Limits to green growth[Des limites à la croissance verte]

In response to the unsustainable nature of current brown growth, the concept of green growth, supposedly compatible with the environment, has been proposed. However, a literature has developed around the unfeasibility of green growth and this article aims to contribute to it on the basis of a reasoning combining (i) the concept of creative destruction; (ii) the distinction between environmental limits, physical limits in the (very) long term and technological limits in the short-medium term; (iii) the description of the possible consequences of the limits on the trajectory of the economy The combination of environmental and physical limits means that indefinite growth (even green growth) in a finite world is impossible. In the long term, the economy can at best tend towards a stationary state. In the medium term, because of an impact effect (due to pollution) and a crowding-out effect (which diverts labor and capital from the production of goods and services), technological limits are likely not only to slow down growth but also to bring the economy into decline (at least transitorily). If innovations (including environmental ones) continually allow technological limits to be pushed back (with diminishing returns due to physical limits), they ultimately exacerbate the contradictions between growth and environmental limits. Far from being the solution, innovations are also the source of the problems because they are at the heart of the creative destruction at the basis of growth. Given the technological limits and the urgency induced by the fact that a number of environmental limits have already been exceeded at the global level, it is problematic, to say the least, to aspire to a transition from the current brown growth to a green growth in the coming decades. To replace brown growth, the alternative is not between green growth and degrowth, but between undergone degrowth and voluntary degrowth.