It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
It's the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity's undoing
Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.
Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.
To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.
Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained. But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.
It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.
On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable, the Ecuadorean government decided to allow oil drilling in the heart of the Yasuni national park. It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as either blackmail or fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich. Why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills, will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America.
Almost 45% of the Yasuni national park is overlapped by oil concessions.
Yasuni national park. Murray Cooper/Minden Pictures/Corbis
The UK oil firm Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa's oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo; one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east, the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it's changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people. These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.
The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world's diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.
Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in 10 years. The trade body Forest Industries tells us that "global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow". If, in the digital age, we won't reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?
Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don't need. Perhaps it's unsurprising that fantasies about colonising space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced.
As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year's predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we miraculously reduced the consumption of raw materials by 90%, we delay the inevitable by just 75 years. Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.
The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth's living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century's great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.
Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn't worthy of mention. That's how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.
I don't know if its just because i've done a crisis of nature module, but im seeing more and more of these articles which are basically saying we are fucked.
We've been in the post-ecological stage - where we believed that improving tech will save us, make us more efficient, and control the problems caused by modernity. basically a belief in reflexive modernity.
we know seem to be in a post-post ecological-stage - weve gone too far. capitalism driven by fossil fuels basically means this is impossible. rather than becoming more efficient we are using more than ever and becoming less sustainable.
So, does anyone have a less gloomy view?
Or are we basically fucked?
Over-fishing, deforestation, inevitable and irreversible anthropogenic climate change, pesticides, gm crops, food shortages, over population, resource conflicts, water shortages.
how fucked are we?
what can we do?
is change realistic?
is it too late?
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:09 pm
by _ronzlo_
see: Thomas Piketty.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:14 pm
by DJoe
dont really know much about economics, i always get a bit lost during those parts of my course. whats he saying?
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:17 pm
by Muncey
_ronzlo_ wrote:see: Thomas Piketty.
Really? Are you just name dropping for the sake of name dropping? His books about wealth inequality, could have picked a number of other economics/ecological books way more relevant.
Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson is well worth a read on this topic. Striving for constant economic growth, wages stagnant since 70s but we've got more shit than we've ever needed, consumerism mentality ect.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:18 pm
by _ronzlo_
DJoe wrote:dont really know much about economics, i always get a bit lost during those parts of my course. whats he saying?
Exactly what's stated above with the hard math & economic theory to back it up. Our current flavor of capitalism is supremely unsustainable and hitting the wall is not an if but a when.
Muncey wrote:Really? Are you just name dropping for the sake of name dropping? His books about wealth inequality, could have picked a number of other economics/ecological books way more relevant.
Hardly. His relevance is particularly important because he's not coming out of established left/right milieus - he is, or at least seriously appears to be, pretty objective about the whole thing and is not advocating for a particular platform shift so much as saying "we need to start doing something or shit's gonna fall apart."
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:21 pm
by DJoe
my knowledge on this all is pretty much rooted in biology/sociology/ecology/environmental science
but from the economics i've read, it seems that our current model of capitalism is unsustainable and promotes inequality
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:32 pm
by Muncey
_ronzlo_ wrote:
DJoe wrote:dont really know much about economics, i always get a bit lost during those parts of my course. whats he saying?
Exactly what's stated above with the hard math & economic theory to back it up. Our current flavor of capitalism is supremely unsustainable and hitting the wall is not an if but a when.
Muncey wrote:Really? Are you just name dropping for the sake of name dropping? His books about wealth inequality, could have picked a number of other economics/ecological books way more relevant.
Hardly. His relevance is particularly important because he's not coming out of established left/right milieus - he is, or at least seriously appears to be, pretty objective about the whole thing and is not advocating for a particular platform shift so much as saying "we need to start doing something or shit's gonna fall apart."
Fair enough, came across a bit aggressive lol I was just curious as I've only read the introduction then had to stop due to exams, pretty meaty book. Read loads of reviews it doesn't really come across as important in relation to the above article though.
David Harvey (Marxist) and Ha-Joon Chang (Cambridge Economist) have written some worth while things to check out in relation to capitalism failing but I guess like you said they're quite politically active (Ha-Joon Chang actually argues you can't have Economics without Politics).
The Tim Jackson book isn't really an economics book I'd say, doesn't really go past explaining Keynesian government spending.
