Tribune. The verdict of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released on August 9, is clear: “The evidence for observed changes in extreme events such as heat waves, heavy rainfall, droughts and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since the fifth report of Evaluation. “ It joins that of the recent joint report of the IPCC and IPBES (the United Nations platform for biodiversity and ecosystems), published in June 2021, and whose first words are: “Climate change and biodiversity loss are two of the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene”, that is to say since the advent of men as the main force for change on earth.
The IPCC and IPBES reports provide the framework. We will not avoid a world at + 1.5 ° C (between 2030 and 2040), explains the IPCC, even if in its most optimistic scenario, the temperature could be stabilized before decreasing to 1.4 ° C towards the end of the century. The political question is therefore one of a responsible solution: to stop making gross domestic product (GDP) growth the compass against which all policies should be evaluated.
This compass is biased because it guides our lives under the domination of economic activity alone. Putting all social life under control corresponds to the victory of a concept: the GDP indicator, which has become an ideology at the service of the world of growth.
Today, any gain in growth is correlated with a degradation of the ecological footprint (EE). Worse, the threshold for exceeding the ceilings of ecological unsustainability is not in front of us but behind us: in 2021, the “day of exceeding” is July 29. From now on each human must feel responsible and strive to go back below this threshold: this is what is called “degrowth”. And let’s call a spade a spade: even if any recession is not just a decrease, the decrease is indeed a kind of recession.
Growth and recession are competing economic concepts. A recession is the decline in economic activity, measured by GDP, for at least two consecutive quarters. When a recession is “severe and long lasting,” it becomes a depression.
The end of fetishism
However, decrease necessarily leads to a decline in economic growth. How long should this decline be? Time to return to a sustainable EA. In France, the EE is 1.8 compared to French biocapacity (and 2.9 compared to global biocapacity). With a rate of decline of 10% per year, it will take nearly 40 quarters of recession if we start from an EE of 2.9. This is a rough calculation, but it gives an order of magnitude to understand that the decrease will be a recession.
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