Indonesia’s largest coal mining company in operation. Even “green” energy requires destructive mining for trace minerals. Credit: Dominik Vanyi
By Kirsten Stade and Alan Ware
SAINT PAUL, Minnesota, May 23 2025 – As the United States lurches toward isolationism and authoritarianism, its political problems are now bleeding into pocketbook anxieties that Trump’s policies will torpedo economic growth, both domestically and globally.
The UN forecasts a slowdown in global economic growth due to Trump’s destructive tariff and trade policies. Though stocks rallied as the US suspended some tariffs, and some analysts are spinning the numbers positively, economic growth signals have turned decidedly negative.
US GDP shrank 0.3% in the first quarter. Moody’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating citing burgeoning US debt and an unfavorable debt-to-GDP ratio.
In most countries, GDP is an indicator of a society’s success — even though it includes things like military expansion, oil spill cleanups, and prison construction. Growthism goes mostly unchallenged and passes for a rational guiding principle for governance and proxy for human well-being.
Yet it ignores important things like climate change, biodiversity collapse, and pollution which are the consequences of endless economic growth, and which threaten the survival of humanity and the millions of species with whom we share this planet.
Economic growth is not just failing as an indicator of human progress. It is failing as an indicator of economic health. The vast majority of economic growth in recent years has accrued to the top 1%. Meanwhile rates of growth in rich countries have been slowing for decades while global debt continues to rise more rapidly.
Understanding why requires understanding the central role of cheap energy in modern civilization. Roads, bridges, sewers, airports, and the electrical grid were all constructed on the back of cheap energy and materials.
With the discovery and extraction of fossil fuels 200 years ago began the modern industrial era, and a frenzy of human enterprise that would not have otherwise been possible.
Now maintenance of all this infrastructure has come due. Those roads, bridges, sewer and water systems are disintegrating and require expensive and ongoing maintenance, on top of new construction to provide for growing populations and economies. But the energy and materials required for all this are no longer as easy to come by.
Skyrocketing debt is a claim on future resources, as all economic activity is dependent on minerals, wood, clean water, and of course fossil fuels that are increasingly scarce and expensive.
Growing risks of climate catastrophes add further to escalating costs, as skyrocketing homeowners insurance adds to the cost of housing. Against this backdrop, prospects for continued economic growth look bleak indeed.
These realities are largely absent from mainstream discourse about economic growth, suffocated under endless proclamations of faith in human ingenuity. Growth proponents are fond of invoking a seamless “green energy transition” without acknowledging that electricity is only 20% of global energy demand, and essential building blocks of growth – steel, cement, fertilizer, and plastics – are manufactured using fossil fuels in processes that cannot be decarbonized at scale.
Renewable technologies themselves require vast amounts of these materials in their construction, along with trace minerals like lithium, cobalt, and other metals whose mining ravages ecosystems, pollutes water, exploits child labor, and requires massive inputs of fossil fuel energy.
Renewables boosters fail to acknowledge that with constant population growth there has never been an energy transition, only energy addition. Even as uptake of “renewable” technologies has expanded since 2000, global coal use went up by 80% over the same period.
Rather than deal with this, growth enthusiasts espouse boundless faith in human innovation. But innovation is slowing according to many measures, and has done little to change the cost of life’s essentials: food, housing, transportation, health care, and education have proven remarkably resistant to breakthroughs that would lower prices or improve quality. As one of Donald Trump’s favorite growth proponents, Peter Thiel, argues, we’re seeing innovation in bits, not atoms.
AI is perhaps the last bastion of hope for continued economic growth, with allegedly unlimited potential for finding new sources of energy and driving production while minimizing capital and labor costs. For all the hype, though, real breakthroughs in materials and energy remain to be seen from AI, which is simply a means to turbocharge extraction of finite materials that will still run out, only sooner.
Meanwhile, AI data centers guzzle fossil fuel energy and require billions of gallons of water to cool all that frenetic digital activity.
No doubt there are still some ways we can squeeze a bit more economic growth out of a system already in ecological overshoot and demanding more of the planet than it has to give or can regenerate. But further growth will require further ravaging nature and the world’s poor, already pushed to the brink.
Is that truly the best path to improve human well-being, especially for the most impoverished who are the most directly impacted by further exploiting and depleting the land, water, trees and minerals?
Ultimately, the question is not how we can tweak the growth system to prolong it indefinitely. It is whether we will face disaster brought on by economic and environmental collapse and all its consequent human suffering, and to make the choice to shrink our population and economy.
It’s whether we are wise enough to choose simplicity over excess and relationships over commodities. Continued economic growth benefits the few already at the top, but conscious, gradual contraction enables the basics of a good life for all. The choice should be clear.
Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and Lead Writer at the NGO Population Balance. Alan Ware is a researcher and writer who cohosts Population Balance’s OVERSHOOT podcast.
IPS UN Bureau
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