The storms weren’t always hostile.

Every afternoon in the late-spring and summer, around four or five o’clock, the thunder would start. The first raindrops were oversized and spaced far enough apart to miss you. You didn’t feel them, but you heard them. Emphatic splats from the ones that made it through the tangle of live oaks and Spanish moss crisscrossing an electric blue expanse that never let on until the last minute.

The downpours were impressive but not threatening. It wasn’t a driving rain. More like a vertical drenching to reset morale and clear away the irritable torpidity that sets in after so many hours on broil. Just in time for cookouts and restaurant reservations.

When it was over, the roads steamed — the paved ones, anyway — and the canopy was alive with a chorus of frogs and who knew what else. As kids, we’d steal away after dinner to one of the only big-name resorts with a presence in those days. It had a lap pool that butted against a sand dune and a hot tub deck built up around three palmettos. The courtyard had grills for guests and porch swings set up around a fishpond.

Things are different now. Instead of thunder, blaring smartphone notifications of “confirmed” tornado sightings announce the arrival of a drama that began hundreds of miles inland, where aerial news footage of scattered detritus attests to bad intentions. The sky isn’t coy about things anymore. And grayscale is unnatural here.

The rain comes in angular waves and sheets. Plants and decorations are hastily removed from screen porches where another generation might’ve dozed off to the pitter-patter or debated meal plans untouched by the perpendicular rinse outside.

When it’s over, water pools in front yards, where decorative shrubs uprooted by the wind will need to be re-planted for the nth time. Broken-off limbs close lanes on narrow roads snarled by overflow traffic from the main thoroughfare, where the stoplights are out. Not devastation, exactly. But near daily disarray which, to the extent it hints at unremitting meteorological agitation, feels foreboding.

I don’t trouble myself with the plight of future generations. I have no children which, as I’m fond of putting it, materially decreases the odds that I’ll have any grandchildren. That has implications for the way I think about (or, more aptly, don’t think about) climate change. Without mincing words, what happens to Earth’s climate after I’m gone is, like everything else that happens after I’m gone, of exactly no consequence to me. Climate change, then, doesn’t pique my interest. Or at least it didn’t until recently.

To be sure, I dutifully documented most of the bigger climate stories looking back over the past half-decade. I don’t skirt the editorial obligations I wittingly took on when I decided to dedicate myself to writing for public consumption so many years ago. It wasn’t lost on me that the stories were becoming more harrowing over time, but it certainly didn’t surprise me. Earth is, after all, headed towards climatic oblivion. Observe the flatly fatalistic, apolitical cadence. This isn’t a debate. We’ve doomed our species, and there’s no collective will to do anything about it. It’ll be irreversible soon, if it isn’t already. The die is probably cast. And, as noted, I don’t personally care.

I’m somewhat unique in being a progressive who acknowledges our species’ dire predicament while simultaneously conceding an almost complete lack of concern. Although some find that juxtaposition distasteful, it puts me at an advantage with various sorts of climate deniers. There isn’t an oil baron or hardline conservative on our withering planet who cares less about this issue than I do. I’m the progressive who knows the planet is dying and loaded up on oil and gas stocks during the first half of 2020. I’m an enigma for the “I drink liberal tears” coffee mug crowd, and not just on this issue — an apathetic, unidealistic, realist progressive comfortably resigned to life as a walking contradiction.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say these past few months, defined as they were by all manner of broken heat records globally, were a wake up call for me vis-à-vis climate change. I won’t be speaking through a bullhorn at any rallies for the polar bears, and I won’t be selling my oil and gas stocks either. But recent events appear to suggest a cataclysmic tipping point could happen in my lifetime — that I may live to see a Hollywood-style climate catastrophe. I’ll confess to being morbidly fascinated by that prospect, not so much because I’m afraid of it, but rather in a, “Wow, wouldn’t that be something?” sort of way.

In the course of perusing media coverage of this summer’s heat wave (and thereby indulging my newfound climate fascination), I came across scattered references to “degrowth” economics, which I’ve touched on sporadically in these pages, but which now merits more attention.

