Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (3 page)

Dollar values are always expressed in US dollars unless otherwise specified. I have used tons, tonnes, acres, and hectares, depending on the original source.

In the Australian political landscape, governments are usually formed by either the Australian Labor Party (ALP), analogous to the Democrats, or the Coalition, which is an alliance between the Liberals (analogous to the Republican party) and the Nationals (formerly the Country Party and based in rural areas). Conservative governments are described as Coalition governments to reflect this reality. The Australian Greens have participated in some State governments; federally, they exert most influence in the Senate where proportional representation gives them a significant minority bloc and sometimes the balance of power.

I reflect on the problems of poverty in several chapters. Since the World Bank is virtually the only institution generating relevant data, I use its various metrics; the bank’s research has, however, been criticized for its bias toward free market economics.
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For the bank, the “extreme poor” live on less than $1 a day (which was adjusted to $1.25 in 2005 dollars); the “poor” live on less than $2 a day (not adjusted); and the “non-middle-class poor,” those without scope for discretionary expenditure, live on less than about $12 a day (or $4,000 a year). All these measures are adjusted for local purchasing power.

Another linguistic choice that may require explanation or defense is that between “skeptic” and “denier” in relation to the vocal dissent regarding the reality of anthropogenic global warming. I subscribe to journalist Chris Mooney’s view, mentioned in his address to the Canberra Press Club. He noted that skepticism implies good critical thinking and that the word should not be applied in its absence. He regards the body of climate knowledge that has been investigated and “picked over” numerous times by countless scientists as the best available and unlikely to be overturned. He sees no reason to reject the use of the term “denier” for people who are not qualified in the specific field or who are in alliance with vested interests.
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My own assumptions include an intuitive belief in the intrinsic value of the natural world, a science-based belief in the physical grounding of all human economic activities in that same natural world, and a realist attitude toward the laws of physics and chemistry.
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I also embrace an inclusive democratic paradigm that is suspicious of the buying of influence, representation, and speech, as well as a conviction that any global account of the world must include all seven billion people and explore the relationships between rich and poor.

It is now 2013, more than forty years since
The Limits to Growth
was published. It soon became obvious, as I studied these years and their prologue, that growth was anchored in the profligate burning of fossil fuels and that, unlike the ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, which were more or less easily replaced with substitutes, the fuels that underpin the entire economy are likely to be far more recalcitrant. Not only are many of the most powerful corporations in the world bound up with the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels but virtually the entire productive apparatus depends on them—and this includes agriculture. In addition, first world people and emerging middle classes everywhere have become increasingly habituated to more material objects and an ever-ascending “standard of living.” It is difficult to separate us from these proxies for the good life.

In Australia, polls now suggest a decline in willingness to make any sacrifices at all in order to tackle global warming, even though the Gillard Labor government’s carbon-pricing scheme was modest and people with lower incomes were well compensated. By September 2013, Australians had elected a conservative Coalition government led by Tony Abbott, which pledged to abolish what it calls “the carbon tax,” claiming that this would lower electricity prices. The new prime minister appealed to people’s narrow self-interest and a skeptical view of climate change, and won. Our reluctance to acknowledge the needs of the rest of the world or to accept a fair share of the global costs of climate action is emblematic of the influence that has been exerted through multiple channels to block or delay real measures aimed at palliating the ever-increasing consequences of rampant economic growth.

Over the course of the twentieth century, big business on the new US model took charge of the new mass media and succeeded in advancing a profit and expansion agenda while pretending to be merely providing a service. Had the planet been a great deal larger, it might not have fallen to the current generations to choose between recognition of the limits to this project and surrender to terminal decline. As it is, the world expects to support nearly 50 percent more people by 2100 than at present, and to do this we are privatizing and corporatizing all economic endeavor. This includes land, and it consigns families, communities, and other human groupings to subsist through exchange in the marketplace. Good luck to the next few generations; they will need it. I offer my apologies that, though I have tried to limit my own contribution, I did not stop the rot.

I

Growth and Its Challengers

As the absolute load is increased the watermark will reach the Plimsoll line even in a boat whose load is optimally allocated. Optimally loaded boats will still sink under too much weight, even if they sink optimally!

—Herman Daly, 1991

1

Economic Growth: Origins

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.

—Karl Marx, 1848

Explosive economic growth is new in human history, and this chapter looks at how it was unleashed in three distinct but related historical developments, with Europe at their center.

First, there was the 500- to 600-year period of Europe’s colonial expansion, which enabled Europeans to accumulate great wealth without commensurate cost by appropriating land, resources, and the slave labor of millions, and to solve numerous resource constraints by simply moving on to new frontiers. Second, there were 250 years of coal-based industrialization, which coincided with a massive development of technological capacity (known as the Industrial Revolution), a great wave of urbanization, and the triumph of capitalism as an economic system. Third, and most recently, the past 130 years have yielded oil-based growth—a unique period in the history of civilization and one that is unlikely to be repeated when cheap oil runs low.

These changes involved a wholesale separation of human populations from the land on which they grew their food and constituted a radical shift in the relationship between people and the processes of the natural world. Called
metabolic rift
by Karl Marx, it continues to develop rapidly today, as the rural people of the third world move to newly industrializing cities.

