Richard Heinberg Says, "Growth Won't Continue."

Richard Heinberg, writer of Peak Everything and most recently Blackout, just wrote an article entitled, “Life Without Growth.” While this is a long article, Richard provides a a potent analysis of our current economic standing, as well as where we are going in the future. Essentially, we’re all out of options that include continued economic growth – time to think about the next phase, a post growth society (hopefully a socially just steady state economy).

He does not mince words and says clearly that we’re “in for some hard times.” But he finds hope that we will use this challenge to eventually find an equilibrium. He goes on to say,

“The transitional period on our way toward a post-growth, equilibrium economy will prove to be the most challenging time any of us has ever lived through. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we can survive this collective journey, and that if we make sound choices as families and communities, life can actually be better for us in the decades ahead than it was during the heady days of seemingly endless economic expansion.”

Four Propositions to Life Without Growth

Heinberg gives us four propositions to not only understand our current situation, but also navigate our way to a desirable future:

1. We have reached the end of economic growth as we have known it.
2. The basic factors that will inevitably shape whatever replaces the growth economy are knowable.
3. It is possible for economies to persist for centuries or millennia with no or minimal growth.
4. Life in a non-growing economy can be fulfilling, interesting, and secure.

With these opening statements Heinberg goes on to advocate local economies, building stronger communities, and going forward with a mindset of action. “We must assume that a satisfactory, sustainable way of life is achievable in the absence of fossil fuels and conventional economic growth, and go about building it,” he says. I agree.

Read the full article here.

I’ve been super busy lately, but I have not lost the urge to write. I have some 7 posts in draft, but that has become the usual in the last couple months. Since we’ve crossed a bit of a milestone, and Steady State Revolution is one year old, I wanted to highlight some of the better posts from the last year.

This is a list of the top ten posts in the last year, chosen by me but with influence from feedback as well. For those of you that are new to this blog or haven’t checked out the archives yet I hope this list is helpful for you!

2009 Top Ten Posts

1. The Creation of Money and the Illusion of Wealth – The banks we give our money to and rely on for loans are the very ones contributing to continued inflation. In fact, they create money out of thin air in order to gain a profit. This illusion of wealth (the creation of money instead of real wealth) will be the downfall of our society if we’re not to careful.
2. Local Currency and Bartering – Money is a part of our daily life. However,any of us m rarely think about where our money goes when we make a purchase. When we buy from a large chain often our money feeds a wealthy few far away. When we buy locally, with currency that supports only local businesses, we in turn support our local economy. Each dollar spent locally is four times as beneficial than a dollar spent in a global owned business. In a sustainable future a flourishing local economy is the more reliable and logical choice over a unstable global one.
3. Sustainable Scale – In order to create a sustainable way of life we must realize that the economy on Earth must also be sustainable. This requires us to create a sustainable scale.
4. Fair Distribution: Ending the Wealth Gap – In order to create a sustainable world we must acknowledge the fact that continued growth does not solve one of the most severe problems: inequality. The top 20% of the world’s wealthy receive 74% of the yearly wealth, while the bottom fifth receives only 2% of the yearly wealth. This disparity must be addressed if we are ever to succeed in eliminating poverty or creating a stable, sustainable society.
5. Carfree Day Leading to a Carfree Lifestyle? – On Worldwide Carfree Day I made an adjustment to my commute that resulted in a few bus transfers and a longer trip, but a much happier one all around. Since then I have cut the car out of most of my commuting. Free yourself from your mobile prison!
6. Why Emissions Must Be Cut Now, Not Later – The concept is simple, the rate of emissions doesn’t matter as much as the total amount of emissions. Think about it this way: we’re in a race towards the apocalypse and the US is in the lead. Not because the US has the fastest car, but because we had the largest head start.
7. Earth Demands a Steady State Economy -  Our planet is finite and as such cannot support a continued increase in resource consumption. If we wish to continue being supported by this planet we must acknowledge it’s limits.
8. Carrying Capacity Reached: The Need for Population Stability – One of the three large issues confronting a sustainable way of life is continued population growth. Obviously, this growth is more disruptive when it comes from developed nations because we make, per capita, the greatest impact. But nonetheless, we can only support so many people on this planet, and only so many at a given level of affluence. In order to maintain certain standards of living in the future we must control the growth of our population and provide sustainable limits to our numbers and our consumption.
9. Uneconomic Growth – Growth is commonly referred to in the neoclassical economics as “economic growth.” However, this implies that it is providing benefit when in fact we’re no longer benefiting from a growing economy. We have past the point where the benefits outweigh the costs and our growth is now uneconomic.
10. Post Growth Reading List – This is a list of books and articles relating to the sustainable, post-growth economics. Both an introductory list and an advanced list are presented. This is a favorite of a few people.

