Our economy is based upon the premise of infinite growth, despite living on a finite planet

[NickB79]

How does one deal with this obvious contradiction? What happens when we start to bump up against the limits of growth and our economy stalls? Wouldn't now be a good time to address this problem and devise a new way of doing business since we're already looking at the possible collapse of our current system?

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. Many Economist have pointed out the contradiction and have

addressed successful solutions to this paradox such as EM Schumaker

[NickB79]

2. Interesting. I hadn't heard of this before

I'm still in the process of reading through what I've found on Google, but how hard do you think it might be to implement such a system into the global economy?

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. I think that the economist from Bangladesh who won the noble prize

also addressed this in his book. There is also another major economist
whose name escapes me right now talks about this and all see that the current
system as applied to global ecology and for human survival; that the current way
must have drastic changes for the health of the planet and humankind.

I would not call any of these marxist but more like the third way economist.

[rucky]

4. The one that does the microlending?

Muhammad Yunus

[JohnyCanuck]

5. A couple of FAQs from steadystate.org

Why is economic growth a threat to economic sustainability, national security, and international stability?

To grow, an economy requires more natural capital, including soil, water, minerals, timber, other raw materials, and energy sources. When the economy grows too fast or gets too big, this natural capital is depleted, or "liquidated." To function smoothly, the economy also requires an environment that can absorb and recycle pollutants. When natural capital stocks are depleted, and/or the capacity of the environment to absorb pollutants is exceeded, the economy is forced to shrink.

National security, meanwhile, is a function of economic sustainability. The economic strife of a nation may result in insurrection or revolution, and eventually the nation-state may turn its agressions outward. From the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum to the 21st century powder kegs, war invariably involves, and often revolves around, struggles for resources by nations that have exceeded their ecological capacities - or have had their capacities impacted by other states.

Can't technology alleviate the threat of economic growth?

Some economists think that, because a particular production process can become more efficient (more output per unit of natural capital), there is no limit to economic growth. These economists and “technological optimists” are disregarding the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which tells us that we cannot achieve 100% efficiency in the economic production process. When the entropy law is applied across all economic sectors, or in other words when the limits to efficiency have been reached, the only remaining way to grow the economy is by using more natural capital (including energy).

Remember: to think there is no limit to growth on a finite planet is precisely, mathematically equivalent to thinking that you may have a stabilized, steady state economy on a perpetually shrinking planet. Both claims are precisely, equally ludicrous!

http://steadystate.org/CASSEFAQs.html#anchor_127

Note that energy is the most fundamental resource of all, because it takes energy to mine and collect physical resources and refine or manufacture them into useful products. In the days of cheap, plentiful oil, energy was not a problem. There was lots of it and it was cheap and relatively easy to come by. That situation is now reversing so that oil is becoming increasingly scarce, difficult and expensive to obtain and this will eventually drive up the costs on other forms of energy as well. Think how much oil derived energy goes into constructing a nuclear power plant and into the mining of the uranium ore used to make the fuel rods for a nuclear power plant.

From Jim Kunstlers latest blog entry:

The Ponzi-plus plan

SNIP

What the mainstream is truly missing here en masse is that another tsunami is building right behind the finance fiasco, and that it will render moot the whole reeking cargo of schemes and wishes that comprises the Great Bail-out. I am speaking of the global oil problem. In fact, the problems in banking and money currently roaring in the center ring of the world circus, can be described categorically as a product of the oil problem -- since oil is the primary resource of industrial economies and therefore the motive force behind our ability to generate "wealth." Without reliable and ever-growing supplies of oil, there is no industrial growth, and without industrial growth things like capital investment instruments lose their legitimacy. That is why the Frankenstein family of Ponzi securities was invented in the first place -- to compensate for the demise of industrial growth by creating wealth out of... nothing!

