As the elusive quest for winning trade “deals” continues, Liberation Day has led to debates on US emissions reduction strategy and degrowth vs. abundance. As is often the case in America, the two parties are largely divided by matters of degree. One side is for neoliberalism and embrace of eugenics while the other wants to put a friendlier face on it. Meanwhile, those further to the left argue there’s a better way, but they’ve almost never appeared further from power. Let’s rewind a few weeks and review.
At the height—or depths?— of Liberation Day(s) it looked like Trump was going to crash the global economy to the point that emissions could fall sharply. While he has taken a few steps back from the abyss for now, there’s no telling what tomorrow will bring. Here’s the AP:
Experts say a slowdown in international trade might have a brief and slight benefit in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which come in part from fuels like gas and oil that are used to move goods around the world via ships, planes and vehicles.
In this way Trump is like a pandemic personified:
Are Trump‘s efforts to shrink the global economy a secret ploy to reduce global CO2 emissions?
🙄 pic.twitter.com/uWj6z8NH7j
— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) April 5, 2025
The AP paints this a great price to pay because it would set back the “energy transition” since China leads in the production of “clean tech.” While there are caveats about the cleanliness of clean tech and whether wealthy lifestyles can continue as they are now if emissions are to come down, one must also note that a major hurdle in the US is that whatever planning is done in the US emanates from profit-seeking centers of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and there just ain’t as much of that profit right now in non-fossil fuel energy—nor are there incentives to do a whole lot else that needs to be done.
Nevertheless, the climate tailings of Trump’s Days of Liberation began to gain supporters from what might seem like unlikely quarters. A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye. It is penned from the bastion of American liberalism by Amy Chan, chief sustainability officer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In it she urges those who care about the climate to take solace in the fact that Trump’s “Liberation Day” policies could be a win for the environment. And there are others that have been making similar arguments.
While Chan doesn’t mention “degrowth” she presents three main arguments along those lines that all seem wildly out of touch with what’s actually occurring; let’s take them one by one.
First, the reordering of global trade is forcing companies to rethink supply chains. Many supply-chain leaders are outlining an emerging strategy called “manufacturing in region for region.” This means producing goods in North America for North American consumers, in Europe for Europeans, and so on. That’s good for stability and even better for the planet. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for roughly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Fewer transoceanic journeys mean less emissions.
But this isn’t really what the Trump administration is doing. If there’s any pattern to Liberation Day policies, it is economic warfare against China and extracting better deals for US oligarchs, such as pushing nations facing tariffs to approve Starlink permits for the world’s richest man. [1]
The administration is trying to relocate supply chains out of China while mega corporations like Apple are trying to relocate cheap labor to places like India. Vietnam’s imports from China and exports to the United States both reached a post-pandemic record in April. Hard to see how that’s a positive for the environment.
At the same time, the administration is defunding programs that aid American manufacturing. Hard to see how that helps lead to “manufacturing in region for region.” And policy-induced recessions can have their own goals like weakening labor power, which the Trump administration is clearly pursuing at home and abroad. Here’s Chan again:
Second, Mr. Trump’s recent move to end the de minimis tax exemption for low-value imports from China could curb America’s addiction to fast fashion and disposable goods supplied by retailers like Shein and Temu. This would result in fewer impulse buys and less landfill waste. Manufacturers may also respond by producing higher-quality, longer-lasting products. The effect won’t be limited to cheap goods. Higher prices on electronics, appliances and vehicles will encourage consumers to extend the life of what they already own. The greenest car isn’t a new electric vehicle; it’s the one you don’t replace.
Is there any evidence this is happening or will happen? As mentioned above, we’re largely seeing the shifting from China to low-cost manufacturers with the additional tariff pressure on these nations to keep costs low, which typically means crushing labor and leaning on the cheapest, dirtiest energy available.
What else does Chan have?
Third, the U.S. remains deeply dependent on China for critical minerals such as rare-earth elements. Rare earths are vital inputs for everything from smartphones and EVs to wind turbines and military systems. China accounts for more than two-thirds of global rare-earth production. The U.S. can mitigate this vulnerability by investing in domestic rare-earth recycling infrastructure.
Yes it can. And it is to a degree. In April, Trump issued an executive order that called for U.S. government support of critical mineral recycling efforts, including rare earth recovery. But where will those resources be allocated after recycling? Chan doesn’t say. Much of them will no doubt be funneled into US priority one: the Military Industrial Complex — the greatest greenhouse gas emitter the world has ever known. And by investing in militarization and economic sabotage towards China, Washington is forcing Beijing to divert money away from its clean tech industry towards its own militarization. As the Transnational Institute states, “A war between the US and China over Taiwan would trigger a global disaster on various fronts, one of which would be to set back decarbonisation everywhere by years, if not decades.”
