Let us imagine that in 3030 BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled 1m3. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5 percent a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30 BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.
Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic Ocean? The volume of the Earth? A little more?
The answer is 2.5 billion, billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.
To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind society has created. Ignore climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil and oil — even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth still make continuity impossible.
Economic growth is an artifact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed — as growth could not be sustained — but coal broke this cycle and enabled the phenomenon we now call sustained growth, for a few hundred years, at least.
It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the pathologies of the modern age, such as worldwide tyranny, total war, unprecedented concentration of global wealth and planetary destruction.
It was coal, followed by oil and gas.
The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fueled expansion. Ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, society must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain the impossible proposition.
On Friday last week, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the western ice sheet in Antarctica is now inevitable, the Ecuadoran government decided to allow oil drilling in the Yasuni National Park. It had made an offer to other governments — if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. This could be seen either as blackmail or fair trade.
Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich. Why, the government said, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for US$3.6 billion and received US$13 million. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colorful record of destruction and spills, is now to enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America.
The UK oil company SOCO International PLC is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, home to chimpanzees and forest elephants.
In the UK, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the southeast, the British government fantasizes about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger Delta. To this end, it is changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to locals.
These potential reserves solve nothing. They do not end the need for resources — they stoke it.
The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual or precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same gray stubble.
Some try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialization — the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturized, fewer materials are used overall.
There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180 percent in 10 years. The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.” If, in the digital age, we will not reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?
Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their art? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone?
Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store superfluous things. Perhaps it is unsurprising that fantasies about colonizing space — which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them — have resurfaced.
As the philosopher Michael Rowan said, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if this year’s predicted global growth rate — 3.1 percent — is sustained, even amid a miraculous 90 percent reduction in the consumption of raw materials, the inevitable is delayed by just three doubling periods. Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.
The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of existence. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate friends and neighbors.
Society seems trapped inside a Sunday supplement — obsessed with fame, fashion and the dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts: Anything but the topic that demands attention.
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