Assuming it’s not too late to save the species, humanity has two options: Transition rapidly to renewable energy or cut back dramatically on the kinds of activities that are making the planet inhospitable. The former is problematic for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that making the transition will itself be energy intensive, not to mention highly extractive and prohibitively costly given political realities. The latter option is generally seen as a total non-starter to the extent it means people could (and should) abandon the “more, more, more” mentality that undergirds not just consumerism, but the religion of growth.

Of course, politicians, economists and citizens fortunate enough to reside in the developed world never frame an aversion to slower growth in terms of their own insatiable appetite for “more.” Rather, they pretend they’re looking out for citizens in less-developed locales, who can only attain a higher standard of living if the global economy keeps expanding in perpetuity.

We take it as a given that more economic growth is everywhere and always better than less, that no growth is bad and that negative growth (which is to say economic contraction) is inherently injurious. That premise, when contextualized by the dramatic increase in living standards witnessed over the past 150 or so years, and the concurrent reduction in global poverty, is difficult to refute.

“Modern civilization rests on a foundation of unprecedented, once even unimaginable productivity,” NYU Stern’s Scott Galloway wrote, in a section of his 2022 volume Adrift called “The World We Made.” “By 1960, the world was producing 20 times as much as it had in the early 19th century,” he went on, noting that the “real miracle” unfolded in the quarter century beginning in 1980, a period during which the world’s economic output again doubled.

The end result, Galloway marveled, was that “in just a single generation, as much economic potency had come online as had taken the human species its entire history to accumulate.” I chose his short summary for convenience. The number of volumes written on the economic miracle witnessed from the late 19th century through the early 21st could fill a library. There’s a new account published seemingly every few months.

That economic miracle (and particularly the latter part of it, which coincided with modern globalization) is generally credited with the sharp decline in global poverty illustrated above and also the concurrent increase in life expectancy, shown below.

I should quickly note that life expectancy around the world fell by nearly two years as a result of the pandemic.

The link between economic growth, prosperity and overall well-being is impossible to deny, and it’s certainly not my intent to cast doubt on it. However, there are at least two points (I won’t call them objections) worth raising.

First, it’s debatable whether people living in advanced economies are actually getting happier and living more fulfilling lives as time goes on. We might’ve bumped up against diminishing returns in that regard decades ago. That still leaves plenty (billions) of people with room to get happier in locales where living standards are still lower than they were in the developed world a few decades ago, but if it’s true that there’s a threshold beyond which “more” (more healthcare, more education, more consumption and so on) doesn’t translate into better subjective experiences, or actually contributes to depression and anxiety, then the pursuit of growth for the sake of it in locales where that threshold has been breached is a fool’s errand, at best.

Second, if the benefits of growth aren’t equitably distributed and policies aren’t enacted to level the playing field, the exponential accrual that results from unequal initial conditions will eventually concentrate virtually all wealth and resources in the hands of just a few individuals, who will get to decide whether, how and to what extent, economic growth raises living standards. Thomas Piketty’s equation suggests we can grow our way to a more equal society — that if growth runs hotter than the return on capital for long enough, the world will automatically become a more equitable place. I’m not sure that’s true, even in theory. I’d conjecture that absent intervention (and Piketty advocates for intervention), the capital-rich are going to get richer both in absolute and relative terms regardless of circumstances. Is the middle-class going to automatically close the gap on the wealthiest if growth expands at a brisker-than-usual pace, wage growth is commensurately higher and somehow, the return on capital over the same period is lower than the pace of GDP growth? I doubt it. Or at least I doubt the “automatically” part.

The second point is a mainstay of above-the-fold coverage in the financial pages. Working towards the equitable distribution of the benefits which accrue from a “bigger pie” (to use the classic analogy) is a veritable obsession for economists all around the world. And rightfully so. That discussion (and all the attendant debate) is pervasive to the point of ubiquity in economic circles.

The happiness issue, by contrast, is both prevalent and obscure. On one hand, interest in measuring overall human well-being (happiness) is growing all the time, and rapidly on some metrics. On the other, happiness is a nebulous concept, and well-being is notoriously hard to measure in a consistent way. So, the idea of replacing a straightforward, universally accepted, mostly objective metric (GDP), with a patchwork of subjective measures aimed at capturing an elusive concept (happiness or well-being) in the service of measuring human progress, is eyed skeptically even where it’s seriously considered. Where it’s not seriously considered, the endeavor is written off as laughably naive.

