Andrew Simms is nef‘s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Like a patient waiting for hospital scan results, this week the government nervously anticipates new growth figures for the economy. Any sign of an increase and relief could quickly lead to self-satisfaction about its handling of the recession. Approving nods may be seen later this week in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Why? Because among political and business classes, growth, measured by rising GDP, is considered always a “good thing”. But is it?
The banking crisis taught us that when things look good on paper, if the underlying accounting system is faulty, it can conceal high risk and imminent disaster – as Jared Diamond put it in Collapse, his book about societies throughout history that fell by wrongly estimating the resilience of their environmental life-support systems. What looks like wealth might just be a one-off fire sale of irreplaceable natural capital. Ecologically speaking, he writes, “an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cashflow”.
To avoid collapse the economy has to operate within thresholds that do not critically undermine the things that we depend on on a daily basis. They’re often interconnected, like a sufficiently stable climate, productive farmland, fresh water and a healthy diversity of plants and animals.
On climate change, a new piece of research by the New Economics Foundation thinktank looks at which rates of global economic growth are compatible with prevention of a dangerous level of warming.
It shows that, even with the most optimistic likely uptake of low-carbon energy, it is seemingly impossible to reconcile a growing global economy with a good likelihood of limiting global temperature rise to 2C, the agreed political objective of the European Union, and widely considered the maximum rise to which humanity can adapt without serious difficulty.
In this context, Adair Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority and the Committee on Climate Change, refers to the pursuit of growth for its own sake as a “false god“. Other work by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University concludes that: “Economic growth in the OECD cannot be reconciled with a 2C, 3C or even 4C characterisation of dangerous climate change.”
The problem is that growth drowns out the gains from increased efficiency and technological innovation. The New Economics Foundation study looks at by how much growth would need to be delinked from fossil fuels – the so-called carbon intensity of the economy – to reach the mark of climate safety suggested by Nasa climate scientist James Hansen.
Having improved steadily in the late last century, “carbon intensity” changes flatlined over the last decade and even worsened in some years. Against this trend, to avoid dangerous climate change the fall in carbon intensity would need to improve by more than two hundredfold. The economic doctrine of growth collides headlong with the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Only so much energy efficiency can be squeezed from a system. The other problem is the counter-intuitive rebound effect spotted by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 when he wrote, “It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” Increased efficiency tends to lower costs and perversely drives up overall resource use.
Writing in the science journal Nature last year, a multidisciplinary group of scientists identified nine key safe-use planetary resource boundaries, three of which had already been transgressed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle to do with farming). We are on the cusp of several others.
So, this week, if you find yourself cheering a return to growth, you may be inadvertently celebrating our acceleration toward an ecological cliff edge and an opportunity missed to find a new, better direction. For example, the economist Herman Daly points out that full employment could be easier to achieve in an economy not addicted to growth because it would reverse “the historical trend of replacing labour with machines and inanimate energy”.
Both the desirability and possibility of never ending growth goes unquestioned in mainstream economics. It’s odd, because the world would be a very strange place if the same was applied in nature. For example, from birth until around six weeks old, a hamster doubles its weight each week. If, it didn’t stop and continued doubling each week, on its first birthday, you would be looking after a very hungry nine billion-tonne pet hamster. There is of course one thing in nature that grows uncontrollably. It’s called cancer and tends to kill its host. So when those growth figures come out, let’s hope the government scans the results for what they really mean.
nef‘s new report Growth isn’t Possible was published today.
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25 January, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Edward Barrow
I could say, “Oh no here is that old 70’s zero growth canard again” – I read the Blueprint for Survival too.
I think you have it wrong about growth but right about almost everything else. What we need to do is not to stop growth, but unlink growth from resource-consumption.On the production side, developed economies are already doing it. It takes far fewer joules to make a pound of added value in IT than it does in steelmaking. The current problem is that we then go and spend that low-energy pound on high-energy consumption.
Growth can come from “better” just as much as it can come from “more”. If we keep on thinking about “more” and not about “better”, then sure, growth is unsustainable. The resource needed for “less and better” is human creativity, which is – to all intents and purposes -unlimited. That’s where the growth comes from, and that’s what we should be encouraging.