Popular view, ecologically, seems we may be too far gone. Tim basically concludes the whole economic system would need to be re-written, GDP and other measures to include ecological consequences, a big push in Government spending/investment towards green on a global scale (Korea are pretty much the only ones who've done it so far) and the western world pretty much has to be 'reprogrammed' out of our consumerism habit... all that to maybe have a chance. Pretty grim outlook tbh I don't think its that bad.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:47 pm
by Jizz
mannheim bruv, phallusy in ideology
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:57 pm
by particle-jim
Tbh you shouldn't need to know much about economics to realise that the concept of continual growth in a world with finite resources is completely ludicrous, it's pretty obvious really
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 9:03 pm
by Sheff
Switch to nuclear power globally, dump all the waste on the moon
ignore me
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 2:45 am
by test_recordings
particle-jim wrote:Tbh you shouldn't need to know much about economics to realise that the concept of continual growth in a world with finite resources is completely ludicrous, it's pretty obvious really
As soon as someone starts talking about big numbers though human brains turn off though. It's called the scope-severity effect: the bigger the effect, the less relevant, and so less important to the person listening, it seems. Same thing with climate change etc, just saying big numbers and facts at people won't make them do anything, they need to have it spelled out to them on a level they can see, hear, feel, etc or they will subconsciously ignore it.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 3:01 am
by wysockisauce
Who cares I'll be dead by then.
Build a Dyson swarm, problem solved.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 3:06 am
by Dystinkt
I reckon we're pretty much fucked, may as well skin up, stick Kahn's outlook mix on and enjoy the last of our civilisation as we know it
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 3:27 am
by titchbit
^this. i don't see humans living (at least on Earth) for more than maybe 10,000 more years but that could be way off. we'll probably colonize the moon - then mars. build massive fake earths, etc. overpopulation will just create ways too many problems unless we limit people to having 2 kids that is.
in terms of economic growth, i dunno, haven't really thought about it or studied it enough. i know most economics takes for granted that growth is essential for prosperity to exist, but it seems clear to me that a more authoritarian economic system (communism?) could force zero % growth while retaining at least some prosperity.
i'm just happy this thread isn't about how the US budget deficit is doomed. that's what i thought it was gonna be from the title
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 7:42 am
by nowaysj
dubunked wrote:10,000 more years
This is so far beyond wishful thinking.
==
There is no likely good way out of this situation.
Perhaps we could halt population growth, transition into negative economic growth for a century without wars, hopefully develop some deus ex machina technology, ie cold fusion, controllable hot fusion. We might be able to get this whole thing under control, relatively intact, restore our soil, water, air, ecosystems, as well as maintain a fairly robust, carbon neutral/negative society.
I don't think it is likely.
I've got money on global war, likely NBC dimensions, shut down of global trade or even regional trade, as well as a cutoff of simple access to energy, food, and potable water for most of the world's population.
Global population could be reduced by 90-95% far quicker than I think you think.
There are plans for continuity of government for just this scenario, and there likely would be a surviving class, an inheriting class.
Forget academics with questionable motives and skewed or limited inputs, just run your own thought experiments: just try to imagine that you and your colleagues owned most of the world. Like literally owned it, like owned the economies, the political, ideological, and military systems. You have no other moral compass other than the rightness of your own actions. Resources are running out. Population is swelling. The atmosphere is become unstable to the point of unlivability. Fiat currencies with hyperinflation built into their fundamentals are getting close to the feedback loops. Technology is advancing in locations and directions you can't control - significant life extending technology, cloning technology. Increasingly destructive and democratized technology is advancing, remote as well as autonomously controlled vehicles are emerging. Weaponized biological technology capable of targeting individuals, families, or races is emerging, and would not require state actors to develop or deploy. The nuclear genie is slipping further out of the bottle.
And more and more people are becoming aware of all of it, and how tight the web of ownership is. The window to act is closing.
What would you do to hold on to your possession and ensure that your family continues ownership? Would you blow the whole system away on the chance of building a new sustainable, and more importantly, totally controllable system? I really think you/they would.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 9:53 am
by DJoe
wysockisauce wrote:Who cares I'll be dead by then.
Build a Dyson swarm, problem solved.
from a climate change perspective we are already feeling the effects. even the very most conservative models have the earth being 2 degrees warmer than 1990 by 2050. that might not seem like a lot but thats a huge difference.
you wont be dead by then
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 10:36 am
by ezza
hmmm according to facebook this is gonna save the world
so everyone just chill
pretty sick idea though tbf
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 11:07 am
by Muncey
particle-jim wrote:Tbh you shouldn't need to know much about economics to realise that the concept of continual growth in a world with finite resources is completely ludicrous, it's pretty obvious really
This really just highlights the incompetence of mainstream economics, total disregard for effects outside the models and disregard for what people actually say. I was shocked to read Keynes, the champion of spending lead growth, said that we'd all want to achieve a steady-state economy one day. Those bits get left out and ignored.
Although... I disagree that the concept of continual growth is completely ludicrous, depends what you define as growth and how much we rely on finite resources. Its possible for continual growth if we aren't so reliant on finite resources or at least replace what we use up. Thats why there's been a call for the introduction of other economic measures like GDP but take into consideration these limited resources. To put it into a smaller scale analogue it would be like nobody ever driving again because they rely on finite resources instead of trying to find, and successfully switching to, a better and renewable alternative.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 11:32 am
by hubb
Piketty in basic terms, states that there's no trickle down effect in wealth on a global scale. And he has proof but he's very much leftwing though.
Re: If we can't change our economic system, our number's up
