I don't understand the compulsion of corporations to be The Biggest One with The Most Money, when ultimately they're playing a zero sum game re: resources, not necessarily dollars or whatever and taking resources from other people. I think that the scientist's fallacy is that they forget what the economy is. They think that it's just this blob of goo that keeps growing and growing. It's really very non-linear and is always evolving. In fact, when it improves, and solves its own problems, it has technically "grown.
A hundred years ago, you were doing well when you could acquire more and more things, but then all of the sudden everything went on the computer, then everything went online. In both cases the economy exploded, but the size of our foot print shrunk. As we move more things from real space into the cloud, the economy will grow, and our physical presence will shrink.
Hi Voice of Reason. The real fallacy, I think, is that no on really understands physics, and no one really understands economics. I'd wager, though, that most economists would agree with that statement, and most physicists would not. A basic understanding of urbanism - how humans arrange themselves on the landscape - is useful here. While increased energy use appears to have gone hand in hand with 20thC economic growth, we also sprawled horribly in that time.
Fortunately the story of the 21st Century will be the rediscovery of traditional urbanism, of how we arranged ourselves on the land - arrangements discovered through thousands of years of trial and error - prior to , following the realisation that that arrangement coupled with modern sanitation, street surfacing materials and mass electric transit reflects innate evolved human psychological preferences like sociability, refuge and prospect, freedom of choice etc.
Energy use does not ineluctably correlate with economic growth, and often it doesn't even correlate well with quality of life. A little walkable car-free neighborhood of thin streets, durable buildings that share walls and capture sunlight consumes far less energy than an area the same size in NYC or San Jose. Humans in general don't want to live in cities: they gathered into cities because communication was limited to the speed of foot or horse, so they had to live in close proximity. As faster transport - rail and then automobile - became available, those who could afford the new technology began the process of sprawl.
Now that communication makes it increasingly possible to do many jobs from anywhere on the planet, what use are cities? We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. The same Jean-Luc Picard with a wealthy collection of artifacts. How very old fashioned and materialistic of him. What, then, must ultimately increase for an economy to display real growth? Logically incorrect: because exponential economic growth is not the same as exponential energy growth it follows that exponential economic growth is possible.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this article if all the arguments concerning energy growth are valid is about the relation between energy growth and economic growth. Economic growth in itself might be less dependent on resource use but it doesn't follow that unending exponential economic growth is possible. It's where all the economists go wrong all the time:. The correct argument should be that unending exponential growth in itself in any system is unsustainable.
That's all we know from science. So why should exponential economic growth be any different than other observed examples of exponential growth? The "boil the Earth" example sounds weirdly familiar. In I was working for a company that created software to design computer chips. We often had academic researchers give presentations on advances in semiconductor design.
One presenter began by showing the historic growth of power consumption of a typical CPU used in desktops, laptops, etc. One way of expressing power consumption in semiconductors is in watts per square centimeter. He claimed that if historic rates continued, by the power consumption of a CPU would, in watts per square centimeter, exceed that produced by a nuclear reactor. He then went on to describe various techniques he was researching to reduce power consumption while continuing to increase computing capacity.
According to the report, there is "growing environmental pressure per unit of economic activity," not less. Optimists will undoubtedly look to renewable energy as a stay against declining EROI and rising seas. But they may be blindsided by the stark limits of wind, solar, and hydro. Researchers at Monash University, marshaling considerable data, concluded that the cheerful scenarios projecting renewables will supply most of the world's energy by mid-century "assume unrealistic technical potentials and implementation times.
Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey has calculated that, at current rates of carbon density—the amount of carbon released per unit of energy consumed—our greenhouse gas emissions will increase by more than 2 percent per year. At that rate, by carbon dioxide emissions would be more than double what they were in To achieve a tenfold reduction in global emissions by , carbon density would have to decline on average 8.
In other words, we would have to innovate carbon-reduction strategies at rates never before seen, with technologies of immense effectiveness whose global-scale implementation would be entirely unprecedented. And so, as we blunder along with business-as-usual, awaiting the techno-messiah promised by the cornucopians with their free markets and their profit-inspired geniuses, an alternate future awaits us.
In , Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway , historians of science at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology, respectively, gave us a picture of what that future might look like. Together they published The Collapse of Western Civilization , a grim work of futurist science fiction. It was Limits transformed into a novella of climate-fueled apocalypse. This results in a sea level rise of five meters or more that inundates coastal cities and, combined with the effects of other melting ice sheets, sends billions of people fleeing inland to higher ground.
The ice sheet meltdown is preceded by decades of social and economic unrest driven by climate change. In the year , for example, a series of "unprecedented heat waves" scorches the global food supply. In North America, desertification that had started in the early 21 century consumes the world's most productive farmland in California and the Great Plains.
As the unrest intensifies the U. Governments worldwide are destabilized, overthrown. The warmer planet, a Petri dish for insects whose ranges have expanded, releases upon a starved, dehydrated, weakened humanity the usual diseases borne by flies and mosquitoes—dengue fever, yellow fever—and lack of sanitation in mass encampments leads to explosive outbreaks of those old nemeses, typhus and cholera, while there emerge, as the future chronicler writes, "viral and retroviral agents never before seen.