25 January, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Andy Wimbush
@Edward Barrow
What you’re talking about is so-called ‘decoupling’. It’s a fine idea in principle, but in order to even aspire to it we need to know that it’s actually possible. Tim Jackson’s excellent book/report Prosperity Without Growth is worth a look in this respect. His 5th chapter is entitled “The Myth of Decoupling” which examines whether improvements in efficiency would ever be enough. He suggests they aren’t and provides the arithmetic to prove it.
Similarly, nef‘s latest report Growth isn’t Possible wonders whether we could ever get to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent while also maintaining a growth rate of 3 per cent per year. Well, theoretically we could – but the carbon intensity of the global economy would need to fall by 95 per cent by 2050 (compared to 2002) or 6.3 per cent per year, an almost five-fold increase in the yearly average between 1965 and 2002. Add to this the fact that, between 2000 and 2007, the carbon intensity of the economy effectively flat-lined. This means that in order to achieve a 350ppm target, the annual fall in the carbon intensity of economy would need to improve by more than 200-fold. For each year that the target was missed, the necessary improvements would grow higher still.
And don’t forget that if peak oil rears its head during this time period and we get more use of coal to liquid fuels, then that pretty much blows our carbon intensity sky high.
Andy
25 January, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Edward Barrow
What does zero-growth mean? It means that there are no improvements in our quality of life from year to year or from generation to generation. I think that economic decoupling is far more achievable than taking away the basic human drive to improve our lives.
I accept absolutely your points about the carbon intensity of the economy; and I also accept that reducing carbon use to acceptable levels in our carbon-intensive economy is likely to lead to -at best – zero-growth economy; I just don’t think that it is humanly sustainable in the long run. It’s probably not even politically-achievable in the short run.
Jackson looks at the evidence for decoupling, and shows that (in developed economies) efficiencies on the production side are lost as the extra wealth is spent on more stuff imported from China (I paraphrase). I don’t think that’s necessary. There are large sectors of our economy which are already low-energy on both the consumption and the production side: for example, music. The creative sector is a net contributor to growth. If I spend my money on new music, it contributes to growth. One of the problems with this is that people for some reason are unwilling to spend money on intangibles – there has to be an over-priced t-shirt made in a sweatshop in bangladesh as a proxy for the intangible – but take the t-shirt out of the equation, and there is with the creative sector real productivity, real pleasure in the consumption, and real growth – but little or no energy use.
Low-energy activities, including the production and enjoyment of creative material, are under-represented in the economy and in the metrics – the slave-made t-shirt is one example where the tangible displaces value from the intangible, but the giant 3D plasma screen might be a better one.
My objection is to an economic system, and metrics, which value “more” more than “better”, and I think that by endorsing zero-growth you are actually endorsing that economy. If we stop thinking that it’s only worth buying ten £3 t-shirts from Primark, and instead buy one £30 organic-cotton t-shirt that will last ten times as long as the Primark ones, we will be moving in the right direction. “Less and better” is a sound slogan for sustainable growth, and it’s much more politically-acceptable than a 0% annual growth rate with all that that entails.
25 January, 2010 at 11:44 pm
lee
You need a NAME for your “New Economic Model”
Without a name people have nothing to get behind.
A word is needed that every intelligent person can get behind and can rival what we have in place now, so that everyone knows that we do not beleive in Capitalism. Only with one voice can we implement change.
Call your system ECOLISM…..
26 January, 2010 at 12:20 am
greendealmanchester
The problem for me is that the NEF work doesn’t really engage with the root causes of growth – a system that makes capital grow.
The place to start is maybe with the definition of capitalism. I think Tim Jackson for example gets this wrong – he’ defines it as private ownership of the means of production, but that ignores the notion of capitalism as a system that makes capital accumulate, expand – via extraction of surplus value and natural resource exploitation. His definition would let the Chinese system off the hook while this latter (Immauel Wallerstein inspired) one would clearly include Chinese State capitalism as well as Chinese private capitalism, as well as the (expanding) capital on which say local authority pension schemes depend.
It is the motor of capital accumulation that is at the root of growth – and this explains why growth is so locked in to the logic, the ideology, the operation of the present system, and conceptions of need, identity and so on. To ignore this is a classical Fabian style of politics – trying to influence those in power by the force of better ideas.
