Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’re at the end of growth. Growth of the economy, of consumption, of wealth. That this would happen isn’t news to those who’ve followed the writings of Meadows, Heinberg, and many others. What’s different now is that it may have actually arrived. I’d like to briefly look at our current situation in this context and synthesize the various ideas we explored in previous posts.
– Buddhism and the End of Economic Growth
– Chris Clugston: Humanity’s Fatal Distraction
– Downloadable book on green economics (translated from German)
More than two decades after the Brundtland Report, it’s past time to abandon this linguistic sleight of hand and rally around a new, shocking but this time realistic slogan: sustainable shrinkage! Within this new perspective, we can get on with saving species, restoring wastelands, improving efficiency, putting our life-support systems on sustainable bases—in short, finding solutions. But we’ll do so with a new urgency and clarity, conscious that if we are to survive on our little planet in some reasonably civilized way, human activity (and its impacts) must shrink. If we don’t shrink it, Gaia will shrink it for us, catastrophically.
(Ernest Callenbach is author of the prescient novel Ecotopia.)
Humans seem to be reaching a new bottleneckrelated to oil limits and financial crises that grow out of these oil limits, with the current example being the European Debt Crisis. Depending how this and other debt crises work out, it seems possible that human population will decline. If this should happen, it could lead to a reduced problem with species extinction.
There is a legend lingering around the first “Limits to Growth” book that says that it was laughed off as an obvious quackery immediately after it was published. It is not true. The study was debated and criticized, as it is normal for a new theory or idea. But it raised enormous interest and millions of copies were sold. Evidently, despite the general optimism of the time, the study had given visibility to a feeling that wasn’t often expressed but that was in everybody’s minds. Can we really grow forever?
During recent weeks, evidence has piled up that U.S. and European economies, far from recovering, are swirling back into recession. Failure of American politicians to address the federal debt crisis, the U.S. credit rating downgrade, and increasing fragility of European economies have investors running for the hills.
3 years on from the worst economic crisis since the great depression and things are looking…well worse really. What is going on, and what actions should we be taking? Read our web chat with Nate and Richard.
French translation of the animation Who Killed Economic Growth?.
“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]
For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast. We might call this tendency the “Seneca effect” or the “Seneca cliff,” from Lucius Anneaus Seneca who wrote that “increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
At the intersection of global energy depletion and concerns about human impact on the environment lie some serious and oft overlooked issues. Largely gone from our public discourse is the idea that oil is infinite. It is now accepted, even to previous staunch cornucopians, that increasing, or even maintaining oil production will come only at higher costs. The new response to the energy/environmental crisis is to transition to a green economy, replacing our declining stocks of fossil sunlight with new technologies able to harness our current sunlight in its various forms. That these renewable technologies are available, viable and becoming more popular is not in question – however, whether these low carbon strategies can combine with now more expensive fossil fuels to maintain a growth trajectory for both the developed and developing worlds is another question entirely.
We speak with engineer, author and speaker Mat Stein about his books, When Technology Fails and the upcoming, When Disaster Strikes. Mat explains how our illusion of abundance and order can be easily shattered through solar flares, EMP strikes and peak oil.