And yet, you could argue it’s laughably naive not to adopt some measure of happiness or overall well-being as the key marker of human progress. After all, “money can’t buy happiness” (or some version of it) is among the most-cited and generally accepted maxims on the planet. Indeed, it’s regarded by most as a truism beyond the (admittedly fuzzy) threshold mentioned above. That threshold varies from person to person, and from society to society, but it’s safe to say that if you have a nice dwelling, are “food rich” (in advanced economies, that means when you go grocery shopping, you don’t care about the prices), have access to quality healthcare and are possessed of enough disposable income to purchase “minor” luxuries (maybe you’re not Chanel shopping, but if you want two new pairs of shoes and a new TV, you can buy them on a whim without thinking about it), you’re closing in on the diminishing returns threshold for incremental happiness gains derived solely from money. I can assure you, for example, that the incremental happiness derived from upgrading to Balenciaga runners from Nike is much smaller than the incremental gain from upgrading to Nike from Payless. Crucially, the happiness derived by someone who’s able to upgrade from barefoot to Payless will be orders of magnitude larger than any footwear-related happiness that person ever subsequently experiences (assuming, of course, the person wanted shoes in the first place).

Growth, money and wealth aren’t always interchangeable, but we do tend to treat them as such. Indeed, that’s part and parcel of the debate. Growth is assumed to be the key to money and wealth, which are in turn assumed to be the keys to happiness, even as conventional wisdom (and common sense) tell us that in fact, money and wealth stop buying incremental happiness past some threshold.

As noted above, it’s possible we procrastinated so long vis-à-vis climate change, that the energy transition on its own can’t save us. Not all of us anyway. Even if we get serious tomorrow (and we won’t), there may not be enough time. Most rational people understand that the endless pursuit of “dirty” growth has contributed to climatic events with increasingly disastrous consequences for our species. You could easily argue that the toll from those events (physical, emotional and monetary) is beginning to outstrip the incremental benefits advanced economies derive from the “more” mentality.

Given all of that, and accepting the fact that in the near-term, growth still depends heavily on fossil fuels, it’s worth asking whether we should just stop pursuing growth, or at least stop prioritizing it above everything else. One way to approach that question is to assess whether the world is, in fact, getting happier the more it grows in GDP terms. If not, then the tradeoff (growth for the biosphere) is ludicrous — a kamikaze mission predicated on false assumptions.

Every year, Gallup asks adults in dozens of countries and regions (more than 140 in 2022) about five types of negative experiences (physical pain, worry, sadness, stress and anger) and whether they (the survey participants) had them the day before. Those responses are used to create an index. The higher the index level, the worse.

The latest reading on the gauge was 33, unchanged from 2021 when the world was “unhappier [and] more stressed out than ever,” as Gallup put it. “In 2022, worry, stress and sadness remained near the record highs set in 2021,” the latest edition of the survey read.

Do note: The trend was established before the pandemic. The index is up 37.5% since 2006. The positive experience index (Gallup asks if respondents are well-rested, treated with respect, if they’ve smiled or laughed recently, learned something new and if they’ve experienced enjoyment) is virtually unchanged over the same time frame.

At the country level, the highest incidence rates for positive experiences aren’t in advanced, “more, more, more” economies. In fact, there were no developed economies that ranked in the top 10 on Gallup’s positive experiences list for 2022, and only one (Sweden) managed to make the top 15 list for lowest negative experiences. Latin American countries perennially rank highest among positive emotions, and Southeast Asia is well represented too.

Although you could plausibly suggest that elevated economic growth rates in some emerging markets are contributing to more positive experiences (and fewer negative ones), the correlation appears tenuous at best. The juxtaposition between pervasive positive emotions in Latin America and the kind of economic precarity which drives so many Latin Americans to make the arduous journey to the US for work, is notable indeed. (Much has been written about Latin Americans’ penchant for expressing positive emotions. The subject is well beyond my purview.)