What stuns the future chronicler in The Collapse of Western Civilization , looking back on this tragic period, is that the smartest scientists in the world, employing the most advanced analytical and technical methods available, had charted the trajectory toward climate doom long before it was a fait accompli. They had warned that, if civilization was to survive, it had to reduce its pressure on waste sinks. Despite the somber context, Limits was not all gloom.
Of the 12 scenarios it presented, four did not end in collapse. Economic and ecological stability was possible, the researchers found, but only if global society engaged in "a deliberate, controlled end to growth," reducing industrial output and per-capita consumption. Limits described this as a "stabilized" world scenario, "a long-term equilibrium state" in which "the basic material needs of each person on Earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
Enough stuff to go around, enough for everyone to share in a decent life, so long as we all agree not to want too much. Terrifying notions for those of us—by which I mean most of us—who are entrenched in the free-market capitalist mindset. No wonder it was the mainstream economists who mounted the strongest attacks on Limits , those whose paychecks depend on elite capitalist institutions, who construct for the public the ideology that rationalizes endless growth, who assure that we will never need to share our piece of the pie if we just keep on growing the pie.
The driving question behind the study was whether global society could organize itself to live within its means while providing a peaceful, equitable existence for its people.
By asking that question and answering it, Limits was dangerous to a social order that posits selfishness, greed, and envy as the drivers of progress, that tells us to hoard for ourselves what we can get and ignore the pangs of conscience reminding us that the bigger pie hasn't led to a better life for all.
When the authors of Limits said in that "population and capital growth are actually increasing the gap between the rich and the poor," when they debunked the myth that more growth will lead to human equality, they were waving a knife at the neoliberal capitalist order.
Because what else were they talking about in a world with no growth and equal opportunity than the redistribution of wealth? What else were they demanding but a radical change in our definition of liberty? But the downsizing, the sharing, would have to be voluntary. We couldn't do it under conditions of coercion. It would have to be, in Dennis Meadows' words, an "orderly and cooperative descent toward a socially just sustainability for all.
The bottom line, though, is that if wealth were divided evenly among the nine billion people expected on this planet by , the per capita material affluence of the global north would have to drop significantly. It's doubtful that an entire civilization indoctrinated in selfishness would bear this without an epic tantrum.
It would be a process of social maturation on a scale never before seen. Because in order to retain our humanity in the face of limits, we would have to confront inequality head on. I called up Meadows to ask him what he thought about Limits to Growth 44 years after its publication. He said that he was optimistic in There was time enough to divert the ship of too-muchness from its collision course with the iceberg.
But last summer he sounded depressed and somewhat cynical. Business-as-usual, he said, risks a chaotic implosion imposed by nature, followed by geopolitical turmoil and resource wars. This now seemed to be our likely path, and it was time, he said, to prepare for "system shock. Meadows sees a link between limits to growth and what he calls "the authoritarian tsunami that is sweeping across Western democracies. When growth stops, tensions mount. Aldous Huxley predicted this eventuality. Read " A Bibliography of Limits ," Christopher Ketcham's reading list prompted by the overwhelming reader response to this story.
California desert town takes back the night, wins rare "Dark Sky" award. The U. The International Astronomical Union has established a committee to finalize a list of official star names. Some companies offer unofficial naming rights for purchase. Additionally, recycling itself may be an energy- and materials-intensive process.
Even if physical laws could be broken they cannot to achieve recycling with percent efficiency, added demand from the imperative for economic growth would necessarily require virgin materials. Unfortunately, the situation is even more dire.
Economic growth is required to be exponential; that is, the size of the economy must double in a fixed period. As referenced earlier, this has driven a corresponding increase in the material footprint. To understand the nature of exponential growth, consider the EV. Suppose that we have enough easily extractable lithium for the batteries needed to fuel the EV revolution for another 30 years.
Now assume that deep-sea mining provides four times the current amount of these materials. Are we covered for years? No, because the current 10 percent rate of growth in demand for lithium is equivalent to doubling of demand every seven years, which means we would only have enough for 44 years. Exponential growth swiftly, inevitably, swamps anything in finite supply. For a virus, that finite resource is the human population and in the context of the planet it is its physical resources.
The inescapable inference is that it is essentially impossible to decouple material use from economic growth. And this is exactly what has transpired. Wiedmann et al. In the — period covered by the study, no country achieved a planned, deliberate economywide decoupling for a sustained length of time.
Claims by the Global North to the contrary conceal the substantial offshoring of its production, and the associated ecological devastation, to the Global South. Recent proposals for ecocidal deep-sea and fantastical exoplanetary mining are an unsurprising consequence of a growth paradigm that refuses to recognize these inconvenient truths. These observations lead us to a natural minimum condition for sustainability: all resource use curves must be simultaneously flatlined and all pollution curves simultaneously extinguished.
It is this resource perspective that allows us to see why EVs may help offset carbon emissions yet remain utterly unsustainable under the limitless growth paradigm.
We have argued that the inextricable link between material consumption and GDP makes the infinite-growth paradigm incompatible with sustaining ecological integrity.
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