Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (48 page)

Paul Gilding takes the view that growth can be curtailed within capitalism. This will happen, he argues, because it must, rather than by choice or at the behest of business. His book appears in the main reference list.

Simon Michaux, a mining engineer with many years experience in the industry, proposes that a resource crisis is almost upon us, driven by the exhaustion of high grade, accessible ores and the ever-increasing energy, water, waste and environmental impact involved in extraction. His lecture on this subject is in the main reference list.

Suggested Reading

Hamilton, Clive. A full list of his numerous publications can be found at
http://www.cappe.edu.au/docs/staff-cvs/hamilton.pdf
.

Sanders, Richard. 2009. Discussion paper 2. In
Future Economic Thought.
ACF.
http://www.acfonline.org.au/future-economic-thought
.

Australian Organizations

The ACF released a paper analyzing growth in 2010. Titled
Better Than Growth: The New Economics of Genuine Progress and Quality of Life
, it is a summary of the issues and some possible remedies, written for popular consumption:
http://www.acfonline.org.au/sites/default/files/resources/ACF_BetterThanGrowth.pdf
.

The CSIRO’s Sustainable Ecosystems Unit has produced two comprehensive reports on the physical impact of different immigration levels, the second in collaboration with Flinders University. These reports analyze the physical parameters that might limit expanding Australian populations.

Foran, Barney, and Franzi Poldy. 2002.
Future Dilemmas: Options to 2050 for Australia’s Population, Technology, Resources and Environment
. Canberra: CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.
http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/2002/fulldilemmasreport02-01.pdf
.

Foran, Barney, and Franzi Poldy. 2002.
Dilemmas Distilled: A Summary and Guide to the CSIRO Technical Report
. Canberra: CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.
http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/2002/dilemmasdistilled.pdf
.

Sobels, Jonathan, Sue Richardson, Graham Turner, et al. 2010.
Long-Term Physical Implications of Net Overseas Migration: Australia in 2050
. National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide.
http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/physical-implications-migration-fullreport.pdf
.

The team at Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research also looks critically at ongoing growth in Australia; it focuses on the impact of the high levels of net immigration required to achieve “pre-set targets for economic growth.” Its website is
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/cpur
.

One of Bob Birrell’s papers, “Population, Growth and Sustainability,” is available here:
http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22library%2Fprspub%2F417066%22
.

Other Australian Critics of Growth

Michael Lardelli is a geneticist at the University of Adelaide who is connected with the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO). Links to his numerous articles on
Limits
issues are listed on his university website under “Popular Media and Other Presentations/Publications”:
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/michael.lardelli
.

Mark O’Connor is a poet and environmentalist who, in 2008, published
Overloading Australia: How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population
with William J. Lines (Canterbury NSW: Envirobooks). It is now in its fourth edition. Extracts are available at
http://www.australianpoet.com/overloading.html
.

See below for comment on Ted Trainer.

Socialist Critics

About

Richard Smith’s socialist critique is concise and telling. Smith acknowledges that Daly and the ecological economists are on the right track as far as the need to put an end to growth and redistribute wealth equitably, but Smith does not agree that the market allocates resources efficiently.

Like Jackson (2009), Smith argues that “decoupling” energy and material flows from GDP growth is a mathematical impossibility. Unlike Jackson and many of the ecological economists, he does not believe that growth can be tackled within a capitalist economic system. He points to the need for very significant regulation, something anathema to business throughout the century since consolidation into gigantic corporations commenced—and no doubt earlier still. He also argues that growth is an inbuilt aspect of the system, not an optional extra. This view accords with my own analysis throughout the present work. The cultivation of consumption for its own sake was an intentional strategy of business since the eighteenth century and was adopted as a key bulwark of the system from the 1920s.

Australian Ted Trainer has been working on these same issues for many years and is in broad agreement with Smith. Links to many of Trainer’s articles and essays are available at
https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
.