If you are still with me, then some questions suggest themselves:
What would a system that made products, even profits, but that didn’t expand its capital, look like?
Is that what is meant by steady state? If so we could look to an alliance of small private businesses, coops, state and mutual enterprises, in other words non-Capitalistic (non-capital expanding) enterprises.
What kind of cut (by taxation, or other mutual aid arrangements) can public welfare take from these for social needs?
Given that a non-expanding capital-based system produces less profit, is the tax take going to be enough – with and without redistribution?
What would this social system look like?
How would the social (including class) interests in this system work?
How do you get there? i.e. who are the political actors – the subjects that will produce this kind of profound social change? Where is the social movement, the politics in NEF’s thinking – or is it just that we all send a hamster to Gordon? (OK I did but I’ve no idea why!).
26 January, 2010 at 4:37 am
fpteditors
You have nailed it. But what to do? Governments can’t even oppose fossil-fuels, let alone oppose growth. What power can change the human course? There is not enough time to convince the likes of Barrow–and to thus shift the center of gravity in the educated classes.
We need to energize the general population around policies that lead to qualitative change. These policies must pass the test of Jevons’ principle. We believe free public transit is a campaign that qualifies.
There are 50 million net new cars every year. This must be slowed, stopped, and reversed. There is only one path to that goal, replace the cars with buses, then streetcars, then return to walking and bicycles. Sprawl is reversed and local agriculture comes back. Free public transit is politically attractive and gets us there.
Fortunately there is already a growing international movement. We could use some good economists, however.
26 January, 2010 at 7:56 am
The Impossible Hamster « The other realm
[…] I can’t do the information justice. So, for more, I suggest you go directly to the NEF Triple Crunch Blog […]
26 January, 2010 at 10:16 am
Andy Wimbush
@greendealmanchester
You’ll find the answers to your questions in our report The Great Transition. That’s where we outline how taxation, social welfare and business works in a steady-state economy. Have a look here: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/great-transition
That report also deals with many of the questions of redistribution that you mention. We’ll be doing more on the subject of income inequality this year. In the meantime, I recommend that you take a look at The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, if you haven’t already. Also see their new organisation, The Equality Trust.
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/
26 January, 2010 at 10:29 am
Andy Wimbush
@Edward Barrow
Economic growth does not straightforwardly translate into improvements in our quality of life. While it is true that in poorer countries, economic growth is vital (and the authors of Growth Isn’t Possible say so), in developed countries like the UK increasing GDP does not make people more satisfied with life. GDP has doubled since the 1970s, but our life satisfaction has flat-lined.
So, if we want quality of life, why not just go straight for that? Why not implement policies that will actually improve our well-being, rather than pursuing it indirectly through economic growth? Through detailed surveys and National Accounts of Well-being we can start measuring well-being and organising our politics around it.
See also: A Well-being Manifesto for a Flourishing Society.
26 January, 2010 at 11:53 am
Dr. Lekha Nath Bhattarai
I think growth is necessary but sustainablity also. I think more growth is needed for the poor economic areas but there should not be more growth in developed areas of the world. why the developed country need more growth just for aditional consumtion at the cost of the survival for the whole humanity or organism of the universe.
26 January, 2010 at 12:41 pm
ejoftheweb
I think we are probably working towards the same point, but attacking different symptoms. My argument is that it is wrong to blame growth as such; rather, it is the GDP metric and ultimately the structure of the money-based economy. Bhutan tries for “Gross national happiness”. I don’t think that it is in human nature to be satisfied with just the same as before: we are a curious, naturally innovative species. We want to make things better for us and for our kin. In a post on my own blog
I have suggested that sustainable growth is pretty much the same as innovation, and that a zero-growth economy is one that must stifle innovation.
26 January, 2010 at 12:43 pm
wendy
Yet again,population growth has been omitted from the discussion:the numbers will never add up-no matter what alternative is proposed-if we don’t take ever increasing numbers of humans into account..
26 January, 2010 at 2:46 pm
ejoftheweb
(ejoftheweb aka edward barrow)
@wendy: yes, population growth is a challenge. Until the start of the industrial era, it correlates strongly with economic growth; with industrialisation, economic growth correlates more closely to energy consumption than population growth.
