Heinberg: The End of Growth - Democratic Underground

GliderGuider

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Sun Nov-14-10 05:54 PM
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Heinberg: The End of Growth

Here are some excepts from an excerpt of a provocative upcoming book by Richard Heinberg.

The End of Growth

The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.

There are three primary factors that stand firmly in the way of further economic growth:

The depletion of important resources including fossil fuels and minerals;
The proliferation of environmental impacts arising from both the extraction and use of resources (including the burning of fossil fuels)—leading to snowballing costs from both these impacts themselves and from efforts to avert them and clean them up; and
Financial disruptions due to the inability of our existing monetary, banking, and investment systems to adjust to both resource scarcity and soaring environmental costs—and their inability (in the context of a shrinking economy) to service the enormous piles of government and private debt that have been generated over the past couple of decades.

We have become so accustomed to growth that it’s hard to remember that it is actually is a fairly recent phenomenon.

During the past few millennia, as empires rose and fell, local economies advanced and retreated—but world economic activity expanded only slowly, and with periodic reversals. However, with the fossil fuel revolution of the past two centuries, we have seen growth at a speed and scale unprecedented in all of human history. We harnessed the energies of coal, oil, and natural gas to build and operate cars, trucks, highways, airports, airplanes, and electric grids—all the essential features of modern industrial society. Through the one-time-only process of extracting and burning hundreds of millions of years’ worth of chemically stored sunlight, we built what appeared (for a brief, shining moment) to be a perpetual-growth machine. We learned to take what was in fact an extraordinary situation for granted. It became normal.

But as the era of cheap, abundant fossil fuels comes to an end, our assumptions about continued expansion are being be shaken to their core.

In effect, we have to create a desirable “new normal” that fits the constraints imposed by depleting natural resources. Maintaining the “old normal” is not an option; if we do not find new goals for ourselves and plan our transition from a growth-based economy to a healthy equilibrium economy, we will by default create a much less desirable “new normal” whose emergence we are already beginning to see in the forms of persistent high unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, and ever more frequent and worsening financial and environmental crises—all of which translate to profound distress for individuals, families, and communities.

There's a lot of substance in the original article. Much of it has been discussed here in drive-by fashion, but Heinberg puts some meat on the bones of our current situation.

I find little to quibble with. Heinberg's conclusion that we need to change our definitions of success, our goals and the places we look for happiness echo my own thoughts. When a course of action had reached a dead end, giving up on it and choosing a new one is the apogee of realism. Our civilization has reached such a dead end with regard to material growth. It's time to make some radical new choices.