The looming oil problem entails a swirl of factors that will aggravate and accelerate our social, economic, and political struggles. These factors will mutually reinforce the instabilities that they set into motion. For instance, the new oil nationalism is undermining the traditional operation of oil markets as we've known them since the mid-20th century. In turn, oil nationalism will aggravate the oil export crisis, which will starve the oil importers -- the USA being the chief victim. Finally, there is the remorseless base-line condition of Peak Oil itself, meaning that we are at point where world oil demand permanently outstrips world oil supply no matter if the USA falls on its ass economically or not. What remains beyond this is a desperate contest among the oil importers -- America, Europe, China, Japan, India -- for control of the world's remaining oil resources.

The fantasies about alternative energy currently wafting across the American media-scape will not "solve" this problem, much as we wish they might. We'll try everything in a quixotic effort to sustain the unsustainable (that is, the happy motoring consumer society), but we will be disappointed by the results. I try to remind readers that the very concept of "solutions" does not apply in this situation, since it implies that we can keep running things in America just the way we are running them now, only by means other than oil. The truth, in my view, is that we have to run things very differently now, at different scales than the ones we're used to -- but we are too invested in our behavior of the past to move forward. This is certainly unfortunate,

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/09/the-pnzi-plus-plan.html

[jazzjunkysue]

6. Humans are immediate gratification creatures. We have to evolve into

sustainability sensitivity in order to survive. Europe has been ahead on this for decades. The pressure will now come from all over the world to make america grow the hell up.

We have to care globally to survive globally.

[tama]

8. Our excessive needs

are manufactured by the system and it's immersive conditioning. So they can be delearned and liberated from.

[The2ndWheel]

10. Europe has higher taxes

That's not really evolution. More like intelligent design.

[galileoreloaded]

31. I agree. I think the word is really de-volve though...n/t

[PVnRT]

22. I suppose we should just give up and freeze progress where it is, then

Yes, you can have sustainable development, despite what the pessimists say.

[Gregorian]

30. Excellent stuff on those websites.

Thanks. I sometimes feel like an alien on this planet. Reading that gives me support.

One problem is moralizing. I do that. But being ironic, like the Daily Show, is often the best attack.

[The2ndWheel]

7. Yeah, physical reality is always chasing us

"What happens when we start to bump up against the limits of growth and our economy stalls?"

Credit.

Bring more people, however it needs to be done, into the stalled economic system.

Increase the efficiency of production and consumption, so that the new people hooked into the economic system can pick up where things were left off.

"Wouldn't now be a good time to address this problem and devise a new way of doing business since we're already looking at the possible collapse of our current system?"

What economic system isn't based on growth? Depending on whether you're a government or corporation you need more people(well, governments and corporations always need more people), higher wages, more benefits, more taxes, more resources, more products, etc, etc, in order to survive.

[tama]

17. Spot on

"What happens when we start to bump up against the limits of growth and our economy stalls?"

Credit.

The limits of growth were bumbed into in 1979 when oil/capita peaked. After that there has been no growth, only hideous overshoot of insane debt bubble.

[iamahaingttta]

9. Outer Space, Baby!

Space is the Place!!!

Mine those asteroids.
There's plenty of water on Mars.
Build domed cities on the Moon.
Naming rights for all the stars in the galaxy.
Solar energy collectors in earth orbit.
Vacations in zero gravity.
Retirement communities off-earth.
The possibilities are endless!

I'm only half kidding...

[quispquake]

25. Buckminster Fuller agreed with you...

His view was that the world was like an egg, and once the nutrients from the egg are used up, it's time to 'hatch'.

[anarch]

28. long term, this is actually the only good answer

It's that or a severe contraction of human activities, a big decrease in population, and a more sustainable existence here on the Earth. But come on, we're humans...once we finish despoiling the planet, it's only logical that we should move on to destroy the rest of the galaxy, no matter how long it takes!

Heute die Welt, morgens das Sonnensystem!

[Hydra]

11. Capitialism is based on the idea that you can steal stuff from other people

There was always a logical limit to that- if nothing else, you run out of people to steal from.

Given that fact, we need to replace this system with something that provides what we NEED rather than looking at exploitation as a goal.