Is any of this creating space for a better economic life for Americans? Or for more environmentally friendly infrastructure? Well, Trump is “unleashing” American fossil fuels, and just blew through billions racing aircraft carriers around the Red Sea, bombing civilians, and dropping fighter jets overboard.
A quick note on the idea of “degrowth,” courtesy of Malcolm Harris’ recent review of the book Abundance by the liberal duo of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson:
Influential economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s argument that entropy was the dominant factor for our world—increasing scarcity and environmental degradation were products of a fundamental law of physics, not human mistakes—helped inspire a “degrowth” line that came to dominate ecological economics in the West. All there seemed left to offer was less.
The counterargument is that it’s not necessarily less that’s needed, but less of certain items. Think less bombs and fighter jets, more—or any—high speed rail, solar panels, and regional self-sufficient production. And if you want to find an easy target for degrowth, the trillion-dollar defense budget should be the place to start. Instead we’re moving in the opposite direction:
All of this highlights the limits to arguments for Trump-style benefits for climate policy. The financial planners on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley prefer to invest in self-licking ice cream cones like the military-industrial complex rather than climate-friendly self-sufficiency or the most simple infrastructure that would reduce emissions and improve Americans’ quality of life.
Yet we now have the likes of Chan, who spent a decade leading environmental initiatives and investments at the World Bank and Apple, selling us on the benefits of Trump’s policies, which simultaneously is working to strengthen that capitalist class.
At the same time, the Trump-Vance project actually calls on Americans to sacrifice—a rarity in American politics— in the name of that project. That’s something widely acknowledged to be necessary to build more self-sufficient communities. As Adam Tooze writes:
The embarrassment for advocates of the Green New Deal and Bidenomics is that in pursuit of their visions of the future, Trump’s national economic strategists are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic party ever were. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, what Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: A direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.
But who is being asked to sacrifice? And who will bear the brunt of the pain? And what type of future is such sacrifice in the name of? This again highlights that there are some rather large blindspots in Chan’s championing of Trump’s “Liberation Day” climate byproducts.
It’s not just that the US war machine isn’t mentioned, but the issue of class is erased entirely.
There are already words that better describe the economic fallout from Team Trump’s Liberation Day policies, such as “recession” or potentially “depression.” And this one, like others previous, is going to hit poor countries and poor Americans the hardest.
While temporary degrowth might be a side effect, it’s being done in such a way to maximize pain to the most vulnerable:
Maybe a lost cause but I remain annoyed at descriptions of Trump’s bungling of world trade as “degrowth.” Degrowth even in the most minimal version entails welfare protections, expanded leisure, north-south rebalancing. This is the difference between crashing & parking your car
— Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation) May 7, 2025
“Environmentalists shouldn’t waste time hoping for a different political landscape. This is a moment for pragmatism,” Chan assures us.
That pragmatism boils down to that if the Trump oligarchs want to detonate the global trading system and try to rewrite the rules to their benefit while inflicting untold pain on billions of people, well, it’s got some good stuff in there too. Maybe. Even if it’s just temporary. Inspiring stuff.
Worst of all, accepting this argument means more power accruing to the very capitalist forces preventing meaningful action on climate and any other meagre efforts at a less brutal societal arrangement. And by doing so lends credence to the idea that emissions reduction requires the poor to suffer, eugenics, and a reliance on our current economic system.
Democrats Embrace “Abundance”
There is another liberal argument making the rounds these days. It comes from the book Abundance, another attempt to find a way out of planetary crisis without addressing the issue of class. The book is leading to numerous reviews and much debate over alternatives to the current course of action: potential emissions reduction if the economy crashes coupled with a hollowing out of the state and seeing what Elon and company have in store for us.
Abundance, as its title suggests, makes a case for more via YIMBYISM.
I’m glad to share that in my review of Abundance I do engage with the specific policies: https://t.co/AsavGk1AMF pic.twitter.com/qrJHSxy0gn
— Isabella M Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) May 10, 2025
It zeroes in on zoning laws and environmental regulations as the problems preventing abundance and argues that less will equal more—essentially DOGE-lite. Let the builders build.
While zoning and other red tape certainly doesn’t help increase housing supply, centering that as the impediment to solving the polycrisis is deranged. Isn’t there someone already promising that cutting regulations and workforces will save money, solve problems, and unleash American ingenuity? And just to mention one hole in Thompson and Klein’s retread theory, here’s Matt Stoller on the US homebuilder cartel rooted in control of land and financing:
In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023! …The story here, in other words, is consolidation.
