Growth - More Deadly Than Fentanyl

For all the potentially devastating scourges humanity will confront this century, growth may be the deadliest. Growth not only drives these existential threats, our blind adherence to growth ensures we will fail to solve them.

Our leaders - intelligent, educated, experienced people, real top drawer folks, still cling to the idea of perpetual exponential growth as the measure of a successful government and a prosperous society.  When we don't have to think on it, most of us would agree.  3 per cent is the usual target. 3 per cent annual growth. Hey, how modest is that?

Imagine you are offered a deal with your bank, where your money doubles every three days. If you invest just $1 today, roughly how long will it take for you to become a millionaire? 

Would it be a year? Six months? 100 days? 

The precise answer is 60 days from your initial investment, when your balance would be exactly $1,048,576. Within a further 30 days, you’d have earnt more than a billion. And by the end of the year, you’d have more than $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – an “undecillion” dollars.

Now, at 3 per cent, the doubling rate is just over 23-years.  Doesn't sound too bad. Another 23 years and it's 4X. 23 more years it will be 8X. By century's end it'll be 16X. That's when the numbers really go crazy. 16 begets 32 which begets 64 which begets 128.

If your entire economy was X at year one, before 200 years passed it would be at 128X. That's 128 times more resources, more production, 128 times more waste.

At the outset it took 23 years to double. In that final 23 years the already massive economy 64 times what it had been in Year 1.

This is one dirty trick to play on nature. Nature, at least on Earth, is finite. It has a limit, a carrying capacity. Those what want to survive harmonize their activity with nature's limits. Those who don't, ignore those limits. Like lemmings of legend they keep racing for the cliff edge until they fall over and die.

Even with the economy-wrecking pandemic we are so far beyond the finite limits of our one and only biosphere that we exhaust the Earth's annual carrying capacity by August. That means we have to cannibalize the planet to make good what Earth cannot sustainably supply. That's what people who don't want to survive do and it's stupid, insanely stupid.

It's a path that cheats by rampaging through the Earth's resources. It's tangible, it's visible. We can measure it. The signs are everywhere. Satellites measure with astonishing accuracy the surface subsidence caused when we drain underwater aquifers. In some parts of California, decades of great agriculture caused the surface to drop by 30 feet.

Other telltales are deforestation and desertification. We savage forests, the lungs of the planet and the habitat of many non-human species. We exhaust arable farmland into desert by intensive, industrial agriculture. Our response is to increase the application of agri-chems (fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides) and did ever deeper wells to chase rapidly depleting groundwater needed for irrigation. We use so much of those chemicals that, when it does rain, they're flushed into our rivers and lakes where blue-green algae blooms, turning the water hypoxic and killing off the fish. It also leaves pretty nasty burns on swimmers and can kill creatures coming to the shores for a drink.

Each passing year leaves the forests more depleted, our farmland more degraded, our surface water resources more contaminated and yet with each passing year we demand ever more.

Now we've got a bright young man as our prime minister, he's got a few bright people in his cabinet and a load of bright people in his public service, so why are we still chasing perpetual exponential growth? Is this like the tiger of legend that you can never risk getting off? Does greed run the world?

I harp on this problem from time to time because I think we need to change our focus. Forget about growth that we can't sustain, growth that we cannot survive. There has to be something more valuable than killing ourselves off.

Here's an idea. Let's focus on what we can do to bolster our chances of survival. Whether it's climate change or soils degradation or freshwater contamination, any of this stuff, that begins by deciding that we can't live outside nature. We have to find ways to live in harmony with nature. We must conform to nature's finite limits. We really have no choice. The way we've been going is closing in on us. We are poisoning our world. We are poisoning the future.

As Einstein said, we can't solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them.