I find it rather amusing that the idea of us living sustainably on this planet is considered unholy for some reason. We have the means to gather renewable energy, we can limit population by allowing for family planning, we can grow organically without using petroleum fertilizer and we can all have homes.

Somehow people have decided that heaven looks like hell, and that hell is the better place to live. Sad.

[tama]

20. I have a Dream

Garden Planet, Paradise on Earth. Humans living as we were meant to.

http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=27815

[ThomWV]

12. You point is accurate as far as it goes but the truth is we've barley touched our resources

Yes, it can't go on forever but we haven't really even touched the resources available to us and if you have traved around this nation even a bit you would have seen that for yourself.

[tama]

21. Nature

is not resource for humans to rob and destroy. It's home.

[tama]

23. Human appropriation of biosphere:

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/31/12942
http://dieoff.org/page83.htm

In a word: overshoot.

[NickB79]

24. Just for reference, what would your definition of 100% resource useage be?

If every acre of arable land on the planet were converted to monocrop farmland and tree farms, every fertile portion of the ocean was used to raise farm-grown fish, the only plants and animals still alive were those we have domesticated for our personal use, and every mountain range was torn down for the last nuggets of coal, iron and other minerals, would we then have reached the limits of our resources?

[NickB79]

34. One more thing: We've barely touched our resources, but we're already reaping horrible consequences

For example, global warming from using just a tiny fraction of the planet's resources is now apparently causing methane hydrates to melt in the Arctic, as discussed on the Environment/Energy board here. Why is this bad? A growing consensus of paleontologists believes that the worst mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian extinction event, was caused by the release of massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere from melting methane hydrates. The result was that 90% of all life on this planet was wiped out. If a similar extinction event begins over the next few decades, humanity itself may not survive or barely survive in a destroyed society.

There are very good reasons to stay far, far away from maximum resource utilization on planet Earth.

[tama]

13. Thanks for this thread

addressing the most important issue that humanity is facing.

There is now lot of panick and fear around now, but if something good is to become of this crisis, it can wake lots of people to reality. Sadly not all, since fear is the mindkiller and many are too deep in the paradigm of narrow and small minded short termism.

[Subdivisions]

14. How stupid is that? No, wait...

I'm part of the problem. Nevermind.

[blindpig]

15. Capitalism is the enemy of nature, and that includes us.

We reject all euphemisms or propagandistic softening of the brutality of this regime: all greenwashing of its ecological costs, all mystification of the human costs under the names of democracy and human rights. We insist instead upon looking at capital from the standpoint of what it has really done. Acting on nature and its ecological balance, the regime, with its imperative to constantly expand profitability, exposes ecosystems to destabilizing pollutants, fragments habitats that have evolved over aeons to allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders resources, and reduces the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital. From the side of humanity, with its requirements for self-determination, community, and a meaningful existence, capital reduces the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power while discarding much of the remainder as useless nuisances. It has invaded and undermined the integrity of communities through its global mass culture of consumerism and depoliticization. It has expanded disparities in wealth and power to levels unprecedented in human history. It has worked hand in glove with a network of corrupt and subservient client states whose local elites carry out the work of repression while sparing the center of its opprobrium. And it has set going a network of transtatal organizations under the overall supervision of the Western powers and the superpower United States, to undermine the autonomy of the periphery and bind it into indebtedness while maintaining a huge military apparatus to enforce compliance to the capitalist center We believe that the present capitalist system cannot regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation—an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die! And it cannot solve the crisis posed by terror and other forms of violent rebellion because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire, which would impose unacceptable limits on growth and the whole “way of life” sustained by empire. Its only remaining option is to resort to brutal force, thereby increasing alienation and sowing the seed of further terrorism . . . and further counter-terrorism, evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism. In sum, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt. It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology, profoundly unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally, nay, replaced, if there is to be a future worth living. Thus the stark choice once posed by Rosa Luxemburg returns: Socialism or Barbarism!, where the face of the latter now reflects the imprint of the intervening century and assumes the countenance of ecocatastrophe, terror counterterror, and their fascist degeneration.

http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Ecosocialist.html

[RufusTFirefly]

16. Natural Capitalism

"According to the authors, the 'next industrial revolution' depends on the espousal of four central strategies: 'the conservation of resources through more effective manufacturing processes, the reuse of materials as found in natural systems, a change in values from quantity to quality, and investing in natural capital, or restoring and sustaining natural resources'"

[Gregorian]

18. Even the most liberal aren't willing to see the problem.

There's denial. Greed. Need. Ignorance. And many more reasons. Palin, for example, doesn't acknowledge global warming. Five kids. A jet to flit around in. Until she sold it on ebay, evidently.

