[dohboi]

Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism?

This is the latest salvo in the discussion heating up about the possible policy responses to Hansen's and Anderson's challenges to the world: to start immediately to make radical reductions in GHG emissions.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2121 ... capitalism

The main claim is that steady-state or no-growth capitalism--of the sort promoted by folks like Herman Daly, Tim Jackson and Jonathan Porritt--are unworkable fantasies.

Either we save capitalism or we save ourselves. We can't save both.

[rollin]

Great essay, thanks for posting. Definitely points out the insanity of our economic systems on a finite world. We can't keep pouring pollutants, toxic chemicals and ripping up the environment in the pursuit of the next great product without coming up hard against the limits of life on this planet. Our current direction produces a world only suitable for robots (imitations of life).

That of course begs the question, what will stop and reverse this horrifying trend? Aside from an asteroid strike or full out nuclear war, bending and changing the inertia developed over 10 millennia of commerce and civilization in a space of a few decades would be an almost miraculous task. There is also the option of pandemics, but we are good at stopping them and would learn nothing from a seemingly natural event.

Which brings up the next and possibly most important question. Why do we think we stand outside the laws of nature? Any species that overgrazes, overkills it's food source or just plain overpopulates from a temporary overgrowth of it's food, suffers the consequence of population reduction. A simple method nature has of balancing the numbers to better fit the environment.

Of course in our case, being so good at survival and destruction of the environment to survive, we may realize that if we die off, most everything else must die off first.

And to point out to any of you who think we have a chance at preventing devastating climate change, there is no way at this time to avoid a 2 degree C rise in global average temperature. It is already built in.
We might be able to avoid three degrees C of rise if we drastically cut back CO2 emissions and reforest about 1/4 of our farmland and at least 1/4 of our ranchland within the next 30 years. Yep, it would take maximum efforts like that, with no guarantees. ( and you farmers thought
Once we get in the 2 to 3 degree rise range, it's anybody's guess as to how much the natural feedbacks will push global warming and how long. As James Hansen has pointed out, the methane hydrate cycle on the planet is about at the maximum mark and could start gasifying at some point. Yes, we are living with a potential climate bomb.

The final question: Does anyone think that the human species can actually work together on a scale large enough to institute the physical and economic changes needed to prevent or mitigate upcoming predicaments in the near future?

[AndyA]

We can't save capitalism, and we can't save ourselves.

Fixed it.

[RobertInget]

Here is why progrowth guys politicized climate... Simple like Borscht...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-1 ... -2030.html

A draft of the study was obtained by Bloomberg from a person with access to the documents who asked not to be identified because it hasn’t been published. A spokesman for the panel declined to comment on the document..

[Pops]

Personally I think the whole "growth/capitalism" bit is misleading because it is not a thing separate from human nature that we can turn on and off or vote for or against: it is human nature. It's the outgrowth of our prime evolutionary adaptation - which is adaptation and invention.

Growth is simply human nature; always wanting more: more pleasure, more leisure, more sex, more.

You'll not do away with more and as long as the population continues to increase you'll have compounding more.

I know, Marx said: "blah blah" but the fact remains humans have been "accumulating" since they first hid some seeds in a rock crevice for planting next spring. You need a longer frame of reference than dead guy from 150 years ago. LOL

[Tanada]

All a steady state economy means to Capitalism is for one to grow other have to shrink. It really isn't rocket science now is it?

[Lore]

Capital accumulation is not the same as modern capitalism. Marx and the Protestant ethic both agree in capital accumulation. The differences lie in how that capital is used and distributed.

The issue with human growth through a capitalist structure is that it tends to ignore the problem of externalities.

[Pops]

but if we were a world of 10 billion peasant farmers or the ever popular Hunter/Gatherer would we not also "ignore externalities" until they rose up and bit us? Of course we would, the next pleasure is our focus and always will be, it's only when we are near satiated that we can afford to look beyond the next meal or neked romp. Fossil fueled capitalism is just the latest wrinkle. Blame cpitalism or whatever other -ism you like but the man behind the curtain is and always will be . . . man.