That was population decoupling, we now need physical resource decoupling.
But people aren’t just a problem, they’re also part of the solution.
Population growth is easing off. In the 70s, when the Blueprint for Survival was published, received opinion was that world population might stabilise at 50bn people, an impossibly malthusian number that has been revised downwards consistently since then, to 15bn and now around 9bn. But actually, the problem is not so much population growth as bringing the living standards of all 6 or 9 bn people upto the levels we consider acceptable in the developed world.
Existing resources just aren’t enough to do that the way we did it, which is why we need innovation and creativity.
26 January, 2010 at 4:48 pm
wendy
Population growth is actually increasing here in the UK-and in the US-to name but 2 industrialised countries.
What would life be like with 70 million and rising in the UK-already one of the most densely populated countries? How would sustainable growth manifest itself?
How may we achieve the aim of improving living standards for up to 9 billion people without exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity?
Yes we need creativity and innovation but we also need a mature aklnowledgement of our responsibilities to the entire biosphere-to its resources and to our fellow creatures.
How can resource decoupling possibly work with an ever rising population?
The jury is still out on whether population growth is actually levelling off.
‘Less or fewer and better’ applies equally aptly to sustainability for human numbers.
26 January, 2010 at 7:13 pm
greendealmanchester
Andy
This is what the Great transformation says on the subject:-
“For a start it must give priority to preventing harm, rather than dealing with the consequences. Today’s state is buckling under the strain of dealing with problems once they have arisen. Yet failure to prevent avoidable needs arising is unsustainable, unethical and unjust. Unsustainable because in a low-growth or no-growth economy, there will be a lot less money to pay for public services: funds for meeting needs that cannot be avoided should not be wasted on meeting those that could have been prevented. Unethical because avoidable risks – including obesity, mental illness, homelessness, incarceration and educational underachievement – undermine people’s well-being. Unjust because the burden of risk falls most heavily on the poor.”
I don’t disagree – but this poses the questions very well, not the answers. Elsewhere there are some proposals on taxation and ideas on the Lifeworld (or as you call it the Core Economy), but I don’t see in this passage or elsewhere (yet) a worked out approach to 1) what level of funding the welfare syste m will need in a no growth society (I agree it could be lower than in a growth society), 2) what level of funding could be obtained from the no growth economy, and therefore whterh this will be sufficieint or not.
Now I’m not trying to be difficult – I believe in the necessity of no growth and I believe in the ethic of redistribution (and the GT has some useful ideas on this) but I think we all need more, especially if we are to convince those still locked in the old paradigm.
26 January, 2010 at 7:21 pm
ejoftheweb
Increasing population in the US and the UK is an anomaly in global terms and it’s mainly due to immigration, because immigrant families tend to be of child-bearing age. Even so, migrants usually have smaller families in their adopted countries than they would have had at home (although with better healthcare, more may survive to adulthood). The demographics of both countries are also affected by the post-war baby-boom, so that another factor in recent population growth is that the children of the baby-boomers are now breeding. Both countries are almost certainly better off for having more young people than countries with a stable, but ageing population like Japan, and there is a looming problem in China, where the one-child policy is having all sorts of unintended consequences..
Population is closely linked to economics and growth. For example, in Africa, in rural areas, a child becomes a net contributor to the family at about seven; in urban areas, it’s about twelve. So in rural areas, large families tend to be wealthier, in urban areas, they’re poorer. Urbanisation tends to reduce population growth. Generally, it’s economics, rather than contraception, that determines family size, so to deal with population, you have to deal with poverty. Back to economic growth.
Population is about people and families, and, yes, we do need to move to have smaller families, and we need to create societies and economies where the childless life is fulfilling. Guess what, those tend to be richer, more developed societies.
There’s a disturbing undercurrent to a lot of discussion about population: “we’ve got to stop the blighters from breeding”: and it’s only a short step from “fewer and better people” to eugenics.
