**Growth Bad – Topshelf
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- Kuznets Curve proves that the environment started to get better with economic growth
Impact – Enviro Ext.Growth is key to pushing “green sectors” to achieve environmental sustainabilityVázquez-Brust et al. 14 Dr. Diego Vázquez-Brust is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy / International Business at the Center for Research into Sustainability in the School of Management at the Royal Holloway University of London, October 20, 2014, “Managing the transition to critical green growth: The ‘Green Growth State’”, http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0016328714001669/1-s2.0-S0016328714001669-main.pdf?_tid=6306d0e0-2f24-11e5-85e8-00000aacb35e&acdnat=1437427083_d20eb4fd9abcc5952f8c6a5caabbba31 Although Green Economies have long included a consideration of environmental issues (Hamdouch & Depret, 2010) the main drivers for Green Growth are not only ecological but also economic, social and technical. Green Growth is proposed as a post-financial remedy to reinvigorate the ailing global economy, refocusing it towards being more socially inclusive through investment in markets for environmental goods and services, and the development of natural infrastructure, and capital, such as forests, water bodies and bio-diversity (Lane, 2010). In this respect, Green Growth breaks from the Kyoto process which signalled restraint in the growth agenda and instead emphasises business opportunities, enterprise and job creation (Martinelli & Midttun, 2012). For example, South Africa’s Working for Water Program, which has created 25,000 new jobs for the unemployed in the removal of invasive plant species that consume high levels of water, and the Kibera Community Youth Program in Nairobi, which involves unemployed youths in the assembly of small and affordable solar panels (UNEP, 2008). Green Growth is not meant to be an extension of the Ecological Modernisation discourse (Dryzek, 1997; Prasad & Elmes, 2005), whose technical-economic focus aims only at improving environmental efficiency to maximise profit while minimising environmental costs (Springett, 2003). Instead game-changing, Critical Green Growth must be fundamentally rooted in economic approaches allowing for the inherent complexity of human–environment relationships. Critical Green Growth is to be fuelled by policies and managerial techniques promoting synergies between–rather than just decoupling – environment and traditional business.3 To achieve this aspirational vision is not enough having a expanding green sector, but also pro-actively phasing out traditional ‘‘brown economy’’ and changing consumption patterns and lifestyle. Green Growth is a combination of growth in ‘‘green, smart sectors’’ and degrowth in ‘‘brown, inefficient sectors’’ (Csaba, 2010). The idea of creative destruction in which new forms and ideas drive out the old is central to this process (Fankhauser et al., 2013). Reflecting how accumulation of growth translates into Green Growth principles, suggest that Critical Green Growth discourse should shift concentration away from the quantity of growth, towards a quality of growth amalgamated from consumption of physical and non-physical outputs (i.e. services and experiences), and from the production of environmentally harmful goods and services to those that are environmentally enhancing (Swart, Raskin, & Robinson, 2004). Moreover, ‘environmental industries’ are to include technological sectors which combine low-input, low entropy and low waste characteristics. Green Growth accepts the assumption that a fundamental transition away from Green House Gas (GHG) intensive energy sources is a matter of urgency. Policy makers must move beyond consideration of the physical availability of carbon based fuel sources. Instead, the true concern must be the decline in ‘‘the capacity of air, water, soil, and biota to absorb, with intolerable consequences for human wellbeing, the effects of energy extraction, transportation and use’’ in addition to the political stability to maintain the current status quo (Holdren, 2002). Consolidation of Growth systems should relate to interventions aimed to make sure that although Green Growth adds value(s) to the economy, it does so in order to identify virtuous cycles, consolidating networks necessary for a circular economy, coordinating global learning curves for green technology and a market for resources with emphasis on recirculation rather than wasteful linear throughput (Mathews, 2011), while seriously considering the need to invest in measures that prevent a major spike in energy prices, and thus significantly endanger national, regional and global economic activity. Allocation of Growth must be carefully monitored by governments. Critical Green Growth discourse also expects economies to be socially innovative in providing the basis for socially just and inclusive growth. Thus, there must be behavioural transitions to slow anthropogenic causes of climate change and trigger both high-skill intensive employment R&D in clean energy technologies – and low-skill intensive employment – for instance in forest planting, and organic agriculture. Inclusive growth is not only a long-term objective. It is also argued that green public and private spending is a better and more inclusive than ‘‘brown’’ spending, when seeking to reactivate economies in a recession.4 Many environmental measures related to construction and resource management activities, such as making buildings more energy-efficient, are not only labour intensive but also location-specific and not practical candidates for off-shoring (Jacobs, 2013). As the discussions in the next section highlight, social justice considerations must be maintained at both the national and transnational scale as fundamental part of the Critical Green Growth approach. However, despite the identification of an aspirational discourse of Green Growth, the underlying question becomes how to manage the process to ensure that ‘creative destruction’ results in Green Growth? The metaphors is a garden where valuable plants must be nurtured but weeds extirped. But, who is the gardener in this metaphor? Kuznets Curve proves that the environment started to get better with economic growthCrampton 15 [Dr. Eric Crampton (Dr Eric Crampton joined The New Zealand Initiative as Head of Research in August, 2014. He served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance), “The Case of Economic Growth”, Obtained from the New Zealand Initiative, online, http://nzinitiative.org.nz/site/nzinitiative/files/Economic%20Growth%20Web.pdf, RaMan] This first-worse-then-better U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental quality is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve. The curve was first described in 1991 by economists Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger, who wanted to test whether free trade between Mexico and the United States was likely to worsen or improve environmental quality in Mexico.46 Trade opponents argued that American industrialists would set up factories in Mexico to take advantage of less restrictive environmental regulations, exporting pollution. Grossman and Krueger argued instead that free trade would increase incomes in Mexico and consequently reduce pollution. Grossman and Krueger found that when per capita GDP reached US$4,000– $5,000 in 1985 dollars, or about US$10,000 today, sulphur dioxide and smoke levels started improving with economic growth rather than worsening. Mexican per capita GDP rose in real terms from about US$4,000 in 1992 to about US$10,000 in 2013. In 2010, a Washington Post headline announced: ‘Mexico City Drastically Reduced Air Pollutants Since 1990s’.47 If anything, Grossman and Krueger were too pessimistic about how long it would take for outcomes to improve. For pollutants with strong local effects, like nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, and particulate matter like fine soot, the relationship holds well. For pollutants whose effects are less noticeable in the area generating the pollution, the effect is weaker.48 Environmental economist Susmita Dasgupta and co-authors reviewed the overall performance of the Environmental Kuznets Curve literature and, with some reservations, ultimately sided with the optimists.49 Dasgupta, et al. argued that the most plausible long-run forecast is for improved environmental quality in both high- and low-income economies. Economic liberalisation, improved information, better technology, and more stringent and cost-effective approaches to regulating pollution in developing countries have begun to ‘flatten’ the Environmental Kuznets Curve. 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