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| courtesy NASA |
Humans can safely use 50 billion tons of material per year. Currently we use 80 billion tons per year and that is rising to approximately 180 billion by the year 2050. This is according to a Fast Company article written by Jason Hickel “Better Technology Isn’t the Solution To Ecological Collapse”. The population will be 9.7 billion in 2050. That means individually we consume, on average, about 10.7 tons of material per year and, by the year 2050, 18.6 tons per person.
Business and governments believe they have to have continuous growth. Economists swear we have to have growth of the GPD every year or dire things will happen, and the more growth the better. Yet, even the inventor of the gross domestic product, Simon Kuznets, wrote in 1934, “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”
One simple solution to plastic grocery bags.
Remember people telling you about or reading articles about the power of compound interest? That is exactly what we are talking about here. The same principle that allows someone to become a millionaire by starting to save a thousand dollars a month when they are twenty is the same principle by which the nations of the world will use up the world’s resources. Next year’s 3% growth has to be on top of the combination of last year’s economy plus the 3% it grew. Ad infinitum. Except it doesn’t go on forever. It has to stop somewhere.
Technology has kept us ahead of Malthusian limits so far, but how long can it continue to do so? The pressure of population growth demands that we use more and more material, no matter how efficient we are at doing it.
If you’re thinking “alarmist”, I hope to God you’re right. If you’re thinking “Cassandra”, you probably are right.
It is like we are all living in a giant ponzi scheme nightmare. We are the ones harvesting the profits of this scheme, some of us anyway. Our immediate descendants; children, grandchildren will be left holding the empty bag.
This insistence on ever-increasing growth is destined for abject, unmitigated, utter failure. And it won’t be pretty. There could be starvation on a scale that will redefine disaster. It may knock back civilization a thousand years.
All because we cannot visualize what happens with incremental change. Tomorrow isn’t that different from today with 3% growth in GPD, but what about 1000 years from now? We are already on our third industrial revolution and the first began only about 250 years ago. Homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years. In about 1/1000 the time we’ve been on this planet, we are on track to ruin it.
Humans have a definite species disorder. We are very short-sighted and tend to be selfish. If we had life spans like Methuselah people might care about what the world would be like in a few hundred years. As it is, we can’t see this existential crisis staring us in the face. Or, perhaps we do. I can not imagine that I am the only one that sees this crisis coming. I am not that damned smart.
Here’s the problem. Practically every person in a developed country is richer than the richest rulers of antiquity. Richer than King Midas or King Solomon. We have chariots with 400 horses at our constant beck and call to ride at dizzying speeds. We have magic carpets that fly us thousands of feet in the air to anywhere in the world we want. We have indoor plumbing and air conditioning. We have the knowledge of the world at our fingertips. We don’t want to hear a whisper about how that all could change. We are whistling past the graveyard.
Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career.
Imagine those people with a million times, a billion times, the average person’s wealth and the commensurate power. They will be actively suppressing this idea that there are limits, that we need to tread more cautiously and slow or still growth. It is conceivable they could use the media to brainwash the population into thinking everything is okay so that they may continue their inflated existence.
Aside from hoping for a singularity event and a benevolent and understanding AI master, there are few solutions. Population control is taboo in western society. We are willing to control deer populations to keep them healthy; but when it comes to humans, sorry, no hunter associations to collect money for our welfare. Personally, I’m pretty okay about that.
Perhaps we need to get away from an income marker and go to something else, like a “wellness and happiness” index. This does exist. The OECD, or Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The U.S. is #14, ahead of Ireland, behind Austria. Number one is Norway. They don’t make the news like the GPD. Maybe they should. Maybe they should be the focus of the news. Perhaps if there was more leeway in the choice of country to reside we would have countries competing to get to the top of the OECD, taking pressure off the GPD as the most significant marker of advancement.
One of the greatest breakthroughs for the human race will be significant life extension technology. We need to be living hundreds of years, not decades. This will force us to plan far into the future to mitigate these problems.
Another solution is to get into space on a large scale. If we can’t fix our unfettered greed and shortsightedness, we have to go where there is unlimited energy and matter. And we have to do it very soon.
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