{"id":710,"date":"2021-10-12T10:13:10","date_gmt":"2021-10-12T10:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecosocialist.scot\/?p=710"},"modified":"2021-10-12T10:13:10","modified_gmt":"2021-10-12T10:13:10","slug":"exponential-growth-on-a-finite-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecosocialist.scot\/?p=710","title":{"rendered":"Exponential Growth on a Finite Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Science is telling us that we have less than 10 years in which to hold the global average surface temperature below 1.5degC, writes Alan Thornet<\/em>t.\u00a0 After which dangerous and irreversible feedback processes will start to take control.<\/p>\n

Those of us who inhabit planet Earth today face an existential problem. Our own species, homo sapiens (modern humans), are trashing the planet at an ever increasing and more destructive rate. We are also the first generation to comprehend the full depth of this crisis, and we could be the last with a the chance to do anything about it. The ability of the planet to sustain human life could be gone within decades, and we could face major social breakdown by mid-century. Or as Jem Bendall, an XR supporter, puts it in his essay Deep Adaptation<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0we are facing a \u201cnear-term collapse of society with serious ramifications for future of (the planet\u2019s) inhabitants\u201d.<\/p>\n

Temperature records, however, continue to be broken with frightening regularity. Floods, droughts and wild fires are more intense and more frequent every year. The artic sea ice will soon be gone, and parts of Antarctica are warming 5 times faster than the rest of the planet. Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are destabilising \u2013 the melting of which would raise the sea level by up to 20 metres, which would obliterate swathes of the most densely populated parts of the globe. The planets permafrost regions are now melting 50 per cent faster than previously thought \u2013 with the potential to release vast quantities of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The planets biodiversity, also essential to human life on the planet, is collapsing in front of our eyes.<\/p>\n

Economic growth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The most dangerous (and intractable) aspect of the ecological crisis is endless exponential economic growth \u2013 which is central the prevailing economic paradigm, and \u00a0which is driving the planet to catastrophe in just a few decades. As George Monbiot has said recently, as far as I know for the first time: \u2018Green growth\u2019 doesn\u2019t exist \u2013 less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe\u2019 \u2013 and he is absolutely right.<\/p>\n

This has been a long-term blind-spot for the left. After WW2 the whole world \u2013 on both sides of the iron curtain \u2013 emerged fully signed up to growth and productivism \u2013 including all sections of the left. In the USSR Stakhanovism was dominant despite the environmental measures taken by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the revolution. Western Marxism \u2013 mainstream Marxism in the Global North \u2013 was now devoid of any detectable ecological legacy from classical Marxism. It was as John Bellamy Foster has put it: \u2018in denial of the dialectic of nature\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the car industry \u2013 where I worked in the 1960s and 70s \u2013 there were strong trade unions, but growth and productivism was rife and unchallenged, including by the left. Environmental issues were dismissed as a middleclass diversion from the \u2018real\u2019 struggles around wages, working conditions.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s\u00a0The Alternative Economic Strategy<\/em><\/strong>, the bible of the Bennite left (inside and outside of the Labour Party), was fully signed up. It started with the following statement: \u201cThe essential basis for any alternative economic strategy must be a policy for planned economic expansion\u201d. The ecology of the planet is not mentioned anywhere in its 45 pages.<\/p>\n

There has been some change since then, pushed by the degrowth movement, but degrowth is far from universally accepted. (The degrowth movement emerged in Barcelona in 1987 and became strong in France where collective called Research and Degrowth was founded in Paris n 2008 which held conferences every few years with attendances of three or four thousand.)<\/p>\n

Johnathan Neale, for example, in his recent book\u00a0Fight the Fire<\/em><\/strong>, is openly opposed to challenging growth, arguing that we have to defeat poverty first \u2013 though he does not rule out doing so longer-term. The problem with this is the damage being done now and the danger that there may be no \u2018long-term\u2019 available to us.<\/p>\n

The damage done by productivism in the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century, however, is only matched by the scale of the problem itself.<\/p>\n

The scale of the problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The clearest exponent of degrowth, in my view, is Giorgos Kallis, a Greek Professor of economics at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, particularly his 2018 book \u2018degrowth<\/em><\/strong>\u2019. He points out, for example, that with an exponential growth rate of 3 per cent a year \u2013 which has prevailed globally for the past 60 years \u2013 the global economy doubles every 24 years. It is four times bigger within 48 years, eight times bigger within 72 years, and so on. The idea that an economy can grow to infinity, he says, is \u201cabsurd.\u201d<\/p>\n

