Most of the main Green policies are terrifying

Right, so how exactly do you propose an infinite growth society then? In what parallel universe do you live in where every single business in existence agrees to be 100% sustainable?

Eh? What benefits give people more than £288/month?

At first I thought this idea was horrendous but on further inspection it makes a great deal of sense. Removing the benefits themselves isn't the money saver, the enormous reduction in administrative costs is. Bennett said something about the administration for childcare benefit being about 100x the cost of the benefit itself.

Right, so how exactly do you propose an infinite growth society then? In what parallel universe do you live in where every single business in existence agrees to be 100% sustainable?

X

Yup.

It's supported by right wingers as well.

Because of course sustainability is the only way(!)
Well, the way that most seem to think that "infinite" growth is impossible is saying "errr, well, resources are finite". And? As was said either earlier in this thread or in a different one, the only resources we have gone after are ones that are in the top up to 2km of some parts of Earth (most not even as deep as that and huge swathes of the planet barely touched). So, we run out of resources there, then there are two things that can happen:
1) different resources
2) go elsewhere, whether that be the unexplored areas, space, or just deeper
Both of which have already happened over the centuries. The likes of Gold are arguably not as important as they once were, after all, these days our money isn't even really backed by gold reserves whereas in the past it WAS the money; not even a century ago coal was a big deal, now it isn't so much, the only real use of it is power generation and we're slowly phasing that out. Hell, you get platinum mining from the roads potentially starting in the not too distant future.

Again, you seem to be confused. Greens are claiming that economic growth and resource consumption are the same thing. They are not.

For example, if a man on benefits sets up a business recycling objects and then selling them, therefore making a living for himself, he has just increased GDP but because it is a recycling business it is not consuming additional resources.

Another example is the consumption of timber; in Australia, for example, the timber industry grows new forests for the specific purpose of harvesting them. The same could be said of anything that is grown; for example, hemp for fibre.

If I set up a farm and workshop that grows hemp and turns it into fibre ropes, which we sell, that has just increased GDP. Those hemp plants didn't exist before, we just created them. It is sustainable. It is economic growth.

So you see, the contention that unsustainable resource consumption and economic growth are the same thing is laughably incorrect. It requires a particularly incoherent understanding of economics to believe they are

If Greens were proposing some smart, nifty ideas about environmentally sustainable economic growth, I would applaud them. But they're not. Because of their childish understanding of economics and zero-sum view of the world, they believe the only answer is to shrink the economy

Excellent examples, because most enterprises on the world are totally centred around lone craftsmen making goods out of recycled objects, aren't they?

And forestry is a renewable resource

On top of this, you're completely ignoring the other side of sustainability, i.e. externalities. Conserving resources is utterly pointless if we've polluted the planet to the point where it's uninhabitable for civilization, which is the route we're heading down at the moment.

Thank you for conceding the fundamental premise that economic growth and growth in resource use are not the same thing.

You do realise you have just conceded the total debunking of the basis for negative growth?



You seem to have confused yourself again. The fact that a resource is renewable doesn't mean that the economic activity associated with it doesn't constitute growth.

We could have a totally sustainable, renewable based economy that was growing at a healthy clip.

The unwillingness of Greens to accept that suggests it has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with hatred of consumption, whether sustainable or not. Either that or their unwillingness to accept it is actually inability to understand

Characteristic Green hysteria. The UK environment is in better shape today than it has been for a hundred years. The air in London is cleaner than it's been since the Middle Ages, and yet we are consuming and producing more than ever before.

The Greens don't seem to understand that increasing wealth brings demand for greater environmental protection and a willingness to spend money on it, on things like carbon capture, on clean air filters for factories even though it makes goods more expensive, etc.

Please tell me you're joking... for the sake of my sanity and yours...

It's pretty self evident that when people have more surplus income they're more likely to spend money with environmental rather than immediate utility concerns in mind.

I'm not an expert in economics, so humour me here. Say we have a country and 100% of its GDP comes from its timber industry. Timber is a renewable resource, and 100% of the country's land area is devoted to timber growth. How does it allow infinite economic growth?

Please tell me you're joking... for the sake of my sanity and yours...

We'll go nuclear eventually anyway, once Thorium is able to be fully utilised. Testing facilities are increasing in development and current injecting isotope methods are doing well. Green energy is more or less a perfunctory waste.

They increase their productivity (for example, by building tree buildings, i.e. create new land vertically, or underground). Or more importantly, they grow by providing more complex value-added (rather than just selling timber, they start manufacturing furniture and wood products, etc, selling CO2 sink certificates for the period the trees are alive).

