quickly from environmental pressures than GDP per capita: in 2005, achieving a life expectancy of 70 years required on average 60% less energy than in 1975. In addition, these studies only account for living standards in fundamentally unequal societies. The energy thresholds for social well-being are much lower if energy consumption was distributed more equally.

7 unsustainable economic institutions

This section presents 7 economic institutions that I identify as unsustainable and outlines some of the available research on their compatibility with sustainability. Most of the arguments I will develop fall into one of the following categories:

  • The institution fosters economic growth.
  • Preserving the institution would worsen inequalities and living standards in a degrowing or stationary economy.
  • The institution reinforces another unsustainable economic institution.
  • The institution has direct links to environmental degradation.

Other institutions could certainly be added to this list. The distinctions I make may also seem arbitrary, because these institutions reinforce each other. I try to clarify their links throughout the argument.

The objective of this section is not to definitively settle the scientific controversies over the sustainability of each institution. I only want to show that there is a diversity of research showing that they have a large responsibility in current ecological problems. I do this for 2 reasons:

  • These controversies seem to be insufficiently substantiated to be the subject of a scientific consensus.
  • The existence of serious doubts about the sustainability of these institutions is enough to call them into question when designing transition scenarios.

Economic growth objectives

Economic growth is not an institution, but enshrining it in law and using it as an objective in public policy documents does indeed constitute a constraint on the organization of the economy. This makes it normal to evaluate social practices according to their contribution to economic growth. For example, companies that do not seek to increase their production will be less valued and receive less support from public authorities.

Parrique et al. (2019) argue that green growth has been the only sustainability strategy of international bodies. The OECD, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the World Bank and the European Commission systematically promote green growth in their reports and have included decoupling in their objectives (Parrique et al. 2019). In fact, the Treaty of Lisbon — which lays the principles of the European Union — reads:

The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth (Traité de Lisbonne, 2007)

Despite the European Union's will to present as a leader in sustainability, it persists in the irrational belief in the possibility of green growth. European law is thus described by Mauger (2023) as an "ocean of green growth", and he struggles to find provisions that could be interpreted in favor of degrowth measures. Several papers show how much the discourse of green growth is deeply anchored in the European Green Deal, and how this immediately prevents it from achieving its objectives (Eckert and Kovalevska 2021). Despite articles and open letters from researchers and NGOs, the European Commission regularly reaffirms its loyalty to economic growth (Hickel et al. 2021 ; Parrique et al. 2023a ; Parrique et al. 2023b ; EC 2023b).

There is no need to justify the unsustainability of these objectives, since that of growth is already well established. Bell (2015) shows that growth objectives in governments systematically take precedence over environmental preservation. This productivist framing limits environmental law to risk management, rather than reducing production that poses health and ecological dangers.

Private property and capital accumulation

Private property is not the only way to relate to the material and biological worlds. Outside of capitalism, the main property regime is common property, where communities that use resources together set rules to make them last. Most of these resources have today been appropriated by capitalists, during what marxists call "primitive accumulation", but multiple forms of accumulation through expropriation are still happening today. These new enclosures have actually accelerated since the 70s, in culture, research, finance, agriculture, etc. (Harvey 2004) This process alone is sufficient to argue that the generalization of private property is unsustainable, as the concentration of capitals removes direct access to essential goods from the majority.

Critiques of private property are often qualified with the assertion that, although ecologically problematic, the generalization of capitalism has allowed a sharp increase in average and median income per capita around the world. However, these figures only take into account the formal economy and exclude non-market access to essential goods, for example through commons. These statements therefore have nothing to do with social well-being, because they do not account for the way in which essential goods are allocated in non-capitalist economies. Sullivan and Hickel (2023) attempt to take these realities into account, by estimating the monetary value of the commons and by choosing human height and mortality as indicators of extreme poverty. They find that the integration of new regions into capitalism has always been associated with a very sharp decline in living standards, which have only been compensated for through decolonial and socialist movements.

