Prosperity or the planet? A false choice

The climate debate is often framed as a choice between growth and sustainability -but that’s misleading. Limiting growth would hinder millions’ aspirations and weaken political support for climate action. In reality, economic growth provides the capital, technology, and innovation needed for a low-emissions future. As A Century of Plenty argues, the best path to a sustainable world is to direct the gains from growth toward it; constraining growth can pose a greater risk to the climate.

Energy makes the world go round
There are no rich countries with low energy consumption. High living standards go hand in hand with it. South Korea’s income per person has increased 22-fold rise since 1965, paralleling a 26-fold increase in energy use. But in Egypt, income per person increased only seven times and energy use three times. It is true that countries become more energy-efficient over time, particularly as they become predominantly focused on services rather than manufacturing. And yet richer countries still consume far more energy per person than poorer ones.

Spreading prosperity relies on there being enough energy, and there isn’t. 60% of the global population, some five billion people, use less than the global average of 77 gigajoules per year, about what a mid-size SUV consumes annually. In 2022, 760m people mostly living in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia had no access to electricity at all. These under-energised regions need an expansion of energy supply. In advanced economies too, an energy affordability crisis and surging AI demand point in the same direction: more power supply.

In our book, myself, Marc Canal and Suhayl Chettih propose an experiment: imagine that by 2100 even the poorest country in the world can match, and others surpass, today’s living standards in Switzerland. This may sound radical, but it would entail global income per capita growth rates similar to the past century’s. By 2100, the global economy would be about 8.5 times larger. What would that mean for energy? We estimate this world of plenty would need two to three times more energy. How can we get 8.5 times larger with only two to three times more energy? Electrification allows far more economic output per unit of energy, while enabling zero-emissions generation. But we’ll need a lot of it: to reach this plentiful, clean, electric future we need to grow low-emissions electricity between 20 and 30 times.

Economic growth to protect the planet
Why do we say economic growth is not only essential to power prosperity, but to protect the climate? There are two main reasons. Economic progress is our best way to mitigate rising temperatures and adapt to climate hazards. Mitigation, our capacity to reduce emissions to limit how much temperatures rise, requires investment at scale. Building vast amounts of clean power, electrifying transport and industry, retrofitting buildings, or developing next-generation technologies demands capital, skills, and innovation ecosystems that only growing economies can sustain. As societies become wealthier, they can afford cleaner technologies, stronger regulations, and better enforcement. Growth expands the menu of feasible climate possibilities while reducing trade-offs. A stagnant economy has much harder choices to make between investing in energy, healthcare, or housing, to name a few.

Adaptation matters just as much. Even with rapid decarbonisation, climate impacts could intensify for decades. Protecting people from heat, wildfires, drought, and flooding requires investments in air conditioning, irrigation, and coastal defenses. At 2°C of warming, the benefits of adaptation outweigh costs by seven to one. The past shows how economic growth helps us adapt: global deaths from natural disasters have plummeted from more than 500,000 per year in the 1920s to fewer than 40,000 annually by the 2020s with four times more people.

New MGI research shows the world currently spends $190bn annually on protection against extreme weather for 1.2bn people in developed economies. Providing a similar level of protection for all 4.1bn people living in places exposed to climate hazards, who today may face trade-offs and challenges in adapting, would cost $540bn. Financing mitigation and adaptation is much easier in a world of rising incomes and productivity than in one constrained by scarcity and stagnation.

Less dread, more decoupling
Energy production is, indeed, the source of more than 85% of global emissions of carbon dioxide. But if we want a more prosperous and cleaner world, we should redouble our focus on decoupling growth from emissions. The good news is that this has already been happening in much of the world for years. Since 2015, Europe’s GDP has grown by 15%, while emissions fell by 9%. The United States grew its economy by 21%, but emissions also fell by 5%. Even in China, where emissions did not fall yet, the economy grew by 56%, while emissions grew much less at 24%, and may have plateaued in 2025.

Efficiency gains and cleaner energy generation are driving lower emissions. Electrification represents a major leap forward, with electric powertrains converting up to 90% of energy into motion, compared with around 45% for diesel engines. Over time, economies have also decoupled growth from energy use: in 1970, producing the same GDP required more than twice the energy used today. Ways of generating energy have also contributed to decoupling. Natural gas produces less emissions than coal; and solar, wind and nuclear, less than gas. Solar costs have fallen by 90%in the last decade, onshore wind by 70%, and batteries by 90 percent. As new technologies scale and become more affordable, we emit less.

Global emissions have risen each year since the Paris Accords, though growth has slowed. If current trends continue, temperatures could rise 2.2–2.6°C by 2100 (we’re already at 1.2°C). However, by pairing economic growth with faster decoupling, warming could be limited to 1.9–2.2°C – still above 1.5°C, but an improvement over the current path without triggering runaway climate change.

Building the future we imagine
Theorising is not enough. We need to build this system. A Century of Plenty offers a modest proposal: 40% from solar and wind, 40% from nuclear, and the rest from gas with carbon capture, hydro, geothermal, and biofuels – by 2100. This is, of course, one possibility among an infinite number, and we will surely be precisely wrong. But a specific proposal allows us to test whether it is feasible. Is it? Achieving this will take effort, but it’s far from unprecedented. Today, the world uses ten times more energy than in 1925. Solar capacity added in 2022–23 exceeded all previous cumulative installations, China has expanded electricity generation tenfold in 25 years, and France built 50 nuclear reactors in 15 years after 1973. Shale went from negligible to surpassing conventional US oil and gas by 2000. Scaling total energy two- to threefold and clean energy twenty- to thirtyfold over 75 years is ambitious, but achievable. A world of plenty lets people thrive – and thriving requires abundant energy. Clean, low-emission energy is possible; the challenge is to envision and build it, starting now.