26 January, 2010 at 9:01 pm
whatagame
Two issues related to the limits to growth that I don’t quite grasp in these pieces:
1. How do we determine when we reach the production possibilities frontier of either a national or global economy? In other words, when do we know that we have no alternative than to convert to a steady state system? Malthus said we reached it a few centuries ago. The neo-Malthusians claimed we reached in the 1970’s. Does technology not just play a role in providing substitutable alternatives to present goods and services we deem to be inferior and costly; but also in spurring growth with superior goods and services?
2. What happens to immigrants in a steady state economy? Assuming that limits have been placed on growth and redistributive policies have been put in place to alleviate poverty, what happens when new people try t o come into the system? Doesn’t the economy have to grow to some extent to continue to absorb those people who will be drawn to it because it still offers a better material life in the near future?
27 January, 2010 at 12:23 am
Lee
It’s very hard to get over 60 years of brainwashing.
It’s hard to get away from notions that are banged into our heads over 60 years, notions like Growth = Progress. We are so used to growth meaning MORE possessions more consumption, therfore MORE happiness we are incapable of thinking anything else. Whatever happened to getting pleasure from personal growth, growth of a community project, growing your skills, growing vegetables!!. Mostly whatever happened to intellectual growth? It’s gone. Just turn on your TV or open a paper and look to see how dumbed down everything is. Celerities, ADVERTS, sport, entertainment, shopping, trivia, gossip etc all designed to divert us from intellectual growth.
Pro “Capitalist” brainwashing + the media also forbids us to talk about Population – EJOFTHEWEB sums it up nicely, this brainwashed idea “discussion about population….it’s only a short step from….eugenics” We are adults we can talk about this. It is wrong to impose our values on other countries but it’s not wrong to discuss as adults the Pro’s and Con’s a larger or smaller UK population and how this impacts on our environment.
What about animal population, Whale population, Fish population, Tigers, Lions…. More people = less habitat and less diversity. How many more species do we wish to become extinct, how many more wildernesses concreted over, forests chopped down, pollutants in rivers before we have adult conversations about population. A population conversation that includes all life.
GREENDEALMANCHESTER; Capitalism is a very loose phrase. Its essentially as you wrote, designed to make money grow, but beyond that it now is many things and one of those is a giant Casino. The economic reforms in China are called Marxist Economics! A name is just a name, its a wholes system of interconnected mechanism designed and leveraging profit from every asset on the planet. lets get a new system that puts the planet & people first.
DR LEKHA NATH BHATTARAI: Developing nations do not need our brand of western growth. They need Economic equality firstly. It’s hardly fair that European nations went over to Africa, took its wealth, took its people and imposed years of misery by subverting their politics. The money we stole is in our banks to this day, which we now give back to those counties on the form of loans, with massive interest and economic strings attached. They need equality and justice first and that I hope will bring “improvements” not growth.
EJOFTHEWEB: Capitalism Stifles innovation but we have 60 years of brainwashing to say how great it is. Zero growth, with the right global economic system will mean more innovating and more progress but not more consumerism! innovation that will benefit us all in many new ways. I wrote about it here: [http://ecolism.blogspot.com/2010/01/ecolism-innovation-invention.html]
The important thing is we can all see there are some HUGE problems facing us. The route cause of all this is the current global financial system. We are mostly blinded from seeing this and talking about this. It sets the agenda for EVERYTHING, it elects our politicians, sets us against each other, fosters inequality, stifles innovation, puts profit before people…. Once you understand this it becomes very clear we need a NEW Global Economic System. Whatever system we choose will never be perfect because life is not perfect but for 99.9% of the inhabitants of this planet [including the less well off, plants and animals] the current System is a cruel self serving, totalitarian beast. Declare you are against this system, never vote for or endorse this system and declare yourself and Ecolist! [Or similar]
27 January, 2010 at 1:26 am
ejoftheweb
@lee: these are all complex issues and there are nuances to every argument. Nothing is as simple as it seems – there are good sides and bad sides to capitalism, to economic growth, to population control. I don’t agree that capitalism stifles innovation; modern capitalism has been around for say two hundred years, which have not been exactly free of innovation. I do think that financial capitalism – which is a particularly toxic mutation of the beast – has diverted innovation to destructive ends; but I also think that financial capitalism is on the verge of collapsing from its internal contradictions: ironically, this was the fate that Marx predicted for bourgeois capitalism, but which first befell Marxism itself. Bankers are behaving like the Russian aristocracy after 1905; but I think the actual revolution will happen in less than 12 years.
