The Reason Why Degrowth is Not What is Needed
If you are arguing for degrowth, this simple analysis ought to help change your mind, or argue with skeptics.
In the diagram above, there are shown three stakeholders
- Nature
- Us as we are now (Humanity in the current architecture).
- Us as we need to become (Humanity in the upgraded architecture).
We know that the creation rate of nature is of an order X.
In the case of oil, X is millions of years per barrel
We also know we can create the clean fuel of green hydrogen in terms of seconds, minutes, hours per barrel, by electrolysis.
And we know we can dig up and consume any fuel in terms of seconds, minutes, hours per barrel.
So in general nature does things at rate X, whereas we do things many times faster, rate MX.
The capital value of Earth is considered in economics as a fixed value, C.
But adding in the effect of nature, we have to say it is C + X.
Note both X and M are functions of time, whereas C is not.
In other words Earth capital isn’t constant, but for the practical puposes of economics, we could say that it was, until we started to run into environmental problems.
Note nature never does work by energy from Earth, other than grow plants to the point where leaves form, it only does work by energy added to Earth from the sun. So that work done by nature is the positive work of creating everything we know, and value.
In the diagram, the actor in red is us doing the work of extraction, digging up the fuel, doing all of our business consuming those fuels of various kinds from Earth, at rate of MX.
This is whilst nature is adding things at rate X.
So the net of things added & subtracted is C+X-MX.
This is negative, with the conclusion that we are consuming everything ever created by nature. MX is the heavily dominant term.
Degrowth, or attempting to reduce that negative function does not change that it is unsustainable.
The only way we can achieve sustainability is to make that function positive.
We can do that by copying what nature does, creating only from the sun, using things like Money-fuel Trees. Similarly, food-from-sunlight technology is now coming online, adding to the list of things we can generate directly from sunlight.
The good news is that when we do it, we will be doing it at rate MX.
So the net result will be C+X+MX.
In other words, the end result of us going positive will be us paying back what is effectively an energy deficit to our planet.
We just need to choose to work positively, by working only from the energy of the sun.
This will very quickly compensate for the damage done to date. The more hands there are to crank the handle, the higher our M, so the more the merrier.
And if everything we do is sourced from solar energy, no harmful by-products (Pollution) need be produced, just like nature.
Thanks for reading, I hope this might help defuse any degrowth / scarcity enforcement arguments / mentalities still lurking around.
