Here's some no growth.

Involuntary bankruptcy sought against ethanol plant.

http://news.tradingcharts.com/futures/3/0/117660903.html

BTW Ethanol production was down Sept 640K Brl's V Aug 647K Brl's/day

I can't speak for everyone, but I'm not ANTI-GROWTH, I wish that growth would go on forever, and that we could all live in large homes and drive big cars, eat 3 full meals and have 4 snacks every day.

But I live on this planet, we call it The Earth

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/needtoknow/2008/12/crisis_...

"Current" global recession? It really depends to whom you're talking. Certainly not the three billion people in the world, living on less than $2.50 a day. For them, there's nothing current about the global recession. For them, it's always been ongoing; it's almost a way of life.

I can't see how a politician would be able to call for no growth, or the end of growth. We're talking about a complete change in our economic system, which I would argue a political process cannot bring about. Frankly, I think there's a 97% chance the auto's bridge loan thing will be completely botched by the "Car Czar." I don't think governments can manage industries (at least not well), or invent a new economy. Rather, government can TRY to mitigate externalities and inequities resulting from the system.

What that may mean, to the degree I'm correct about that, is that the only way to move to a different system is for the old one to collapse, or be abandoned by society.

Obama? He is going to seek to restart growth in the US. Accept that. Critique his choices for how that's attempted, sure. But why argue the premise - it won't be changed.

I don't think growth per say is a problem. In our case, growth against finite resources of fossil fuels is the problem. If by some stroke of universal genius we acquired another cheaper energy source (cold fusion, cheap hot fusion), i believe we would enter a period of growth on the scale of the solar system. What would it take to enter a period of growth on the galactic scale? Who knows, but i do think the Fermi Paradox is pointing to the likley answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

My kids are 9. With them I am pro-growth.

I am 39. With me I am anti-growth (we are talking physical here).

I take the same attitude with the economy.

(1) Are there sectors that need to grow--yes.

(2) Are there obese sectors or ancient sectors that need to decline or die--yes.

(3) Is the human economy in its totality too large relative to the planet--yes.

Therefore, any stimulus plan needs to increase 1 and allow 2 to decrease so that total economic scale is reduced.

I am not talking about money when I talk about scale, but actual quantities of low entropy materials extracted, work performed, and waste created.

Pro-growth or anti-growth? What is the point proposed by pigeon-holing people into one of two preconceived partitions?

Because we'd have to understand (1) what we mean by growth and (2) in what environments, specific or general, are we talking about growth.

A lot of people think that growth is the creating of something from nothing, and that's not how it works. All growth is the temporary appropriation of materials from somewhere else (this follows from Conservation of Mass). In the process, on a fundamental level, nothing is created or destroyed, only depleted in one area and increased in another.

All living things "grow" in this fashion. But after a sustainable point, molded by evolutionary and complex self-organizing forces, growth ceases and the system of the living thing is maintained until collapse (death) from injury, old age, etc. Cancer is a disorder in this process in living things, where cells become damaged and replicate out of control.

It is not a matter of being pro- or anti-growth. It is about whether it is appropriate for our society, our species, and the ecology upon which we rely.

As to answering the question of appropriateness, we can look to mass poverty, resource depletion, arable land depletion, deforestation, climate change, species mass extinctions. Growth at this point is certainly no longer medium-term or long-term appropriate for us or the ecosystem, and hasn't been for quite some time.

There are two confounding problems with this.

The first is that in the short-term, where we humans make most of our decisions, growth is the only remotely appealing option for the overwhelming majority of people. Everything else involves major sacrifices and/or hardships somewhere.

The second is the issue of making changes in a massively complex social system (6.7 billion nodes and counting) at a time when the system is already under incredible stress. Nobody understands all the issues, details, forces, and inter-relationships involved between and among billions of people, and altering such a complex system opens it up to black swans (Black Swan theory, wiki on "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb).

These black swans, unintended consequences of our mis-informed actions, tend to make matters worse, not better.

I, for one, am completely in favour of growth, no growth would condemn billions of people around the world especially in the poorer parts of Africa and Asia to a continuous life of strife, misery, and violence that is today much worse than the worse Long Emergency scenarios.

