Pretty Green Lies

Tom Friedmans's column in last week's New York Times almost had me. Such tease was Tom, to an ecosocialist NEPer such as I, when he wrote:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

I was gobsmacked to begin to think Captain Capitalism had seen the emerald light of reason, stepped off the treadmill and had finally understood that the tension between a system of production based on embedded inequalities and infinite growth within a finite ecosystem was unsustainable on its face. I began to think, just a little, that a conversion of sorts had occurred in Tom's mind, where he was released from his prison of dogmatic adherence to a logic defying model of idolised globalisation. I was so hopeful. Not that Tom's views mean much to me or the world in the greater scheme of the universe, but just that he strikes me as a figurehead of that whole end-of-history, shallow, big liberal, fad-driven, Occidental consumer-Capitalist mindset that seems to currently define much of our society. If he could change so radically, so then might many more of us.

And then I read the rest of the column:

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.”
“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.Gilding says he’s actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea’s new national paradigm for development is called: “Low carbon, green growth.” Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes — and we’re seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways.

And I realised that, no, Tom still did not understand. He did not complete the thought and draw the difficult conclusion. Instead, he retreated into the familiar arms of his old religion, and embrassed Capitalism's pretty green lie that yes, yes, oh god yes, I can grow and grow and grow forever without poisoning another square metre of land, sea or sky. All I have to do is turn my waste into products that I can sell and sell and sell. Tom, sadly, tragically, does not understand entropy, and does not understand what 'growth' actually means. If he's accurately interpretting what Mr. Gilding the business expert(!) said when he follows it with "We must have growth...", than neither does Mr. Gilding.

Gilding speaks of the laws of biology and physics, but Tom's interpretation suggests that he does not grasp Newton's 3rd Law. That is, you can't perpetually recycle an object into other objects because, first, at each stage of recycling, more energy is used up in the process, and less end product remains. And second, if this process is meant to feed a society rooted in 'growth' and growth involves increasing things like monetary wealth, as well as the variety and availability of things for people to buy with that wealth, then at some point virigin material must be acquired from somewhere to make up for entropic loss. Most of us understand this when we get feel tired. Tom does not understand that in a non-extractive economy, this ultimately results in diminishing returns and eventual system collapse due to this energy bleed over time. No matter how green one makes their growth focused economy, a point will be reached where critical resource losses occur, and the economy will fail.

Sure, he speaks of net-zero, but this is not a scalable concept. It works for houses and structures that, once built, can maintain their own energy balance through a mix of active and passive means (materials, location, heating systems). But at a scale to satisfy the material desires of nearly 7 billion people? And with net zero fabrication process? He's dreaming in technicolor. Mentioning green energy policies is misleading and contradicts his early point that "we have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows" because low carbon is simply low carbon, not zero carbon, not zero environmental impact on the land or sea bases where green energy generation are located. A growing green economy by definition needs more resources. More resources, no matter how green they might be individually, may not be green at scale.

His talk of flows might tend toward a systems or process approach to sustainability where energy cycles are understood in terms of their roles in complex systems behaviour, but he does not go there. If he did, he would understand that a system with a growth tendency also has a collapse tendency when it reaches a certain scale and complexity that exceeds limits. If we grow and complexify a financial economy to a certain point, say through packed subprime mortgages, then at some point something happens and it all falls down. If we grow and perpetuate a system that promoted inequality of wealth, violence and power, then eventually some of the unequals will crash the system. If we expand a system of civilisation into its ecological limits, eventually we hit a potentially terminal collapse. This is as much a physical law to me as anything else - everything is dynamic.

No system rooted in growth is sustainable. So for all Tom Friedman's talk about flows and ecological destruction, he fails to capture the essence of the problem. Indeed he triumphs the need for it like it's some sort of integral element of human survival on par with air and water. Mr. Friedman, if he's able to the advance his thinking just a little more, could stop saying inane things like "we must have growth." Saying "we must have growth" is speaking abstraction and akin to such catchy phrases like "war on terror" except that I would venture a war on terror makes slightly more sense than we must have growth, because terror, even the the feeling, is pretty much a universal bad. Whereas growth seems much more positive sound and speaks the bigger-better-faster ethos that permeates global social and economic culture. The only way around this is to shift away from that model of civilisation. So how do we move off growth?

I sometimes get fanciful ideas about how we might revisit the concept and get a critical mass of people to voluntarily shift their thinking through good public education campaigns and political mobilising. But I don't really feel that's actually possible. Sure, I've met enough leftwing academics, activists and citizens who understand this contradiction of growth and sustainability, but these are not the majority. The dominant, and unconcious paradigm is still one oriented toward to a capitalist mode of production. The average citizen or politician even the most environmentally aware, might understand climate change, or ecosystem disruption but the discourse is still revolving around restoring this idea of growth. Recession equals bad, and not recession equals growth, which again is believed to be a net good. Even where Friedman's greening is woven into growth, every single institutional response to the financial crises is focussed on getting us back on that bandwagon without question.

So, I remain unconvinced we're going to use this crisis to voluntarily change our ways. We're going to have to hurt.