My argument throughout is that we have to look for the solution in people. We the people are the problem: we are greedy, selfish and stupid. But we are also smart, generous and kind. The environment matters because us people live in it; and we destroy it. But we are either smart enough to sort it out, or f*kd.
And sorry, Lee, I fundamentally disagree with you about the name. It’s much more important and much more complicated than that; it won’t be solved by the kind of hollow branding that capitalism uses to sell jeans.
27 January, 2010 at 4:51 am
Lee
Hey ejoftheweb: Thanks for posting a well reasoned and intelligent reply to my rant! 🙂 Yes I am being rather Black and White I know, but when faced with thousands of hours of daily media about the wonders of Capitalism I beleive my one little voice can afford to be a little one sided!? Perhaps you are right and a WORD cannot change the world. How would you go about uniting all those of us who care and can see the folly of [Financial] Capitalism? We need unity don’t we? I don’t think people “are greedy, selfish and stupid” any more than they are kind, generous, giving and clever. It is just that [Financial] Capitalism has exacerbated those human traits over the last 60 years and promoted them as the norm, through mass media. If a word cannot fix this, what shall we do? I feel disinclined to just sit and wait till we are f**ked.
27 January, 2010 at 9:02 am
ejoftheweb
I never said we should sit and wait! It will take a lot more than branding a movement to change the way we are conditioned to think and to behave. We have to divert innovation away from brighter plasma screens, larger 4x4s, beefier burgers, more exotic holidays or more lethal drones towards zero energy homes that are more comfortable than the draughty ones we already live in, creating diverse inclusive communities that value mutual support and cooperation over conflict and exclusion. People have to engage with the issues. I have a problem with branding: it’s too often about sidestepping critical engagement, whether it’s with a product (it’s Armani, so it must be good) or a political brand (New Labour, Caring Conservatism), or even labels like “green”, “organic”, “fair-trade”. So, I say I’m an ecolist, can I go back to watching Clarkson now?
I picked up on Wendy’s comment on population because it’s an issue you do have to engage with. Yes, there are intense population pressures. So what do we do about it? Stop people having families? Impose a one-child policy like China? These are all solutions that are even worse than the disease. You have to work towards a society where people don’t always want large families; and actually, when you look at it on a global scale, these things are already happening faster than anyone expected 30 years ago.
27 January, 2010 at 2:47 pm
fpteditors
Clean rice water with molasses –ends childhood diarrhea. Global price < USD 1 Billion. Educate all children. Global price USD 16 Billion. Both of these have shown to drop birth rates immediately and dramatically.
Instead of doing the above, we are fighting energy wars and wasting energy at an alarming rate with the private auto transport system.
1. make public transit free. 2. nutrition and education for all children. 3. gradually reconvert the suburbs to organic farms.
27 January, 2010 at 6:06 pm
wendy
4. free and accessible family planning for all;5. true equality for women;6.a re-evaluation of labour together with a minimum wage and a cap on maximum wages-including bonuses;7.an overhaul of the taxation system : taxes on pollution, reckless speculation aand plundering of the earth’s resources to replace taxes on incomes;8.fiscal incentives to promote and protect our fellow creatures-(flora and fauna).
27 January, 2010 at 6:42 pm
ejoftheweb
@wendy: 7, yes definitely an overhaul of the taxation system, it’s really broken. But there’s a basic problem with relying on the sort of taxes on bad things that you propose. Once the taxes start working to reduce the bad things, you start running out of money. Or the government finds itself in the really uncomfortable position of needing people to keep on polluting so that they raise enough tax to pay for the schools and hospitals.
28 January, 2010 at 2:43 am
fpteditors
Thanks, wendy. Join us on facebook.
28 January, 2010 at 8:35 am
David Ball
I’m probably being very naive here- but what does MONEY represent? I believe that it always finally resolves to energy. Thus spending even on things like music, as suggested above, results in the extraction of more energy. The musician, who in all probabilty is less ‘green’ than you, will spend his earnings on more goods. Even savings suffer the same fate. I believe that at present the ratio of unsustainable energy to sustainable energy is around 9:1, which I interpret to mean that 90% of our efforts to reduce energy consumption by investment are wasted.
