It's a core tenet of our Western industrial/capitalist/democratic orthodoxy that something in the range of 3% annual economic growth is the benchmark of a healthy society. That's 3% compounded growth.
Now let's take a span of 50-years, roughly one adult lifetime. Let's say the economy stood at 100X at the beginning of that period and grew at 3% over that interval. By the end of that 50-years, what began as 100X would have grown to 438X.
This is all great stuff if only our world, our planet, our biosphere was as expansive and elastic that it could grow 4.38X every half century. But it isn't expansive or elastic and it doesn't grow. It's finite, fixed, very precisely limited. It's no bigger than it was when the Pharoahs built their pyramids. We've rearranged the molecules and chemical properties of some of it. For example, we have transformed long sequestered underground fossil fuels into atmospheric carbon compounds but everything is pretty much still around in some form.
One thing that has grown is us, the human race. We have grown like crazy. In 60-years we have grown by almost 3X but along with there being so many more of us we have also seem a massive increase in the amount of stuff - resources - each of us consumes, uses up and emits, transformed in one manner or another.
When I was a child my parents would buy our shoes in a slightly bigger size than we actually needed. They knew we would "grow into them" quickly enough and, sure enough, we did just that. If they calculated right we would wear those shoes out at about the same time as we outgrew them. Those of us in larger families also became accustomed to "hand me downs" from older sibs.
Our problem at the moment is that we've "grown into" the earth but there's no store where we can buy a bigger one, no older brother to hand us down a bigger size.
We can't get a bigger planet but we've been reluctant to accept that reality. Our stubborn refusal to face reality is evident just about anywhere we look. Spreading deforestation is visible to the naked eye from space. So too is desertification - the exhaustion of once productive land and its transformation into sterile desert. Satellite-borne radars can now measure surface subsidence caused by draining of ancient aquifers. We don't need manned spacecraft or satellites to reveal the collapse of global fisheries as our industrial fleets "fish down the food chain" pursuing one fish stock after another.
These events have little or nothing to do with climate change. They're mainly the product of overpopulation and increased per capita consumption. Yet, even the most advantaged people of the industrialized nations, keep questing for 3% annual growth from a world that's already sagging under the weight of our wildly excessive demands.
In a nutshell, we're defying gravity. Years ago I watched a black and white film clip that showed a U.S. Navy balloon that was being controlled by dozens of sailors holding mooring lines. Suddenly it broke free and climbed. Most sailors simply let go of their lines. Others held on until they were five to ten feet off the ground and then let go. There was another bunch of sailors that couldn't let go and clung to their mooring lines as the balloon climbed higher and higher until they fell, one by one, to their deaths.
For us, that 3% annual growth target is our breakaway balloon. That's the bad part. The good part is that we're still within a safe landing distance of the ground. We can still let go of the lines on our terms.
7 comments:
We can let go -- if we're not obsessed with growth, Mound.
An obsession is irrational and immune to evidence.
Nice little analysis there. Too bad it is politically taboo to raise that concern on the mainstream media, or at least to do it with any thorough-going regularity.
Owen, are we really obsessed or too spineless that we prefer whistling past the graveyard?
Anon, I think I have your point and, at least in part, agree. These questions aren't new. They go back well before Malthus and Marx - in the days when they were still theoretical.
Our reluctance to engage with these issues, especially given the inevitability of outcome if we don't, is suggestive of a fundamental and potentially existential failing in the way we are socially organized.
Zero or negative growth should not be impossible.
The problem is that Governments have allowed debt levels to get too high.
They see economic growth as a way to deal with all the debt.
Now economic growth is no longer really possible, particularly with limited cheap oil, limited water etc.
You're right, Hugh. Governments are acting very much like those sailors who couldn't let go of the mooring lines. Their "solution" - growth - is of steadily decreasing utility even as it steadily worsens the problem it is supposed to remedy.
We see the world in the context of our own lifetimes and so we have enormous trouble understanding how the world functioned without being so slavishly tied to growth.
Yes, the world grew but it wasn't forced, nurtured growth. That's why it wasn't until around 1814 that the human population first reached one billion. It took us over a century to double that, which, in historical context was very rapid. Yet in barely one lifetime we have tripled that again. In two centuries we have gone from one to well over seven billion. At the same time we have enormously inflated our per capita consumption of energy and other resources and our carbon and other contaminants footprint. Layer atop all that the impacts of climate change, particularly our already broken hydrological cycle that is severely impacting agriculture from Australia to Russia to the United States.
We all want to grow our economies at target rates that are "compounded" growth. Everyone wants the existing standard of living that we in the West enjoy but we would need 3.5 Earth's worth of resources to achieve that.
We target 3% a year growth. Any mortgage calculator will show that, over 50-years, that comes in at over 400% growth.
It's all madness perpetuated by people who consider themselves entirely rational.
Yes, I saw a graph once that showed the world population explosion coinciding with the growth in global oil production.
Oil production won't continue to grow, I don't think.
The onset of relatively cheap and abundant fossil fuels played a powerful role in population growth since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Modern agriculture would be all but impossible without cheap energy. The latest American gas and oil boom has given rise to terrific growth in U.S. fertilizer production.
More energy = more food = more people = ever greater demand for energy and food. That's why we will be forced to transition to renewable energy no matter how much we might prefer fossil fuels.
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