Growth or Scale?
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
Demonstrating that growth can’t continue on a finite planet has been a favorite sport of mine in the past (e.g., here, here, and here). But it’s child’s play, really: not a difficult accomplishment. Still, as blatantly obvious as it is, a surprising number of people are surprised to hear that growth can’t last. I guess that’s what happens when an entire system is predicated on growth’s continuance. Exposing the foundation to be shaky can come as seismic news.
But let’s say that we (collectively) were able to accept that growth is a no-go for the future. Fine. Let’s just stay here, then, shall we? Maybe we fashion a steady-state economy that continues to support the present scale of the human enterprise (perhaps redistributed for better equity) but without those nasty ills of growth.
In this post, I do the simple “math” of presenting graphs (Do the Graph?) to try and ascertain whether the ills stem primarily from growth, or primarily from scale.
Death by Hockey Sticks was a simpler precursor to this post, comparing exponential-looking trends side-by-side and making the simple observation that this moment is highly anomalous, exceedingly brief, and surely can’t continue. Here, we separate growth from scale to see who deserves more of the blame.
Separating Growth and Scale
My intuition going in was that scale is a more important driver than growth in effecting ecological harm, so that stopping growth only stops the acceleration, but not accumulating damage. However, one could try to make the argument that the extractive practices causing such harms represent a one-time “outfitting” of humans with the basic things they need in terms of metals, lumber, agricultural land, solar panels, etc. and can coast to a constant pace once steady state is reached (via circular economy notions, for instance)…
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