Can we have green growth and sustainable consumption, too?
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Green growth is an economic approach that supports continual economic growth combined with more efficient use of environmental resources.
Because it ignores total environmental impact, green growth puts us on a collision course with our planet’s ecological limits, says USC Wrigley Institute researcher Aitor Marcos Diaz.
Marcos’s research shows that “post-growth” models may be a better choice. These models focus on meeting today’s needs without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their own needs.
Imagine that you’ve decided to buy a new pair of sneakers. You shop around, compare prices, and narrow your list to two options. One pair costs more, but it’s made from recycled and natural materials. The other pair costs less, but it’s made from new, synthetic materials.
You care about the environment and want to live sustainably, so you buy the first pair of shoes. Congratulations, you’ve just done something good for the planet! Right?
Well, maybe.
If you already own sneakers that are in good condition, the most sustainable choice is not to buy more sneakers, says Aitor Marcos Diaz, a postdoctoral research scholar at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability. He is an ecological economist, someone who researches how much of our planet’s finite resources can be used to meet today’s human needs without risking the well-being of future generations.
Green growth: what it is and how it falls short
“Mainstream economics often assumes that we can detach our economic growth or our consumption habits from our environmental footprint, relying on new technologies that haven’t been proven at scale. Instead of questioning the prevailing model of compound growth, we just look for ways to produce or consume that make more efficient use of environmental resources. That’s called ‘green growth’,” Marcos says.
The green growth model focuses on reducing the environmental impact of each unit produced but ignores the total volume of production. In other words, it focuses on reducing the environmental impact of each pair of sneakers, but ignores how many total pairs of sneakers are being made.
That oversight, Marcos says, causes problems for the planet. Even if they’re made with recycled materials, each sneaker still has an environmental footprint. This footprint comes from the energy required to run the factory where the shoes are produced, the new materials (such as glue or thread) that go into each shoe, and so on. As more pairs of sneakers are produced and sold, that environmental footprint adds up. The same is true for any product you find in a store. The end result: As production increases due to demands for growth, even sustainably made products can contribute to greater environmental harm.
For this reason, Marcos warns, green growth may not be compatible with truly sustainable consumption. In his view, when companies use terms such as sustainable, eco-friendly, or recycled as marketing tools, they’re really just driving green consumerism. And this green consumerism has a hidden dark side. According to Marcos, people who buy eco-labeled products are vulnerable to a psychological effect called moral licensing. This occurs when people do a good deed, then feel entitled to do a bad or less-good deed as a result. Buy the “eco-friendly” sneakers, and you may feel like you don’t need to be careful about the environmental footprint of the backpack you buy next week.
Marcos encountered this effect while studying carbon taxes (surcharges for products with high carbon footprints). He looked at the practice in Europe, where countries were testing whether to call out carbon taxes on product labels. Marcos expected to find that people would buy fewer products if they knew they were paying more per product due to a carbon tax. To his surprise, however, he found that people who knew they were paying a carbon tax tended to make more purchases than people who didn’t know they were paying the tax. The knowing buyers’ rationale? They were doing something good for the planet by paying the carbon tax, so it was OK to commit the bad deed of buying even more stuff.
Accepted wisdom around the gross domestic product, or GDP, is another example of the limitations to a green growth mindset. Used as a key indicator of U.S. economic health, the GDP measures the value of goods and services produced in the country. Economists and policymakers, Marcos explains, usually frame GDP growth as an absolute positive, and green growth advocates tend to agree. But he believes a different approach is better.
“Being at the Wrigley Institute, I’ve been made more aware of strong ecological limits, not just limits on paper. Green growth ignores these limits,” Marcos says. “Mathematically, when you grow GDP 2 percent and then 2 percent on top of that and then 2 percent on top of that, it’s exponential. Nothing in nature, where we get the resources for this growth, can grow exponentially without crashing afterwards, because you reach an ecological limit.”
Post-growth: a more sustainable alternative to green growth
Rather than thinking about green growth-style efficient growth or consumption, Marcos says, we need to think about sufficient growth and consumption. His approach to sufficiency references the Planetary Boundaries framework developed by environmental scientist Johan Rockström. The framework outlines nine essential processes for a stable and resilient Earth, and the boundaries within which those processes can function. As of September 2023, Earth had crossed six of those nine boundaries.
By keeping consumption and production at a flat level or reducing it, however, we can avoid crossing the other boundaries–and perhaps even retreat from the six we’ve already crossed. The technical term for this approach is a post-growth model. In society at large, it’s often known by other names, such as sustainable consumption or underconsumption.
(VIDEO: Watch as Marcos explains over- and under-consumption. Story continues after the video.)
Marcos’s research shows that most people currently prefer green growth, but it may be possible to nudge them toward post-growth models, which create prosperity without growth. Marcos and Wrigley Institute Director Joe Árvai tested this hypothesis in a recent study to be submitted for publication in February 2025. They began by surveying participants about their attitudes toward post-growth models such as agrowth (abandoning GDP growth as a policy aim) and degrowth (actively downscaling unnecessarily large economic sectors). The survey also included questions about characteristics, such as political affiliation and mathematical proficiency, that might affect study outcomes.
Next, some of the participants were put in a control group that received no additional information. The remaining participants received varying combinations of information about GDP growth, carbon footprint growth, or material footprint growth and the links between the different measures. (Carbon footprint tracks climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions, while material footprint tracks the extraction of natural resources.)
Finally, Marcos and Árvai surveyed the participants again about their attitudes toward agrowth and degrowth. Individuals who received information about GDP growth only, or who received information about all three types of growth, increased their support for agrowth and degrowth. Support increased even more among people who entered the study with the ability to recognize exponential growth trends.
The effect of the information provided during the study was not enough to overcome certain pre-existing beliefs. For instance, it didn’t make a difference to people who entered the study believing that climate change is not real. However, the overall changes were small but significant, and Marcos takes that as a good sign.
“The information increases people’s awareness of [ecological] limits, and that awareness is what leads to policy support,” he says.
What real-life sustainable consumption looks like
The overall goal of post-growth models, according to Marcos, is to achieve a level of consumption that keeps us between the Planetary Boundaries at the upper limit and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at the lower limit. This means aiming for what he calls a “steady-state economy,” where everyone has enough for a good life, but constant year-over-year economic growth is no longer the overriding goal for governments and companies.
At the individual level, this might mean buying those new sneakers, but using your cellphone until it dies (and then replacing it with a secondhand model). Or it might mean shifting to public transit instead of buying an electric vehicle, repairing your broken refrigerator instead of replacing it, or teaming up with neighbors to share ownership of a lawn mower.
More importantly, it also means making systemic changes. These changes are crucial to widespread, long-term sustainability, and they can take place through both private-sector and government action. Marcos points to examples such as right-to-repair laws, widespread use of renewable energy, prioritization of public transit in government infrastructure projects, and sustainable towns supported through the grassroots Transition Network.
“Degrowth is going to happen, either by design or disaster, because there are ecological limits on how much we can extract from our planet. Planned degrowth looks like democratically planned downscaling of consumption,” Marcos says. “It’s not a single vision–we need a multitude of post-growth alternatives to spark our imagination. And it doesn’t mean we’re going to live worse. It means we won’t hamper future generations’ ability to meet their needs.”