Certainly, a complete lack of economic growth and opportunity is associated with across-the-board negativity, but in locales like Afghanistan (which landed at the top of Gallup’s negative experiences list and at the bottom of the positive emotions list for 2022), it’s impossible to disentangle economic collapse from conflict and political instability. The same is true of other countries that rank high on negative experiences or low on positive experiences, like Yemen. In Turkey, which landed near the bottom of the positive experiences list again in 2022, the problem isn’t growth, it’s inflation (and some other things too, but inflation is surely a factor).

Developed nations’ scores for both positive and negative experiences on the Gallup indexes might fairly be described as middling considering stable governments, social safety nets and endless creature comforts. Is that because highly advanced economies aren’t growing fast enough? I doubt it. My guess, rather, would be that the capacity for economic development to curb worry, sadness, stress and anger was reached decades ago, and that relative affluence is now a contributor to some of those negative emotions, particularly if people’s expectations in advanced economies have risen such that disappointment is all but guaranteed. In the World Happiness Report (a decade-old project which leverages life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll), the US, Germany, UK, France and Japan rank 15th, 16th, 19th, 21st and 47th, respectively, out of 137.

Nations with the highest GDP per capita aren’t necessarily the happiest nations, although it certainly helps. There’s no consensus on how to measure happiness. All we can say with certainty is that wealth and income paint an incomplete picture. The figure below shows the average score of countries which ranked in the top 40 on the OECD’s “Better Life Index,” the World Happiness Report’s “Average Life Evaluation” and US News’s “Happiest Countries” list, arranged by GDP per capita. A country needed to score in the top 40 on all three lists for inclusion.

To be completely transparent: I don’t think that visual is particularly useful. There’s no settled way to measure happiness, and about all we can say is that Finland, and particularly Norway, are both well-off and happy. Not exactly new information.

Crucially, interest in happiness as the primary measure of human success is growing, while some metrics suggest the importance of income and GDP is in decline.

“The word ‘happiness’ accounts for more than 25 out of each million words in print,” Christopher Barrington-Leigh, an associate professor at McGill’s Institute for Health and Social Policy and Bieler School of Environment, observed early last year, noting that “happiness” now shows up “more frequently than the phrase ‘gross domestic product,'” which he called “an older marker of progress.” GDP, he noted, “has been declining in frequency of usage” for a dozen years.

The same analysis showed the occurrence of “happiness” rising across languages since 1980, while the incidence of “economic growth” declined.

In 2007, the European Commission, European Parliament, OECD and WWF convened a high-level conference which declared, among other things, that, “the relationship between economic growth as measured by GDP and other dimensions of societal progress is not straightforward.” A summary of the proceedings emphasized that “effectively measuring progress, wealth and well-being requires indexes that are as clear and appealing as GDP, but more inclusive than GDP — ones that incorporate social and environmental issues.”

Since then, the popularity of the phrase “beyond GDP” has risen steadily, according to Barrington-Leigh. Two years after the 2007 conference, the European Commission released a “road map,” detailing “five key actions” aimed at “improv[ing] indicators of progress in ways that meet citizens’ concerns.” The same year, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi released a landmark report commissioned by the French government. “The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being,” the 292-page odyssey said, adding that “measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability.”

The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission was a key moment in the “beyond GDP” movement. The overarching goal was to “identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress.” The report, a tome’s tome, was clear that “changing emphasis” shouldn’t mean doing away with GDP or other measures of production, and there was ample consideration of income (which came up 850 times) and wealth (205 times). But the report suggested we’re probably not doing the best job of measuring overall life satisfaction. As Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi put it, “there appears to be an increasing gap between the information contained in aggregate GDP data and what counts for common people’s well-being.” Well-being, they wrote, “is multi-dimensional.” It includes income, consumption and wealth (“material living standards”), but it also includes health, education, personal activities, political voice, governance, social connections, relationships, environment and security.

