Growing without limits

'The idea that we can address climate change matters successfully at the expense of economic growth is not only unrealistic but it also unacceptable to the population of Australia which I represent.' - Prime Minister John Howard, at the Asia-Pacific Clean Development and Climate Partnership [link].

Arh, the growth at all costs mantra. Perhaps that's one of the reasons we find ourselves in this predicament? As ecologist Paul Ehrlich says, endless growth in a finite world is the creed of the cancer cell, and the result of adhering to it is death. In any case, I think I might pick up a copy of “The Ecology of Commerce” and send it Mr Howards way. Maybe he will be able to sneak in a page or two between re-reads of his favourite Bradman biography or something.

"Howard told a conference of Asia-Pacific nations and corporations that growth was the only way many nations could reduce poverty levels among their populations."

Surely the problem is not lack of wealth, but the inequality in the distribution of that wealth? In “Naked Ape to Superspecies”, economist Herman Daly says:

“We’ve built the modern economy around the idea of growth, I believe at least partly, in order to avoid facing up to the problem of sharing. If you don’t continue to grow, and you still have poverty, then you have to redistribute. You have to share in order to cure poverty. How do you cure poverty without sharing? Well, the only way we’ve been able to come up with is growing.”

So it seems you can either keep growing (and hope the poor see some of the benefits) or you can share the wealth around more evenly. The latter is a moral problem of the type that we humans apparently aren’t very good at solving. So we tend to favor the technical problem of chasing continual economic growth – with its inherent detrimental effect on the environment.