The
impossibility of the growth model always misses the power of resource
displacement. We use scarce resources only because it is presently
cheap. When that changes a new resource is applied. This whole blog
has been about discovering those inevitable options and telling you
about it.
After
seven years, I how know that energy will be almost free and that it
will be available to every human on Earth. I even know how to
deliver it. Otherwise, sustainable surface agriculture can support
100,000,000,000 souls in comfort and delight and fabulous health.
If we
then get bored we can then go underground and we should anyway to
provide refugia in case of cosmic emergency. That is for many more
such one hundred billions as we occupy thre dimensional space.
This
blog has shown us that it is a done deal.
The Impossibility
of Growth Demands a New Economic System
Why collapse and
salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.
by George Monbiot
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(1).The trajectory of compound growth shows that the
scouring of the planet has only just begun. We simply can't go on
this way.
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(2). 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 were miraculously to vanish, 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(3). 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 the
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, as
the most accessible reserves have been 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(4), the Ecuadorean government decided
that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national
park(5). 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 blackmail or you could
see it as 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(6), 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(7).
The UK oil company
Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park,
Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo(8); 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(9), 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(10,11). 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 ten
years(12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that
“global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will
continue to grow.”(13) 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 the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our
problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced(14).
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 were miraculously to reduce the consumption of
raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15).
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.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853
2. Grantham expressed
this volume as 1057 cubic metres. In his paper We Need To Talk
About Growth, Michael Rowan translated this as 2.5 billion
billion solar systems.
(http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/). This
source gives the volume of the solar system (if it is
treated as a sphere) at 39,629,013,196,241.7 cubic kilometres, which
is roughly 40 x 1021 cubic metres. Multiplied by 2.5 billion
billion, this gives 1041cubic metres. So, unless I’ve got the wrong
figure for the volume of the solar system or screwed my units up,
which is eminently possible, Michael Rowan’s translation looks like
an underestimate. I’ll stick with his figure though, as I don’t
have much confidence in my own. Any improvements, comments or
corrections via the contact form gratefully received.
3. EA Wrigley, 2010.
Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University
Press.
4. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/12/western-antarctic-ice...
5. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/ecuador-amazon-yasuni...
6. http://www.entornointeligente.com/articulo/2559574/ECUADOR-Gobierno-conc...
7. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/16/ecuador-approves-yasuni-ama...
8. http://www.wwf.org.uk/how_you_can_help/virunga/
9. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-report-billi...
10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10598473/Fracking-could...
11. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-report-billi...
12. Philippe Sibaud,
2012. Opening Pandora’s Box: The New Wave of Land
Grabbing by the Extractive Industries and the Devastating Impact on
Earth. The Gaia
Foundation.http://www.gaiafoundation.org/opening-pandoras-box
13. http://www.forestindustries.fi/industry/paper_cardboard_converted/paper_...
14. https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/articles/space-race-over
15. Michael Rowan,
2014. We Need To Talk About Growth (And we need to do the sums as
well.) http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/
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