![]() The point is that when you scratch the surface of any of the seminal tracts of the degrowth movement, you find they are based on the same fake science, right through to the present day. The point here is not that solar power is the key to endless growth, though it could well be - nuclear fission and fusion are other strong contenders. Daly must have known it too, since he noted that six days’ worth of radiation from the sun contained more useful energy (or exergy, to give it its correct name) than that embodied in all the fossil fuel reserves known at the time. ![]() Any subsystem of a finite nongrowing system must itself at some point also become nongrowing.” It’s a repeat of Georgescu-Roegen’s error. In it he explains that “the economy is an open subsystem of a finite and nongrowing ecosystem. This finding, so congenial to the model’s commissioners, stemmed entirely from errors in its structure, as pointed out by a then fresh-faced young economics professor at Yale, William Nordhaus.Ī third foundational work in the degrowth canon is Steady State Economics (v) by Herman Daly, later Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank. In 1972 his marvellous black box produced another best-seller, Limits to Growth (iv), which purported to prove that almost every combination of economic parameters ended up not just with growth slowing, but with an overshoot and collapse. Pure fake science.Īround the same time as Georgescu-Roegen was making up thermodynamic laws, a group of concerned environmentalists calling themselves the Club of Rome invited one of the doyens of the new field of computer modelling, Jay Forrester, to create a simulation of the world economy and its interaction with the environment. Later in his career, after ruefully acknowledging his mistake, he invented a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, claiming that “material entropy” would forever prevent materials from being perfectly recycled. In his book, Georgescu-Roegen even acknowledged the existence of huge solar energy fluxes, but that didn’t stop him from basing his seminal work on a scientific error. ![]() It may be nearly closed, exchanging limited matter across the planetary boundary, but it is far from isolated, as it receives a huge daily flux of energy from the sun and radiates almost as much away to space. The earth, however, is not an isolated system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy can only ever increase in an isolated system Georgescu-Roegen used it to argue that “increasing entropy in the economy sets the limit on the scale it can achieve and maintain.” The modern case against growth finds its root in the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, whose 1971 book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (iii), is the Old Testament of the degrowth industry. However, the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Paul Romer and William Nordhaus (i), in the same week, can only be interpreted as a huge slap in the face for the champions of “degrowth”.Įver since Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population (ii) there have been strident voices predicting the catastrophic end of economic growth. This month’s IPCC report into the dire consequences of a 1.5☌ increase in global temperatures will have given it encouragement. ![]() The sooner it can be brought to a halt, or even reversed, the better. It is an article of faith for the anti-capitalist, anti-trade left that endless economic growth is impossible on a finite planet. The physics behind pro-growth environmentalism
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