Builders Don't Degrow
If you’ve ever pulled an engine, replaced blown struts, or brought a dead board back to life with a soldering iron, you already understand the argument I’m about to make. You are a builder. You make things work. And for the last two decades, a very confident set of people has been telling builders that making things is the problem.
They’re wrong. Not a little wrong — backwards.
The real path runs through development, not around it
The claim we’re all supposed to accept is that to save the environment, we have to slow down: less industry, less energy, less building, “degrowth.” But look at what actually lifted billions of people out of poverty — it wasn’t restraint, it was development. Electricity, machines, industry, better tools. Every step up in living standards, cleaner water, longer lives, came from producing more, not less.
And here’s the part the degrowth crowd never wants to sit with: newer technology is usually cleaner, not dirtier. A modern turbine, a modern engine, a modern reactor produces more with less waste than anything before it. The way you reduce pollution is not by freezing progress at today’s tech — it’s by building the next generation. Stop the creative process and you don’t get a cleaner world. You get a poorer, dirtier, more dependent one.
"Green capitalism" is degrowth wearing a nicer suit
Somebody will say, “Nobody serious wants degrowth — they want green growth.” Fine. Judge it by the outcome, not the brochure.
Look at Germany. They shut down their nuclear plants, bet the grid on intermittent wind and solar propped up by imported gas, and today they carry some of the highest industrial energy costs in Europe — and their industrial base is walking out the door. Chemical plants, manufacturers, the backbone of a country that used to build things. That’s not a theory. That’s the experiment, and we have the result.
Higher energy prices. A hollowed-out industrial core. Deeper dependence on foreign supply chains. Whether you call it “degrowth” or “green capitalism,” the working class lives the same outcome: it costs more, we make less, and we owe more to somebody else. Same result, different marketing. That’s why I say they’re the same thing — not the same people, the same machine.
How a fringe idea stopped being fringe
Here’s the part worth understanding. On its own, the “stop building to save the planet” idea would be a fringe position — a handful of activists gluing themselves to roads. Most working people would laugh it off.
It’s not fringe. And the reason is simple: the people who set the policy papers, the university curriculum, and the media narrative treat it as respectable. You don’t need a conspiracy for this. You need control of the two institutions that decide what counts as “serious” — the universities and the press — and the fringe becomes the mainstream. The radical gets a soft interview instead of a hard question. The degrowth professor gets a book deal. The kid who wants to be an engineer gets taught that his ambition is the problem.
That’s the apparatus. The activist supplies the noise; the institutions supply the legitimacy. Take away the media cover and the academic blessing, and the whole thing collapses back to the fringe where it started.
You don't buy your energy from your rival
Now add the strategic piece, the one that should bother every American who thinks about it for five minutes.
The “solution” we’ve been sold — cover the country in wind and solar — runs on a supply chain owned by China. The panels, the polysilicon, the rare-earth magnets, the batteries. We buy the hardware from a strategic rival, and then we buy the maintenance from them forever. That’s not energy independence. That’s the opposite. Henry Carey called the alternative the harmony of interests — you build your prosperity on production you actually control, so no one else holds the valve.
Buying your power infrastructure from the country you’re competing with is the definition of disharmony. It’s expensive, it’s dependent, and intermittent sources still can’t replace baseload coal and gas across the whole grid anyway. We gave away batteries, we gave away silicon, we gave away whole industries — all because a price tag on a spreadsheet said “cheaper to import.” That’s the rot at the center of price-only, Friedman-style free trade: it can’t see the factory it’s destroying, only the sticker.
The true green deal is built, not banned
So what is the answer? Not “stop.” Build.
The real green deal is industrial:
– Nuclear, and small modular reactors (SMRs). Dense, dispatchable, low-emission baseload — the one energy source that can out-produce a coal or gas plant by orders of magnitude and do it clean. This is the spine.
– Rebuild the domestic capacity to actually build it. Here’s the uncomfortable truth even for our side: we have the legacy nuclear lead, but we’ve let the muscle atrophy — no new plants in decades, tangled permitting, a lost construction workforce — while China builds the most reactors on Earth. The fight isn’t choosing nuclear on paper. It’s rebuilding the industry that pours the concrete.
– Keep our own gas and coal as the bridge. We’ll always have them, and they’re useful. You don’t switch off the baseload before the replacement is running. That’s not betrayal of the environment — it’s engineering.
– Own the supply chain. Refineries, materials, production, at home. Harmony of interests.
And beyond that — the frontier we abandoned while we chased apps and ad clicks: space-based solar (collect energy above the atmosphere, beam it down), wireless power transmission, the hard-physics moonshots. We got distracted by digital and extraction business models and let the power problems sit. Falling launch costs are quietly making some of that real again. That’s where a nation that still builds would be pointed.
Builders build
The whole degrowth project — in every disguise — asks you to accept less so someone else can manage the decline. It’s suicide for the working class, a permission slip for the few who can afford to pollute anyway, and a one-way ticket to dependence on China or on our own elites.
The answer is older and simpler than any of it: keep building. More energy, cheaper, cleaner, and ours. The next level up — the one that supports more people, at a higher standard of living, with less harm — doesn’t come from stopping. It comes from the exact instinct that made you pick up the wrench in the first place.
We don’t degrow. We build the next thing.