Copenhagen Needs Some Help

The countdown is on with now just under 55 days until the much anxiously awaited Copenhagen Climate Conference where world leaders (we hope it’s the leaders, not delegates) will work on drafting a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012 (and a serious agreement is needed).

Nations know that there is no excuse for waiting, binding action must be taken at Copenhagen. Not only to maintain a decent standard of living and healthy planet for ourselves, but for our children. However, in order to realize this green dream we must recognize the inherent problems with our current system. Otherwise, we will continue to feed the growth machine without making ourselves happier and while making the world worse for our children.

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In a previous post I discussed the scale of our economy. Economists have quite a bit to say about scale in microeconomics, or economics at the level of the household and the firm. They report the existence of a “when to stop rule.”  This rule states that an activity should cease just as the costs begin to outweigh the benefits. An example might be deciding when to stop drinking bottles of beer.  After about the third or fourth bottle, the costs begin to outweigh the benefits.

We could say that three bottles represent the “optimal scale” of beer consumption for an individual. Even though mainstream economists (dubbed neoclassical economists) readily apply this concept to the small-scale, micro-economy, they refuse to apply it to the big-picture, macro-economy. On the large scale, according to neoclassical theory, our economy as a whole has no optimal scale – just growth.  And that’s an implausible conclusion, given that the macro-economy is simply a summation of all the micro-economies.

Ecological economics argues that everything has an optimal scale including big-picture activities and systems. It is hard to conceive of a more pressing place to apply the “when to stop rule” than the whole economy, because if we overreach our limits here, the entire ship goes down. A steady state economy strives to stop growth at the optimal point, maintaining a sustainable scale for the entire human enterprise.

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Herman Daly is often given credit for pioneering the term “Uneconomic Growth.“  It is a key term in ecological economics and Daly has given us numerous works on the subject. What is uneconomic growth? It is closely related to the optimal or sustainable scale of our economy.

When social or environment costs become larger than the benefits of more production and consumption growth is no longer economic. As Daly and Farley put it in their textbook Ecological Economics uneconomic growth happens when continued growth “costs us more than it is worth. A situation in which further expansion entails lost ecosystem services that are worth more than the extra production benefits of the expanded economy.”

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Size Does Matter

Sustainability is quite the buzzword nowadays. What is sustainability anyway? It would appear at face value to have a simple, easily understood meaning. On the contrary, almost everything labeled “sustainable” is not, creating ambiguity in the meaning of the concept. It has become more of a marketing tool than an actual process. Being sustainable is quite different from what is typically called sustainable in our culture currently.

Something is sustainable if it can maintain balance with the system supporting it, and can do so indefinitely. A sustainable process takes only the amount of resources that can be regenerated by its supporting system between each processing cycle. Waste generated by a sustainable process can be absorbed by the surrounding system at the same rate it is created. Sound familiar? On a large scale, that’s the steady state economy.

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Too Many People Harms Us All

We all want to have long, peaceful, and prosperous lives – to do this we need fresh water, healthy cropland for food, and materials for shelter and security. However, being that we live in a finite world, there are limits on everything needed for a long, healthy human life.

There is a limit to size of the pie. If more people eat from this proverbial pie, each piece must shrink to accommodate the growing number of people at the table. Historically the Earth’s resources have provided amply for the population. We always had more then enough pie to feed new people at the table, and more people were a welcomed sign of continued prosperity (generally).

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Spring Blooms At UW

Spring is in the air! For us Seattleites, spring is not exactly like the season seen in movies or television. Spring in Seattle is like a bipolar transition between seasons: Mother Nature changes her mind frequently and without warning until May or June when the weather finally evens out to the best-kept Seattle secret: 3 to 4 months of glorious sun-filled summer days.

Spring brings with it new growth, beautiful blooms, and the chance to connect with the outdoors again. As all the hermits and season-affective-disorder sufferers creep out of their caves, from the winter rises a chance to renew the bond with community.

A great source of connection in communities is through food. It is over meals that deals are made, laughs are had, and romances flourish. So much of our lives are involved with food, yet it is something many fail to think too much about. We can create and nourish relationships with our planet and our community through food: growing it, buying it and eating it

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