One more article warning that a growth economy will doom us

By SJ Otto

Not long ago I published an article about a “no-growth economy,” called “We need to adopt a “no growth” economy for future survival,” If that is something the reader is unfamiliar with he/she is not alone. For most people, almost all people, an economy is healthy when it grows. I have proposed a no-growth or controlled growth economy and most people scratch their head and say “what?” It totally throws them off. It is like throwing a Latin proverb at them and expecting them to understand it. Like; “no growth economy? What are you talking about?” I might as well propose a system of legalized incest. Or maybe legalize heroin for sale at Wal*Mart.” When I bring that up among mainstream people at a debate I see blank stares that say the people are stunned.

So I wrote an article about the need to shift away from a “growth economy” to either a controlled growth economy or a no-growth economy. While it seems extremely radical, it really isn’t. Just recently I’ve come across an article by James Dyke, in The Conversation, “Climate change: ‘We’ve created a civilization hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’, writes Earth scientist.”

One big problem with Dyke’s analysis, it is very bleak:

“I was born in the early 1970s. This means in my lifetime the number of people on Earth has doubled, while the size of wild animal populations has been reduced by 60%. Humanity has swung a wrecking ball through the biosphere. We have chopped down over half of the world’s rainforests and by the middle of this century there may not be much more than a quarter left. This has been accompanied by a massive loss in biodiversity, such that the biosphere may be entering one of the great mass extinction events in the history of life on Earth.

What makes this even more disturbing, is that these impacts are as yet largely unaffected by climate change. Climate change is the ghosts of impacts future. It has the potential to ratchet up whatever humans have done to even higher levels. Credible assessments conclude that one in sixspecies are threatened with extinction if climate change continues.

The scientific community has been sounding the alarm over climate change for decades. The political and economic response has been at best sluggish. We know that in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to rapidly reduce emissions now.

The sudden increase in media coverage of climate change as a result of the actions of Extinction Rebellion and school strike for climate pioneer Greta Thunburg, demonstrates that wider society is waking up to the need for urgent action. Why has it taken the occupation of Parliament Square in London or children across the world walking out of school to get this message heard?

There is another way of looking at how we have been responding to climate change and other environmental challenges. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying. Exhilarating because it offers a new perspective that could cut through inaction. Terrifying as it could, if we are not careful, lead to resignation and paralysis.

Because one explanation for our collective failure on climate change is that such collective action is perhaps impossible. It’s not that we don’t want to change, but that we can’t. We are locked into a planetary-scale system that while built by humans, is largely beyond our control. This system is called the technosphere.”

He says we can’t change. That is pretty grim. To say we are doomed by our nature is very negative. It may be true. But I really don’t want to believe that. But one of the problems he sees is one that we on this site see and that is capitalism:

“It seems sensible to assume that the reason products and services are made is so that they can be bought and sold and so the makers can turn a profit. So the drive for innovation – for faster, smaller phones, for example – is driven by being able to make more money by selling more phones. In line with this, the environmental writer George Monbiot argued that the root cause of climate change and other environmental calamities is capitalism and consequently any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will ultimately fail if we allow capitalism to continue.

But zooming out from the toil of individual manufacturers, and even humanity, allows us to take a fundamentally different perspective, one that transcends critiques of capitalism and other forms of government.

Humans consume. In the first instance, we must eat and drink in order to maintain our metabolism, to stay alive. Beyond that, we need shelter and protection from physical elements.

There are also the things we need to perform our different jobs and activities and to travel to and from our jobs and activities. And beyond that is more discretional consumption: TVs, games consoles, jewellery, fashion.

The purpose of humans in this context is to consume products and services. The more we consume, the more materials will be extracted from the Earth, and the more energy resources consumed, the more factories and infrastructure built. And ultimately, the more the technosphere will grow.

The emergence and development of capitalism obviously lead to the growth of the technosphere: the application of markets and legal systems allows increased consumption and so growth. But other political systems may serve the same purpose, with varying degrees of success. Recall the industrial output and environmental pollution of the former Soviet Union. In the modern world, all that matters is growth.

The idea that growth is ultimately behind our unsustainable civilisation is not a new concept. Thomas Malthus famously argued there were limits to human population growth, while the Club of Rome’s 1972 book, Limits to Growth, presented simulation results that pointed to a collapse in global civilisation.

Today, alternative narratives to the growth agenda are, perhaps, getting political traction with an All Party Parliamentary Group convening meetings and activities that seriously consider de-growth policies. And curbing growth within environmental limits is central to the idea of a Green New Deal, which is now being discussed seriously in the US, UK, and other nations.”

At least one part of this problem was obvious. Capitalism needs to go. Many of us have fought that system for all our lives. And this is just one more article that supports our position that capitalism will provide us with the end of modern humanity as we know it. So here is one more article warning us to abandon capitalism.