The appropriation of means of production by a small minority consolidates classes, which have to use markets to meet their needs (Cahen-Fourot 2022). For example, Malm (2018) explains that the emergence of large cities in the United Kingdom in the 19th century was enabled by the enclosure movement, which pushed peasants off their land in search of work. This allowed capitalists to have a precarious workforce accustomed to factory work. Private property therefore reinforces 2 other institutions: markets and wage labour.

Several economists suggest capitalism incorporates growth imperatives (Cahen-Fourot 2022), which implies it could be inherently unsustainable. As the generalization of private property is the cornerstone of capitalism, this statement also applies to private property.

Malm (2018) further argues that fossil fuel extraction meets the accumulation goals of capitalists. Coal and oil are "abstract" energies: unlike wind or rivers, they can be moved and made available at any time. These characteristics:

  • Facilitate the increase in production, and the increase in the share of capital in production: human muscle is less crucial when energy is more available.
  • Give more power to capitalists: they can locate industries in cities, where workers have less bargaining power because labor is more available.

This theory has aged a little, because renewable electricity could achieve similar or even greater availability than fossil fuels, with the development of smart electricity grids (Lopez 2022). But this is far from being the case today: even France still uses gas power plants when nuclear and renewables cannot meet all demand. Of course, none of this contradicts the fact that private property creates dominant classes which have an interest in increasing energy demand to increase their profits.

Another way of approaching the unsustainability of private property is to show the unsustainability of the inequalities it generates. The 10% people that consume the most are responsible for 43% of GHG emissions and 37.2% of biodiversity loss (Tian et al. 2024). Similarly, Bell (2015) identifies 7 characteristics of capitalism that maintain environmental inequalities, among which are the concentration of wealth and the search for profit. Wilkinson and Pickett (2024) find a strong correlation between a rich country's level of inequality and air pollution, lack of recycling, poor health, violence and low scores on the Sustainable Development Goals. They also explain that people who live in unequal societies spend more money on "status goods," which increases consumption. Redistribution would therefore mechanically reduce environmental pressures, while improving social well-being. To solve the ecological crises, they recommend to first establish highly progressive taxes on capital, income and consumption, and encouraging the development of non-profit cooperatives. Their proposals therefore amount to limiting property rights and their extension.

This type of proposals has been particularly developed by economic research on degrowth. To use fewer resources and limit impacts, scholars recommend redistributing income, wealth, land, infrastructure, and resources within and between countries (Fitzpatrick, Parrique, and Cosme 2022 ; Hickel and al. 2021). This can be done without replacing private property, through taxes and distribution, or by reversing its generalization, through the development of commons and public services (Coote, Kasliwal, and Percy 2019).

Some researchers also argue that only planning could respond to ecological issues quickly enough (Fremstad and Paul 2022 ; Li 2020 ; Bickhardt, Hutteau, and Jacquin 2023 ; Durand, Hofferberth, and Schmelzer 2024). Rebuilding planning capacities after decades of neoliberalism (Durand 2023b) would require a socialization of the means of production, and therefore a radical break with private property (Li 2020).

Generalization of markets

Another commonly recognized characteristic of capitalism is the generalization of market relations and their continuous expansion, which is called commodification (Lawn 2011). Markets are social spaces that allow the exchange of goods and services for currency. Like private property, markets are rarely the only institution for individuals to meet their needs in non-capitalist societies.

For Cahen-Fourot (2022), the generalization of market relations constitutes a growth imperative, because it makes income highly unpredictable. Events such as layoffs, loss of customers, new competitors, costs increases, push companies and individuals to find ways to stabilize their existence. They often do this by striving to increase their income, which would not happen in a society where essential needs are collectively guaranteed. This leads to the continual expansion of the domain of exchangeable goods, in both the natural and social worlds, and results in their overexploitation (Singer 2010).

The generalization of markets also makes it possible to sell off overproduction, which makes it an essential institution for economic growth. Wars accelerate the development of production and logistics, by leading States to invest directly in production and transport infrastructures, which are then handed over to companies (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013 ; Quet 2022). After the conflict, this excess of productive capacity can find outlets on markets thanks to state policies and industrial initiatives. The level of production therefore never returns to what it was before the war. In a similar vein, Fressoz (2024) notes that under capitalism, production levels of materials always increase. This is because when new, more interesting materials arrive on the market, companies producing the old materials are pushed to find outlets to continue growing.