The faster we produce and consume goods, he argues, the more we transform and damage the environment. \u201cThere is no way to have our cake and eat it if we are to avoid destroying the planet\u2019s life support systems. The global economy will have to slow down. We should extract less and produce less, and we should do it differently. To prosper without growth we have to establish a radically different economic system and way of living.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jason Hickel (an XR supporter) takes the same view in his 2020 book\u00a0Less is More \u2013<\/em><\/strong>how degrowth will save the World<\/strong>.<\/em>\u00a0As the GDP grows, he says \u201cthe global economy churns through more energy resources and waste each year, to the point where it is dramatically overshooting what scientists have defined as safe planetary boundaries \u2013 with devastating consequences for the living world\u201d.<\/p>\n

The unavoidable conclusion from this is that with today\u2019s growth rate, what-ever else we do to avoid the destruction of the planet \u2013 and there are myriad things we have to do \u2013 will eventually be swept aside by it.<\/p>\n

Rising Population<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A major component of global GDP is the rising human population, although not always identified as such.<\/p>\n

Many on the radical left avoid (or even object to) discussing it. Others deny that it is happening, often quoting the falling (global) birth rate. Whilst this is true the death rate is falling as well, and the population, in absolute terms, continues to rise by 80m a year: which means it doubles every 24 years. The UN expects it to reach 9 billion by 2050 and just under 11 billion by 2100. It may then peak, but it would be too late to make any difference.<\/p>\n

This increase compounded by rapid urbanisation. There are now 34 mega cities in the world, exceeding 10m people with Tokyo as the biggest with 37 million people. There are three others in excess of 20m \u2013 Shanghai with 25m and Chongqing and Beijing with 22m. China is currently planning a super-city with a population of 40 million in the Pearl River Delta.<\/p>\n

One recent major study that does identify population as a component of GDP was\u00a0The Dasgupta Review<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(<\/em><\/strong>The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review<\/em><\/strong>)<\/em>. Which was commissioned by the UK government published in February of this year. Although government sponsored it went seriously off message, arguing, rightly in my view, that economic growth and population growth are indivisible \u2013 that you can\u2019t, in the end, contain economic growth without containing population growth.<\/p>\n

It points to three parallel components of GDP: \u201cpopulation size; per capita GDP, the efficiency with which we convert the biosphere\u2019s goods and services into GDP, and the extent to which the biosphere is transformed by global waste disposal\u201d. These factors, it insists, \u201care not independent of one another, and are, in any case, the outcome of our own choices.\u201d<\/p>\n

After an embarrassing public launch with Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, and many others praising it to the skies,\u00a0the Review<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0was banished to the very long grass.<\/p>\n

Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, says the following on populations in his best-selling bookProsperity Without Growth<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0published in 2009:<\/p>\n

\u201cA world in which things simply go on as usual is already inconceivable. But what about a world in which an estimated 9 billion people [the UN projection by 2050] all achieve the level of affluence expected in the OECD nations? Such an economy would need to be 15 times the size of today\u2019s economy (75 times what it was in 1950) by 2050, and 40 times bigger than today\u2019s economy (200 times bigger than 1950) by the end of the century. What on earth does such an economy look like? What does it run on? Does it really offer a credible vision for a shared and lasting prosperity?\u201c<\/p>\n

Any attempt to reduce population growth, however, must be based entirely on the empowerment of women to control their own lives and their own fertility through full access to health services, education and employment, and must reject any and all form of coercive control.<\/p>\n

Giorgos Kallis supports this approach, including opposition to population control.<\/p>\n

The \u2018anthropogenic techno-mass\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Another major indicator of human impact is the concept of the \u2018anthropogenic techno-mass\u2019(all human made stuff). It includes all roads, factories, houses, vehicles, railways, shipping, aviation, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printing paper, plastic, computers, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of today\u2019s daily life. The world\u2019s plastic alone, for example, now weighs twice as much as all marine and terrestrial animals, and buildings now outweigh all trees and shrubs.<\/p>\n

This concept was first advanced in 2000 by the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F Stoermer, a biologist from the University of Michigan. Their work was and followed up in 2016 by a paper entitled \u2018Scale and Diversity of the Physical Technosphere: A Geological Perspective\u2019<\/em><\/strong>, published in the\u00a0Anthropogenic Review<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Last year Israeli scientists published a further study of the Anthropogenic techno-mass in the journal\u00a0Nature<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0entitled\u00a0Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It was timed it to coincide with the point at which the Anthropogenic techno-mass \u2013 which now weighs in at a gigantic 1.1 trillion tonnes \u2013 has become equal to the total natural global bio-mass \u2013 all flora and fauna.<\/p>\n

They also point out that creation of human techno-mass has accelerated over the past 120 years and now doubles every 20 years. It has gone from 3 percent of the world\u2019s biomass in 1900 to parity with it today.<\/p>\n

