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China: An eco-friendly growth model for both the South and the North

2022-09-27 11:34·CGTN
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by Azhar Azam

  Conceived in the 1970s, degrowth is a radical economic theory that emphasizes a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput in high-income countries to reduce inequality and improve human well-being. The idea aches for a rapid transition to renewable energy, restore soils and biodiversity and reverse ecological breakdown. Leading environmentalist, Jason Hickel, argues degrowth isn't about reducing GDP.

The concept critiques the capitalist ideology of growth, a core tenet of the capitalism's cultural hegemony that pursues corporate profits at all costs. Its proponents believe the developed world – which maintains high income and consumption levels through "an ongoing process of net appropriation (of land, labor, resources and energy)" of the global South and seeks to depress prices of labor and resources – needs to end this exploitative and colonial relationship and degrow to make the planet environmentally sustainable.

In a groundbreaking study earlier this year on the ecological damage in the last half century, the journal Lancet Planetary Health assigned the responsibility of global environmental breakdown on high-income countries including the U.S., which accounted for the largest excess material use (27 percent). In tons of overshoot per capita, China was up to four times less than Australia, Canada and the U.S.

As the South has industrialized more recently, the environmental degradation cannot be attributed to these countries including China whose much of the infrastructure development occurred after 2000. The assessment didn't account for "asynchronous patterns" of industrial development which would have significantly elevated the responsibility of resource overuse on the U.S. and others and far less on the nations in the South.

 

On carbon dioxide emissions, the U.S. held a much higher share of responsibility (40 percent) compared to China that again remained within its fair share of the planetary boundary. America and the alike states may boast their "gradual" decline is their share of global overuse; it is largely achieved by shifting their emissions to China and emerging countries of the South, producing the most manufactured goods for them.

Labeling China as the "chimney of the world" or just seeing the South's emergence as a "reckless and dirty model of economic growth" won't solve the climate change puzzle given many of the mature economies, the U.S. amongst the top, had and continue to have some of the largest per capita carbon footprints on earth. For this reason, the wealthy nations have been advised to embrace "radical and immediate degrowth" strategies in order to avoid a climate disaster.

A fair-shares assessment of the paper sought high-income countries to radically reduce their resource use, even if they have to adopt transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches, to moderate the huge ecological debt stock they owe to the rest of the world. Shocked by the sheer scale of the developed world's contribution to excess resource overuse, Hickel reckoned it to be about 70 percent from existing levels.

Citing the economic term, reports of the United Nations (UN)' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) challenged the notion: endless economic growth was essential to poverty mitigation and lifting the quality of life. For instance, in the U.S. – Arizona's worst drought in 1200 years that left Lake Mead, the largest reservoirs in the country at just 35 percent capacity – has torpedoed the lives of the Gila River Indiana communities. The anthropogenic phenomenon is to blame; climate change exposes racial inequities for the people of color and indigenous people in America.Poor countries are bearing the brunt of the climate change crisis. The droughts and floods, they face today, are partly the consequence of developed countries' perpetual obsession of economic dominance. By burning too much fossil fuels and spewing carbon for more than a century, the first world has piled up such an enormous task for the developing countries they have difficulties in coping and is doing irreparable damage to them. In the last decade alone, droughts and floods had affected more than 700 million people in China and India.

The UN climate agency's call for cuts in consumer demand, a core premise of degrowth to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and contain environmental degradation, isn't about stopping growth of a low-income South where most of the countries lack sufficient energy and need growth to make room for unemployed youth bulges. An article on degrowth at the World Economic Forum suggested "it might mean people in rich countries changing their diets, living in smaller houses and driving and traveling less."

As absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions again becomes a debating point, China shows the way it can be achieved simply by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. The Chinese strong growth in renewable output is helping to turn the country greener at a fast pace. A new analysis of the Carbon Brief found China's emissions had fallen for a fourth consecutive time. In the second quarter of 2022, the drop was 8 percent or 230 million tons, the largest in at least a decade.

Beijing is not just trying to recast, but is emerging as a leader in climate change. China in 2021 is estimated to account for more than half of the world's 54 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity with its offshore wind capacity exceeding the five-year global total. It also has 21 GW of onshore wind power. The country leads in solar power generation too, adding 54.9 GW to help meet its climate goals and promise. Last year, wind and solar farms combined produced over 50 percent of the new power generation for the fifth consecutive year in China. This is in stark contrast to the U.S. President Joe Biden's lofty pledges which bears little fruit yet.

Most of today's challenges including ecological devastation partly emanate from capitalism, which seeks to sustain the North's growth and make windfall profits by suppressing economy and exploiting cheap labor of the South as well as taking advantage of the inflation and supply chain crises to lower wages even within their countries and influence social and ecological legislation.

In future too, the broken capitalist system will most likely thrash the calls of degrowthers and exert efforts to keep the developing and emerging countries at bay to maintain the North's dominance on the South. But China's success in poverty alleviation and human well-being and rapid transition to renewable energy offers a hope for the entire world to arrest the environmental challenges. In a globally-networked topography, the world cannot afford China or largely a poor-South to contract economically; it's the North that has to prevail over its desire for control on the developing world and learn from China's experience to make this planet a better place to live in.