They summarized the report’s argument in a half-dozen bullet points, the first of which began by noting that “quality of life includes the full range of factors that make life worth living, including those that are not traded in markets and not captured by monetary measures.” They also suggested that the single-minded pursuit of higher GDP might’ve contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. “Perhaps had there been more awareness of the limitations of standard metrics, like GDP, there would have been less euphoria over economic performance in the years prior to the crisis,” Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi wrote. Certainly, an excessive commitment to production and output at all costs is contributing to the world’s environmental crisis, something they also addressed. The environment came up hundreds of times. “Choices between promoting GDP and protecting the environment may be false choices,” the report said. “A tendency to measure gradual change may be inadequate to capture risks of abrupt alterations in the environment.” I think it’s fair to suggest the frequency of such “abrupt alterations” has increased since the report was written.

Although the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission was a watershed moment, it wasn’t the first time growth for its own sake was called into question. In 1972, the Club of Rome commissioned The Limits to Growth, a 200-page report by M.I.T. economists who utilized computers (at the time that counted as a bold approach) to predict that the prevailing rate of economic growth, if sustained, might kill the planet’s ecosystem sometime around… well, sometime around now, to put it bluntly. “The message of this book still holds today: The Earth’s interlocking resources — the global system of nature in which we all live — probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology,” a summary reads.

Nearly a decade after their original report, Stiglitz and Fitoussi, along with Martine Durand, followed up in a short book called, appropriately, Beyond GDP, published by the OECD, which neatly summarized the message from the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission: “Change the focus of our statistics from measuring the size of economic production, which is what GDP is about, to measuring what shapes the well-being of people today and that of future generations.”

In 2021, more than a year into the pandemic, the UN urged the world to “correct a glaring blind spot in how we measure economic prosperity and progress.” “As currently measured, GDP fails to capture the human and environmental destruction of some business activities,” a report detailing member states’ “common agenda” read. The UN called for the creation of “new measures to complement GDP, so that people can gain a full understanding of the impacts of business activities and how we can and must do better to support people and our planet.”

Does GDP, in fact, correlate with happiness and well-being? To a point, the answer is obviously “yes.” In locales defined by extreme poverty and deprivation, happiness is hard to come by. If you’re starving, destitute or dodging bullets, you can’t enjoy life. But if that were all there is to it, then well-fed, wealthy people in safe, developed economies wouldn’t commit suicide. As noted above, there’s a threshold beyond which incremental output, income, wealth, consumption, perceptions of safety and even higher life expectancy, don’t translate to better subjective experiences, or least not on a one-for-one basis. A 2020 OECD study published in conjunction with the group’s “Better Life” initiative, showed that from 2012 to 2018, GDP growth was statistically significant only for a handful of well-being indicators.

To be sure, the indicators for which GDP was significant are critical: Higher household incomes, higher employment rates, lower labor underutilization, better overall life evaluations, higher voter turnout, less social isolation and richer governments. Some of that is just the relationship between growth and “material conditions,” as the OECD put it, but there’s clearly a positive relationship between growth and social outcomes too.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that more growth will everywhere and always lead to better outcomes even on the metrics with which GDP is significantly associated. Voter turnout and employment can only go to 100%, for example.

More germane for our purposes here is the insignificant correlation between GDP and the majority of well-being metrics measured by the OECD. “Changes in current well-being indicators on income inequality, the prevalence of long hours in paid employment, the gender wage gap, housing affordability, air pollution, the homicide rate and life expectancy are not significantly associated with changes in GDP,” the OECD found, noting that the same is true of household debt, fixed asset production, premature mortality, educational attainment for young adults, the protection of threatened species, trust in government and political gender parity. (The study covers 2012-2018. My guess would be that GDP predicts life expectancy and premature mortality very well up to a point, beyond which its usefulness as a predictor diminishes rapidly. Many OECD nations probably reached that point before 2012.)

Intuitively, greenhouse gas emissions per capita were better as economies contracted. That speaks directly to the notion that in order to ensure the planet remains hospitable, we should consider deemphasizing GDP given that i) it’s not everywhere and always synonymous with happiness, and it’s apparently not a significant predictor of many common sense well-being metrics, and ii) global perceptions of well-being will anyway deteriorate significantly in the event natural disasters continue to wreak havoc and destroy livelihoods, not to mention lives.

