Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet
Our economy exhibits infinite growth, and in fact depends upon it. But the natural world is finite. How can this work?
HOCKEY STICK CURVES AND LIMITS TO GROWTH
HART HAGAN: Let’s talk about your hockey sticks, i.e., your hockey stick curves. Hockey stick curves are reminiscent of the Limits to Growth an important environmental book that came out 50 years ago.
A hockey stick curve is a curve on the graph that stays flat for a while and then goes up suddenly like a hockey stick. The hockey stick curves that represent sudden jumps in output include the Gross World Product. Gross World Product is similar to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) except it includes the whole world, whereas GDP is just one country.
So GWP is a hockey stick curve.
GWP per capita is a hockey stick curve.
Energy per capita is a hockey stick curve.
These all represent sudden jumps that occurred in the 20th century and continue to shoot upwards toward the sky.
Copper production, CO2 pollution, plastic pollution are all hockey stick curves.
In other words, you look at the graph and you see a sudden jump sometime in the 20th century.
And then there are hockey sticks that go down in the wrong direction. The mass of wild mammals on land is a hockey stick curve that suddenly trends downward. The forest cover as a percent of land is rapidly trending downward. These numbers all trend toward zero some time in this century.
TOM MURPHY: They're diving hard. It's a free fall. It's devastating.
Correlation is not always causation. But these negative trends are human caused. So you have to ask: What are we going to do about any of this?
As our resource use and energy use go up, these trends have direct consequences as we expand, as we destroy habitats.
And it's a double whammy for the critters because as climate changes animals might be tempted to migrate, but they can't anymore because they don’t have a contiguous forest (for example) that lets them move as they need to. So they're trapped on these little “habitat islands” and they'll just die.