The continual expansion of markets, particularly to the detriment of public services, weakens governments' capacities for action and coordination in the face of global ecological crises. Fremstad and Paul (2022) find a negative correlation between a country's degree of neoliberalism and its "climate performance". In fact, public investments and regulation are responsible for most GHG emissions reductions in rich countries (Harvey et al. 2018 cited by Fremstad and Paul 2022), 2 types of measure which hamper market freedom. Furthermore, regulation is the instrument that researchers from diverse fields of climate change mitigation consider most effective (Drews, Savin, and Bergh 2024).

Finally, considering markets as untouchable prevents the design of post-growth societies. In an economy primarily organized around markets, well-being approximately depends on maintaining economic growth. A reduction in GDP would have extremely negative social consequences: unemployment would increase and investment would cease, causing an economic crisis (Li 2020). To ensure that everyone can eat in these circumstances, it would be possible to decommodify food, for example by establishing a universal access to food. More generally, many degrowth policies are based on removing essential goods from markets: housing, energy, water, health, education, etc. (Fitzpatrick, Parrique, and Cosme 2022 ; Hickel et al. 2021). This can be done without totally eradicating markets, and scholars often argue for their marginalization (Li 2020) in order to decouple well-being from economic growth.

Conversely, proponents of free market environmentalism consider that all problems — including ecological and social justice problems — can be solved through the creation of markets internalizing pollution (Bell 2015). This is because neoclassical and environmental economists are haunted by inefficiency: the idea that one actor reduces its pollution because of regulation, while it would have been less costly for another actor. This is why so much of them defend cap-and-trade mechanisms (Drews, Savin, and Bergh 2024). Pottier (2016) traces how this approach dominated climate negotiations for more than 20 years, and shows the intractable difficulties encountered in creating a global carbon market. Due to the complexity of markets, the effects of carbon quotas are very difficult to predict. Three quarters of the quotas generated by joint implementation projects (between rich and poor countries) of the Kyoto protocol have not led to real reductions in emissions. Factories have even been created only to reduce their emissions, gain carbon quotas, then resell the quotas. More generally, all empirical research on market instruments for climate change mitigation have shown that they most likely had no positive impact, because of overallocation, and had only disadvantages when compared to price instruments (Quirion 2020). In addition to these well-documented problems, voluntary carbon markets generate environmental injustices (Pottier 2016). In 2019, Europe purchased 60% of the total volume of carbon credits, the United States 31%, and the rest of the world 9%. The projects they finance allow businesses in the North to continue their economic growth, and have harmful consequences in the global South, through the privatization of commons, illegal evictions, lax certifications, etc. (Evite and Zara 2023). Therefore, trying to reduce pollution and resource use through cap-and-trade mechanisms often seems to cause more harm than good.

Proponents of stationary capitalism have an intermediate position: they argue that public investment and public employment have an important role in environmental policies, but believe in the capacity of markets to respond efficiently to ecological crises. Lawn (2011) proposes the distribution and exchange of a finite number of resource use quotas, which would mechanically ensure that production does not exceed thresholds defined in advance. The profits from the sale of these quotas would be redistributed, allowing a reduction in inequalities. I cannot judge the credibility of this system in comparison with decommodification policies, but if it worked, it would amount to considerably restrict other economic institutions: entrepreneurship freedom, consumption freedom.

Wage labour

Wage labour is when people work in exchange of money, in a company whose bosses and shareholders own the means of production. When wage labour is generalized, it is the only way for individuals to support themselves.