It's a one word answer. Population. And I'll get denials even here. Oh no it's not! It's _______. We can _______ our way out of it. But it's population.

And this is why when populations decrease, governments go into panic mode. They even go as far as to pay people to have kids. Because more people guarantees more growth.

We're in far deeper than anyone realizes. The economy is just a symptom. And not a very important one. We may suffer, but it's nothing like an eleven degree rise in temperatures. Or low water tables. Or no more petroleum in which to supercharge our farms.

[Locrian]

26. population

The old elephant turd in the room and you are 100% right.

How many did the the earth support for about 500,000 years? About 10 millon?

And the only thing that has kept it going from the last century is cheap energy.

We really arent very smart - a colony of bacteria is more like it.


>>It's a one word answer. Population. And I'll get denials even here. Oh no it's not! It's _______. We can _______ our way out of it. But it's population.

[galileoreloaded]

32. You are absolutly correct. n/t

[deaniac21]

19. I thought that was the purpose of World Wars.

[blindpig]

27. Just who's in charge here?

Under normal operating conditions, capitalist society never includes the vast majority of the population in the decision-making process concerning public policy. There was no public debate followed by a referendum over whether the US should instigate an entirely unprovoked war against Iraq. The vast majority of us have absolutely no say in whether nuclear power plants should be constructed or what kinds of cars Ford and GM should produce. These decisions are made behind closed doors by corporate America with the intent of promoting their own special interests, in particular, raising their profits. They are not concerned with the well-being of the general population, but in order to thrive, they must pretend they are operating in everyone’s interests.

snip

We in the Workers International League are convinced that only a socialist movement, led by working people, is capable of meeting the challenge of environmental destruction. Only when the economy is collectively owned and democratically operated will the possibility of a collective decision-making process become a reality. With all the relevant information at our disposal, all members of society will be able to discuss and debate which way forward and then determine policy by voting. Socialism means that the majority will rule in the interests of the majority, and a healthy, vibrant environment is in everyone’s interests.

http://www.marxist.com/capitalism-environment-global-warming121007.htm

[blindpig]

29. Savage Capitalism

The overall threat to humanity and the planet we sum up here under four headings – environmental catastrophe, imperialist war and the crushing of the third world, savage capitalism in everyday life and the surveillance- security lockdown state. They are all linked; they all are part of a single system of power and exploitation. ‘Neoliberalism’, with the added ingredient of US-style neoconservatism, has degenerated into a new and more barbarous phase – ‘savage capitalism’.

This new phase of capitalism forces an inevitable conclusion – only by a total transformation in politics and production, in other words a transformation of our social relations, can a sustainable future for humanity be established. We are facing the biggest crisis of human civilisation ever. No previous crisis has ever posed the existence human civilisation so directly. Revolutionary answers are needed, qualitative answers which go way beyond the standard ‘no to’ slogans of daily campaigns, and point the way to an eco-socialist alternative.

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1311

[Indenturedebtor]

33. I'm 50/50 here hopeful/pessimistic

There is a lot of energy entering our atmosphere every day that could be used for sustainable growth. It all comes down to a question of energy doesn't it? Energy to move people, build things, feed people.

But in any case our population will have to reduce. Either we do it ourselves or nature does it for us. I think that we need a one-child policy or at least a two-child policy.

[anigbrowl]

35. Innovation + time = growth

Take a look at the specs on your computer and get back to me. We live on a finite planet, but are blessed with the ability to innovate.