[Lore]

I would venture to say that humans were more aware of problems of externalities when we were a species dependent on hunting and gathering for our existence. Does that mean we were not just as greedy 10 thousand years ago as we are today, of course not. What it does suggest is that we existed for 90,000 years prior to then more aware of our nature and how we interacted with our physical environment. Less time to accumulate wealth, more time spent just to survive.

We've spent most of the last 500 years, a brief time in our history, adapting and innovating ourselves essentially out of existence. While putting an extraordinary emphasis on the acquisition of material things that essentially no longer mean anything to our basic needs to survive we have ended up ignoring the long range outlook for short term gratification.

The proof of that is right here in this forum. While we try to forge an understanding of the threat, 99% of the rest of the world still dreams of BAU.

I do agree that we are our own worst enemy. Which is why I'm also beginning to realize just how failed the human evolutionary branch has become. If we were a more enlightened species we'd take what we need, not what we want.

[dohboi]

Pops: So all the millions of people who, over the years, have taken vows of voluntary poverty presumably aren't human?

My point is that, yes, there are definite trends in social evolution toward accumulation. But there are also plenty of counter examples. 'Human nature' in most cases is quite fluid and changeable--strongly influenced by dominant social norms...If "I want more and I'm gonna get it no matter what" were a part of 'human nature' that could never be countered by other parts of human nature, imposing limits on hunters would be a totally hopeless task. But mostly hunters more or less stay within those limits, even when the authorities aren't watching. Similarly, most traditional societies have a wide range of tabus, mostly aimed at stopping individuals and groups from over-exploiting resources.

So yes, hunter-gatherer societies are very aware of 'externalities,' though none of them would ever put it that way, because, unlike our modern mad society, they did not, by and large, see themselves as radically separated from the ebb and flow of the living communities around them. (And yes, there are exceptions, but generally exceptions that prove the rule.)

Lore wrote:

We've spent most of the last 500 years, a brief time in our history, adapting and innovating ourselves essentially out of existence.

Nicely put! Worthy of a quote of the day, I'd say.

[Timo]

Well said, Lore. Well said. Sorry to say this on the PO website, but PO has nothing to do with the future habitability of our planet. Oil and other combustibles were the enablers of our assention, and now to our demise. Modern humans have lost the capability to live without the creature comforts affored to us by fossil fuels. Modern politicians have lost the understanding that time is nearly gone to do anything relevant to prevent a mass extinction. They'll deny the problem exists until the day they die. Doing otherwise puts their campaigns at financial risk. Politics is just another, very ugly capitalist industry. It's purpose is to perpetuate BAU. Nothing will ever change. Until it's too late. And then, adios muchachos.

[Pops]

I agree with all of that, Lore.

[Pops]

Doh-boy! Here we go with the noble savage bit, LOL

Eskimos are said to have 100 words for snow, does that mean they are necessarily more in touch with "nature" than a porn star who has 100 words for sex?

LOL, . . . LOL

Simply because some professor stumbles upon a tiny remote tribe of bony bush meat hunters, without an enemy in sight doesn't mean they had no enemies nor does it mean they had no wish to have more children live to be adults or be a bigger tribe or be fat instead of bony or to eat something other than monkey, monkey, monkey.

LOL

[KaiserJeep]

This is, after all, peakoil.com. I don't actually believe that the humans WILL get wiser, BEHAVE any wiser, or in any way change lifestyles - and certainly nothing will ever change as a result of a scholarly, well written paper with references. Here's what I believe will happen:

1) The oil runs out (short for petroleum EROEI becomes unity), the price of crude exponentially rises, and we enter our Strange Days.

2) The corner service station keeps the building, and acquires a heap of coal to sell. A profitable sideline develops installing coal cookers on older, easy-to-convert cars with V-8's, and well-to-do people putt-putt around belching noxious black clouds, and occasionally stop to shovel coal from the trunk into the coal cooker. Carbon Dioxide emissions blow through 4000ppm worldwide, but everybody welcomes warmer Winters because they are less deadly.

