The uttermost definition of capitalism.
"Our economies and culture have a skills crisis not a growth crisis."
Capitalism can't survive without growth by definition.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-sta...
Capitalism prefers growth. It causes growth, which is good. (Growth does not have to mean resource intensity.)
It does not require growth. Zero-grow and shrinking economies can allocate resources well through markets.
Because for everything else someone somewhere will need very tangible resources e.g. raw materials to build that phone you are using do X or Y.
The price of a CPU is unrelated to the price of sand. CPUs are 10000x faster over the last couple of decades. So there’s little or no correlation required between raw materials consumption and growth.
Do you really believe that computing comes cheap and is unrelated to climate change? I find that line of thinking extremely naive.
Let me share a few links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/30/cloud-co...
etc.
No I believe something more subtle than that: that the same raw materials that make a computer of speed X can be used to make a computer of speed 1000X with the input of better design. So we have economic growth there purely through intellect with no correlation to raw materials consumed.
That would be wonderful, alas the data we have suggest otherwise. But if you have ideas of how that decoupling between ressource extraction and growth could work I would glad to hear/read them (for real, I would like to be more positive on those matters).
No [1]. They don’t [2].
> if you have ideas of how that decoupling between ressource extraction and growth could work
The universe of digital goods and services, for one. A few grams of metal and silicon producing as much value today as a car’s worth of steel did a century ago.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10191
[2] https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/07/decoupling-emissions-gdp-us
https://davidmytton.blog/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-use...
2nd, check this link: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/11/30/thoughts-on-why-energy...
"3. Rest of the World. This group is the only group showing a favorable trend in energy growth relative to GDP growth, even in the last decade, although the pace of improvement has slowed. Two reasons for this favorable trend seem to be (a) continued growth of services, such as financial service, healthcare, and education, which use relatively little energy and (b) outsourcing of a major portion of heavy industry to Southeast Asia."
iPhones are produced in China. But the profits appear at Apple Inc.
And of course, the data has to be world-wide since the economy is globalized [1].
[1]: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption...
> The universe of digital goods and services, for one.
Digital goods consume energy, more and more of it. For now gain in efficiency almost (not quite though) offset the growth [2], and that is discarding all the energy and ressources needed to build the servers and chips in the first place.
[2]: https://www.iea.org/reports/digitalisation-and-energy#energy...
We agree on this. But nothing requires the base resource load to increase. That's my point.
Blaming capitalism for our ecological problem is a cop out. It makes it sound like we have to re-engineer our civilization to escape resource over-use. We don't. The changes are simpler. But making it look like our entire financial system has to be rebooted to effect real change helps punt the issue.
And again the data we have shows that GPD is positively correlated with energy consumption. I take your point that it does not have to be this way though, let's just say I am not convinced.
>Blaming capitalism for our ecological problem is a cop out.
Ok I deserved that, it is true that blaming capitalism is a bit of my go to card. But to be fair lets not act like our system of production has no impact on how we consume ressources. You have a point though: ressource over-use is not strictly a problem of capitalism, a thing to keep in mind for the proponent of the fully automated luxury communism utopia.
"The planet has a fever, and the cure is more capitalism, a prominent researcher argues" "This “decoupling” of growth from environmental degradation is showing up in other major economies as well, and even in some developing ones, MIT scientist Andrew McAfee argues in what’s bound to be a controversial new book. He asserts that the phenomenon represents a critical turning point in economic history—and an essential one if we hope to sustain a growing global population without decimating the planet."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/20/134845/the-plane...
I emailed him that his data is correct but how does his conclusion fit with the fact that the west just outsources energy heavy industries to China and pointed to some statistics supporting my question. He never replied. I think he may have fucked the chicken (as my professor always said, if you did a major f. up in science).
Capitalism isn't "a/many market(s)." Capitalism is much more than that, and one of those constituent pieces is profit-seeking.
Capitalism, that we have have since more or less 150 years requires the pre financing on a huge scale of industrial production. This requires debt that can only be, due to interest, paid back with growth.
There can't be a capitalist economy without growth by definition. From the link given by me:
"One big issue with even trying to stair-step fossil fuel use is the fact that our financial system needs growth to keep from collapsing. In order to pay back debt with interest, it is necessary to have economic growth, and financial growth and growth in fossil fuel use are very closely tied. Economic growth can be 2% or 3% above fossil fuel use growth because of efficiency gains, and economic growth in a particular country can be higher than that of world economic growth because of greater outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries. There was even a gain in the late 70s and early 80s, as we picked the low-hanging efficiency fruit and switched to using nuclear. But overall, there is no evidence that fossil fuel use, or even oil use, can be divorced from economic growth. If there is a big decline in fossil fuel use, it will translate to a decline in economic growth.
The need for economic growth in order to pay back debt even applies to our money supply itself. Money is loaned into existence. This happens when a commercial bank makes a loan and deposit at the same time. The problem is that when the money is created, not enough money is loaned into existence to pay back the interest as well. So economic growth is needed to create the additional money so that the debt can be paid back with interest.
Because of this issue, a Steady State Economy (economy without growth) requires a financial system with virtually no debt. It might be possible to have a little debt, but its use would be primarily to facilitate short-term transactions. Debt jubilees at regular intervals might be needed, to keep people from building up much debt."
This toy model ignores defaults and fiscal spending.
Defaults destroy debt in the absence of growth (in the process transferring wealth from creditors to debtors). Fiscal spending crates money with no debt (in the process transferring wealth from savers to borrowers). These counter-currents let the system stay stable while credit flows from savers (via equity) and creditors (via debt) to investments and borrowers.
Leveraged systems have a multitude of steady states in a zero-sum environment. Even more when tastes and preferences change as human tastes and preferences do.
> growth in fossil fuel use are very closely tied
I have debunked this in another comment [1]. Energy intensity of GDP has been falling for decades. The carbon intensity of our economy is falling faster.
No, it has not. While this is true for the US, she just outsources manufacturing to China. Hence the energy intensive steps are done outside the US. So your comment is true for the US but not for the world economy as a whole.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/energy-in...
Nope [1][2][3].
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/energy...
[1] http://theoildrum.com/node/8615
[2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/
[3] https://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy...
And this one as a bonus :-)
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
The first graph there seems to show a decreasing energy intensity since 2011. Is there something I'm not seeing here?
For instance, one source says that energy production in 2019 was 14,715 MToe (million tonnes oil equivalent) or 14.7 E12 koe (kilograms). The graph said energy intensity was 0.110 koe per $2015. That implies a world GDP of over 130 trillion in 2015$. But I thought GDP was around $80 trillion (maybe a bit higher using purchasing power parity).
I'm confused. Is energy intensity decreasing because somebody's using an inflated denominator (PPP dollars)? What's really happening?
>I have debunked this in another comment [1]. Energy intensity of GDP has been falling for decades. The carbon intensity of our economy is falling faster.
Both can be true, energy intensity of GDP has been falling even worldwide. But GDP and energy consumption is still correlated, i.e. you can plot a nice regression line in this plot:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-capita-vs-...
There is some debate as to the direction of the causal link, it's probably dynamic and context dependant, but the correlation is definitely here.