Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (2 page)

This book is about the story of this growth, its astonishing acceleration since World War II, and its equally astonishing impact on the natural world. Above all, it’s about the way the notion of ever-expanding economic growth has gained virtually ubiquitous popularity, both with policymakers and in public discourse, while the idea put forward by physical scientists—that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion—has been treated as an opinion of the lunatic “doom-saying” fringe. Even as concepts such as sustainability and “going green” have, in recent times, paid lip service to the need to act, the commitment to growth without end has not wavered.

From the 1960s on, a succession of books pointed to the perils of pollution, untrammeled population growth, and ignoring ecology in the economic calculus.
The Limits to Growth
¹
was written by MIT researchers in 1972 and commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international think tank promoting “identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public.” The
Limits
authors, with expertise across many disciplines, including biophysics, system dynamics, and management, found that unmodified economic growth was likely to collide with the realities of a finite planet within a century. They saw grave problems emerging from five major tendencies: accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, extensive malnutrition, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and environmental decline.
²
Their modeling of these trends showed that, if we continued along the same growth trajectory, we would be likely to precipitate ecological and social collapse in the second half of the twenty-first century.

I happened upon
Limits
in the year it was published. Its logic was persuasive to me from the outset, and I expected its message to have a significant impact on the subsequent conduct of human affairs. But as the years rolled by, it seemed there was little effect—and then, even less. True, scientists continued to voice alarm, while the evidence began to mount that life on earth was experiencing a sixth extinction pulse and that the planet was warming. United Nations conferences proliferated, drawing attention to a plethora of environmental problems at every imaginable scale and attempting various treaties, protocols, and programs to address them. But outside the scientific community, in governments, bureaucracies, and public debate, an intensifying promotion of economic growth rendered it ever more securely entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. Growth became the “commonsense” solution to virtually all social problems—including, paradoxically, the environmental degradation it was causing. This quickening intent was not confined to the developed world but was increasingly emulated by almost all types of state, including communist China.

It was this contradiction between the warnings of scientists and the popularity of growth economics, witnessed over the course of my adult life, that triggered the curiosity that led to this book. How could the advice of the scientific establishment, venerated to a fault during my early life, have been so comprehensively ignored and emphatically discarded a decade or two later by governments and policymakers worldwide? What were the decisive influences that neutralized that counsel of caution? How was such a compelling alert from a hitherto trusted source discounted so successfully? How did the opposite view, that growth was the most essential purpose of human societies, become the accepted wisdom? How had economists eclipsed scientists as preeminent authorities and indispensable voices in the policy sphere?

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, economic growth remains the guiding principle for human endeavor, impeded only by the internal busts endemic to the capitalist system itself and the cascades of environmental degradation that are common in growing economies. The ship of growth sails on virtually unchallenged, as if its consequences had nothing at all to do with it. From international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund to most governments and their oppositions throughout the world, growth is more than ever the prize, the goal, the indispensable foundation, mentioned endlessly in speeches, reports, and press releases. As the idea has continued to flourish, its risks have come to seem less serious, despite the mounting evidence of its dysfunctional outcomes—accelerating species destruction, climate destabilization, toxic pollution of rivers and groundwater, and the depletion of many of the key resources on which the economic edifice depends. In Frederick Buell’s words, what was once entertained as a looming apocalypse has been normalized as a “way of life.”
³

The unprecedented economic expansion of the past century and a half coincided with the emergence of modern corporations. These consolidated corporate entities, dependent on a stream of always increasing profits and invested in the continuation of economic growth, were assembled around 1900 in the United States. They went on to band together in various trade lobbies and business organizations designed to influence democratic processes and, later, to propagate an ideology of growth as a universal panacea—even as the solution to the social and environmental problems that followed in the wake of their expansion.

One central aim of the new business organizations of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was the limitation of regulation, regarded as an unacceptable brake on growth and profits, whether intended to make the workplace safe or to protect the environment. Neoliberal economics, which has come to dominate political institutions since the 1970s, has been embraced and promoted by the corporations. It shifted the right to make many decisions about the material world away from people and their elected representatives and reassigned this role to unelected bodies such as the World Trade Organization, while suggesting it was merely tapping into the “magic of the market.” It also discarded planning and regulation as inefficient, passé remnants of “socialism”—a term often used to describe all forms of social democratic government. The neoliberal “revolution” in public policy set up crucial roadblocks in the path of regulatory strategies and shifted the ideological emphasis from assumptions of pursuit of the common good by a welfare-oriented state to the liberation of the “free market” from state “interference,” and the ability of business to dictate government policy. This shift disabled existing democratic methods of addressing environmental questions.

Growth also came to be the preferred solution to global inequality after World War II, initially as “development,” later as “globalization.” In both variants, economic growth along first world lines was advanced as the commonsense solution to the problems of the postcolonial third world and the guarantee that “millions will be lifted out of poverty,” a claim that is frequently made but misleading.

As environmental damage became increasingly apparent and threatened to slow the growth of many industries, scientists who exposed ecological problems found themselves under attack from business organizations and the panoply of think tanks championing the business agenda. Corporations funded attempts to deny the problems, neutralize the science, and delay action.