These findings also consistent with the idea of the Anthropocene, the decision of scientists to rename the current planetary epoch (the Holocene or interglacial period) as the epoch of the Anthropocene \u2013 or the epoch of human beings.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, however, the radical, or indeed Marxist left, have yest to show any interest in it.<\/p>\n

The Limits to Growth Report<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Debate on growth is not new, of course. In 1972 it was the subject of\u00a0The<\/em>Limits to Growth<\/em>Report<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0published by the Club of Rome and written, principally, by Donella and Dennis Meadows from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It sold 12 million copies, was translated into 37 languages, and remains the top-selling environmental title of all time. It was highly influential \u2013 along with Rachel Carson\u2019s\u00a0Silent Spring<\/em><\/strong>\u00a010 years earlier \u2013 in stimulating the emergence of the modern environmental movement that was taking place at the time.<\/p>\n

The central message of the\u00a0Report<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0was that it is impossible to have exponential\u00a0growth in a finite system like the Earth without its systems sooner or later collapsing. Its conclusion was that \u201cif 1970 rates of economic growth, resource use and pollution continued unchanged, then modern civilisation would face environmental and economic collapse sometime in the mid-twenty-first century:\u201d which has turned out to be a remarkable accurate prediction.<\/p>\n

It was heavily attacked by the establishment, but the left was deeply divided. The Austrian philosopher and ecologist Andr\u00e9 Gorz defended the\u00a0Report<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0in his 1980 book\u00a0Ecology as Politics.\u00a0<\/em>In the end he said:\u00a0\u201c<\/em>Physical growth has physical limits, and any attempt to push them back (by recycling and purification) only pushes the problem around.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2009 the legacy of the\u00a0Report<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0was strongly defended by Tim Jackson \u2013 an ecological economist and professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey \u2013 in his bookProsperity Without Growth.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0The\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Limits to Growth Report<\/em><\/strong>, he says, \u2018with all the advantage of hindsight\u2019, has turned out to be a \u2018remarkably accurate\u2019 analysis.<\/p>\n

Today, he says: \u201cquestioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists, and revolutionaries\u2026 But question it we must. The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is anathema to an ecologist. No subsystem of a finite system can grow indefinitely, in physical terms. Economists have to be able to answer the question of how a continually growing economic system can fit within a finite ecological system.<\/p>\n

Jackson says the following on population: \u201cA world in which things go on as usual is already inconceivable. But what about a world in which an estimated 9 billion people all achieve the level of affluence expected in the OECD nations? Such an economy would need to be 15 times the size of today\u2019s economy (75 times what it was in 1950) by 2050, and 40 times bigger than today\u2019s economy (200 times bigger than 1950) by the end of the century. What on earth does such an economy look like? What does it run on? Does it really offer a credible vision for a shared and lasting prosperity? \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Naomi Klein puts it this way in\u00a0This Changes Everything<\/em><\/strong>:<\/em>\u00a0\u2018steady exponential material growth with no limits on resource consumption and population is the dominant conceptual model used by today\u2019s decision makers.\u201d It is, however, total nonsense. Economic growth, along with population growth, is one of the main drivers of global warming and environmental destruction, and it cannot continue at its current rate without disastrous results.<\/p>\n

Even Al Gore in his 2013 book\u00a0The Future<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0points out that:<\/p>\n

The rapid growth of human civilisation \u2013 in the number of people, the power of technology, the size of the global economy \u2013 is colliding with approaching limits to the supply of key natural resources on which millions of lives depend, including topsoil and freshwater. It is also seriously damaging to the integrity of crucial planetary ecological systems. Yet \u2018growth\u2019 in the peculiar and self-defeating way we define it, continues to be the principal and overriding objective of almost all the global economic policies and the business plans of almost all corporations.<\/p>\n

High growth rates, including that of population, were and are highly popular with ruling elites, of course, who see in expanding markets, higher profits, workers for factories and services, and soldiers for the battlefields.<\/p>\n

The case for degrowth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Giorgos Kallis concludes his book as follows: \u201cThis book has presented the case for a radical social transformation that leads to a significant reduction in societies throughput. I have argued that degrowth is necessary because if growth continues at pace, we will cross planetary boundaries with unforeseen and in all certainty very undesirable consequences. Degrowth is not only ecologically necessary but also socially desirable. The pursuit of perpetual growth is a major obstacle to the achievement of a more equal society that lives in creative balance with the environment. Growth is fuelled by exploitation and cost-shifting. A sharing sociality cannot, and should not, be one that constantly expands, constantly creates new frontiers that only a few can access\u2026 If this is right then the future will be by necessity one of lower throughput \u2013 the question is will it be by design or disaster?\u201d<\/p>\n

He is right. The planet cannot survive the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century model of the throwaway society, particularly in the Global North. Vast amounts of commodities are churned out, driven by the advertising industry, that go from factory to landfill in very short periods of time.<\/p>\n

