Why we have to slow down

Speed drives fuel consumption, which drives growth.

This saved a lot of energy, saved a lot of lives, and everybody hated it

My new favourite Substack is Jeff McFadden’s A Systemic Approach. He is a guy on a farm with a donkey who writes about slowing down. In a recent post, he notes that it would be easy to significantly reduce carbon emissions: just reduce the speed limits. Oh, and my mantra, use less stuff.

“If we were really serious about the climate, we would make less stuff. Making stuff is the big one. We spend more energy on making stuff than on everything else put together…

We could burn less fuel with a global speed limit. Right now. The day you go slower, you reduce your personal emissions. We don’t need Daddy to make us be good. Driving slower everywhere would reduce your personal emissions more than all the magic lightbulbs in the entire global economy.”

Of course, nobody wants to slow down. Nobody was impressed when I called for slower cars; Where I live in Ontario Canada, polls show that Doug Ford is the most popular politician in the province, and he just raised the speed limits. Speed cameras get chopped down as fast as they get put up, and many politicians want the fines reduced or removed because the cameras are a “cash grab.” Slowing down anything, from cars to the economy, is an anathema.

McFadden complains that the degrowth movement ignores the option of slowing down.

“I’ve never seen a publicly recognized degrowth advocate say slow down. I think degrowth envisions everybody going the same speed or faster in new, sleek, industrially developed and constructed, renewable energy driverless cars. I don’t know.”

I don’t know what McFadden has been reading, but “Slow down” is right in the title of two of the most important recent books about degrowth. They are talking about economies, not speed limits, but both propose slower lifestyles. Parrique nails it:

“The challenge ahead of us is one of less, lighter, slower, smaller. It is the challenge of restraint, frugality, moderation, and sufficiency.”

Kōhei writes,

“As a quick look at the history of capitalism since the Industrial Revolution tells us, economic growth during the twentieth century was only possible through the use of enormous amounts of fossil fuels. Economic growth and fossil fuel consumption are intimately and inextricably linked, and thus fossil fuel cannot be replaced with green energy. It’s physically impossible to sustain the same level of economic growth as before and reduce carbon dioxide emissions at the same time.”

This is why so many people hate the idea of degrowth; Nobody wants to slow down their cars or their economy. Instead, everyone is grabbing at the Abundance agenda, which wants to speed things up. The Abundance authors write:

“We seek a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world. We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction. This is a story that must be built out of bricks and steel and solar panels and transmission lines, not just words.”

But all those bricks and steel are made from fossil fuels, and even as the band showing renewables is growing fatter, so are the bands for natural gas, oil, and even coal.

According to the Energy Institute, 2023 was the first year that energy-related greenhouse gas emissions exceeded 40 gigatonnes. “CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels is by far the largest source of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions contributing around 87% of the total.” According to the Climate Change Tracker, we have a carbon budget of 130 gigatonnes remaining to have a 50% chance of staying under 1.5°C of warming, which runs out in three years. If you include agricultural emissions, we’re cooked now. For 2°C, we have 1050 gigatonnes. If we tried, we could possibly stay under that.

Except we are not seriously trying, and magic lightbulbs, solar panels and even my beloved e-bikes aren’t enough; greenhouse gas emissions keep going up.

What energy transition?

Bill Rees, co-inventor of the ecological footprint and someone I have followed for almost twenty years, wrote a post last month that says all of this more authoritatively than I. He notes that all those modern green renewables clean up electricity, but “Keep in mind, however, that electricity constitutes only about 19% of global final energy consumption so, after three decades of rapid growth, modern renewables – wind and solar – provide less than 3% of consumers’ energy demand.” He also notes that demand for fossil fuels is growing, not shrinking. He concludes:

“MTI [Modern Techno-Industrial] culture has become the greatest of geological forces scouring the face of Earth and snuffing out life on every continent. Successful development of a low-cost quantitative replacement for fossil fuels without a sea change in contemporary ecological values, social sensibilities and economic behaviour is a story that would not end well.”

yesterday in Europe

We need that sea change. This is why I and others seek a politics of sufficiency, of using less stuff, of slowing down, of not burning things. It remains a tough sell, in a world where the USA president bans wind turbines and the Canadian Prime Minister panders with pipelines; they know, as Rees notes, that “abundant cheap energy is the engine of material economic growth.” As long as we keep demanding endless growth, we’re trapped.

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I wrote about this earlier:

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