“If I hadn’t met him in the flesh, I would never have believed that Serge Allegrezza really existed. Only a bot could have produced such a cheap review, in the manner of the low-grade AIs that spread conspiracies on social networks. It’s a slapdash review with absolutely no originality; no research, no figures, and a salad of '-ism' words by way of argument. It’s hard to sink any lower.” It must have been a rotten Christmas for Timothee Parrique to get out the sulphate gun on 26 December on his blog, in his favourite style of ‘answers to.’
After Bruno Le Maire (December 2023), Hannah Ritchie (Scottish data scientist, senior research fellow at Oxford University's Oxford Martin School and deputy editor of Our World in Data), Gabriel Attal, Daniel Driscoll (professor in the department of sociology at the University of Virginia), Hadrien Klent (author of “Paresse pour tous” and “La Vie est à nous”), Nicolas Doze (editorialist in charge of economic issues on BFMTV), Ivan Savin and Jeroen van den Bergh (economists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona)--all in 2024--the specialist in degrowth says he had no intention of adding another layer.... but to respond to a comment by Allegrezza in the Echo de la Fedil, published on 12 December.
“There is a key concept at the heart of the debate in ecological economics between the protagonists of degrowth and green growth, and that is the decoupling of greenhouse gas emissions from economic and population growth,” explains the former Statec director in politically correct style. “There are a good number of countries, especially in Europe and North America, that have managed to achieve this (absolute) decoupling of growth and greenhouse gas emissions. This is known as green growth, or the Green Deal. But for green growth to succeed, it has to be deployed on a global scale. This strategy has a name: the Cop and an objective, a quantified objective: the Paris Agreement. If all countries make the effort to achieve absolute decoupling between the use of resources (including energy) and the production of added value, decoupling can be set in motion and climate change can be curbed.”
“This decoupling was modelled in the Club of Rome’s latest ‘Planet4 all’ report (Dixson-Decleve, Sandrine; Gaffney, Owen; Ghosh, Jayati; Randers, Jorgen; Rockstrom, Johan; Stoknes, Per Espen). The authors have called this scenario the ‘Giant Leap’ because, contrary to what the degrowthists say, green growth proposes a very ambitious plan for the whole world. The authors advocate a series of drastic measures to end poverty and inequality, enhance the role of women, improve food systems and make energy cleaner. There is also a need for substantial investment in electrification. It’s a book that should be in everyone's hands, and one that's been reviled by degreeningists and collapsologists of all stripes,” says Allegrezza.
The text is full of little jabs at his interlocutor, from the one that states that “degrowth studies have a rather weak scientific content, as was recently shown by two researchers, Ivan Savin and Jeroen Van den Bergh, in the December 2024 issue of the journal ‘Ecological Economics’ (Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?)” or “since economic activity is the result of thousands of ideas and initiatives emanating from a host of people working in companies and organisations, we should ban projects! Indeed, carrying them out would run the risk of leading to new products or processes that create added value, and therefore... growth (GDP).”
The Statec director emeritus says he cannot find in these degrowth theories any examination of the consequences of factory closures, or even of the colossal public and private investment required for the energy transition, or of the means to finance it.
“Under normal circumstances, I would have let it slide. Short, superficial and full of errors, these analyses are a waste of time for those who are really interested in the subject. But it just so happens that this latest text is addressed directly to me,” replied the Frenchman on Boxing Day.
Decoupling, he wrote, is only one side of a multi-faceted problem, like a Rubik’s cube. “I also warned against the use of territorial indicators that do not take imported emissions into account. For a country like Luxembourg, this is a major omission, as they account for . The title of the graph, which appears in the latest edition of published by Statec, is unequivocal: ‘No decrease in the carbon footprint.’ Between 2010 and 2020, Luxembourg’s footprint will stagnate at between ,” points out Parrique.
“It’s hard to talk about decarbonising the Luxembourg economy when the carbon footprint is not falling. It’s as impressive as going on a diet without losing weight,” he says, adding that “Luxembourg’s footprint is 2.3 times the average footprint in the EU, 3.8 times the average footprint worldwide, and 12 times the target of 1.9 tCO2e per year/capita in the 1.5°C scenarios".
“Statec reveals a decoupling between the volume of water extracted and the population: ‘despite a population increase of almost 28.6%, the volume of water extracted per inhabitant shows a reduction of some 24.2%.’ Once again, the message is misleading. Another way of reading the same graph would be to say that Luxembourg has not managed to reduce its total water consumption. The same goes for the use of chemical fertilisers, with levels stagnating since 2010, and for the total volume of waste generated, which has risen slightly since 2004. The report celebrates a decoupling between total energy consumption and population growth without noting that Luxembourg consumes more energy than it did 20 years ago,” continues the doctor of economics from the Centre d’études et de recherches sur le développement international (CERDI) at the University of Clermont Auvergne and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the University of Stockholm, whose doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Political Economy of Degrowth’ (2019), explores the economic implications of degrowth. Parrique is also the author of the book “Slow down or perish. The Economics of Degrowth” (”Ralentir ou périr: l'économie de la décroissance,” 2022), an adaptation of his thesis aimed at the general public, which has met with notable success, with over 40,000 copies sold and translations in progress in several languages.
8,000 characters for Allegrezza's post and 24,000 for Parrique's, which emphasise that the two economists will not be going on holiday together, or even getting on a plane together. In fact, it could make a good subject for philosophy at next year’s baccalauréat: ‘Does lack of respect advance the Schmilblick in an already complicated debate?’
To read them in their entirety without the extraction of the ‘best’ bits detracting from their overall understanding:
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This article was originally published in .