David Harvey, one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars, argues that one of the fundamental contradictions of capital today is its dependence on continuing economic growth. A short statement that echoes Daly’s distinction between growth and development is found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOsKuyh5ps0
.

Harvey’s argument is more fully elaborated in “The contradictions of capital,” a lecture he gave at Warwick University:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UD-QqYFJqY
.

Suggested Reading

Smith, Richard. 2010. Beyond growth or beyond capitalism?
real-world economics review
53:28–42.
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue53/Smith53.pdf
.

Smith, Richard. 2011. Green capitalism: The god that failed.
real-world economics review
56:112–144.
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue56/Smith56.pdf
.

Smith, Richard. 2013. Capitalism and the destruction of life on Earth: Six theses on saving the humans.
real-world economics review
64: 125–151.

Trainer, Ted. 2011. The radical implications of a zero growth economy.
real-world economics review
57:71–82.
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue57/Trainer57.pdf
.

Notes

Introduction

1
. Meadows et al. 1972.

2
. Meadows et al. 1972, 27.

3
. Buell 2003.

4
. Oreskes and Conway 2008, 66.

5
. Wallerstein 1974, 347–357.

6
. Cited in Fones-Wolf 1994, 16.

7
. CNN
Mone
y 2012.

8
. Broad 2006. Development economist Robin Broad’s study of the World Bank found bias in its hiring and promotion practices, the selective application of peer review, the exclusion of dissenting voices, and manipulation of data. She challenges the objectivity of its work.

9
. Mooney 2010.

10
. This is not intended to exclude acceptance of the notion, in physics, of the influence of the observer on quantum reality or more recent developments in science such as chaos and complexity theory.

1 Economic Growth: Origins

1
. Crosby 1986, 71–103.

2
. Ponting 1993, chaps. 7, 9.

3
. Clark 2008.

4
. Berman 1981, 53.

5
. Nef 1969, 24–26.

6
. Berman 1981, 58.

7
. Biggins 1978, 53; Berman 1981, 49.

8
. Bowden 1965, 65.

9
. Wolf 1997, 274–78.

10
. Campbell and Laherrère 1998, 81; BP 2012, 8.

11
. McNeill 2001, 298–9.

12
. McNeill 2001, 6.

13
. Marx 1954a [1848], 10.

14
. Marx was also a close follower of contemporary scientific research, so it is not possible to predict what attitude he might have taken to the “limits” theorists of the late twentieth century, even though it is usually assumed that he would dismiss them because of their perceived similarity to Malthus.

15
. Marx 1954b [1887], 229, 257.

16
. Marx 1959 [1894], 813.

17
. Marx 1954b [1887], 474.

18
. Dead zones occur when fertilizer-rich runoff leads to algal blooms that exhaust the available oxygen.

19
. Cordell and White 2008, 1, 6.

20
. Smith 2002, 1654.

21
. Rockström et al. 2009, 32.

22
. Den Biggelaar et al. 2003, 3; Arnalds 2009, 43; Montgomery 2007, 4.

23
. Marx 1959 [1894], 820; 1954a [1848].

24
. Farrelly 2006.

25
. Clausen 2007, 48–49.

2 Economic Growth: Perceptions

1
. Larry Summers was the World Bank’s chief economist at this time. Summers is notorious for signing a 1991 memo drafted by his staff which held that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable” and “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City” (cited in Pellow 2007, 9). Summers was President Clinton’s treasury secretary and has also served with the Obama administration.

2
. Daly 1999, 16–17.

3
. Daly 1999, 15.

4
. Boulding 1966, 303.

5
. Sachs 1999, 26–27.

6
. Solow 1974, 1.

7
. Beckerman 1972, 332–333.

8
. Ponting 1993, 18.

9
. Ponting 1993, chaps. 4, 13.

10
. Ponting 1993, 41.

11
. Montgomery 2007; Smith 1995.

12
. Ponting 2002.

