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Our whole economic system is predicated on continuous everlasting growth. Well, apart from the fact that that is impossible, the alternative isn’t actually as bad as it sounds. Zero growth doesn’t mean that things can’t get better. It just means that we don’t make more and consume more that we do at the moment.
It means we would generate the same amount of electricity in the future as we do today. It means we would grow the same amount of food, have the same number of people, have the same amount of money.
We just wouldn’t have – MORE.
That is OK - Truely, it is. There is a huge amount you can still do within that limitation.
And it’s not like I just plucked that concept out of my arse because it seemed like a good idea at the time, it is about recognizing that we won’t have a choice. Continual growth will hit the wall. Sooner rather than later. Frankly my estimation is that we have started to hit already. The global financial crisis isn’t just about financial malfeasance and fraud. It is also about such things as Peak Oil, Peak Water and the limits of the worlds carrying capacity. There are just too damn many of us. We can’t continue on doing things the way we have been. Certainly not everyone is going to be able to have the resource rich lifestyle that America and the West have enjoyed. Even America and the West won’t be able to afford that much longer either.
So we are all going to get much poorer, or we are going to have to figure out how to do more with less. Or more accurately: do better with what we have already got.
A (simplistic) analogy would be electric lights. If you replaced every incandescent bulb with an LED light fitting, you cut electricity consumption for lighting by some 90%.
Duh… why would you not…
And then you have freed up a significant portion of your resource for other uses.
A lot of what we currently do is ridiculously wasteful. We have suburban sprawl and ridiculous commutes. That is time, and energy(oil), and resources(cars), tied up doing things that simply don’t need to be done. We have done it of course because hitherto it has been easy and cheap to. And because that has been the way we have “always” done it.
Imagining an alternative is very differcult for most people. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or even that it would be difficult technically. It just means that “you” can’t imagine it. Which is a whole different matter entirely.
There isn’t any shortage of ideas and possibilities for how to implement this sort of change. The trick is getting peoples heads around the whole idea in the first place. Convincing them that it doesn’t mean the end of the world.
What it does mean the end of is doing things the same ways as always, it would be the end of business as usual. You know – change. That thing that everyone hates SO much.
Typically you only manage to get changes past people when the status quo is in catastrophic collapse. That is a pretty sad indictment.
However… if that is the way it is… then that is the way it is… Roll on the bad-times…???
Thinking positively for the time being though, let’s just assume that we get cracking on our transformation and have accepted Zero-Growth as a basic principle.
Then the process, and action, and energy becomes about how we divert resources from some(wasteful) sectors of our economy and direct it into others. The object being to create better outcomes.
One thing for sure about that – Ponzi schemes, endless Debt, Inflation, and our Banking and Political systems wouldn’t, and couldn’t be allowed to carry on the way they have been. And there is the real critical point. The Power and the Money aren’t going to want to surrender a system that has so far worked very very well for them.
The other thing, is that ideas that most of us haven’t been able to think of, or about, are going to have to become part of our world veiw.
That’s OK, that is a good thing.
There is plenty of room within what we have already got, to make everything a lot lot better.
Continual Growth is a fools illusion, a mirage. It cannot and will not solve our problems, it can only make them worse.
(speaking to those people who think we actually do have a problem…)
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(update: Second Opinion )
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