Historically, the capitalist world-system has only experienced one long phase of economic growth, occasionally dampened by financial and supply crises. Whatever the reasons, it is therefore difficult to deny that capitalist companies have a tendency towards infinite economic growth. However, in a stationary economy, shareholders and bosses could no longer increase their income by increasing production. They can only do this by reducing salaries, paid hours, or increasing prices, which ultimately leads to conflicts and revolts (Cahen-Fourot 2022). This is what pushes some economists to consider that the combination of markets and wage labour pushes an economy to grow, and that stationary capitalism is impossible. The generalization of wage labour would therefore be an unsustainable institution. Allowing individuals to support themselves outside of wage work would offer ways out of this tendency to growth. Once again, this requires developing commons and/or public services.

In proposals for degrowth policies, wage labour is also often presented as an institution to be preserved, but scholars argue that working time must be reduced and better distributed. The 3 most common measures in the literature are working time reductions with stable incomes, the establishment of a universal basic income and the creation of work guarantees ensured by the State (d'Alessandro et al. 2020 ; Fitzpatrick, Parrique, and Cosme 2022 ; Hickel et al. 2021). It would thus be possible to produce less, more useful things, while meeting everyone's needs. These measures therefore amount to marginalizing wage labour in social life.

International trade and global supply chains

Between 1950 and 2018, the value of goods traded internationally increased 300-fold. Between 1980 and 2017, traffic by container ship increased 20-fold (Quet 2022). There is nothing necessary about this expansion of international trade and supply chains: it is a recent phenomenon, which requires a colossal amount of design and maintenance work. This involved negotiating trade agreements, defining processes for controlling the origin of goods, health standards, the design of machines and containers standardized throughout the world (Quet 2022), etc. International trade is therefore an economic institution, made possible by colossal stocks of infrastructures (Magalhães 2024).

The development of international trade has enabled the acceleration of global economic production (and environmental injustices). In the 1980s and 1990s, the neoliberal turn and the deregulation that accompanied it facilitated a rapid increase in international trade. Reductions in transport costs due to a critical stock of infrastructures (Magalhães 2024) and increased standardization have made it possible to considerably lengthen supply chains, to reduce stocks, to relocate jobs to countries where labor laws are less demanding, to dilute responsibilities by multiplying subcontractors and to relocate pollution (Quet 2022).

An entire field of research is dedicated to describing the impacts of international trade: Unequal Ecological Exchange. Hickel et al. (2022) quantify inequalities in trade between countries of the Global South and the Global North. They find that between 1990 and 2015, the global North appropriated 254 Gt of raw materials, 33 billion hectares of land, 650 exajoules of energy and 5.9 billion person-years of work. The losses of the Global South due to these unequal exchanges are 30 times greater than the cumulative aid these countries have received. In 2015 alone, the appropriation made by the countries of the Global North is equivalent to 10.8 trillion dollars, which is enough to eradicate worldwide extreme poverty 70 times over. Althouse et al. (2023) look more specifically at global value chains, which are required for the most complex products. They find that the poorest countries, depending on whether they are integrated or excluded from these supply chains, suffer from significant but different ecological degradations. Conversely, rich countries benefit the most, by producing goods and services with high added value and low ecological impacts.

Furthermore, the net appropriation of materials, land, energy and labor has increased steadily since 1990 (Hickel et al. 2022). This reflects a trend in Northern countries to shift their environmental impacts to Southern countries, allowing them to create an illusion of green growth Magalhães et al. (2019). Thus, Wiedmann et al. (2015) show that between 1990 and 2008, OECD countries increased their GDP without increasing the extraction of materials within their territory, because all the additional material was extracted in other countries. Material imports per capita are generally much higher in rich countries. Karstensen, Peters, and Andrew (2018) show that between 1990 and 2014, the European Union reduced its territorial emissions 1.3 times faster than its carbon footprint, which means that a significant part of emissions is displaced to other countries.

It should be noted that the creation of peripheries dedicated to extracting resources and externalizing pollutions is a widely recognized characteristic of capitalism (Singer 2010), which largely preceded the logistics revolution of the 1980s. Thus, if canals and railways are today seen as low-impact means of transport, they have made possible the exploitation of rural and colonial territories by urban centers Malm (2018).

