Unraveling the claims for (and against) green growth

American economist Kenneth Boulding famously quipped, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” (1). He was giving evidence to the U.S. Congress in 1973, in the wake of the Club of Rome's first, enormously influential and provocative report, The Limits to Growth (2). The remark has survived to this day as a somewhat satirical comment on the economics profession, but it also has a certain internal logic and provides a useful starting point for thinking about the “decoupling wars” that tend to be fought around the compatibility between economic growth and environmental limits (3).