Charles High Smith, Washington's Blog -The “eternal growth” model has dominated all political-economic ideologies for hundreds of years. When humanity first industrialized the planet, there were fewer than 1 billion humans. Now 7.7 billion humans all want the resource/energy intensive lifestyle of the developed-world middle class.
There is no way our planet has enough resources to provide all the goodies for 8 to 10 billion humans. We can’t even provide clean fresh water to 8 billion people, much less Roombas, electric vehicles, refrigerated medications, frozen spring rolls, door-to-door delivery of the latest gizmo and cheap flights to every corner of the globe.
The technological fantasy is that new efficiencies will magically make eternal growth possible. But all these fantasies overlook 1) that markets cause the destruction of everything that isn’t being monetized for profit in the moment; 2) that “renewable” energy all depends on cheap hydrocarbons in essentially limitless quantities and 3) that replacing everything every generation creates what my colleague Bart D. calls The Landfill Economy.
In other words, the tech “solution” to 500 million internal combustion engine vehicles is to toss those 500 million vehicles in the landfill (recycling is a nice idea but not always financially practical) and then go mine the immense amounts of metals, minerals and hydrocarbons needed to built 500 million all-electric vehicles.
Then, in a generation, repeat the process, as “more efficient” vehicles are developed.
This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever, and fuel the entire process of replacement with hydrocarbons, essentially forever, and pay for it all with more debt.
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