3) A few years later, as you slowly starve, you watch enviously as a 1980 Ford Taurus works its way down your mostly empty suburban street, and the owner salvages your neighbor's split rail fence and odd furniture hardwoods from the many abandoned houses to fuel his car. The brief resurgence of the Age of Coal has ended.

4) You go inside and break open another bundle of banknotes from your 401K to cook this week's meat meal, a cat carcass only two days old.

5) You decide to use the approximately one hour's worth of electrical service available from your worn-out batteries (charged by the 30-year old solar PV on the roof) to check on the folks in peakoil.com.

Richard Smith was absolutely right about one thing, you did learn to use less energy.

[KaiserJeep]

KaiserJeep just bid the Matrix farewell. Welcome Comrade

Of course, your sad personal circumstances are only because you could not afford a ticket to immigrate to the Elysium space habitat, and so had to remain among the squalid planet dwellers....

[americandream]

Personally I think the whole "growth/capitalism" bit is misleading because it is not a thing separate from human nature that we can turn on and off or vote for or against: it is human nature. It's the outgrowth of our prime evolutionary adaptation - which is adaptation and invention.

Growth is simply human nature; always wanting more: more pleasure, more leisure, more sex, more.

You'll not do away with more and as long as the population continues to increase you'll have compounding more.

I know, Marx said: "blah blah" but the fact remains humans have been "accumulating" since they first hid some seeds in a rock crevice for planting next spring. You need a longer frame of reference than dead guy from 150 years ago. LOL

Which accounts for why you see accumulation (as opposed to needs based resource use) in the other of our brothers who share this planet with us, the animal kingdom? Think about it. If the act of accumulation (which is quite a specofic act and does not include for example stroring potatoes or grazing your territory) is instinctual, we would see some evidence of it in all other lifeforms. Needs based usage can also drive us to the brink but that is largely due to population size and territoriality. In mankinds case, a wants based culture has essentislly magnified this risk tenfold to a planetary wide magnitude. In other words, once our wants have stripped this planetary territory, we are done.

[americandream]

Capital accumulation is not the same as modern capitalism. Marx and the Protestant ethic both agree in capital accumulation. The differences lie in how that capital is used and distributed.

The issue with human growth through a capitalist structure is that it tends to ignore the problem of externalities.

Absurd nonsense. The very act of communitarian modernism precludes accumulation. It is merely the restoration of needs usage with the additional support of more efficient tool usage via mechinisation. Machines should merely supplement our social relations, not be the engine via which the labour surplus extracted through thses distorted these social relations is amplified.

edit: And the idiotic fiasco that is "communist" China is nothing other than the crass opportunism of a corrupt elite.

[dohboi]

Welcome to the fray, ad...I was wondering when you'd show up.

Pops, I guess I opened myself up to that one. I did not mean to imply that all traditional societies were always noble, perfect and right. Just that it is our particular (now world) culture who has particularly managed to get it spectacularly wrong. It is, of course, a completely predictable cliche to justify or explain away our own depredations by claiming that we are only working out our human nature.

I do think that the combination of fossil fuels and machines allowed first European then global society to conclude that they were now beyond the (superstitious, nobly savage...or whatever other predictably derogatory term one prefers) limits their forefathers had imposed on society. And the ideology of modern capitalism rose up to justify this kind of thinking--such an ideology would not have lasted long under any other situation than an ever-increasing availability of seemingly endless energy put to use in ever more elaborate ways by the industrial society that it helped foster. (And, a.d., it does seem that those machines do have a way of becoming more than just tools to "supplement our social relations.")

Perhaps it was inevitable that some human society would end up figuring out how to exploit the vast reservoir of energy that is ffs. Perhaps it was inevitable that the first Australians would annihilate most of the native mega-fauna they found on that continent--also a,for them, vast source of readily available energy (if it is the case that they did so). But the aboriginal Australians over time learned to generally live within the ecosystem they inhabited and create elaborate systems insight that helped them see their proper place within that ecosystem.

It is long past time that we come to a similar understanding, and create a society that understands and stays withing limits.