Finally, the weigh of transport infrastructures that supports international trade has been growing with the volume of trade, and necessitates immense amounts of materials. Magalhães (2024) shows that in France, the sole maintenance of roads, ports and railways now demands more materials than new constructions. Most of these needs is due to the continuous circulation of trucks on the road network. Similarly, the existing stock of infrastructures and machines requires half of annual resource use just for its maintenance (Krausmann et al. 2017), and its growth poses significant risk for climate targets (Krausmann, Wiedenhofer, and Haberl 2020). Reducing international trade would alleviate the need for extraction to sustain these infrastructures, and therefore considerably reduce their environmental impacts.

Entrepreneurship freedom

Entrepreneurship freedom is enshrined in the law of multiple states. In the French Constitution, it is named "freedom of commerce and industry", and states that anyone can develop the economic activity of their choice. This was not always the case, as before mid 18th century in Europe, an industrial activity coul be stopped just by reporting a nuisance. With the rise of chemical capitalism, a series of laws ensured that industrial interests took precedence over public health and the environment Fressoz (2012). Entrepreneurship freedom is also guaranteed by the absence of democratic debate on techno-economic choices, by the institution of private property, and sustained by the profit-oriented subjectivities created within capitalism (Doganova 2024).

Surprisingly, this theme is rarely addressed in research on sustainability, even though any sustainable future would entail considerably reducing this "freedom", if not abandoning it entirely. If existing fossil fuel infrastructures are operated for their usual duration, the budget to stay under 1.5°C of global warming by 2100 will be exhausted. When all planned projects are included, the budget to stay below 2°C would be almost exhausted (Lee et al. 2023). Thus, the expression "energy transition" gives a very euphemized image of what building a sustainable society entails. The "transition", if it takes place, will be the most gigantic closure and dismantling operation ever carried out: mines, pipelines, power plants, container ships, roads, factories, industrial farms, data centers, warehouses, industrial ports, etc.

This is what Monnin (2021) refers to as "negative commons": all realities to be urgently closed to avoid the worsening of ecological disasters. Challenging entrepreneurship freedom goes further than defining environmental quality standards: it involves designating certain activities as unsustainable and prohibiting or reducing them. This requires the invention of new forms of democracy to arbitrate both on which activities should be closed first, and on which ones should not develop (Bonnet, Landivar, and Monnin 2021). Commonly proposed measures in the degrowth literature include planned reductions in air travel, reductions in meat production (Hickel and al. 2021), and moratoriums on resource extraction and major development projects (Fitzpatrick, Parrique, and Cosme 2022).

Consumption freedom

In capitalist societies, as long as someone has the money to purchase a good or service, they can have access to it. This "consumption freedom" does not seem to be enshrined in legal systems as such, but is guaranteed by other institutions such as property rights and the generalization of markets. It is also supported by consumerism (Bell 2015), a cultural trait which has been constructed by a large number of symbolic and technical devices: brands, mail order sales, consumer credit, supermarket chains, massification of advertising, positive discourses on consumption (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013), digital marketing (Durand 2023a), etc. These devices have created outlets for the increasing production during the 20th century, by changing lifestyles and marginalizing recycling and reuse (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013).

Consumption freedom is the demand side counterpart of entrepreneurship freedom: prohibiting any new road project can be seen as prohibiting access to new roads. However, there are also specific policies that seek to reduce the consumption of certain goods and services. They are often called sufficiency policies (Négawatt 2022b). For example, the utopian book Half-Earth Socialism proposes a global ceiling of 2000W per person and the generalization of vegetarianism (Bickhardt, Hutteau, and Jacquin 2023). The french association Négawatt specializes in the design of climate change mitigation scenarios based on the reduction of demand: reduction of speed on roads, of average indoor temperature, of inhabited space, of hot water use per person, of the electricity used by electronics (Négawatt 2022a ; Bourgeois et al. 2023). These changes are in fact the practical translation of a reduction in the volume of economic production, but it can be unclear how they would be implemented. What is certain is that they constrain freedom of consumption to reduce environmental pressures, and sometimes inequalities.

