What is wrong with growth?

"All these problems seem to be getting bigger rather than smaller every year and for every single one of them there are hosts of organisations clamouring for attention and offering solutions to the problem. But the more I read and think about the problems as a whole, the more I become convinced that they were all in fact symptoms and not causes in themselves. Trying to remedy a symptom is almost always useless if the root cause is ignored. Obiously all the problems have to do with human activities, and these activities have to do with the context they are taking place in, the economic context to be precise. This economic context is determined by the dominant economic concept, and in our case I think it is safe to say that for many decades now the neoclassical economic concept of infinite growth has been shaping the economies of developed nations."

- Neven, Infinite Growth and the Crisis Cocktail.

What is wrong with growth?

Nothing, until it doesn't stop. Then it is cancer.

On Michael Tobis' blog, Neven has written a thought-provoking guest post summarising many of the ecological and resource crises I've been talking about and drawing the links to distorted ideologies of (endless economic) growth.

The (quite long) discussion in the comments is also valuable.

At greater length and from a Christian point of view on the same topic, Andrew Cameron has written an excellent piece called Is Growth Good? which I recommend even more highly. Don't believe the bankers, CEOs, politicians and pundits: there are things better than growth and it is possible to discover more by joyfully embracing less.

What does radical climate action look like?

"You are not the radicals in this fight. The radicals are the people who are fundamentally altering the composition of the atmosphere. That is most radical thing that people have ever done."

- Bill McKibben, Power Shift 2011.

I support radical climate (and ecological) action because I am fundamentally a conservative. I would like the planet on which my child grows up to bear some resemblance to the planet on which human civilisation developed.

Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi!
"If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change!"

- Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo.

H/T Michael Tobis.

Are you certain you know what uncertainty means?

I've said before that there is indeed still some significant uncertainty in the scientific literature concerning our ongoing and increasing climate disruption, that is, there is genuine scientific debate between those who argue that climate disruption is likely to be horrendous and those who argue it could well be catastrophic.

Within this context, Michael Tobis points out that arguments highlighting the uncertainty of climate science increase the reasons for taking aggressive policy action. Greater uncertainty means greater risk.

Gazing into the crystal ball: prognostications will continue to be popular

Recently, I considered one of the moral dangers of attempting to predict the future, namely, hubris, a mistaken alignment to the future that elides the priority of human receptivity over (re)action. However, there is a further difficulty in picturing the future, particularly at the scale of society: difficulty.

Making concrete predictions of likely or possible global scenarios over the next five, ten, twenty, fifty years is a difficult well-nigh impossible task, yet it doesn't stop plenty of people from trying. For example, The Guardian has just published 20 predictions of the next 25 years. At the moment, there are parts in a number of these scenarios that I find plausible and others I find fairly unlikely (including for instance key elements of the second and ninth). Yet the great problem with predictions of this nature (taking one arena of the present world and trying to explain what it might look like in 25 years) is that no arena is an island. Few of these scenarios seem to have thought deeply about the possible interconnections between some of these fields. How could possible political backlash over deteriorating energy security affect banking? Or how might worsening climate change affect attitudes and policies towards fossil fuels?

Here's Michael Tobis making another attempt at what the next few decades might look like. Michael predicts the collapse of industrial civilisation and is called an optimist for saying it won't be before 2030. Feel free to provide links in the comments to other specific predictions of coming decades.

I reflected back here on the shortcomings and benefits of such activities. However, at the moment I don't think I'm willing to make any predictions more specific than that the next few decades are likely to be very bumpy indeed.

One exception to this I'm happy to make is that such prognostications are likely to continue to be popular for the foreseeable future. And that most of them will be wrong.

Getting angry for reasonableness

A sign at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.
H/T Michael Tobis.

Willful ignorance

I also wrote a brief piece on the preference for the political newcomer back here.
H/T Michael.