Why is economic growth a threat to economic sustainability, national security, and international stability?To grow, an economy requires more natural capital, including soil, water, minerals, timber, other raw materials, and energy sources. When the economy grows too fast or gets too big, this natural capital is depleted, or "liquidated." To function smoothly, the economy also requires an environment that can absorb and recycle pollutants. When natural capital stocks are depleted, and/or the capacity of the environment to absorb pollutants is exceeded, the economy is forced to shrink.
National security, meanwhile, is a function of economic sustainability. The economic strife of a nation may result in insurrection or revolution, and eventually the nation-state may turn its agressions outward. From the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum to the 21st century powder kegs, war invariably involves, and often revolves around, struggles for resources by nations that have exceeded their ecological capacities - or have had their capacities impacted by other states.
Can't technology alleviate the threat of economic growth?Some economists think that, because a particular production process can become more efficient (more output per unit of natural capital), there is no limit to economic growth. These economists and “technological optimists” are disregarding the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which tells us that we cannot achieve 100% efficiency in the economic production process. When the entropy law is applied across all economic sectors, or in other words when the limits to efficiency have been reached, the only remaining way to grow the economy is by using more natural capital (including energy).
Remember: to think there is no limit to growth on a finite planet is precisely, mathematically equivalent to thinking that you may have a stabilized, steady state economy on a perpetually shrinking planet. Both claims are precisely, equally ludicrous!http://steadystate.org/CASSEFAQs.html#anchor_127 Note that energy is the most fundamental resource of all, because it takes energy to mine and collect physical resources and refine or manufacture them into useful products. In the days of cheap, plentiful oil, energy was not a problem. There was lots of it and it was cheap and relatively easy to come by. That situation is now reversing so that oil is becoming increasingly scarce, difficult and expensive to obtain and this will eventually drive up the costs on other forms of energy as well. Think how much oil derived energy goes into constructing a nuclear power plant and into the mining of the uranium ore used to make the fuel rods for a nuclear power plant.
From Jim Kunstlers latest blog entry:
The Ponzi-plus planSNIP
What the mainstream is truly missing here en masse is that another tsunami is building right behind the finance fiasco, and that it will render moot the whole reeking cargo of schemes and wishes that comprises the Great Bail-out. I am speaking of the global oil problem. In fact, the problems in banking and money currently roaring in the center ring of the world circus, can be described categorically as a product of the oil problem -- since oil is the primary resource of industrial economies and therefore the motive force behind our ability to generate "wealth." Without reliable and ever-growing supplies of oil, there is no industrial growth, and without industrial growth things like capital investment instruments lose their legitimacy. That is why the Frankenstein family of Ponzi securities was invented in the first place -- to compensate for the demise of industrial growth by creating wealth out of... nothing!
The looming oil problem entails a swirl of factors that will aggravate and accelerate our social, economic, and political struggles. These factors will mutually reinforce the instabilities that they set into motion. For instance, the new oil nationalism is undermining the traditional operation of oil markets as we've known them since the mid-20th century. In turn, oil nationalism will aggravate the oil export crisis, which will starve the oil importers -- the USA being the chief victim. Finally, there is the remorseless base-line condition of Peak Oil itself, meaning that we are at point where world oil demand permanently outstrips world oil supply no matter if the USA falls on its ass economically or not. What remains beyond this is a desperate contest among the oil importers -- America, Europe, China, Japan, India -- for control of the world's remaining oil resources.
The fantasies about alternative energy currently wafting across the American media-scape will not "solve" this problem, much as we wish they might. We'll try everything in a quixotic effort to sustain the unsustainable (that is, the happy motoring consumer society), but we will be disappointed by the results. I try to remind readers that the very concept of "solutions" does not apply in this situation, since it implies that we can keep running things in America just the way we are running them now, only by means other than oil. The truth, in my view, is that we have to run things very differently now, at different scales than the ones we're used to -- but we are too invested in our behavior of the past to move forward. This is certainly unfortunate,
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/09/the-pnzi-plus-plan.html