In many countries, the far right is pushing back on climate action. In the UK, Europe and South America, dangerous demagogues are whipping up confusion and spreading climate misinformation. After years of progress, the climate movement has a real fight on its hands.
Despite the obvious threat from climate obstructionists, too many of us who believe in climate science want to focus on what divides rather than what unites us. This problem is seen, above all, in the debate about how to organise the relationship between climate change and the economy.
The current debate frames it as a stark choice. Either we embrace green growth, the idea that capitalism can be cleaned up through technology, markets, and investment, or we accept degrowth, the claim that sustainability requires producing and consuming less.
This binary animates academic journals, protest movements, policy debates and newspaper columns. It also increasingly shapes public discourse, where critical voices consider green growth an expression of naive techno-optimism, while degrowth is caricatured as taking a utopian view of austerity.
Jacob Hasselbalch and I have found that this framing of the relationship between climate change and the economy is inaccurate, and is actively getting in the way of progress. The problem is that the dichotomy does not produce two, distinct and equally coherent opposing political projects. Instead, there is enormous disagreement within each camp, and substantial overlap between them. What looks like a clash of worldviews is better understood as a crowded landscape of opinions, where there is a lot more agreement than conflict.
Consider green growth. Its critics often portray it as a single project: faith in markets, carbon pricing, and breakthrough technologies that will allow us to carry on much as before. That version certainly exists. It animates ecomodernist manifestos, corporate net-zero strategies and a great deal of mainstream climate economics. But green growth is also invoked by advocates of large-scale industrial policy, public investment and state-led planning. The Green New Deal tradition—hardly a neoliberal project—explicitly ties decarbonisation to job creation, redistribution and industrial strategy. China’s climate transition, meanwhile, rests on authoritarian state coordination rather than market nudges. These are radically different political economies, yet they are all filed under the same label.
The same is true of degrowth. It is often treated as a unified rejection of modernity, technology and the state. In practice, degrowth encompasses everything from anarchist localism and ecological communes to highly coordinated, globally planned visions of ecosocialism. Some degrowth thinkers emphasise grassroots social movements and democratic experimentation, while others openly argue for emergency planning and centralised authority to confront climate breakdown. On technology, too, the divisions run deep. Parts of the degrowth literature are sceptical of industrialism itself, while others embrace digital planning, automation and technologies as tools for freeing people from unnecessary work.
Once we start mapping these differences, the supposed paradigms begin to dissolve. Green growth is not synonymous with markets. Degrowth is not synonymous with restraint. Both contain democratic and authoritarian strands, localist and globalist visions, techno-optimist and techno-sceptic positions.
This binary persists in part because it is rhetorically powerful. It can be useful to have clear enemies, especially when climate politics already feels overwhelming. It is easier to argue against a simplified opponent than to engage with a messy field of partial agreements and tensions. Straw men flourish when each side critiques the other. Green growth is dismissed as denialism in disguise; degrowth as politically suicidal.
But this polarisation comes at a cost. It encourages scholars and activists to talk past each other, even when they share concrete goals of faster decarbonisation, reduced material throughout, public control over key infrastructures, and global redistribution. It also makes climate politics look like a zero-sum fight over GDP, when the real conflicts are about power, institutions and distribution.
Insisting on a choice between green growth and degrowth also misses the point. The era of confident neoliberal globalisation is over, and climate action is increasingly entangled with industrial policy, national security, trade fragmentation and geopolitical rivalry. The most pressing questions are pragmatic and political: Who plans the transition? At what scale? Using which technologies? With what forms of democratic control? And how are costs and benefits shared across classes and borders?
We are not at a fork in the road. There are growth futures that expand care, public services and renewable energy while shrinking material extraction. There are also growth futures that rely on sophisticated planning, global coordination and advanced technology. There are hybrids, compromises and pathways for a green transition that refuse to treat GDP as either sacred or taboo.
Escaping the false binary may mean abandoning the terms “degrowth” and “green growth”, but it does not mean abandoning critique. Instead of arguing endlessly about whether growth is possible or impossible in the abstract, we should be debating which forms of economic activity should grow, which should shrink, and under what political conditions. Instead of policing paradigms, we should be building coalitions around shared institutional reforms.
Climate breakdown is not waiting for us to settle the dispute. A rapid, just and politically durable green transition will not emerge from doctrinal purity but from recognising that the real challenge is choosing, democratically, which growth futures we want to build.
Without this realisation, the internal split in the climate movement will only benefit the far right and its anti-climate agenda.
