[Adopted at the MOGP Annual Convention on August 10, 2025.]

1. Countries, states, cities and neighborhoods are populated by the rich and the poor, a division which makes “degrowth” necessary. The “rich world” is built upon wasteful and destructive spending in areas such as military arms, enormous mansions for a few, products designed to fall apart which cannot easily be repaired, financial investment in areas like insurance, and excessive transportation of over-processed and non-nutritional food.  The “poor world” includes those places where people have insufficient health
care, housing, utilities (water, electricity, heating), transportation, nutritional food, and educational opportunities.

2. Green New Deal (GND). Some advocate that degrowth should become part of the GND. In actuality, the GND and Degrowth are diametrically opposed.  The GND is a framework for a new industrial policy for the nation and the world, claiming to be able to eliminate or significantly reduce the use of fossil fuels and continue "business as usual." This assumes a growth economy. The GND promises good jobs building the next technological step in our further expansion of human civilization, which is the opposite of degrowth, as well as a complete illusion.

3. The Green Party advocates two essential processes for degrowth:

a. A rapid reduction of work to 32 (or fewer) hours per week with no loss in the provision of necessities.

b. Working people must themselves decide how their worklife will be altered.

We cannot rely on the rich and powerful who are responsible for enormous destruction and suffering to be the ones who plan the complex transformation of jobs that society must undertake. Working people are best positioned to understand how to stretch limited resources and establish priorities to meet everyone’s basic needs.

4. A decline in harmful production means that we will work fewer hours per week. Making fewer junk goods and more items that last will reduce the required work hours each week to meet society’s needs. With a full Medicare-for-All program, the need for the wasteful, private medical insurance industry will disappear. Insurance is an example of unnecessary office labor.  Those working in the area will need to decide if their jobs can be transformed or if they should receive training for guaranteed employment
doing something positive. 

5. Overproduction in the rich world demands a continuous expansion of energy from both fossil fuels and “alternative” energy such as solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power. The preservation of millions of species (including humans) means lowering this overproduction by the process of “degrowth.”

Purposeful degrowth includes three principles:

a. Reduction of harmful production in the rich world (colonizers).

b. An increase in the necessities of life in the poor world (colonized).

c. Reduction of harmful production must be greater than the increase of necessities.

Thus, degrowth does not mean decreasing every area of production by the same amount – some will be reduced (a lot), some will be altered very little, and others will expand.

6. Alternative energy. (AltE) By now, it should be clear that the use of fossil fuels is having effects on climate that threaten life throughout the planet. These effects will increase over time, even if we were to completely stop the use of fossil fuels today.  The damage from climate change is being felt the most in the poor world even though its population exists far from the overuse of fossil fuels in the rich world. 

7. At current use rates, it will be uneconomical to obtain many fossil fuel sources within 50 to 100 years. However, the crisis will not wait until we run out of fossil fuels – it will happen when the demand for fossil fuels outpaces supply.  At the point of “peak-oil,” the price of these resources will explode.  Fossil fuel depletion will compel involuntary and chaotic degrowth.  But rapid adoption of planned degrowth policies can prevent exhaustion of fossil fuel resources and uncontrolled degrowth.

8. Two questions about degrowth often arise: (a) Why can humanity not simply shift from fossil fuels to alternative energy (AltE)? (b) Can degrowth be included as part of the Green New Deal (GND)?

9. Why will alternative energy sources be unable to solve the problem? Resource constraints prevent us from constructing enough AltE infrastructure to replace the fossil fuel infrastructure. There are insufficient raw materials on Earth to construct even one-twenty year generation of the AltE infrastructure that would be necessary to replace fossil fuel energy at current use levels, and certainly not enough to replace it for any significant length of time. Unfortunately, as renewable infrastructure has been rapidly expanding, so has fossil fuel infrastructure, driven by an endless-growth based system of industrial capitalism.  We cannot grow endlessly on this finite planet and the current era of human civilizational growth is rapidly coming to a close, whether humanity realizes that or not.

10. Some energy sources for a degrowth economy may seem to be the same as those called for in the GND but there is a huge difference. Degrowth aims for as much energy production as possible to be small scale and for local use. The GND aims to expand energy production massively which may include transporting energy across countries or even internationally. Here are some examples.

a. Solar power.  Degrowth would welcome “passive solar,” such as buildings with windows that let sunshine in to warm during winter but can be shut off during the summer to keep a building cool. The GND aims for enormous quantities of solar panels that require mining rare metals, using enormous amounts of land and transportation lines and result in piles of discarded and toxic panels.

b. Wind power. Degrowth favors old fashioned wind mills that use natural materials like wood and cloth which can be recycled after use. The GND looks to wind turbines based on metals, cement bases and large amounts of rare earth elements which require habitat destruction for materials that plague communities when they are dumped after their useful lives of 20-25 years.

c. Hydropower. Degrowth utilizes paddle wheels and other small devices that do not halt the flow of water or destroy aquatic life. The GND is based on mega-dams that are destructive to human culture and community life and multiple species of aquatic life as they prevent rivers from reaching the sea.

d. Nuclear power is unique. It poisons human and other life forms as material is mined, milled, transported and used. Euphemistically labeled “spent fuel,” nuclear waste is a threat to any complex life form for eternity.

11. Probably no area of the economy will be affected more than arms production. As it is quickly disassembled, some jobs can be preserved by shifting to production of non-destructive machinery. Highly skilled workers may choose to teach math or science skills in schools that need more instructors. Others may need re-training for totally different jobs.

12. Whatever changes occur must not be dictated by technocrats hired by the rich. Rather, industry planners should outline alternatives and make recommendations to those whose livelihoods will be affected. A bottom-up, democratic approach to transitioning away from war production should be a model for others in less destructive industries. Re-designing a peacetime, environmentally friendly economy obliges active participation by all.  Elimination of the ability of the rich to hijack this process by outlawing their public relations campaigns, lobbyists and bribes is crucial. Redistributing wealth and resources by setting a maximum wage that is a multiple of the minimum wage is one example of the types of structural changes that will be needed.

13. With no safe or sustainable way to continue on our current path we will either purposefully degrow or we will continue on our current trajectory and chaotically and catastrophically crash. At present, we are accelerating toward our imminent extinction. AltE and the GND are not a part of our survival on this planet.