The fashion industry (for example) produces 150 billion garments a year, enough to provide twenty new articles of clothing for every person on the planet. Eighty per cent of all clothing, irrespective of the level of use, including baby clothes that are discarded very quickly, goes into landfill. Every year, consumers in the UK buy 2 million tonnes of clothes, of which more than half \u2013 1.2 million tonnes \u2013 ends up in landfill. Religious and other popular festivals, like Christmas, result in the production of vast quantities of stuff that is used very little or even remains entirely unused before reaching a landfill site.<\/p>\n

Alongside the clothing industry we have plastic waste. A survey by Greenpeace found that single-use plastic bottles weighing more than 2 million tonnes are sold every year; another study has shown that that by 2050 there will be more plastic waste than fish in the sea.<\/p>\n

What kind of new society?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

This issue came up in the discussion, and it is very important.<\/p>\n

First, the ecological crisis (in my view) cannot be reduced to the capitalist system, nor the \u00a0solution reduced to its overthrow \u2013 hugely destructive as it is. The environmental crisis is first and foremost anthropogenic and major anthropological damage was inflicted on the ecosphere of the planet long before the arrival of capitalism \u2013 and the struggle (hopefully) will continue long after it is gone \u2013 depending on the nature of its removal and the alternative that replaces it. The deforestation of Britain, for example, took place in the Neolithic period.<\/p>\n

20th<\/sup>\u00a0century models as to what a post capitalist society would look like have little to offer. The depth of the crisis today redefines the socialist (i.e. ecosocialist) project. It is no longer a struggle \u2018simply\u2019 to replace capitalism with an economically and socially just society. Today we have to go further. A society that (for example) rejects growth from the outset and is capable of constructing a none-exploitative relationship between human beings and the natural world that is sustainable for the long term for both ourselves and the millions of other species with which we share the planet.<\/p>\n

This is only achievable if it is pursued and advocated a conscious objective during the revolutionary struggle itself. This is what makes the strategic issues so important today. It is also what makes an ecosocialist world view indispensable: which criticises both the capitalist \u2018market ecology\u2019 and productivist \u2018socialism\u2019 \u2013 which ignores the Earth\u2019s limits. This involves a shift away from quantitative and toward qualitative economic criteria, and an emphasis on use-value instead of exchange-value.<\/p>\n

Can such changes be contained within the capitalist system? No. Growth based economies collapse without growth. We therefore have to fight for such changes, in the here and now, whilst capitalism still exists as part of a longer term project to replace capitalism with an ecosocialist society. We have just 10 years in which to reach zero carbon, after the revolution will be too late.\u00a0Socialism can\u2019t be built on a dead planet.<\/p>\n

Our task, therefore, is to force the elites to\u00a0make major structural changes, in the here and now, whilst capitalism still exists \u2013 including the complete decarbonisation of the global economy and its replacement by renewable energy.<\/p>\n

Reforms are not necessarily reformist. The most effective road to revolutionary change is via the struggle for partial and transitional demands. The struggle for such demands generates both self-organisation and ecological consciousness and can take the struggle to a higher and more radical stage. In any case, if we are unable to build the kind of movement capable of forcing capitalism to make big changes, how are we going to build a movement capable of expropriating it by revolutionary means?<\/p>\n

W<\/strong>illiam Morris<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Few have critiqued growth more effectively, or indeed set out the principles of a future sustainable society, than William Morris \u2013 Britain\u2019s first ecosocialist.<\/p>\n

In his lecture \u2018Makeshift<\/em><\/strong>\u2019, for example, delivered in Manchester in 1894 he said the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy friends, a very great many people are employed in producing mere nuisances, like barbed wire, 100 ton guns, sky signs and advertising boards for the disfigurement of the green fields along the railways and so forth. But apart from these nuisances, how many more are employed in making market wares for rich people which are of no use whatever except to enable the said rich to `spend their money\u2019 as \u2019tis called; and again how many more in producing wretched makeshifts for the working classes because they are so poor that they can afford nothing better?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his lecture\u00a0Useful Work Versus Useless Toil<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0delivered in London the same year, he added:<\/p>\n

\u201cNext there is the mass of people employed in making articles of folly and luxury, the demand for which comes from the rich non-producing classes and which most people would not dream of wanting. These things are not wealth but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us: sunlight, fresh air, the unspoiled earth, food, clothing and necessary housing; the storing and dissemination of knowledge, the means of communication between humans and works of art created when humans are most aspiring and thoughtful \u2013 all the things which serve free people.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can\u2019t go back to the medieval village of course but there are a lot of lesions for us in what Morris had to say.<\/p>\n

Action demands<\/strong><\/h2>\n