  Central to the official "green growth" discourse is the conjecture that
absolute decoupling can be achieved with certain market instruments. This paper
evaluates this claim focusing on the role of technology, while changes in GDP
composition are treated elsewhere. Some fundamental difficulties for absolute
decoupling, referring specifically to thermodynamic costs, are identified
through a stylized model based on empirical knowledge on innovation and
learning. Normally, monetary costs decrease more slowly than production grows,
and this is unlikely to change should monetary costs align with thermodynamic
costs, except, potentially, in the transition after the price reform.
Furthermore, thermodynamic efficiency must eventually saturate for physical
reasons. While this model, as usual, introduces technological innovation just
as a source of efficiency, innovation also creates challenges: therefore,
attempts to sustain growth by ever-accelerating innovation collide also with
the limited reaction capacity of people and institutions. Information
technology could disrupt innovation dynamics in the future, permitting quicker
gains in eco-efficiency, but only up to saturation and exacerbating the
downsides of innovation. These observations suggest that long-term
sustainability requires much deeper transformations than the green growth
discourse presumes, exposing the need to rethink scales, tempos and
institutions, in line with ecological economics and the degrowth literature.