I hope you can explain where I’m wrong!
28 January, 2010 at 9:07 am
wendy
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2009/pb4ch01_ss4
28 January, 2010 at 9:17 am
ejoftheweb
@david ball: very good question indeed! I blogged here: http://trustrans.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/what-is-money/ about it. Today, money is just numbers in a network of computers, which is somehow quite disturbing.
If money is just another form of energy, it’s because it’s a form of information, and information theory and statistical thermodynamics show that information resolves to energy, but I don’t think that the connection is strong enough for your parallels to work. Nothing is ultimately sustainable on a universal scale, but we are talking billions of years.
On the human and planetary scale, money is in the end just a measure of value in exchange, and value is always subjective.
30 January, 2010 at 7:24 am
mammon
So what’s driving this mantra of economic growth to unhealthy extremes?
Legal Tender is a legal contrivance, and when issued in the form of debt is nothing more than a pyramid/ponzi scheme. The quantification of debt wrongfully applies the algebraic concept of exponential growth – compounding interest – upon money. The distinction between usury and interest is an arbitrary legal determination with no basis in mathematics. Nothing can grow forever at an ever-increasing rate. As time moves on, the emphasis of ever-increasing growth becomes omnipresent, is quantified and institutionalized in the societal structure, encouraging over consumption, over development, and excessive expectations, pushing economic stress to its upper limit of expansion, eventually inciting conflict and spawning War to insure growth.
Economic systems of capitalism, communism, socialism, imperialism, colonialism, totalitarianism, fascism, nazism, monarchism, corporatism, and all other centralist monetary-isms maintain the monopolized control of money, and hence the control of society itself, through their own brand of Legal Tender that excludes other forms of money from the Market.
http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/18/1236759.html
7 February, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Barry E Lerner
Improbably, Malthus lives. Predictions over the last 200 years or so of us running out of this or that commodity have uniformly proved false, yet such predictions continue in their authors’ attempts to alarm us.
First, (grit your teeth), so-called climate change, if it is occurring at all, is not caused by human activity nor can it be modified by human effort. Understand that it is a scam promoted by those who are positioning themselves to become very wealthy indeed.
Second, the economic downturn in which we now find ouselves was caused not by some inherent defect of capitalism, but by politicians (Democrats all) meddling with the system. When the Feds insisted that banks lend to those who obviously could not repay, using profits from government-created Fannie and Freddie as the carrot and accusations of “red-lining” as the stick, they set the stage for the current disaster.
Third, ever since the Founding Fathers passed from the scene, politicians have in general been a sorry lot. With the occasional standout exception, they have been all too willing to sell out the national interest for a few pieces of silver to buy re-election. Their power to do this, making an end-run around the strictures of the Constitution, derives from their power to direct, and misdirect, taxation. It’s not a definitive solution to our currently increasing enslavement by Washington, but a simple, flat tax would go a long way to restoring freedom.
So let us not invent new and complex ways to force people to do this or compel them to do that, even for what initially seem to be noble and worthwhile goals, but let us rather liberate the creative genius in the individual citizen that has made of America the last best hope of freedom and dignity for all. The whole world depends on it.
8 February, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Mark Burton
hmm, I thought this blog was moderated.
9 February, 2010 at 8:12 am
ejoftheweb
@Mark Burton – yes, but should Barry Lerner’s post have been moderated? I agree it’s unclear whether or not his post is from a real human or a spambot, but I guess it’s from one of those Fox-watching Americans whose critical faculties have been entirely destroyed by the drivel he watches. If he is human, then he should be allowed to have his say; it isn’t offensive, just stupid. He obviously hasn’t picked up that this is a UK blog. Or perhaps it’s actually a really clever post from someone trying to discredit the position he appears to be taking? I almost wish they could string a coherent argument together, so that intelligent people could engage with them. But that would require them to assess evidence impartially, which would destroy their case….
9 February, 2010 at 10:50 am
Andy Wimbush
@Mark Burton
The blog is moderated to prevent spam, abusive language and ad-hominem attacks. We don’t censor someone just because they disagree with us.