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If you have love in your heart but are apathetic with respect to the reality of what's going on around you, what you can be left with is simply a formula for tyranny. And that's because if you ignore the injustices that are being perpetrated upon others, and you have no active response to it, what you call love is not enough. The truth is, God is real and not a myth. You can think of Him anyway you want, but God will still be God, no matter what you think. And what I know about God is this: God is the utmost example of truth, honor, dignity, compassion, courage, and love. And in that truth is the respect for your freedom and free will. God will expose you to an understanding as you look for understanding, but He will not make you do anything, for He respects your free will. He will let you learn from your experience knowing that with enough experience you will come to value truth, honor, dignity, compassion, courage, and love. Somewhere in experience, I think, is the understanding that love includes compassion, and courage, and the dignity of seeking the truth, and the honor of being an expression of that which you have learned. And I don't think that leads to apathy, or ignoring what's going on around you, what's happening to other people, or where things are going if people with love in their hearts don't act to intercede on their behalf.
Mark A. Goldman
The Impossibility of Growth Demands a New Economic System
Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.
By George Monbiot May 28 2014 "ICH" - "Monbiot" - - Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham (1).
Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.
By George Monbiot May 28 2014 "ICH" - "Monbiot" - - Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham (1).
Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems (2). It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.
To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.
Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained(3). But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.
It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and the pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible reserves have been exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.
On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable(4), the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park(5). It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills(6), will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America(7).
The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo(8); one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east(9), the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people(10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.
The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.
Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years(12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.”(13) If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?
Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced(14).
As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.
The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.
Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.
References:
2. Grantham expressed this volume as 1057 cubic metres. In his paper We Need To Talk About Growth, Michael Rowan translated this as 2.5 billion billion solar systems. (http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/). This source gives the volume of the solar system (if it is treated as a sphere) at 39,629,013,196,241.7 cubic kilometres, which is roughly 40 x 1021 cubic metres. Multiplied by 2.5 billion billion, this gives 1041 cubic metres. So, unless I’ve got the wrong figure for the volume of the solar system or screwed my units up, which is eminently possible, Michael Rowan’s translation looks like an underestimate. I’ll stick with his figure though, as I don’t have much confidence in my own. Any improvements, comments or corrections via the contact form gratefully received.
3. EA Wrigley, 2010. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press.
12. Philippe Sibaud, 2012. Opening Pandora’s Box: The New Wave of Land Grabbing by the Extractive Industries and the Devastating Impact on Earth. The Gaia Foundation. http://www.gaiafoundation.org/opening-pandoras-box
15. Michael Rowan, 2014. We Need To Talk About Growth (And we need to do the sums as well.) http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/
© 2014 George Monbiot
As to the rodents, when there is no cake, let them eat sweet bread?
fruit cake has more flavour
Unsettling and pragmatic. But just realpolitik. What party would close the door that leads to power.
Fianna Fáil are Clann Na Poblachta Éadrom.
Once you get into bed with the deVils, the only way you'll come out is as a political corpse.
*delete as appropriate
Stick to whinging - you're good at that.
I refer to Magill...when did it (first) cease to exist?
Before the GFA.
First, the budget deficit in 2010 was nearly 12% of GDP i.e. the Government was spending nearly €19 billion it did not have. Even after all the austerity of recent years, the deficit will be about 4.8% of GDP in 2014 as the "wicked, brutal" Government spends roughly another €7 billion it doesn't have. You know Vincent, €19 billion here and €7 billion there and soon you're talking big money! Instead of your incessant... » more
Well said Con.
There are lots of "proper" leftist parties; the problem is that very few people will vote for them.
Recognising what the problem is, is a necessary prerequisite to fixing it; though I doubt the "problem" of minimal votes for the Socialist Party and PBP can be fixed.