{"id":47347,"date":"2019-07-20T14:25:12","date_gmt":"2019-07-20T19:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47347"},"modified":"2019-07-20T14:27:13","modified_gmt":"2019-07-20T19:27:13","slug":"the-planetary-insanity-of-eternal-economic-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47347","title":{"rendered":"The Planetary Insanity of Eternal Economic Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Planetary Insanity of Eternal Economic Growth<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Earthrise” is one of the most influential photographs ever published.<\/strong> Taken on the Apollo 8 mission in late December 1968 by astronaut Bill Anders, it captures Earth’s uniqueness, isolation and modest scale: a blue and white dot on a vast sea of lifeless darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The revelation that strikes me is the insanity of pursuing eternal economic growth, not as an option but as the only possible path:<\/strong> there is literally no alternative to extracting ever greater quantities of the planet’s resources to enable ever greater consumption by the planet’s 7.7 billion humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stripped to its essence, this mad drive is about profit and power.<\/strong> The necessity is sold as the only path to prosperity for humanity, but it’s really about securing wealth and power for the few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recent article in Scientific American<\/em> magazine highlights how the idealistic impulses of protecting the planet’s diverse life from the machinery of “growth” are inevitably subsumed by the necessity for profit: The Ecologists and the Mine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what these kinds of articles never say: markets cannot price in the value of non-monetized natural assets such as diverse ecosystems.<\/strong> Whatever cannot be monetized right now is worthless, as markets lack any mechanism to price in what cannot be valued by market supply and demand in the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no way to fix this fatal flaw in markets<\/strong>, and attempts to do so are merely excuses deployed to enable the profitable exploitation and resulting ruin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Recall that neoliberalism is the quasi-religious ideology of turning everything on Earth into a market, so it can be exploited and financialized by the few at the expense of the many.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Planetary Insanity of Eternal Economic Growth This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever.  “Earthrise” is one of the most influential photographs ever published. Taken on the Apollo 8 mission in late December 1968 by astronaut Bill Anders, it captures Earth’s uniqueness, isolation and modest scale: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,7],"tags":[127,391,587],"class_list":["post-47347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-growth","tag-of-two-minds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47348,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47347\/revisions\/47348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}