Powerful propaganda techniques evolved through the twentieth century and were increasingly applied, both to the selling of proliferating consumer goods and to the task of selling private enterprise itself. Economic growth was thus naturalized as the bedrock of prosperity, and prosperity in turn as the meaning of life. From the 1970s, the think tanks amplified this ideological project. Leading corporations funded their expansion, creating a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of business values and business interests. Scientists and the science they pursued, always struggling for limited funds, had no comparable means of communicating with the public—a situation that has facilitated the denial of numerous health and environmental dangers, from tobacco and thalidomide to DDT and acid rain. In the past decade, scholars have begun to analyze the denial of global warming and the more general attempt to dispute and undermine evidence of environmental decline. These practices have been described as “the cultural production of ignorance,”
⁴
in which fake experts, assisted by the mainstream press’s fixation on “balance,” bamboozle the public with spurious doubts.

The book is in four parts, each in roughly chronological order and covering a similar period of history, but with a different focus. Part I sets the stage with an account of the history and science of growth, a history of the dawning awareness of environmental decline, and the emergence of a “limits” literature and debate. Part II returns to the beginning of the twentieth century to explore the pursuit of growth through the construction of consumerism, the neoliberal transformation of policy debate from the 1970s, and the impact of first world growth prescriptions on the rest of the world since World War II. Part III returns again to the early twentieth century to examine the emergence of the large corporation, the propaganda apparatus built over the century, and the consolidation of the idea of economic growth as the overarching goal of human endeavor, especially after World War II. Part IV measures the
Limits
diagnosis against the actual situation forty years later and summarizes my conclusions.

Sources

I have used extensive secondary sources across several disciplines, the chief of which are economics, geography, history, politics, and sociology, though I also touch on the natural sciences, rhetoric, and system dynamics.

I also analyze numerous crucial primary texts written by economists, scientists, other scholars, and public relations advocates, including the work emanating from think tanks, UN agencies, international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations; and numerous articles by journalists.

Throughout my research period, I monitored the elite, business, and scientific press of the United States, Australia, Germany, France, and the UK on a regular basis and also reviewed the press of India and China. In this I was assisted by online subscriptions to several premier newspapers and numerous invaluable news digests. I also subscribed to daily and weekly political and environmental journals from the same countries and a number of digests on these subjects. The international scope of this reading provided me with a window onto the major public debates (in key world centers) that have touched on growth, environmental problems, economic beliefs, and the solutions debated in the public sphere.

Key Terms and Emphasis

The work frequently requires me to refer to various nations and to distinguish between the European powers and the countries they colonized over the last five hundred years and more. There are numerous modes for expressing this division: first world and third world (and second world, when the Communist bloc still persisted); industrialized and nonindustrialized; global north and global south; developed and underdeveloped world; developed and developing world; developed, emerging, and less developed world. Immanuel Wallerstein, who theorized the
modern world-system
, used the terms
center
,
semi-periphery,
and
periphery
.
⁵
There are no doubt others. I use many of these terms, more or less interchangeably, but prefer first and third world in most contexts; old habits die hard and, to me as an Australian, being part of the “north” makes little sense.

The scope of the book is global, and it has been necessary to select and emphasize particular crucial players and nations. My examination of first world countries has focused mainly on the United States and, to some extent, Australia. The focus on Australia results from my being an Australian who has lived through the recent history in question. I also had considerable exposure to the US press through the period of the research; however, the overwhelming reason for the American focus is the preeminent role of the United States in the global economy from early in the twentieth century.
Industry Magazine
celebrated this role in 1921: “among the nations of the earth today America stands for one idea: Business.”
⁶
In line with this reality, Americans also played a leading role in the development of the modern national and transnational corporation, the PR industry, the worldwide selling of “free enterprise,” and the proliferation of neoliberal think tanks during the years since 1970. My discussion of capitalism in the twentieth century is often centered on the US version, which produced large integrated national corporations and dominated the spread of transnational business. Transnational corporations headquartered in Europe, Japan, and other OECD countries gradually proliferated after World War II, however, and significant numbers of Chinese corporations now feature in the Fortune Global 500.
⁷

For development issues, I have focused largely on China and India, countries that have been regarded as “emerging” or “semiperipheral” in recent decades. They illustrate well the ambiguous benefit of a “growth for prosperity” approach—the air in Beijing, for example, is frequently dangerous to breathe, while Chinese rivers are grossly contaminated and traffic jams last for days or, in one case, well over a week.

I use the term “mainstream economics” to refer to the neoclassical stream of economics, of which neoliberalism became the dominant version beginning in the late 1970s. When I refer to mainstream economists, I allude to this class of economists rather than to those with dissenting views, whether ecological economists or economic historians. Although not strictly mainstream, most Marxists and Keynesians share mainstream growth assumptions.

Gross domestic product also requires a brief explanation. As set out in box 9.4, GDP is not a reliable measure of human well-being and cannot be used as a proxy for it. Neither does it include economic activities, such as housework and subsistence farming, that are conducted outside commodity exchange. At the same time, GDP has several benefits as a metric. It is the available statistic in almost all accounts of economic processes and is a reasonable approximation of the market economy’s rate of extraction and depletion; in this respect, it measures gross economic growth without reference to welfare or rationality. I have thus used GDP when discussing the growth in the market economy. It is important to be aware of the usefulness as well as the limitations of the data associated with it.