Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
"the recently-emerged De growth movement advances the basic, fifty year old, ”limits to growth” case which has now accumulated a huge supporting literature. Its core point is that there is too much production and consumption going on, that this is the main cause of global problems, that eventually we must have stable or zero-growth economies, and that GDP must be reduced. For many years there has been debate between these two general world-views, that is, between those arguing that there are bio-physical-social limits to growth and those who believe that technical advance can solve any problems growth causes. This is a debate between those who believe that “tech-fixes” can solve the problems without radical change from a system committed to affluence and growth, and those who argue that only radical change to a very different, post consumer-capitalist society can solve the big problems." "in general if production, sales and GDP increase, then resource use and ecological impact increase. They emphasise that there are not good reasons to expect this to change or absolute decoupling to be achieved in future; in fact the trends are getting worse. This aligns with the fact that there has been a long term decline in productivity growth rates."
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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2...i-and-parenti/ |
Two things can be true at the same time; that rates of any change are unsustainable, and that technology will continue to solve many problems.
Moore's law is broken, and the rate of improving computing power/efficiency has slowed significantly. It was never sustainable because no rate is ever sustainable in anything, especially ones with doubling factors with short timeframes.
There's reason to believe economic stagnation and technological progress will slow, but then we can never predict breakthroughs. If automation/robotics gets extremely good, the cost of labor will drop to nearly nothing, which means the cost of physical goods will drop to nearly nothing. That would put a huge burden on resource consumption, but then we could leverage automation to recycle and find other areas to improve efficiency. Or, we could have a breakthrough with fusion power, or even innovative fusion power that drops the price of electricity so low that nobody would dream of burning fossil fuels for energy.
Those are 2 areas that I expect within my lifetime there will be great advances; that automation will drastically reduce prices of nearly everything and improve efficiency, and that electricity will be so plentiful and cheap that we can expend more of it to efficiently manage our natural resources.