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129 comments on Our World Is Finite: The Implications of Resource Limitations

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Gail the Actuary on October 24, 2007 - 3:47pm

WNC Observer,

I agree we need to get to a zero-growth sustainable economy. For now we can use non-renewable resources, but these will deplete over time.

I wish we didn't have so many problems to deal with simultaneously, including:

- Soon to be declining fossil fuels
- A monetary system that needs growth to continue
- Global warming
- Fresh water shortages
- Soil problems
- Serious balance of payment problems (import more than we export)
- A debt system that is out of control
- Population overshoot
- Elected officials who are unwilling to deal with the situation

If we only had one problem, the task of trying to fix it might be reasonable. As we discover more and more problems, it is harder to see how one might find a solution and implement it on a broad scale. Relocalization would work much better as a solution if we had a stable climate, higher water tables, and fewer people.

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sofistek on October 26, 2007 - 6:42am

Yes, we need to get to zero growth sustainability but I now think this is unlikely. Just reading many of the comments in this and other TOD posts, it is clear that even those who understand the threat posed by resource depletion still hope for some technological solution to just the energy problem, without regard for what continued growth has done to our world. The latest GEO report from the UN (actually from 390 scientists, reviewed by a thousand others) shows continued degradation of our planet in the face of continued economic prosperity and population growth. Everyone wants to find a solution but no-one wants to do anything about it.

So long as we continue to use resources beyond their renewal rates and continue to emit waste materials faster than the rest of nature can deal with them, there is no way we can head for a soft landing, no matter how many substitutions we make for the resources that are already running out.

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“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

—Max Weber, 1905