To say there’s unfinished business when it comes to establishing better metrics of human progress than GDP would be to materially understate the case. The point is to emphasize piqued interest in complementary indicators which might address the perceived shortcomings of GDP when it comes to predicting and facilitating overall well-being. Some climate activists believe this project is urgent such that failing to complete it posthaste would be tantamount to oblivion.

Writing in The New Yorker on July 5, the American environmentalist and author Bill McKibben noted that if the question is whether “the only way” to put the brakes on climate change brought about by human activity is “to invest in green technologies that take us beyond the world of fossil fuels,” the degrowth movement’s answer is “a muted no.” Again, it may be too late for that, and even if it isn’t, the cost (both in terms of investment and, ironically, the environmental consequences of mining the necessary minerals and so on) may be too high. Instead, some ecologists have suggested that citizens in advanced economies should consider doing with less — of everything.

“In the 1960s people didn’t have three-car garages, fly to Las Vegas to gamble or drive SUVs, but they lived comfortably,” the Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil said in 2013, during an interview with The Tyee, a Vancouver-based online daily. Needless to say, citizens in advanced economies used far less energy back then. “We can return to 1964 with no problem. Living in 1964 is not a sacrifice,” Smil insisted.

That assessment is nothing short of heresy to most Americans, and to many citizens in other developed countries besides. But Smil is, at the least, not wrong. Nor was he wrong in 2011 when, in a feature piece for Foreign Policy called “A Hummer In Every Driveway,” he declared that Americans “have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit.”

Speaking directly to the well-being discussion in the same article, he wrote that, “Energy use is merely a means to many rewarding ends [like] economic security, education [and] health.” The US consumes far more energy per capita than other rich nations, but to what end? “Are Americans twice as rich as the French? Are they twice as educated as the Germans? Do they live twice as long as the Swedes? Are they twice as happy as the Danes or twice as safe as the Dutch?” he wondered. Rhetorical questions, all. “The obvious answer for all of the above is no; indeed, many of America’s quality-of-life indicators do not even rank among the world’s top 10!” he exclaimed.

To be sure, there’s some overlap between happy countries and energy use, as the figure above makes clear. However, it’s difficult to argue that the US is a happier place than New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, and yet Americans used vastly more energy than those nations’ citizens in 2022.

The more important point is that we’re not just living beyond our means, we’re living beyond the planet’s. McKibben quoted Christopher Ketcham who, in April, called for, “contraction and simplification, a downsizing of the economy and population, so that Homo sapiens can prosper within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of the biosphere.” Practicing what he preaches, Ketcham simplified: “In other words, we must live within our planet’s biophysical limits.”

But we’re doing the opposite. For example, even as each day brings new evidence of climatic catastrophe, the world is using more oil than ever. “So far, we have only partial numbers for May and June, and directional evidence for July [but] extrapolating from earlier this year, the fresh information, including real-time traffic congestion in multiple countries and global airline travel, suggests that global oil demand went above the pre-COVID peak recently, even when considering the margin of error,” Javier Blas wrote for Bloomberg, during what appears to be the hottest month in human history.

According to Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation program, the global mean surface air temperature for the first three weeks of July virtually guaranteed that 2023 would be the hottest July ever and, more notably, that July 2023 would be the hottest-ever month. Take a moment to let that sink in: This July was probably the hottest month in the history of human civilization.

“July’s record is unlikely to remain isolated this year,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, echoed that assessment. “July is unfortunately a foretaste of the future,” he remarked. The WMO said the odds that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record are 98%.

To me, those odds underscore the notion that it’s too late for the energy transition to rescue us on its own. We’ve seen the warmest June since at least 1850, record ocean surface anomalies, the lowest June sea ice coverage ever recorded and the 10 hottest days ever recorded, in succession.

It goes on and on. On July 18, Margaret Sutherlin, writing for one of the countless Bloomberg newsletters I receive in addition to the firehouse of headlines, terminal blogs and mini-stories, tried to capture it all. “The world is burning up,” she wrote, noting that Tokyo topped a heat record that stood for 150 years, Rome notched the hottest day ever and it was 110 in Phoenix for three weeks straight. At one point, it was 126 in China.