13
. Ruddiman 2005, 88–93. Ruddiman suggests that rice-paddy agriculture may have magnified the effect.

14
. McNeill 2001, 8.

15
. Durning 1994, 22–23.

16
. McNeill 2003, 264.

17
. McNeill 2003, 268.

18
. Clark 2008.

19
. Georgescu-Røegen 1971, 278; 1975, 353.

20
. Perlez and Johnson 2005; Michaux 2013.

21
. Georgescu-Røegen 1971, 19. “The Great Migration” is the westward movement of the Central Asian herders (known popularly as barbarians) into Europe, a migration sometimes argued to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

22
. Osnos 2006.

23
. International Energy Agency (IEA) 2010, 23.

24
. Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren 1993 [1977], 73.

25
. Campbell 1999; Hirsch 2005; Klare 2005; Simmons 2005; IEA 2010.

26
. Also known as “shale oil,” this is liquid petroleum still locked in rock (see chapter 14). It should not be confused with “oil shale” (kerogen), a solid bituminous substance that has yet to be successfully extracted.

27
. Carey and Carter 2007; Pimentel 2003.

28
. Bleizeffer 2006.

29
. Solo 1974, 515–517.

30
. Daly 1991a, 226.

31
. Daly 1991b, 37.

32
. Chew 2001, 9.

33
. Ruddiman 2005.

34
. Meadows, Meadows, and Randers 2004, 17–49, esp. 21.

35
. International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2013b, 149.

36
. Daly 1991b, 39.

37
. Daly 1991b, 40.

38
. Daly 1978, 14–48.

39
. Daly 1991b, 35–36.

40
. Mill 1848, 306–311.

41
. Norgaard 1994, 32.

42
. Norgaard 1994, 7, 33.

43
. Truman 1949.

44
. Norgaard 1994, 79.

45
. Norgaard 1994, 126–127.

46
. Norgaard 1994, 122.

47
. Norgaard 1994, 124.

48
. Public Citizen 2003.

49
. Norgaard 1994, 131–132.

50
. Kaysen 1972, 663.

51
. E.g., Diamond 2005; Chew 2001; Ruddiman 2005.

52
. Solow 1974, 11.

3 The Limits to Growth Debate

1
. DeLong 1997.

2
. DeLong (1998) produces three columns of estimates of comparative GDP over time, according to differing criteria. His preferred model amplifies the estimate to account for the value of new commodities not available in earlier periods. Even if this weighting is excluded, the annual increase in world GDP in the last decade of the twentieth century equates to half the total world economy in 1900.

3
. IMF 2000, 150–151.

4
. Kraft 2000, 21.

5
. Beck and Kolankiewicz 2000, 123–124.

6
. Sinding 2007, 8.

7
. Foster 1998; Ross 1998.

8
. Kraft 2000, 23.

9
. Darling 1970.

10
. Macinko 1973.

11
. Goldsmith and Allen (with Davoll, Lawrence, and Allaby) 1972, 30.

12
. Meadows et al. 1972, 27.

13
. UN Environment Programme (UNEP) 2007, 2012.

14
. Verney 1972, 418.

15
. Strong 1972, 414.

16
. Golub and Townsend 1977.

17
. Strong 1972, 414–417.

18
. Barney 1982, preface to vol. 1.

19
. Barney, Freeman, and Ulinsky 1981; Voyer and Murphy 1984.

20
. Ponting 1993.

21
. Braudel 1981, 73–78.

22
. Benedictine sister Joan Chittister, cochair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, speaking to Rachael Kohn on January 31, 2010 (Kohn 2010).

23
. Malthus 1976 [1798].

24
. Polanyi 1944, 82.

25
. Malthus 1989 [1803], 127.

26
. Malthus 1976 [1798], 135.

27
. Ricardo 1952 [1817], 175.

28
. Osborn 1948, 65.

29
. Osborn 1948, 179–192.

30
. Vogt 1948, 110.