Thursday, August 20, 2020

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.


9 comments:

  1. Suppose for a moment that Covid-xxx wiped out 5 billion people. Within a century they would be replaced. We not only have to slow down our birth rate, we have to keep it down.

    We have to do the same with a whole lot of other stuff. And we need to redistribute wealth and resources so that everyone is comfortable. It's a big order.

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  2. Does greed run the world, you ask. Well, yes. It's called "capitalism".

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  3. Toby, try persuading the average Canadian that we have to 'share' and they need to revert to a 50s standard of living. Change of that magnitude cannot be achieved voluntarily. History tells of societies that collapsed because they chose not to make hard decisions.

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  4. Greed's allure, PLG, is dependent on an ability to deny reality.

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  5. Mound, the nature of systems is part of reality. You set up the economic institutions in certain ways and it mandates victory for the greedy. In an economy defined by profit, private investment and market competition, greed and infinite growth are engineered in.
    Consider: Say you have various firms. Some are run by people who understand the meaning of the word "enough", and decide to stop growing their firms after they are living pretty well. Others are run by people who have no idea of the meaning of "enough" and instead want it all, whatever "it all" might turn out to be. So they keep growing their firms forever.
    Question: Which set of firms attracts investment? Which set of firms ends up buying out the other or running them out of business? With the system we have, obviously the ever-growing firms eliminate the non-ever-growing firms.

    This is a part of reality that IMO you have consistently shown an ability to deny. You need to look it in the face: If we want different results, we need a different setup from the ground up. Something that does not reward and give power consistently to the people producing exactly the opposite of the results we want.

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  6. Do you seriously think there are people in Parliment intelligent enough who could make the changes you speak about? If so, what must the Canadian people do to draw attention to this road to our demise? Really? I seriously would like to know if there there is some other way we could wake them from their semi sleep. Not send in an income tax return next year? Or march on Ottawa? Or refuse to go to work? WHAT?? Anyong

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  7. PLG, I have no more confidence in our system of government than I have in the general population when it comes to the high risk reality of perpetual growth.

    I can't think of anyone I know who would voluntarily go back to a 1950s standard of living. Not one. They're very much an "over my dead body" crowd on that question.

    I probably won't be around to witness the real carnage that's coming but that's one of the rare advantages of being a senior in these perilous times. My sense is that you are a good measure younger than I so you may not be so fortunate.

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  8. Anyong, as I just wrote to PLG, I have no confidence that the Canadian public or the populations of other developed countries would consider the idea. They would throw any party that tried straight out of office. What I'm trying to say is there's no getting off this tiger we're riding.

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  9. 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..

    Mound, with a comment like that I don't think you are having enough sleep!
    The Public Service well may have many bright minds, but Trudeau!
    He has similarities to Trump; that he is a better speaker and put a on compassionate voice does not detract from his lies and misdeeds.
    Trump and Trudeau both spin lies and falsehoods to appeal to their base.
    Both are shallow and self seeking.
    Both are out of their depth in politics.

    TB



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