|
|
Musings Report 2019-28 7-13-19 The Planetary Insanity of Eternal Economic Growth
You are receiving this email because you are one of the 500+ subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
The Planetary Insanity of Eternal Economic Growth
"Earthrise" is one of the most influential photographs ever published. Taken on the Apollo 8 mission in late December 1968 by astronaut Bill Anders, it captures Earth's uniqueness, isolation and modest scale: a blue and white dot on a vast sea of lifeless darkness.
The revelations embedded in the photo caused Anders to re-examine his religious beliefs, a self-explanatory process: the universe does not revolve around the Earth or humanity.
The revelation that strikes me is the insanity of pursuing eternal economic growth, not as an option but as the only possible path: there is literally no alternative to extracting ever greater quantities of the planet's resources to enable ever greater consumption by the planet's 7.7 billion humans.
Stripped down to its essence, this mad drive is about profit and power. The necessity is sold as the only path to prosperity for humanity, but it's really about securing wealth and power for the few.
A recent article in Scientific American magazine highlights how the idealistic impulses of protecting the planet's diverse life from the machinery of "growth" are inevitably subsumed by the necessity for profit: The Ecologists and the Mine.
Here's what these kinds of articles never say: markets cannot price in the value of non-monetized natural assets such as diverse ecosystems. Whatever cannot be monetized in this moment is worthless, as markets lack any mechanism to price in what cannot be valued by supply and demand in the moment.
There is no way to fix this flaw in markets, and attempts to do so are merely excuses deployed to enable the profitable exploitation and resulting ruin.
As for renewable energy: as my colleague Nate Hagens has observed, renewables are more properly called "rebuildables," as solar panels, windmills, etc. don't last forever but must be replaced every 20 years or so. Yes, dams last a long time, but solar panels, wind turbines, and all the other forms of "renewable" energy must be periodically replaced.
And where do the resources and energy come from to replace the immense base of "renewable" energy installations? From oil/natural gas and vast pit-mines.
As Chris Martenson noted in a recent conversation with me (paraphrasing his comment), "I'll be impressed with renewable installations when they can power the fabrication of their replacements."
This is the inconvenient reality few want to discuss publicly: none of the renewable energy sources is remotely capable of generating enough energy to smelt and mold industrial metals at scale, fabricate silicon wafers and so on.
The "eternal growth" model has dominated all political-economic ideologies for hundreds of years. When humanity first industrialized the planet, there were fewer than 1 billion humans. Now 7.7 billion humans all want the resource/energy intensive lifestyle of the developed-world middle class.
There is no way our planet has enough resources to provide all the goodies for 8 to 10 billion humans.
The technological fantasy is that new efficiencies will magically make eternal growth possible. But all these fantasies overlook 1) that markets cause the destruction of everything that isn't being monetized for profit in the moment; 2) that "renewable" energy all depends on cheap hydrocarbons in essentially limitless quantities forever and 3) that replacing everything every generation creates what my colleague Bart D. calls The Landfill Economy.
In other words, the tech "solution" to 500 million internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles is to toss those 500 million vehicles in the landfill (recycling is a nice idea but not always financially practical) and then go mine the immense amounts of metals, minerals and hydrocarbons needed to built 500 million all-electric vehicles.
Then, in a generation, repeat the process, as "more efficient" vehicles are developed.
This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever, and fuel the entire process of replacement with hydrocarbons, essentially forever.
The impossibility of this vision--a tech-enabled Landfill Economy that tells itself it's "efficient" and "sustainable" because the full costs are never calculated, indeed, cannot be calculated in a market-based economy--is what drives me to keep working on an alternative socio-political-economic system, CLIME: the community-labor-integrated-money economy.
One glance at Earthrise informs us that the only sustainable path is DeGrowth: using far less resources and energy, a path that will spell the end of the current model of profit-driven eternal growth: the Landfill Economy, and the entire financial structure built on the Landfill Model.
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
"Alexa, How Do We Subvert Big Tech's Orwellian Internet-of-Things Surveillance?" 7/12/19
Predatory "Green Capitalism" Is Monetizing the Air, and It's Going to Cost You 7/10/19
When Everything from Bat Guano to Quatloos Is Soaring, Speculative Euphoria Has Reached
an Extreme 7/8/19
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Celebrating the moon landing 50 years ago, accomplished with technologies that were primitive by today's standards.
Musings on the Economy: Stock Market Mania
U.S. stock markets have rallied to new all-time highs on the belief that the floodgates of monetary and fiscal stimulus will overwhelm the cyclical exhaustion of credit that we call Recession.
Since incomes aren't rising as fast as debt, this belief is based on the notion that lowering interest rates will enable the same income to service ever-higher debt loads.
The net result is asset valuations can loft ever higher. History suggests borrowers eventually lose the ability to service their debts even at near-zero rates of interest, and so this belief will be tested at some point. If it fails--something history suggests is inevitable--the resulting Recession won't be fixable by lowering interest rates. Only a vast cleansing of bad debt will do the job, and that process will wipe out tens of trillions of dollars of assets.
From Left Field
Artificial Stupidity -- review of Utopian book claiming robots will do all the work for us, enabling leisure and wealth for all...
The mindfulness conspiracy--everything is now in doubt....
How Google, Microsoft, and Big Tech Are Automating the Climate Crisis--which is oh-so profitable....
Rent and Its Discontents--Leftist survey of solutions to California's housing crisis--none are viable at scale.
Facebook's Calibra and Linbra digital currency--a good overview...
How We Keep Destroying the Things that Make us Live: The Biotic Pump and the Raw Power of Science
Want to Fight Climate Change? Plant 1 Trillion Trees.
Decentralized AI -- Ben Goertzel (TEDxBerkeley video)
France has turned into one of the worldwide threats to free speech (via Craig S.)
Exposing the Great 'Poverty Reduction' Scandal (2014)
The most powerful person in Silicon Valley--maybe, maybe not...
Exodus: For Bay Area millennials, moving up means moving out (via Adam T.) -- 60% plan on leaving within a few years--there goes your workforce and your customer base....
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves." Henry David Thoreau
Thanks for reading--
charles |
|
|
|
|
|