Or they diversify into other areas, like biotech research, software, financial services, and the like. Viewing everything as a function of how much land x resources etc you have is to view things through the prism of a 19th century industrialist, rather than someone who lives in the 21st century, where we have the technological capability to create limitless energy sustainably

And the Greens have yet to demonstrate that there is a practically finite limit on resource exploitation. There might be one day, in thousands of years. And yet the Greens are demanding we kick our economy into a depression right now. (even if they're finite, why shouldn't they be used? why should we kick ourselves into an economic depression now as opposed to using those resources we have and planning for the day when they do run out, if that ever comes at a point where it actually matters)

And perhaps the more important consideration is that we are becoming ever more efficient in the use of resources. Our houses, our cars, are more energy efficient than ever before. We are more skilled creating synthetic substances. And we recycle more.

It's not at all implausible (in fact, this is the most plausible prediction) is that we will become more efficient, using a mix of sustainable resources and recycling to the point where we do have an advanced, sustainable and growing economy, particularly given so much economic activity now has nothing to do with the physical world and is about buying and selling information, bits, intellectual services, and so on.

I much prefer that future to a bleak, zero-sum, neo-Malthusian future where we ignore our amazing ability to recycle and produce synthetic materials and sensible use the resources we do have available

You can really tell that this is about irrational hatred of consumption rather than the environment when the Greens demand a permanent economic depression and massive cuts in energy supply, when it would be entirely possible to create large amounts of renewable energy supplies, use recycling and sensible exploitation of resources, to have a genuinely decent, growing economy



How can you be a Green and be so ignorant of environmental history? When was the last time we had one of these in London;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

We don't have another century for people to realise that it's worth investing money in the environment. We have under 10 years now to start significant cutting out CO2 emissions (not reaching equilibrium but actively reducing by >5% a year) to avoid the international limit of "catastrophic climate change", essentially rendering the planet significantly less habitable for humans for the next millennia. That's not scare-mongering, that's a universally accepted scientific fact. We haven't got the time for the free market to come to our rescue - the markets are responsive, not proactive. They might respond to a crisis but by the time catastrophic climate change kicks in, it will be decades too late to do anything about it.

I've got a mission for you. Go to a dictionary, and look up the word "sustainable". When you do, you'll find out it means an activity that can be sustained. Hence, if an activity is not sustainable, it cannot be sustained. The clue is in the word. Sustainability is by definition the only resource model that works in the long term because any unsustainable activity will eventually be forced to stop by nature.

I don't even know why I'm bothering to respond to this, but I'm going to do it anyway. You cannot bet on future technology that does not currently exist. "Digging deeper" is not an option for many resources, which you'd know if you knew the slightest bit about geology, and from economics you should realise that this also renders it unreasonable for all but the most expensive of resources.

No amount of technical development is going to make digging deeper an option for the resources we use the most. Using different resources is also not an option for a lot of things. Virtually the entire planet has been prospected for minerals and practically all of the high-yield deposits have been mined or are being mined. The only exceptions are those in the Arctic and Antarctica which aren't going to be mined for obvious reasons. And if you genuinely think that Space is going to solve our problems, I think you're living on a different planet (no pun intended).

On top of this, you're completely ignoring the other side of sustainability, i.e. externalities. Conserving resources is utterly pointless if we've polluted the planet to the point where it's uninhabitable for civilization, which is the route we're heading down at the moment.

but people are willing to invest money into the environment, if you create incentives for them to do so and you have an economy which gives them the money to do so. The latter seems to be something the Greens actively want to reduce.

You've got it the wrong way round. Imagine there's a random guy and every day, he throws his trash into your front garden. When you protest, he says "I'm very willing to dispose of my trash responsibly but only if you pay me so I've got an incentive". Obviously, you'd be pretty pissed off because he has absolutely no right to throw his trash into your garden. Similarly, when a company emits air or water pollution, that goes into the environment and affects everyone. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere affects the entire globe. Sustainability is the default - you shouldn't have to pay people not to throw their trash into everyone else's front garden. We shouldn't be creating "financial incentives" to stop people polluting, we should be creative regulations with punishments serious enough to completely destroy any business that doesn't abide with these regulations. That is the absolute only way a capitalist system can ever be sustainable because companies are never willingly going to be sustainable since it's more expensive for them.

If we're going to be pedantic, I put this to you: There is no viable, truly sustainable model, or at least not one that doesn't necessitate a massive step back in development.


Oh, so because it's not economical to do something now it won't be in 10 years time? Or a century? I suppose the whole oil price business is a prime example. What is the current thinking on the reason for OPEC letting the price drop? Little more than to crush the likes of US shale, it cannot be economical with $50 per barrel prices, neither can opec really, but they can handle it a lot better and ultimately they're in control. Does the fact that US shale (and North Sea for that matter) isn't economically viable now mean it won't be in a year? Well, no, expectation is for the prices to go right back up in the next year and then it will be again.


Which resources are you thinking of in particular, and for what reason(s) are you declaring extraterrestrial exploration to not be a solution


Do you actually mean civilisation, or large civilisation