Some consumption reduction tactics are harder to classify. Wilkinson and Pickett (2024) propose the establishment of a consumption tax indexed to income, to mitigate the excesses of the richest. Lopez (2022) proposes democratically defining the essential uses of electricity (such as health and food), which should be prioritised. Consumption in other sectors could thus be interrupted if electricity demand exceeds production capacity, which facilitates the management of a small-scale renewable energy system.

Summary

Below are summarized the 7 economic institutions with the main papers and books that provide proof of their unsustainability. I also indicated alternative policies and institutions which can reduce or replace them, although all these alternatives were not always mentioned in my text. It is now clear that one should explore alternative economic insitutions when designing climate mitigation scenarios, or at least explain why they chose not to.15

Institution Main evidence on unsustainability Alternatives
Economic growth objectives Parrique et al. 2019 ; Vadén et al. 2020 ; Vogel and Hickel 2023 ; Li 2020 ; Cuny and Parrique 2024 ; Hickel and Kallis 2020 ; Brockway et al. 2021 Multiple social and ecological indicators
Private property and capital accumulation Malm 2018 ; Sullivan and Hickel 2023 ; Wilkinson and Pickett 2024 ; Bell 2015 Commons, economic democracy, cooperatives, wealth taxes, public property
Generalization of markets Cahen-Fourot 2022 ; Singer 2010 ; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013 ; Fressoz 2024 ; Fremstad and Paul 2022 ; Evite and Zara 2023 Democratic planning, decommodification, universal basic services, regulation
Generalization of wage labour Cahen-Fourot 2022 Working time reductions, universal basic income, job guarantees
International trade Quet 2022 ; Hickel et al. 2022 ; Althouse et al. 2023 ; Jarrige 2010 ; Malm 2018 ; Magalhães 2024 Relocation of essential production, high environmental standards on imports, reduction of trade volume
Entrepreneurship freedom Le Roux 2020 ; Fressoz 2012 ; Lee and al. 2023 ; Bonnet, Landivar, and Monnin 2021 Technical democracy, moratorium on infrastructure projects, bans on activities
Consumption freedom Wilkinson and Pickett 2024 ; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013 ; Bell 2015 ; Durand 2023a Sufficiency policies, consumption thresholds, progressive prices

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  1. Models are computer programs that represent parts of the world, for example power plants, the atmosphere, the oceans, an economic sector, etc. ↩︎

  2. Of course, stabilizing the climate is only one part of sustainability, but it is nonetheless an important part. ↩︎

  3. Although my own research does not provide any help either, but at least I'm not pretending. ↩︎

  4. Hell no. ↩︎

  5. See https://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/countryTrends?cn=5001&type=BCtot,EFCtot ↩︎

  6. It's very simple math: with less people, but the same impacts per person, you have less impacts. Although I'm not saying the respectable scientists working on planetary boundaries and ecological footprint advocate for that. ↩︎

  7. The justifications for a resource consumption target are often quite funny, such as estimating what is possible and assuming it is sustainable, or comparing human resource consumption with materials displaced by nature. ↩︎

  8. Which represent about 99% of the research produced, let's be honest. ↩︎

  9. No one does that, but it could exist. And it would not necessarily be sustainable. ↩︎

  10. Or at least not increase those that do not diminish. ↩︎

  11. Or at least not degrade it. ↩︎

  12. Although it is impossible to know when, as the researchers from the Club of Rome have always stressed. And even if industrial production was to decline, it would be hard to unambiguously attribute it to biophysical limitations. ↩︎

  13. I'm not the only one to specifically designate institutions as the main source of unsustainability. See for example Magalhães (2021) ↩︎

  14. Institutional economics is a strand of heterodox economic research that studies how socially constructed rules shape economic behaviours. The marxist political economist Thorstein Veblen is widely recognized as its founder. Authors in this field are of diverse backgrounds: John Kenneth Galbraith was a post-keynesian, Elinor Ostrom a political scientist, Bichler and Nitzan are anarchist economists. ↩︎

  15. If of course the scenarios aim to produce knowledge on how to reach sustainability, which is sometimes ambiguous. ↩︎