Let’s face it, capitalism, for all it brings us in wealth—also destroys our supporting environment at a sickening pace. Capitalism’s voracious drive for production and consumption knows no bounds. If allowed, it would, like a cancer cell, multiply production until it kills its host.
Daly states, “Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by physicians (pro-growth advocates) who attempt to treat the sickness with unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited production. We do not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage.”
What does that mean? You can’t keep red-lining a four cylinder engine with limited horsepower to make it rev up forever in order to create more energy. You will, in the end, blow up the engine just as you would kill a horse by overloading the wagon it’s pulling.
As the economist Tobin wrote, “The prevailing standard model of growth assumes that there are no limits on the expanding of supplies of nonhuman agents of production. It is a two-factor model in which production depends only on labor and reproducible capital. Land and resources, the third member of the triad, have been dropped.”
In other words, ignored as a factor in GNP! That’s like ignoring that our 500 pound friend has reached 600 pounds and can no longer walk because he’s too fat to get onto his feet.
As Daly said, “Current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”
If we bet the house on growing our population by adding 100 million and then, another 100 million, what if the hypothesis that technology will save us turns out wrong? We bet now by adding 100 million and our children in 30 years reap the whirlwind of a lost wager.
Will you please note that as our population increases toward adding 100 million in three decades, every aspect of the first 16 parts of this series accelerates commensurately? Once manifested, there’s no escape for any of us.
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