The Limits to Growth

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

CounterPunch

October 11, 2002

The Greatest Deception of All Time:
The Blessings of Growth
by Jerre Skog

You hear it almost daily. "Growth first half year has fallen to less than 
0.3%" or "Economical growth has to increase if we are not to..." or "We 
have to have steady growth or we have nothing to distribute". Except for 
the obvious reply "Why don´t we distribute, more fairly, the wealth we 
already have?" (and the fact that the wealth added by economical growth is 
generally distributed with something like 10% to the poor, 20% to the 
middle classes and 70% to the already wealthy), there´s a fundamental flaw 
in the growth philosophy: Everlasting growth is dependent on everlasting 
supply. The producers might be able to con people into buying almost 
everything in these days of murdering sales promotion and ads but unless 
they have the raw materials nothing will come out of the machines. And the 
raw materials are limited!

Which means that the economical gurus who hail growth as the base for 
economical success and the statesmen who make this an overriding goal 
(probably 95% of them) for some reason either must have missed almost all 
their geography lessons when in school, or are lying like mad. According to 
all science the earth has a certain mass and dimensions which don´t seem to 
increase as to follow the growth-idiots´ plans. But of course the people 
who talk about eternal growth know very well that it can´t go on. That´s 
why they are so desperate to lay their hands on as much of the natural 
resources they can before they run out completely, some in the next ten to 
forty years. Don´t they have children or grandchildren? Do they expect 
their offspring to live in caves? Maybe in the future they have plans to 
ship iron ore from the moon or copper from Venus, I don´t know, but having 
experienced the common just-in-time trend in business I greatly fear for 
the delivery time and price if I need a 20mm M6 bolt for my Opel and the 
raw material has to be dug up in a mine on the moon. Perhaps that´s what 
the traditional economists have envisaged for their children. To start 
interstellar raw materials freight lines?

Let´s be absolutely clear about this! (I mean really, and not in the Nixon 
sense of making things perfectly clear.) The planet earth consists of only 
so much iron, copper, uranium, oil, gold, cobalt and other materials, and 
not one bloody milligram more. Any growth that is based on taking out these 
limited resources from the ground is doomed to come to an end. While 
talking about limits we should perhaps remember that all talk about oil and 
a lot of other things as being produced is lies! We don´t produce any oil, 
we take out what is there. We don´t produce copper, we refine ore already 
there. And what is there, surprise surprise WTO, is limited. Unlike the pig 
Saerimner, in the vikings´ belief of the beyond death, Valhalla, who is 
slaughtered every winter and reappears to be slaughtered next winter again, 
that part of our common cake is not renewable.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/skog1011.html


Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org


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