Blindness to limits to growth leading to disaster
November 17th, 2008 by Jim JustHerman Daly, one of the founders of the field of ecological economics, writes at NewScientist that traditional economists have a blind spot: they fail to recognize that our economy is part of a larger system – the ecosystem.
“[E]conomists have not grasped a simple fact that to scientists is obvious: the size of the Earth as a whole is fixed. Neither the surface nor the mass of the planet is growing or shrinking. The same is true for energy budgets: the amount absorbed by the Earth is equal to the amount it radiates. The overall size of the system – the amount of water, land, air, minerals and other resources present on the planet we live on – is fixed.
“The most important change on Earth in recent times has been the enormous growth of the economy, which has taken over an ever greater share of the planet’s resources. In my lifetime, world population has tripled, while the numbers of livestock, cars, houses and refrigerators have increased by vastly more. In fact, our economy is now reaching the point where it is outstripping Earth’s ability to sustain it. Resources are running out and waste sinks are becoming full. The remaining natural world can no longer support the existing economy, much less one that continues to expand.”
The sources of the resources consumed and the sinks into which wastes are deposited are ignored. Effectively, economists are assuming they are infinite. Consequently, economists recognize no limits on the capacity for economic growth.
Now we are seeing the warnings uttered in the 1972 book Limits to Growth come true: exponential growth is resulting in economic and environmental collapse.
Daly says to avoid environmental and economic disaster we must transition to a “steady-state” economy – one where the value of goods produced can still increase, but the physical scale of our economy is kept at a level the planet is able to sustain.
The idea of moving to a steady-state economy may at this moment appear radical and politically unimaginable. But the alternative – an economy that grows in scale beyond the biophysical limits of the Earth – is an absurdity impossible to sustain.