Can It Go On Forever?

It seems yet again the world teaters on the brink of a global recession. Growth has slowed, and when growth slows and economies contract jobs are lost, companies collapse and the world grinds to a halt. We have built ourselves a system reliant upon continual economic growth, much to the detriment of the environment from which our economy feeds. A system of boom and bust that comes crashing to its knees every few decades, or in this case, possibly twice in one. Yet it is no secret continual exponential growth in a closed system (the earth) is simply impossible. Still people seem to blindly adhere to the belief that supplies of finite resources will never run out, that despite what we have consumed today there will still be just as much of it tomorrow.

Basically they live in a fantasy world where cause does not equal effect. Yet the problem is far worse than this. The growth that our economies rely upon is a measure of the rate at which consumption increases. If the economy grows at a rate of 3.5% per annum, it in fact doubles in size every 20 years. This means that the rate at wich we consume is getting faster and faster. Over 100 years the rate of consumption at this growth rate would mean that the in the last 20 years, the amount consumed is equal to everything consumed in the last 80. Exponential curves are scary things. To learn more about them take a read of this lecture. 

One of the illustrative examples it gives concerns our perception that energy from the sun is an endless source of electricity. In fact it seems that way with there being 11,514x more energy falling on the earth from the sun than we consume each year. Yet even if we could harvest every last ray of it, how long will it take for our energy consumption to grow at just 4% per anum 11514 times? The answer is 245 years. Pretty quickly even 'endless' resources run out. 

The long and short of it is: Growth can not go on indefinitely as a fact of nature. How then, can we justify to pin our economies on continued growth when we know it must and will end? But dont worry, the same people that caused the last recession are still behind the wheel of their dangerous money making machine. No matter how many times it crashes, they will continue to run it until every last drop of fuel in its tank is spent.