Why is unlimited growth impossible

It is clear that we cannot continue to consume more water, burn more fuel, and spew out more and more carbon dioxide at ever increasing rates. While theoretically possible, we are at a point in history where separating economic growth from physical growth has to become a reality or economic growth will begin to reduce human well-being.

Bradford DeLong. Accessed Oct. Renewable Energy. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification.

I Accept Show Purposes. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Economy Economics.

Key Takeaways Economic growth is often associated with environmental degradation. Improvement in quality of life is what drives the desire for economic growth. However, economic growth can be separated from unsustainable resource consumption and harmful pollution. Separating economic growth from physical growth can help attain higher standards of living without unsustainable resource consumption and harmful pollution. Article Sources. Who is going to tell them you should not do that?

While Pinzler championed slower growth worldwide, Schmidt aired the idea of slowing down growth only in countries that are already saturated with industrial development. In response to Pinzler's contention that increased growth does not guarantee an increased sense of well-being, Schmidt pointed to Greece.

He said lack of growth in the economically beleaguered country has caused a drastic downturn in both wealth and happiness. The panel proposed that GDP be replaced as a measure of prosperity - or at least balanced against other factors such as environmental damage. The panel said such a step would reduce pressure on governments to constantly grow their economies just to maintain the status quo. Many developing countries remain skeptical about the idea of a "green economy" based on socially and ecologically sustainable growth.

Do you think countries should slow down their growth? We want to hear from you! Find out how to share your thoughts at the link below. What are your thoughts on the topic? Send your thoughts to mydw dw. Visit the new DW website Take a look at the beta version of dw. Go to the new dw. More info OK. The first salvo arrived in the New York Times in April of , a month after publication, from the pens of three economics professors at Columbia University and Harvard University, two of whom happened to be publishing a book that year about "affluence and its enemies.

It was "less than pseudoscience and little more than polemical fiction. With an evangelical fervor, article after article assured the public that the book so badly miscalculated our future it should be dismissed outright.

The most commonly cited error ascribed to Limits centered on a table of data that suggested the world would run out of gold by , petroleum by , copper, lead, and natural gas by Other vital minerals—silver, tin, zinc, mercury—would be gone by But the book's authors made no such predictions.

The data was used only to illustrate how exponential growth quickly depletes non-renewable natural resources. Nevertheless, Limits ' detractors to this day continue to cite this allegedly erroneous data set to support the claim that the modeling was all wrong. Worse than any specific prediction, however, was that the Limits team seemed to be questioning the viability of the American Dream.

The study was an affront to the cornucopian credo of mainstream economics, which says that pricing and innovation will always save us from the depletion of sources and the saturation of sinks.

If a resource becomes scarce in the marketplace, economists tell us, its price rises, which acts as the signal for society to innovate alternatives because there's money to be made doing so. If a sink is saturated, technology—priced right—will ameliorate the effect, scrub the smokestacks, disperse the oil spills, and so on.

This unquestioning faith in the magical powers of human ingenuity has led economists to make some preposterous assertions. Oxford University professor Wilfred Beckerman , who dubbed Limits "a brazen, impudent piece of nonsense," claimed there is "no reason to suppose that economic growth cannot continue for another 2, years. Julian Simon, who publicly expressed his loathing for Limits , assured us back in that "We now have in our hands—in our libraries, really—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.

The Limits authors were facing off against a fundamentalist ideology here, one that happened to have the winds of history at its back. In the two centuries of Western techno-industrial civilization that preceded the book, the ceilings to population and economic growth had been shattered again and again by free-market-driven innovation.

The doomsayers had consistently been proved wrong. The century political economist Thomas Malthus famously predicted that exponential growth of population would eventually outstrip the capacity of land to produce food, and the result would be mass starvation.

But the world innovated its way around hunger with the Green Revolution and genetically modified organisms and the deep-drilling of previously untappable aquifers. So it was that Limits was relegated to the blinkered realm of Malthusian doomsdayism.

By the s, President Ronald Reagan was citing the book in his speeches only to ridicule it. There are "no such things as limits to growth," he declared to the students in the audience.

Even the title itself, Reagan said, was offensive, because "in this vast and wonderful world that God has given us, it's not what's inside the Earth that counts, but what's inside your minds and hearts, because that's the stuff that dreams are made of, and America's future is in your dreams. The effect of this critical backlash was that Limits mostly disappeared from mainstream discussion.

It was commonly understood, Meadows said, that it would be very inconvenient to the high priests of the growthist orthodoxy if the public began to take the study seriously. Meadows, who is retired from academia but still travels the world to lecture, met readers in the s and '80s who said the book had changed their lives.

Over the last decade, Limits has attracted renewed interest from ecologists and economists, with many having developed their own methodologies to gauge its accuracy. In , Graham Turner, of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute in Australia, compared the book's standard run projections with historical data since He looked at, among other statistics, birth and death rates as an approximation of population trends, industrial output per capita as a measure of development, and carbon in the atmosphere as a measure of pollution.

We are hewing pretty closely to business-as-usual, he concluded, noting that "the alignment of data trends with the LTG dynamics indicates that the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway. In March of , the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth in the United Kingdom issued a report declaring that the projections were worrisomely spot-on.

The author of the report, Tim Jackson , a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, told me, "Numerous analyses have shown that the historical data track very closely the lines of the Limits to Growth standard run.

Day conducted their own comparison of Limits ' projections with real-world data in , and found the projections to be "quite on target. We are not aware of any model made by economists that is as accurate over such a long time span. On the book's 20th anniversary, in , Meadows gathered up his original team to co-author an update called Beyond the Limits , and, in , he completed a year update.

He hoped, in part, to address the most widespread critique of the study: that it had underestimated innovation and technology, the twin engines of industrial civilization and the pillars of the growthist faith. The first edition of Limits had, in fact, gone a long way toward accommodating technology as a possible saving grace for the growth system. In one of the 12 scenarios, the authors modeled a world system "producing nuclear power, recycling resources, and mining the most remote reserves; withholding as many pollutants as possible; pushing yields from the land to undreamed-of heights; and producing only children who are actively wanted by their parents.

The application of technological solutions alone has prolonged the period of population and industrial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits to that growth.

And this is exactly what has transpired. Wiedmann et al. In the — period covered by the study, no country achieved a planned, deliberate economywide decoupling for a sustained length of time. Claims by the Global North to the contrary conceal the substantial offshoring of its production, and the associated ecological devastation, to the Global South.

Recent proposals for ecocidal deep-sea and fantastical exoplanetary mining are an unsurprising consequence of a growth paradigm that refuses to recognize these inconvenient truths. These observations lead us to a natural minimum condition for sustainability: all resource use curves must be simultaneously flatlined and all pollution curves simultaneously extinguished. It is this resource perspective that allows us to see why EVs may help offset carbon emissions yet remain utterly unsustainable under the limitless growth paradigm.

We have argued that the inextricable link between material consumption and GDP makes the infinite-growth paradigm incompatible with sustaining ecological integrity. Thus, while EVs constitute a partial answer to the climate question, within the current paradigm they will only exacerbate the larger anthropogenic crises connected to unsustainable resource consumption.

The real question is this: how do we transition to alternative economic paradigms founded on the reconciliation of equitable human well-being with ecological integrity? This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Chirag Dhara is a climate physicist and a research associate at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Vandana Singh is a professor of physics at Framingham State University working on transdisciplinary climate pedagogy.

Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.