And without more democratic control over the allocation of capital, what difference does it make if there’s “less red tape”? Abundance, rather than charting a new course, is really more of an argument for liberals to double down on neoliberalism, and it highlights the lack of any real Democrat opposition to Trump’s economic policies.
Here’s coauthor Derek Thompson explaining the role he sees Abundance playing within the Democratic Party, in an interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast:
So, what we’re trying to do is essentially say, here’s a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right? We believe that we have answers on housing and energy and high-quality governance and science and technology, really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. We’re trying to be oppositional in a way that’s constructive rather than just destructive.
“Our” ends? And “constructive” and “destructive” for whom? In Klein and Thompson’s telling the dividing line is between parties and those who care about the climate and those who don’t. They don’t mention class, but their argument boils down to a defense of the plutocrats, and that will fit the Dems just fine. A bipartisan(!) group of lawmakers led by Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.) is now starting a roughly 30-member bloc that’s claiming inspiration from the “abundance movement.”
“This is a moment that has been building for a while,” Harder told Politico. “I think there’s been a lot of simmering interest in permitting reform and making sure that things are built faster, better, cheaper.”
Because everyone knows the best things are fast and cheap.
Is there another way that the fighting Dems are omitting? I think Malcolm Harris puts it best in his review of Abundance, describing the very simple way to tackle housing, as well as emissions reduction and a whole lot else:
The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general.
That path might be “destructive”—as Thompson says— for American oligarchs, but it would be constructive for the rest of us. That is the choice we are currently faced with. As NC commenter Henry Moon Pie put it recently:
…degrowth is coming regardless of what we do. Consider property insurance, for example. As disasters increase in spread and severity, more and more areas will become uninsurable. What will happen to real estate values on the Gulf Coast if another couple of hurricanes hit it this season? What about any property located in woods west of the Mississippi? For that matter, as fires rage again in the Tri-state area, any wooded area east of the Mississippi looks iffy.
We could act like a grown-up society and admit that we’ve trashed the environment with 50 years of McMansions and seeing the USA in our Chevrolets. We could acknowledge that we’ve changed the Earth; now the Earth is going to change us, our children, our grandchildren, our culture, our economy, our worldview. With that facing up to reality behind us, we could begin the hard work of “landing the plane” as Kate Raworth says in Doughnut Economics. We could eliminate economic activity that adversely affects the environment but is non-essential to human welfare (everything from the military to luxury goods) while upgrading public services to cushion the blows of climate and decreased economic activity on the struggling majority as Jason Hickel advocates.
This system of endless growth and consumerism is coming to an end. The question is what will replace it: an Elysium with a few living in luxury while the masses die young in an Earth venting its rage against humans; or a world where we share the hardships that we and our recent ancestors have brought upon ourselves as we learn to live more meaningful lives with less stuff.
Trump charts a course towards an elite Elysium, while the working class and most vulnerable Americans are going to get hammered. What little remains of the US social safety net is being set alight while the government shifts the financial burden of climate change onto individuals. Meanwhile Trump is using immigration policy and other tools to further decimate labor.
The wealthiest Americans, most responsible for climate change emissions, are not being asked to make the same sacrifices and will be able to ride out any tariff recession. While Trump might have asked Americans to go without thirty dolls, there’s a difference between that and shortages of more essential items, but we know who will lose out first while the wealthy horde supplies.
And what is all this sacrifice for? According to Trump, it’s to Make America Great Again, yet his idea of greatness increasingly resembles 1990s Russia-style shock therapy that allows the likes of Musk, Bezos, Altman, Thiel, and company to take over core government functions, self-enrichment, and a Golden Dome over a land of more exploitation and more eugenics.
Any “degrowth” arising from such policies is not a silver lining to celebrate, but rather marks the arrival of a societal tipping point to an accelerating descent into further depths of dystopia.
The other way sounds better.
Notes
[1] A reminder that there are other ways to go about tariffs that don’t mean widespread suffering and actually help the working class:
NEW: Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff fiasco angered everyone from Democrats to Trump’s billionaire friends.
Now some people are suggesting that we go back to free trade.
They’re all wrong. Tariffs can help build a more fair and just economy — but not the way Trump is using them. pic.twitter.com/j4vX7wqp37
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 6, 2025
“The Impossible Plight of the Pro-Tariff Liberal” in today’s @TheAtlantic captures the perversity of Trump’s tariff chaos undermining 30 years of advocacy from the Left to replace damaging corporate-led globalization w/ trade policy that works for people & the planet. Pl read👇 https://t.co/vC4HVWhxZf
— Lori Wallach (@WallachLori) May 7, 2025
