Sustainable Growth: An Oxymoron?
During a speech to the U.S. Congress in 1973, Kenneth Boulding famously said that anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
Despite a wide range of warnings, the modern world has been engaged in a multitude of activities that are dependent on the idea of continuous growth. The expectations of an ever-increasing gross domestic product would be one of the most consequential examples, as we are well-aware of the shocks brought by short periods of negative growth.
Earth contains a finite amount of essential resources, and it can support only a limited amount of anthropogenic alterations. Modern civilizations are open subsystems of the biosphere, which is finite, non-growing, and materially closed. Persistent population and economic growth in a finite biosphere are impossible. Knowing that something is impossible is valuable, as we can redirect our energies on something possible.
Energy, in one form or another, is required to fuel any form of growth. At the most fundamental level, population growth requires energy via food and water, and human beings have aspirations for better nutrition, shelter, education, and health, among many others. Most of those aspirations are achievable only through higher energy consumption. In turn, those higher aspirations are, more often than not, the fuel of economic growth.
A quick examination of a basic aspiration, the one of meat consumption, highlights our dependence and our acute impact on the natural world. Other examples like the desire for mobility or the possessions of material goods could have been used, but the impact of meat consumption is often overlooked.
Throughout history, most human populations were able to secure adequate amounts of carbohydrates, but lipids and high-quality proteins were scarce in most traditional agricultures. The role of animal protein in early human growth is essential, especially for growing our outsized brains.
In the evolution of our specie, Homo Sapiens, brain growth was directly linked with meat consumption by the expensive-tissue hypothesis formulated by Aiello and Wheeler (1995).
According to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, meat consumption in developing countries has been growing at 5% to 6% per annum, which is mostly due to a combination of strong population growth and rising income levels.
Despite sustained growth over the last few decades, meat consumption per capita in developing countries is still significantly below the levels experienced in developed countries, where it reached a saturation point.
As a result, the saturation of average per capita meat demand followed by a gradual decline in affluent and middle-income countries will not result in an overall reduction of global meat demand during the next generation. Even if by 2030 average capita supply for 1.3 billion affluent people were to decline by as much as 25%, such a decline would be far too small to make up for only a 10% higher demand for 7.0 billion people that are expected to live at that time in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Vaclav Smil, Should We Eat Meat?, Page 203
The conversion of natural ecosystems to crop and grazing land has been the most important cause of changing land usage, and a significant source of fossil fuel consumption, ultimately leading to remarkable perturbations of the nitrogen cycle. There are approximately 24 billion chickens putting pressure on the biosphere at any given time. Other sources of protein, like beef and pork, are also widespread and require significantly more energy per pound of meat than chicken.
The consequences of changing land usage due to increasing meat consumption can be summarized by the fact that roughly 25% of ice-free continental surfaces are used for livestock grazing and that 33% of all arable land is planted for feed crops. Cropland and grazing land are also responsible for the deforestation of tropical forests, one of the most biodiverse biomes on Earth, and responsible for absorbing significant quantities of greenhouse gases.
According to the Yale School of Environment, cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazonian country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Approximately 450,000 square kilometres of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now used for cattle pasture.
The negative impacts of increasing meat consumption on the biosphere are too numerous to discuss all of them here. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to understand the multitude of implications, notably on the biogeochemical cycles.
Increasing meat consumption is only one consequence of population and income growth. With the world’s population expected to reach almost 11.0 billion by 2100, it will become more and more difficult for the biosphere to answer the increasing needs of a growing population.
Sustainable growth is an oxymoron. Negative growth would be a more accurate term and would reflect what is actually needed and possible.
Who will be the first developed country to talk about negative growth instead of sustainable growth? What would be the consequences on the economic system?
Considering that the concept of growth is still mostly taken for granted and embedded in the world’s economic system, talking about negative growth still sounds comical.
Please share your comments.
Economic concepts lack any systematic awareness of the implications of the Laws of Thermodynamics for the physical process of production. A corollary, almost worthy of being a separate idea on its own, is that energy does not matter much because the cost share of energy in the economy is so small that it can be ignored, as if output could be produced by labor and capital alone, or as if energy is merely a form of man-made capital that can be produce, as opposed to extracted, by labor and capital.
The essential truth missing from economic education today is that energy is the stuff of the universe, that all matter is also a form of energy, and that the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services. This is a thermodynamic process, as the Rumanian economist Georgescu-Roegen said half a century ago. Robert Ayres, 2017
