Limits to Growth

Climate breakdown will hit global growth by a third, say central banks (11/8/2024)

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth (7/12/2021)

"Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer" Growth Delusion: David Pilling

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. In 2021, it fell on July 29. https://www.overshootday.org/

#SDGs
1-No Poverty
2-No Hunger
3-Health
4-Education
5-Gender Equality
6-Water& sanitation
7-Clean energy
8-Economies
9-Innovation
10-Reduced inequality
11-Cities
12-Reduce Consumption
13-Climate
14-Ocean
15-Biodiversity
16-Peace
17-Partnerships @ShinKoyamada @RobertoValentUN pic.twitter.com/Eas8ChK9Kv
— SDG2030 (@SDG2030) August 21, 2019

“We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.” UK Government-backed Scientific Model Flags Risk of Civilization’s Collapse by 2040

...the costs of climate change, if not addressed, will be equivalent to losing 5 percent (and potentially as much as 20 percent) of the global gross domestic product (GDP) each year, now and forever." Hundreds of millions of people could be threatened with hunger, water shortages, and severe economic deprivation. "Climate change is the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen." from the Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change. (updated 8/2011 in Technology Review Magazine).

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function."
Albert A. Bartlett, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Colorado.

Shrink the Economy, Save the World? (6/8/2024)

Republicans are opposed to any moves toward sustainability. A vote for them is a threat to future generations.

The 1972, “Limits to Growth” computer model and study projected a business as usual mid century collapse would be caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution resulting in global warming. Only specific measures aimed a curbing growth and limit population could avoid collapse.

Strong criticism followed. “With time, the debate on the Limits book veered more and more on the political side. In 1997, the Italian economist Giorgio Nebbia noted that the reaction against the study had arrived from at least four different fronts. One was from those who saw the book as a threat to the growth of their businesses and industries. A second set was that of professional economists, who saw it as a threat to their dominance in advising on economic matters. The Catholic Church provided further ammunition for the critics, being piqued at the suggestion that overpopulation was one of the major causes of the problems. Then, the political left in the Western World saw the study as a scam of the ruling class, designed to trick workers into believing that the proletarian paradise was not a practical goal. And this is a clearly incomplete list; forgetting the political right, the believers in infinite growth, politicians seeking for easy solutions to all problems, and many others.”

Recent work updated the model showing our business-as-usual mentality will spark a decline of economic growth within the next decade, but a total collapse by 2040. Data updated to 2021 shows we are still on track for collapse.

Growth can cause further environmental degradation, unlimited devastation. If you doubt this see this video: The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function. Albert A. Bartlett, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Colorado.

Population has already outgrown the carrying capacity of the planet. The outlook is not good. Global warming will cause climate collapse, and most likely the destruction of the natural world.

We should be seeking a balance with nature. For example: our oxygen is generated in forests we are fast cutting down, but it also comes from small creatures in the ocean which are threatened by acidification.

Growth is not the answer, equitable distribution is. There are obvious limits to growth and we have already exceeded them. To reach some kind of sustainability we will need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and convert to renewable energy. If we don´t, we will face planet wide catastrophe as a hostile climate devastates ever more frequently, as the ecology degrades, crops fail, food shortages widen, and the environment collapses.

"Society must cease to look upon "progress" as something desirable. `Eternal Progress’ is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a `steadily expanding economy,’ but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous." Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

Take economic growth. There is strong historical evidence that when the economy stalls, democracy fractures. From the 1890s to the 2010s, the absence of economic growth has repeatedly fuelled the rise of populist anger. Voters need a sense that the future will be materially better than the past if they are to resist the appeal of politicians who tell them that the present is the fault of someone else. The economist Benjamin Friedman has made this case most forcefully: the reason growth matters is not for its own sake, but because the healthy functioning of democracy depends on it... Could we step off even if we wanted to ? How Democracy Ends: David Runciman Pg 192

In the past fifty years we've doubled our irrigated cropland and tripled our water consumption to meet global food demand. In the next fifty, we must double food production again. Is there really enough water to pull that off ? In his book When the Rivers Run Dry environmental journalist Fred Pearce describes in vivid, firsthand detail the stark reality of impending water crises in more than thirty countries around the globe. We now withdraw so much water that many of our mightiest and most historic rivers - like the Nile, the Colorado, the Yellow, the Indus - have barely a trickle left to meet the sea. (From the World in 2050: Laurence C Smith

By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages. And ecosystems around the world will suffer even more. WWF

It is clear that the United States has no established policies to guide interactions between government, growth, unemployment, and inflation. The need to develop long-term policies becomes ever more urgent as the country moves for the first time from a history of growth into the turbulent pressures accompanying the transition from growth to one of the many possible kinds of equilibrium. We need to choose and work toward a desirable kind of equilibrium before we arrive at a point where the system imposes its own choice of regrettable consequences. JAY W. FORRESTER (1995)

We are doomed if, in the post-Covid-19 world, we cannot abandon non-essentials (8/10/2020)

Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think (10/23/2019)

[Can] human-engineered social systems from economies to cities, which have only existed for the past five thousand years or so, continue to coexist with the ¨natural¨ biological world from which they emerged and which has been around for several billion years. To sustain more than 10 billion people living in harmony with the biosphere at a standard of living and quality of life comparable to what we now have requires that we develop a deep understanding of the principles and underlying system dynamics of this social-environmental coupling. ... It is implicitly taken for granted, and often taken as unquestioned dogma, that as long as human beings remain inventive we will stay ahead of any impending threat by continuous and ever more ingenious innovations. (from Scale, The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West.)

"But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (pg 196).

Pentagon Video Warns of “Unavoidable” Dystopian Future for World’s Biggest Cities

Republicans often say that 'growth' can solve many of our economic problems. Rising incomes can be favorable for openness, tolerance, and democracy, but "these precious features are at risk if economies falter and incomes stagnate." Benjamin M. Friedman's book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth".

The only limit to the damage that the right-wing and it's allied Republican, Tea Party, Birchers, and other fringe, radical factions is the destruction of the habitability of the planet. You will find some of the explanation here of how that can happen. Technology will be incapable of meeting the challenges. Here's the outlook.

"...we live in a world where economic growth is generally seen as both beneficent and necessary _ the more, the better; where past growth has brought us to a perilous state environmentally; where we are poised for unprecedented increments in growth; where this growth is proceeding with wildly wrong market signals, including prices that do not incorporate environmental costs or reflect the needs of future generations; where a failed politics has not meaningfully corrected the routinely deploying technology that was created in an environmentally unaware era; where there is no hidden hand or inherent mechanism adequate to correct the destructive tendencies. So, right now, one can only conclude that growth is the enemy of environment. Economy and environment remain in collision." The Bridge at the End of the World: Gus Speth (2008)

Speth also lists the kinds of pathological growth that can occur. (from the UNDP Human Development Report 1996)