Christopher F. Jones in The New Republic
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
One of the reasons nations fail to address climate change is the belief that we can have infinite economic growth independent of ecosystem sustainability. Extreme weather events, melting arctic ice, and species extinction expose the lie that growth can forever be prioritized over planetary boundaries.
It wasn’t always this way. The fairy tale of infinite growth – which so many today accept as unquestioned fact – is relatively recent. Economists have only begun to model never-ending growth over the last 75 years. Before that, they had ignored the topic for a century. And before that, they had believed in limits. If more people saw the idea of infinite growth as a departure from the history of economics rather than a timeless law of nature, perhaps they’d be readier to re-imagine the links between the environment and the economy.
In 1950, the economics profession had surprisingly little to say about growth. That year, the American Economic Association (AEA) asked Moses Abramovitz to write a state-of-the-field essay on economic growth. He quickly discovered a problem: There was no field to review.
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This is a subject that I know I have posted about before but it is one which I believe bears being repeated again, and again, and again. The wealth inequality gap gets wider and wider as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
And it is the poor of our world who are going to bear the brunt of the environmental disaster which is sure to come.
I don’t suppose I will be around to see it but my children probably will and the grandchildren fairly certainly will unless …
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