Ray Pensador - Countdown: We Need to Stop The Madmen Before They Destroy Us All
Sometimes it's hard to try to get across the point that unless we somehow are able to stop the madmen now piloting the locomotive (as it were), we will be heading towards assured destruction--and fast. To put it bluntly, these folks are out of their minds!
The social system based on unbridled capitalism and constant (quantitative) growth already failed. And it should not come as a surprise. Ethical and conscientious philosophers, economists, and thinkers warned us about it long ago.
Because of the massive levels of fossil fuel burning the earth is fast approaching a climate change tipping point which means massive ecological and biological destruction. The parasitic (in the truest sense of the word) capitalist system has "matured" to the point that it is now doing what those who have been warning us for generations said it would do: An accelerated transfer of wealth and power towards a tiny elite and increased economic insecurity an poverty for the rest.
Okay, so now that I got that off my chest, I fully understand that some may see it as hyperbolic, so let me take it down a couple of notches and moderate the language. To help me do that, let me use the work of Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson for reference: Qualitative Growth
Most economists still measure a country’s wealth in terms of its GDP in which all economic activities associated with monetary values are added up indiscriminately while all non-monetary aspects of the economy are ignored. Social costs, like those of accidents, wars, litigation, and health care, are added as positive contributions to the GDP, and the undifferentiated growth of this crude quantitative index is considered to be the sign of a “healthy” economy. The idea that growth can be obstructive, unhealthy, or pathological is rarely entertained by economists, even though they have been criticized for decades.
The goal of most national economies is to achieve unlimited growth of their GDP through the continuing accumulation of material goods and expansion of services. The over-expansion of financial services, in particular, is parasitic on the real economyand led to the current [2008] collapse. Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through the artificial creation of needs through advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and therefore are essentially waste. Moreover, the pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes.
As the article also mentions, a good analogy for this situation is the growth of cancerous cells.
An instructive example is the rapid growth of cancer cells, which does not recognize boundaries and is not sustainable because the cancer cells die when the host organism dies. Similarly, unlimited quantitative economic growth on a finite planet cannot be sustainable.
And so the authors of the paper argue that instead of focusing on linear "quantitative growth" we should be focusing on the type of non-linear "qualitative growth" which is more attuned to biological and ecological systems.
From the ecological point of view, the distinction between “good” and “bad” economic growth is obvious. Bad growth is growth of production processes and services that are based on fossil fuels, involve toxic substances, deplete our natural resources, and degrade the Earth’s ecosystems. Good growth is growth of more efficient production processes and services that involve renewable energies, zero emissions, continual recycling of natural resources, and restoration of the Earth’s ecosystems.Climate change and the other manifestations of our global environmental crisis make it imperative that we shift from our destructive production processes to sustainable “green,” or “ecodesign” alternatives; and it so happens that these alternatives will also solve our economic crisis in ways that are socially just.
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