1.5 C degrowth scenarios suggest the need for new mitigation pathways

[PETRUS]

Abstract

1.5??°C scenarios reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rely on combinations of controversial negative emissions and unprecedented technological change, while assuming continued growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Thus far, the integrated assessment modelling community and the IPCC have neglected to consider degrowth scenarios, where economic output declines due to stringent climate mitigation. Hence, their potential to avoid reliance on negative emissions and speculative rates of technological change remains unexplored. As a first step to address this gap, this paper compares 1.5??°C degrowth scenarios with IPCC archetype scenarios, using a simplified quantitative representation of the fuel-energy-emissions nexus. Here we find that the degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared totechnology-driven pathways, such as the reliance on high energy-GDP decoupling, large-scale carbon dioxide removal and large-scale and high-speed renewable energy transformation. However, substantial challenges remain regarding political feasibility. Nevertheless, degrowth pathways should be thoroughly considered.

Introduction

Five years after the Paris Agreement, CO2 emissions are still rising1, and mitigation timelines for the 1.5?°C and 2?°C climate target become ever more stringent2. Meanwhile, integrated assessment model (IAM) mitigation scenarios reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5?°C (SR1.5) rely on controversial amounts of carbon dioxide removal and/or on unprecedented technological changes2,3. Simultaneously, all of them assume continued growth in gross domestic product (GDP), among other reasons because this is deemed necessary to support societal wellbeing4. However, continued GDP growth is widely associated with increasing mitigation challenges...

Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22884-9

Personally, I would like to see degrowth become part of the mainstream conversation about climate change and ecological breakdown. In my opinion, it's a necessary path to take if we want a just and livable world.

[PETRUS]

1. Oops! I meant to post this in Environment & Energy (which I'll do now).

I figure it doesn't hurt to leave it here as well, though.

[Hortensis]

3. :) From the little I've read, virtually all strategies depend on "degrowth,"

but that new technologies make it both possible and palatable, and even desirable. After a period of exploding sizes of houses, far less to create larger active living spaces for families to gather in than to create more storage for bloated accumulations, I think support for simplification while retaining all the comforts will be pretty easy to get. We have to clean, heat and cool, and maintain those houses at real, constant effort and expense, after all, while typical living rooms are no bigger than many that people moved "up" from. Same for kitchens, though many may not realize it because of layout changes.

[PETRUS]

4. Thanks. I think any meaningful strategy has to include degrowth.

My impression, though, is that most of the strategies embraced by the governments of rich countries (like the US) do not include degrowth. They do assume (eventual) absolute decoupling of GDP growth from material use and carbon emissions, but also assume ongoing growth in GDP.

[Hortensis]

5. Terrible of course, but they have to build support for -- and lessen support

against -- by building confidence that change doesn't have to mean deprivation.

My husband and I are undergoing personal degrowth to lessen the burden of over accumulation and are hardly unique in that. Like so many, new technology allowed our house to be unnecessarily large and us to fill it with stuff we didn't really need and no longer want. But back in the 1980s and 1990s, new technology made many things available at much more affordable prices than ever before, plus many, many new things, and like others we accumulated what we wanted and could afford. I think there is understanding among many already that there's enormous room to cut back to a better but still luxurious plenty. In all of human history it was never like this for most people who only had to work full time to have a share of the plenty.

[roamer65]

2. We are nearing the halfway point of GHGs from the late Cretaceous period.

The Late Cretaceous Thermal Maximum as they call it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum

We will be going higher than 2 deg centigrade.