(2019-09-21) Vaclav Smil Growth Must End Our Economist Friends Dont Seem To Realise That

Review of Vaclav Smil book: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’. The latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.

Growth is a huge book – almost 200,000 words

I wanted to put it all together under one roof so people could see how these things are inevitably connected and how it all shares one crystal clarity: that growth must come to an end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that.

In many countries, the downside of material growth now seems greater than the upside, which leads to what you call “anthropogenic insults to ecosystems”. Is that a fair summary? Yes, I think so. (climate change)

The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense.

You cite Kenneth Boulding’s distinction between the “cowboy economy” and the “spaceman economy”. The former is wide-open spaces and seemingly endless opportunities for resource consumption. The latter is a recognition that planet Earth is more like a closed spaceship on which we need to carefully manage our resources.

How do we move in that direction before the risks become unmanageable?

What you do in each place will be different.

We are buried under information. It’s not doing anyone any good.

Population continues to grow in absolute terms, but in percentage terms it has been declining since the mid-60s.

The real bulge is coming in Africa, where 1 billion more people will be born. Just to bring the current African population to a decent level of living, like Vietnam and Thailand, is tough

You can bring it all down to one figure – it is gigajoules of consumption of energy per person per year.

To grow from Nigeria to China is a 20-fold increase just on per capita terms