Prelude: The “Age of Discovery”

Well before Columbus’s world-altering first voyage to the Americas, sailors had begun to range into the eastern Atlantic; when Columbus set sail, the uninhabited Azores and Madeiras were already in European hands, and Spain had colonized all but one of the Canary Islands. By the time Tenerife was conquered, in 1496, most of the Canaries’ indigenous people, the Guanches, had been captured and enslaved, or eliminated by European diseases. The occupation of the Atlantic islands during the fifteenth century provided a foretaste of the patterns of expansion that were to follow. A few rabbits taken ashore on Porto Santo, the smaller of the two Madeiras, multiplied so fast they denuded the place within a few decades, forcing humans to abandon the island, now stripped of their crops as well as of the native flora and fauna. The larger island, Madeira, was named for the “great trees” that covered “every foot” of it. Here the settlers set fire to the forest in order to clear it; over seven years, the entire island was burned. By the middle of the fifteenth century, sugarcane was well established, and the next decades saw an immense explosion of sugar production. By the early sixteenth century, sugar was supporting a population of some 20,000 people, at least 2,000 of them slaves.
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Plantation colonies worked by slaves were replicated across the world, accompanied by the destruction of vulnerable native populations, the expropriation of their lands, crops, and natural wealth, and the progressive transformation of native ecologies. Settler colonies were established in more temperate regions, and these too supplanted existing peoples, expropriated their resources, imported slave labor, and replaced forest, woodland, and prairie with crops. Europe exported millions of its own to these new colonies, easing domestic population pressures and importing other people’s wealth back into its own metropolitan centers.

Until the so-called Age of Discovery, when the Spanish reached America and the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in India, northwestern Europe had been a backwater of peripheral world importance; before the late fifteenth century it was access to the Mediterranean that gave Europeans global reach. Nonetheless, northwestern Europeans had begun to transform their backwater; by 1300 they had spread out over western and central Europe, cleared the once ubiquitous forest back to some 20 percent of its original cover, and created widespread permanent fields for the first time. Trapping coincided with this great forest clearance and continued eastward after 1300, across Russia, into Siberia, and on to the Pacific coast, driving ever more species of fur-bearing animals to extinction or its brink. Billions of individual animals were killed. The fur trade reflects as well as any activity the way European expansion relied on ever-new frontiers of exploitation. When Europe’s own animal numbers declined, the hunt for fur moved in the same way across North America until the immense populations of the boreal forests had largely collapsed.
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Capitalist Accumulation: Engine of Growth

Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, whether land or technology. The feudal system that preceded capitalism in Europe did not separate peasants from the land that produced both their subsistence and the tribute they owed their masters; they were often tied to the land as serfs, but the land was also tied to them through customary rights to their tenancies and the use of extensive commons for such purposes as grazing, hunting, and collecting firewood. They did not sell their labor for wages; however, they were obliged to pay their masters a significant share of what they produced.

Marx regarded the surge in mercantile wealth associated with colonization as the prelude to capitalism and as one of the primary sources of what he called “primitive accumulation,” a translation of Adam Smith’s term “previous accumulation.” Both Smith and Marx recognized that capitalism required some kind of prelude whereby wealth was first accumulated so that it could be applied to further accumulation. The successive waves of enclosure carried out across Europe over several centuries can be seen as one aspect of primitive accumulation. Landlords, often assisted by the state, curtailed the traditional rights of peasants to their tenant holdings and progressively enclosed the commons and woods on which they had depended. The dispossession of Europe’s own peasantry not only turned their land over to sheep farming but created laborers without means of subsistence, the very workforce that industry required. Though originally conceived by Smith as “previous” accumulation, both colonial and internal expropriation went on for centuries, and both continued as industrial capitalism emerged.

Human societies have produced surpluses since the earliest agricultural communities some ten thousand years ago, but precapitalist systems tended to deploy this surplus for consumption, sometimes by elites, priests, the military, relatives, or select allies, sometimes in great monuments or via redistribution among the people. Even though the surplus could and did free certain classes in society from abject toil, it was put to immediate use and, in these circumstances—generalized throughout precapitalist history—economic growth remained slow.

One of capitalism’s key innovations was to direct the surplus to reinvestment in production, establishing an ongoing process of accumulation. The influx of plunder from the colonized world underpinned the expanding wealth of the early capitalist nations of Europe, though the wealth was not widely shared among the population in the first few centuries. Once industrialization began, generations of landless laborers—men, women, and children—worked long hours every day of their short, harsh lives. Members of the new industrial working class had a Stone Age standard of living (measured by life expectancy and food intake) and would have been better off in a hunter-gatherer band.
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It was only much later that capitalist wealth flowed on to considerable majorities of European and settler populations and provided a hitherto unimaginable level of material comfort to the mass of people.

Around the same time as the colonization of the eastern Atlantic in the late fifteenth century, manufacture and technical innovation began to gain ground in England with the introduction of paper and gunpowder mills, cannon foundries, sugar refineries, and various metallurgical works. Commerce, associated with the expansion of long-distance trade, was beginning to apply its profits to investment in agriculture and industry, and to appropriate the artisan’s product for trade rather than local use.
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Technological innovation proceeded in step with the transition from mercantile wealth to industrial capitalism. However, these early industrial processes relied mainly on wind, water, wood, or muscle (both animal and human) for their power, with attendant limitations. Though coal mining began to expand from about 1530,
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the starting volume was very small, and coal remained a minor power source.