Growth, however, needs to be balanced and not predicated on wasteful consumerism, if growth policies are needed to help arrest this downturn, they should be aimed at increasing efficiency in the economy, especially in the energy sector, not on just throwing money out the window and telling people to go shopping for more "apple corers", "pasta turners", or magic electric belts that will make your fat ass lose weight even while you sit in your couch drinking beer and buying more crap from TV...

This growth predicated on gadget buying at a frenetic pace (this IPod is so 2008 already...) is, in my view unsustainable, and will sap the strength of even a strong economy, let alone one debilitated by rampant economic mismanagment.

So where do you folks stand on the upcoming efforts by the Obama administration (and govt's in other countries) to reignite growth?

I stand against re-igniting growth. I favor government spending to help us shrink comfortably -- i.e. reviving small, dense towns with surrounding diversified agriculture, light industry and few or no cars; contracting and densifying the suburbs; getting cars out of urban areas; running train tracks down the median strips of interstates, radically reducing truck and car traffic, etc.

Millions of people are being sidelined, the market economy no longer has room for them. It's a great opportunity to begin going in the direction we will have to go anyway.

The market system can't be allowed to just collapse, so intervention is needed. Fed money should be carefully targeted at those business necessary to keeping the essentials working. The bailout approach is useless and criminal. The Fed should have nationalized the banks and/or made the loans directly. There should be no attempt to prop up asset values.

A steeply progressive tax schedule should be imposed, same for estate, and possibly an assets tax. For that matter, there should be a steep tax on oil too. Instead, they are printing money, wrecking the currency. Deflation and credit contraction will be replaced with hyper-inflation at some point. The money raised should be used to make sure no one starves, has a roof and medical care, and a job, and to carry out above programs. There's plenty to do in shrinking, radical retrenchment I call it. The shrinking will take place one way or another. It will be a lot less painful, at least for the common folk, if we do it under our control.

Chances of happening anytime soon? Zilch. Still, has to be put out there.

I'm for growth to lunar colonies, terraforming Mars, and possibly inhabiting Lagrange points. Maybe even leave Earth for recuperation (re: David Brin). Sure, its out there, but its a good goal, to find other places to thrive, and bring out more forms of life.

I am not anti-growth, I think that we need to function sustainably. There are two reasons why being anti-growth is overkill.

1. If to accomplish a task takes 100 joules of energy now, but through cleverness we can accomplish the same task with 50 joules of energy, then we can grow quite a bit.

2. There are massive amounts of energy resources available that we aren't tapping into because of inertia.

While certainly there are clear examples of modern technology reducing the efficiency of tasks (particularly farming, but I'm sure there are plenty of others), there are also examples such as computers. Certainly it is difficult to do a full life-cycle analysis of all of the R&D that has gone into electronics research over 50 years, but I think that if you consider increased capacity for computation as a society to be growth (and I do), then we have probably increased this capacity by many, many orders of magnitude. What would have certainly taken a thousand people a decade to do by hand can be done by a computer consuming 300W in a day (I'm specifically doing my fermi analysis on an example physics simulation, say turbulence).

This is just one example, but anti-growth is too far, what we need is a reevaluation of where we are investing our limited energy resources to cause the most benefit to society. If by shifting resources from flying planes to building high speed trains and better internet pipelines for communication, we can reduce our resource utilization by a factor of 10 (and I think this is probably the case, if not more than a factor of 10), then isn't that growth? Certainly we can communicate better for less energy...

If Obama's "growth" involves improving broadband internet access to better handle video conferencing and online collaboration, building high speed electrified rail to handle in-person interactions, improving building energy efficiency, and building renewable energy facilities with the goal to eventually increase our resource base, then we are simultaneously improving our societal efficiency (which if I recall is now at about 30% from articles I read here a while back, where an EROI of 3 or less was unable to sustain our civilization) while tapping into our massive unutilized resource base in the form of solar, wind, and (breeder) nuclear energy, then certainly we can continue to grow -- and it will create job "growth" in the short term as well.