Growth: A History and a Reckoning by Daniel Susskind
Published in April 2024
“Once you start thinking about [economic] growth, it’s hard to think about anything else.”
While it is doubtful that the economist Robert Lucas ever uttered these exact words, they—the words—feel true.
My experience has been that once I started thinking seriously about climate change after reading Bryan Alexander’s indispensable Universities on Fire, I thought (or read) about little else.
The more you learn about climate change, the more worried you become.
If you count yourself among the climate change obsessives, then Daniel Susskind’s book Growth: A History and a Reckoning should be on your reading list. Reading Growth helped me—and maybe it can help you—balance two seemingly contradictory beliefs.
The first belief is that the history of rapid economic growth made possible by burning fossil fuels since the industrial revolution is how we got ourselves into this climate mess in the first place. The second belief is that the way to address the threat of climate change by decarbonizing our society requires a different sort of economic growth, one with renewable energy at its center.
In other words, it is possible to simultaneously champion economic growth and support policies to address climate change.
The book’s strongest parts are where Susskind unpacks the causes and consequences of economic growth until today while explaining why simplistic degrowth policies may have significant unintended negative consequences.
Transitioning from carbon burning to renewable energy sources will require enormous investment. This reality plays out across higher education, as universities take seriously the necessity of directing significant long-term investments towards decarbonization.
At my own institution, there is a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2030 (compared to the 2010 baseline), with carbon-zero operations reached by 2050. This energy transition will be accomplished with a $500 million investment in eight core infrastructure investments and technologies: geo-exchange borefields, geo-exchange plants, building conversions, thermal storage, electrical resilience, heating plant upgrades, distribution piping and solar thermal/PV installations.
Living through a campus decarbonization initiative (lots of construction) provides a tangible education about the effort and resources necessary to accomplish the energy transition at scale. The infrastructure required to generate and distribute renewable energy is highly capital-intensive. Unlike fossil-based energy sources, where the costs are ongoing as the fuel is burned, renewables require heavy up-front costs (solar, battery, turbine, geo-exchange borefields and plants, etc.).
At any scale, paying for the energy transition will be expensive up front. Over the long run, investments in renewable energy almost always pay off—whether for homeowners installing solar panels to campuses drilling geo-exchange borefields or governments financing grid-scale wind, solar, hydro and nuclear projects.
Those long-term investments come with trade-offs. A university committed to decarbonizing its long-term energy footprint will have fewer resources in the near term for other priorities. Any university’s success in energy decarbonization will be dependent, at least partly, on that school’s ability to drive new revenues.
For higher education, the cost of decarbonization will be high enough that redistributing existing budgets to pay the costs of transitioning to renewable energy sources will be inadequate. Universities will need to grow revenues to pay for the necessary infrastructure changes.
I suspect the story will be much the same outside of higher education. Fighting climate change will require economic growth. Here, Susskind’s book is particularly helpful, as Growth provides an intellectual foundation for a pro-growth/pro-environmental orientation. Admittedly, the book succeeds more in its effort to combat anti-growth activists than in articulating a robust set of policies and investments.
Perhaps we view the energy decarbonization initiatives across numerous colleges and universities as living laboratories, with lessons applicable to large-scale investments and policy initiatives.
University communities grappling with how to pay to decarbonize their campuses might want to broaden their thinking by reading and discussing and reading Growth: A History and a Reckoning.
What are you reading?