Would it help if the world (or advanced economies, and particularly the US) deemphasized growth and decided to roll back the clock to 1964, as Smil suggested? I don’t know, frankly. But it probably wouldn’t hurt. Or at least it wouldn’t hurt the environment. McKibben (who, I should note, doesn’t believe that degrowth is the only answer or even the best answer), called the argument that rich nations could do with less both “seductive” and “sound.”

In April, Steve Genco, a Stanford political science PhD, cited a study by a Berlin-based think tank while enumerating the steps necessary to stabilize the Earth’s temperature. Among those steps: “Decrease the share of passenger car transport by 81% in Global North urban areas by 2050, reduce ground freight transport by 62%, limit per-person air travel to one trip per year by 2025 and one trip every three years by 2050, reduce living space per person by 25%, reduce the average number of appliances in Global North homes by 50%, decrease meat consumption in rich nations by 60% by 2030, reduce overall calorie consumption per person in the Global North by 24% [and] end subsidies for fossil fuel companies.”

There’s little doubt that Americans would do well to reduce overall calorie consumption. The nation is plagued by obesity. And ending subsidies for fossil fuel companies is an idea that would surely enjoy broad-based support among large swaths of the electorate in most advanced economies. (Note that “broad-based support” needn’t mean a majority or even a plurality, it just means the idea isn’t wildly far-fetched). The rest of the prescriptions mentioned above might sound extreme, but as McKibben remarked, commenting on the same study, they’re really not. “The median square footage of an American house built in the 1960s was 1,500 square feet, compared with about 2,200 today, and the earlier model was home to more people,” he said, in the same New Yorker piece, adding that “before 1972, more than half of Americans had never taken a plane trip, much less more than one a year, and, since 1960, we’ve increased our total meat and poultry consumption by 35%.” So, no, the steps Genco cited aren’t drastic, unless you want to argue that middle-class Americans had it bad during the period today’s right-wing populists (including and especially Donald Trump) generally equate with the country’s golden years.

For his part, Bloomberg’s Blas (a mainstay of oil market journalism) doubts society is capable of rolling back energy consumption. “I’d like to be proved wrong, but currently there’s no chance that the world will reduce oil consumption by 2030 nearly as much as needed to meet its net-zero emissions targets,” he said. Smil offered an even gloomier assessment. “We will never act voluntarily,” he said in 2013, commenting on the (nonexistent) odds that humanity might willingly use less energy. The environment would “have to collapse” first, and “that’s optimistic,” he joked.

Some who write on the subject argue that degrowth needn’t involve any direct effort to downgrade GDP. “It is important to clarify that degrowth is not about reducing GDP,” Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist from the University of London, wrote in 2020. Rather, it’s about “reducing [energy and resource] throughput.” It “differs fundamentally from recession,” he emphasized.

Writing in July for the Monthly Review, the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the US (the first issue, in 1949, featured a lead article by Albert Einstein), Hickel said that, “We must be clear about what growth actually is. It is not innovation, or social progress, or improvements in well-being.” Rather, growth has become a narrow concept, “defined as an increase in aggregate production, as measured in market prices.” “GDP makes no distinction between $100 worth of tear gas and $100 worth of health care,” he pointed out. I’d make the point more emphatically: GDP also has no reason to distinguish between $100 worth of sarin gas and $100 worth of health care. GDP, as a metric, “is not intended to measure what is important for people, but rather what is important for capitalism,” Hickel went on.

Naturally, opponents of degrowth economics argue it’d be a disastrous idea to wittingly deemphasize economic expansion. As the World Economic Forum helpfully explained, “detractors say economic growth has given the world everything from cancer treatments to indoor plumbing.” That’s true, but if economic growth has also given the world climate change, it’s signing death certificates and, according to many scientists, increasing the odds of new pandemics. If that latter contention is true, the decrease in global life expectancy witnessed in the wake of COVID-19 suggests one of growth’s greatest achievements (the extension of human life spans) could be rolled back as a result of growth’s most deleterious side effect (climate change).

