{"id":68429,"date":"2024-05-28T10:53:14","date_gmt":"2024-05-28T15:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68429"},"modified":"2024-05-28T10:53:14","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T15:53:14","slug":"growth-or-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68429","title":{"rendered":"Growth or Scale?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Growth or Scale?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Demonstrating that growth can\u2019t continue on a finite planet has been a favorite sport of mine in the past (e.g.,\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>). But it\u2019s child\u2019s 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\u2019t last. I guess that\u2019s what happens when an entire system is predicated on growth\u2019s continuance. Exposing the foundation to be shaky can come as seismic news.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s say that we (collectively) were able to accept that growth is a no-go for the future. Fine. Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In this post, I do the simple \u201cmath\u201d of presenting graphs (Do the Graph?) to try and ascertain whether the ills stem primarily from\u00a0growth<\/strong>, or primarily from\u00a0scale<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Death by Hockey Sticks<\/a>\u00a0was a simpler precursor to this post, comparing exponential-looking trends side-by-side and making the simple observation that this moment is highly anomalous,\u00a0exceedingly brief<\/a>, and surely can\u2019t continue. Here, we separate growth from scale to see who deserves more of the blame.<\/p>\n

Separating Growth and Scale<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0acceleration<\/em>, but not accumulating damage. However, one could try to make the argument that the extractive practices causing such harms represent a one-time \u201coutfitting\u201d 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)…<\/p>\n

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

Growth or Scale? Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay Demonstrating that growth can\u2019t continue on a finite planet has been a favorite sport of mine in the past (e.g.,\u00a0here,\u00a0here, and\u00a0here). But it\u2019s child\u2019s play, really: not a difficult accomplishment. Still, as blatantly obvious as it is, a surprising number of people are surprised […]<\/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":[4,7],"tags":[9128,34656,286,391,20154],"class_list":["post-68429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-do-the-math","tag-dr-tom-murphy","tag-exponential-growth","tag-growth","tag-scale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68429","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=68429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68430,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68429\/revisions\/68430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}