The ecological crisis is an existential threat to life on Earth. The IPCC estimates that, on our current trajectory, it is very likely we will exceed even the 2 degree limit ¹ and that several tipping points will be crossed ², beyond which global heating will accelerate uncontrollably and extreme weather events will become the norm, leading towards mass extinction.³ Moreover, with the collapse of biodiversity and pollution of all kinds, 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries have been crossed ⁴, causing irreversible damage to life on Earth, and endangering food and water security. Faced with the greatest challenge ever posed to humanity, we must take immediate action to limit this ongoing catastrophe.

As European citizens, we bear a heavy responsibility for this catastrophe. The average European citizen’s ecological consumption is 2.8 times that of our planet’s capacity to regenerate itself ⁵, and 5 times that of the average Indian citizen.⁶ ⁷ We must therefore drastically reduce the destruction created by our economic activity and our use of natural resources.

The main obstacle standing between us and the required measures is this: the pursuit of infinite economic growth. Our leaders keep trying to make us believe that this is compatible with the necessary ecological transition, yet there is no empirical basis indicating that it is possible to globally and sufficiently decouple GDP from environmental pressures ⁸, nor, writes the EEA, is it likely to become so.⁹ Our politicians are betting on technological progress to alleviate the crisis, even though the presented “green technologies” are yet another way to drive inequality and an important part of those technologies are still in the testing phase, uncertain whether they are themselves environmentally friendly.¹⁰ The promise that economic growth results in human wellbeing is broken too: looking at the past 40 years, there isn’t any correlation between economic growth and human development such as literacy, life expectancy and education.¹¹ GDP measures the welfare of capitalism, not the welfare of people. Do we want to keep accelerating profits for the few or create wellbeing for all? There is only one solution: to produce and consume drastically less.

Unlike the planetary boundaries, the economic system is not a law of nature, but a social construct, and can be tamed. The wild neoliberalism that rules our lives is only a recent invention; before the state was much less reluctant to intervene in the economy for the general good, and much more reluctant to intervene for the benefit of private capital. How many measures could we put in place with the budgets that were granted to the private sector during the financial crisis of 2008 or the Covid-19 pandemic! And let’s not delude ourselves: the current growth-oriented economic system has reached saturation point and would collapse sooner or later, even without ecological pressure, as the financial crisis and covid pandemic made painfully clear. It is up to us to choose between a controlled reduction of those sectors that don’t contribute to society and revaluing essential work, or witness a horrendous collapse of both.

The severity of the ecological crisis demands that we fundamentally rethink the economic system in order to guarantee a decent standard of living for all citizens within the limits of the planet. We therefore call on the EU government to abandon growth as an economic objective and to launch a socially just European ecological emergency plan to fundamentally reform the economy, under democratic control.