Harvard’s school of public health recently called the idea that governments can separate health and environmental policy “a dangerous delusion.” Last year, a study published in Nature warned that “changes in climate and land use will lead to opportunities for viral sharing among previously geographically isolated species of wildlife.” “The closest analogy is actually the risks we see in the wildlife trade,” the study’s lead author, a Berkeley PhD and a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown, said. “We worry about markets because bringing unhealthy animals together in unnatural combinations creates opportunities for [a] stepwise process of emergence, but markets aren’t special anymore; in a changing climate, that kind of process will be the reality in nature just about everywhere.”

Notably, the study suggested it’s too late to mitigate that risk. “This ecological transition may already be underway, and holding warming under 2C within the 21st century will not reduce future viral sharing,” the authors said. “When a Brazilian free-tailed bat makes it all the way to Appalachia, we should be invested in knowing what viruses are tagging along,” one of the researchers remarked.

In late July, scientists from the University of Copenhagen predicted imminent collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (the AMOC), the network of ocean currents which determines the climate in the North Atlantic. The timeframe on that event is “around mid-century” based on “a current scenario of future emissions,” the study said. As the New York Times pointed out, “The last time there was a major slowdown in [this] mighty network of ocean currents it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.” If it happens again, “much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool, the coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise, northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain,” the Times explained.

There’s a lot of debate about the findings of the AMOC study. I’m not the person to adjudicate, and even if the results are somehow invalid, it doesn’t change the overall message: We have a problem, and it’s getting worse all the time.

In 2009, 28 scientists came together to identify “the nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system.” Using that framework, they developed what they called “quantitative planetary boundaries” — basically a set of thresholds which, if exceeded, would jeopardize our species’ future. Two months ago, the same scientists said eight of those nine boundaries are breached. “Human pressures have put the Earth system on a trajectory moving rapidly away from the stable Holocene state of the past 12,000 years,” they said, before offering a helpful reminder: That’s “the only state of the Earth system we have evidence of being able to support the world as we know it.”

“Been back home lately?” I despise small talk, but the man who can’t make small talk in a barber chair is a sad soul, so I always try. Her eyes lit up. “We went for the 4th!” She was nearly shouting. The people in the waiting area looked up from their phones. She noticed. Her voice dropped to a whisper, as though it was a secret: “So much fun.”

She was born and raised in a tourist hot spot best described as Myrtle Beach with no beach — a long stretch of road with themed miniature golf, chain restaurants, souvenir shops and outlet malls on either side. It dead ends in what the locals call “mountains,” a misnomer. It’s the kind of place you go for vacation if you spend your weekends at the county fair. For a time, I lived 45 minutes from that carnivalesque nightmare in a decent-sized city which I actually quite enjoyed. To her, that meant we had something in common.

“Kids had fun?” I asked. “Oh my God, yes,” she beamed. She drags her husband along for these semi-annual, Walley World-style pilgrimages. He’s not from there. He’s from here, on the island. I can’t imagine he enjoys himself, but I guess you never know.

She got back to my straight razor shave. “You ever going back to the city?” She meant the city near her hometown. She’s never been to a real city that I know of, let alone Manhattan. And God help her if she ever goes. She’s the type who’d pay $50 for a selfie with one of Times Square’s three-dozen superheroes. I waited until the razor was off my cheek to lie to her. “Nah. Who’d wanna leave here?”

Truth be told, I was moving back to the city she meant. And imminently. I’ve had enough of the storms and the tornado warnings that almost invariably accompany them these days. Hurricane season gets worse every year, and besides, I’ve been here too long. Seven years of self-imposed exile is enough.

She finished up, and when I was out of the chair, she motioned to someone in the waiting area: “You ready?” I handed her a fifty and she dutifully feigned surprise. As if I hadn’t paid the same $50 for the same shave to everyone who works there a hundred times since 2017.

“Any plans for the weekend?” she wondered after me, swooping the cape over the next customer. The answer was yes. I was packing boxes ahead of the movers. But what’d be the point in telling her? “Nada. Same as usual.” “Until next time then!” “Yeah,” I said, walking out. “Next time.”

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