French economist Thomas Piketty has revived an old question with new urgency: can countries such as India reach developed-world living standards if rich nations keep expanding consumption as before?
The provocation comes from the World Inequality Lab’s Global Justice Report, which sets out a path to average incomes of about €5,000 a month across countries by 2100 while limiting warming to 1.8°C. The report’s central claim is not that prosperity is impossible. It is that prosperity cannot be universal if it follows the fossil-fuel and resource-intensive path taken by the West.
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That is the point worth debating. Not whether India has the right to grow. It does. Not whether poverty reduction needs growth. It does. The issue is whether global convergence can be achieved without changing the pattern of production and consumption in rich countries.
Global South growth and the limits of convergence
Development economics has long treated convergence as both possible and desirable. Poorer economies can grow faster than richer ones by absorbing existing technologies, building infrastructure, and moving labour from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity industry and services. China, South Korea and Singapore narrowed the gap with advanced economies by doing just that.
India has also made progress. But its per capita income remains far below that of the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Even on purchasing power parity terms, the average Indian consumes only a fraction of what citizens in rich economies do.
India’s aspiration for higher incomes is therefore legitimate. Growth is not an abstraction here. It means better jobs, better housing, urban services, health, education, transport and energy access. A low-income country cannot be asked to treat today’s global carbon constraint as a reason to freeze living standards.
But the constraint exists. If India’s 1.4 billion people consumed energy, materials, meat, transport and housing space at current rich-world levels, using current technologies, global ecological pressure would rise sharply. Piketty’s argument begins there. The planet may have resources, but it does not have infinite carbon space.
Climate justice and rich-country consumption
The World Inequality Lab’s proposition is closer to sufficiency than to conventional growth theory. It asks rich societies to reduce carbon-intensive consumption while preserving quality of life through redistribution, public services and cleaner infrastructure. In some circles this is called degrowth. The word is politically toxic. The underlying proposition is narrower: affluent societies must consume fewer high-emission goods if poorer societies are to gain room to grow.
Piketty’s argument is not simply a call for rich countries to stop growing. It is also a redistribution project. The Global Justice Report calls for wealth taxes, lower working hours, dietary change, and a shift in spending from materially intensive sectors to education and health. It also proposes a Global Justice Fund to finance the energy transition and higher social spending. The purpose is to make climate restraint politically bearable. Without redistribution inside rich countries, any appeal to consume less will be read as another burden on workers and the middle class.
This is not an eccentric claim. The climate debate has long acknowledged differentiated responsibility. Rich economies account for a disproportionate share of cumulative emissions. Developing countries, including India, have contributed less historically and still have lower per capita emissions.
India has made this case at every major climate negotiation. New Delhi’s position is that developed countries must cut faster, finance more, and leave carbon space for late industrialisers. That argument is correct as equity. It is weaker as strategy if it is not matched by an Indian growth model that uses that space well.
The missing bridge is finance. Developing countries cannot be expected to pay the full cost of a cleaner development path while rich countries retain the gains from two centuries of high-carbon growth. COP29 agreed to raise climate finance for developing countries from $100 billion a year to $300 billion a year by 2035, with a wider ambition to scale finance from public and private sources to $1.3 trillion annually. But the settlement was criticised for being too small, too slow, and weak on the quality of finance. Without predictable concessional finance, climate justice remains a negotiating phrase.
The difficulty is political. Growth remains indispensable in advanced economies. Governments rely on it to sustain jobs, tax revenues, welfare systems and debt management. Asking voters in Europe or North America to accept stagnant incomes for decades in the name of global justice is not a programme likely to win elections. Populism in rich democracies already draws strength from anxiety over immigration, wages, energy prices and living standards.
Piketty’s proposal is intellectually coherent. Its politics are far harder.
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Degrowth will meet democratic resistance
The weakness of the degrowth argument is not its moral claim. It is its assumption about political consent.
A German worker, an American truck owner or a French pensioner may accept cleaner energy. They may even accept higher taxes for better public services. But few electorates will voluntarily embrace lower consumption if the policy is framed as sacrifice for the Global South. That language will be turned against climate policy.
This matters for India. A strategy that depends on rich-country restraint may be ethically attractive but practically fragile. India cannot build its development pathway on the hope that rich societies will consume less. It must argue for climate justice, but plan for a world in which rich countries under-deliver.
That means three things. India must grow. It must grow with less carbon intensity than earlier industrialisers. And it must demand finance and technology from the West without waiting for them before acting.
Clean growth is possible, but not automatic
There is a less fatalistic route. Technological progress can weaken the link between GDP growth and ecological damage. Solar and wind costs have fallen. Electric mobility is spreading. Green hydrogen, battery storage, circular manufacturing and efficiency gains can cut emissions from power, transport and industry.
The International Energy Agency has repeatedly pointed to the rapid expansion of clean-energy technologies as evidence that decarbonisation is becoming more feasible. But feasibility is not certainty. Clean power must be built. Grids must be modernised. Storage must become cheaper. Industrial decarbonisation must move beyond pilot projects. Coal-dependent systems must manage reliability and demand peaks.
India illustrates both sides of the story. It has become one of the world’s largest renewable energy markets. India has already crossed the 50% mark in installed non-fossil electricity capacity and has approved a 2035 target of 60%. Yet coal still dominates actual electricity generation and remains central to meeting peak demand.
That gap between installed capacity and actual generation is the real policy problem. Solar panels do not replace coal unless storage, transmission, flexible demand and market design move with them.
India’s carbon space must be used well
India’s per capita emissions are still below those of advanced economies. That gives New Delhi a strong equity argument. But it should not become an excuse for delay.
The equity argument also has a domestic side. The average Indian emits far less than the average American or European, but averages conceal sharp inequality. Globally, the wealthiest 10% account for a vastly disproportionate share of warming, and the richest 1% are even more carbon-intensive. India is not exempt from this pattern. The richest Indians consume electricity, air travel, private transport and urban real estate in ways closer to global affluent classes. A fair Indian transition must protect development space for the poor, not subsidise high-carbon consumption by the rich.
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India’s development challenge is not merely to emit less than the West did. It is to build a cleaner growth machine at scale. That requires electricity reform, lower distribution losses, rational tariffs, faster transmission approvals, predictable renewable purchase obligations, better urban planning, and industrial policy for clean technology manufacturing.
The harder questions are domestic. Can Indian cities grow without locking in car-dependent sprawl? Can housing be made energy-efficient without raising costs beyond the reach of the middle class? Can manufacturing expand while using cleaner power? Can coal regions be given credible transition plans before jobs disappear? Can public transport become a growth asset rather than a municipal afterthought?
These are not matters for climate diplomacy alone. They are fiscal, industrial and urban policy choices.
Economic justice needs a bargain, not a slogan
The larger question is not whether the Global South should grow. It must. Nor is it whether rich countries should cut emissions faster. They must.
The question is whether the world can produce a bargain that joins these two truths. Rich countries must reduce wasteful consumption, finance technology transfer, and accept their historical responsibility. Developing countries must use carbon space prudently, avoid avoidable lock-ins, and build institutions that make clean growth cheaper than dirty growth.
Piketty is right to challenge the complacent view that everyone can become rich by following the same route. The West’s development model cannot simply be universalised. But he underestimates the democratic resistance to asking rich societies to stop growing.
For India, the lesson is clear. Climate justice remains a valid demand. But development cannot wait for moral clarity in Paris, Brussels or Washington. India must use the next two decades to prove that a large, poor and energy-hungry democracy can raise living standards without copying the West’s carbon mistakes.
That is the only convergence that will matter.