Green growth is the idea that a massive investment in clean technologies will be good for the economy, for employment, for the overall public good, and for the environment. The case is strongest in the area of climate change which, although it’s not the only environmental problem around, is so large that it threatens to disrupt everything else if it’s not addressed. The technologies should be proven and have radically lower footprints than what we have now.

Currently in New Zealand we’re not doing nearly enough – we’re certainly not on track to halve emissions by 2030, and even that target doesn’t take into account our historical responsibility as a high emitter. Our energy supply is 30% renewable, 70% fossil. That has to change urgently.

There’s a missing party in the green growth vs degrowth debate: namely, the status quo. Who is going to stand up and say that our current direction is sustainable? Yet somehow we are driven to keep doubling down on an unsustainable path. New motorways are not green growth. Diesel utes and SUVs are not green growth. Suburban sprawl is not green growth. New international airports are not green growth. All of these should be stopped.

Fifty years ago, the film maker Paul Maughan saw Wellington going down the wrong path. In “Notes on a city: Wellington” he interviewed John Roberts, a founder of Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies, who made a remark that has stayed with me: “People are not progressive and they don’t like to disturb the status quo, because there’s too many interlocking agreements in it.” Those agreements are held in place by powerful pro-dirty growth forces, and those forces are the real enemy.

In New Zealand we have had thirty years of failure at getting strong climate action in place. Big battles remain ahead in many areas – cars, trees, cows, industry. The evidence from overseas, where climate politics is just as difficult, is that green growth can be delivered politically and can be scaled up massively and quickly.

In Australia – no friend to the climate – solar power has skyrocketed, to put the country in first place globally for solar power per person. In the US, the Green New Deal movement – adopted by the youth climate movement Sunrise and then by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – led to the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, a trillion dollar climate bill (equivalent to $14 billion here). The EU Green Deal, now undergoing final approval, is of a similar magnitude.

An IEA study of renewable energy concludes that strong climate action will lead to a quadrupling of demand for criticial minerals by 2040, to 28 million tonnes a year. However, those minerals last an extremely long time, and should be compared to the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels that are mined every year at present and which, once burned, are gone in seconds and go on to cause ongoing damage for thousands of years. The question of resources for the renewable transition has been studied extensively by, for example, the European Commission, the US Department of Energy, and the US Geological Survey. There is a diversity of available technologies and a track record of efficiency improvements. Lack of minerals is not the reason that the climate crisis is not yet solved.

Once the transition is underway and the fossil fuel industry starts shrinking, its political power will wane. Importantly, Green New Deal proposals also involve major restructuring of the finance industry to serve human needs and to stop funding environmentally damaging projects.

There’s a very useful dogma in transport planning, “Avoid/Shift/Improve”. Avoid trips, shift trips to lower-emission modes, and improve the remaining ones. The same idea applies to all activities. Degrowth is more on the avoid side, green growth more on the shift and improve, but all three are needed. The new urbanists are calling for us to live in compact, higher-rise centres, with local services and communities, maybe built from wood with ultra-low energy requirements, and linked with sustainable transport. That’s a pretty radical shift which will require a lot of investment and development of skills and experience and, probably, whole new industries – in other words, growth.

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Dr Robert McLachlan - Distinguished Professor in Applied Mathematics, Massey University.