An excellent explanation of why a "Cancer Cell Economy" will ultimately collapse with catastrophic results. Unfortunately, the U.S. and the world's economy is in fact based on this flawed model.
Listen, all of this may be true, but we have to keep producing more stuff to sell so rich people can have more money, or they won’t give the rest of us jobs.
We dont need to work much at all today, if we just turn our backs to the mindless consumption, which purpose is only to give the consumer a short dopamine rush so that he will do it again, and again, and again. Spending time with family and fiends, and exploring the world life and universe with our minds, and enjoying culture, takes hardly any resources at all, yet gives us long lasting feelings of satisfaction and joy because it produces seratonine inside of us. Humans today are doing it all wrong.
I think they got so accustomed to their greed, that they refuse to even consider the reality that the sun is setting on their system. They mastered how to accumulate wealth before, but it is incompatible with scarcity. They don't know how to do anything else, so they struggle to hold on to the past.
11 years on and the world population has increased by 1> billion to reach 8> billion. Capitalism has no reverse gear nor does it have any brakes, hopefully some passengers have seat belts and can survive the crash well enough to pick up the pieces and start again.
i graduated PhD Forestry UBC, we graduate students ex. the economists SPENT many discussion periods at the Grad Student seminars discussing this ... No one has listened deeply since ... so now the problem is much more complex and possibly insoluable
I think we should all go back to button-down shirt collars like I had in 1966 and really fascinating colour combinations by recycling our ties. It's better to light a candle.
no you dont understand, look 1 pound doubled is 2 pounds, thats after one week, after the following week it is 4 pounds, then 8 pounds, then 16 pounds, then 32 pounds, repeat this process 52 times and you will reach some ridiculously enormous number, its not as simple as just multiplying 1 pound times 52..
GDP/ consumer spending is not a metric that measures true social progress. The problem is that people still think money has any real value/ worth and wealth. Money is nothing more than numerical figures on a balance sheet and bookkeeping entries. Fractional reserve lending where banks create debt based money out of thin air charged with interest
You have to wonder the mentality behind the mineral and gas/oil energy industry. Where the mining industry is very comparable to the economic returns or the lack of returns between fracking and industrial mineral mining where these companies are making big losses just to stay viable and continue operating. Like Richard mentions it’s like a giant pyramid schemes. Pyramids which will inevitable come crashing down
in the beginning, he sets the parameters of the argument by assuming that if money isn't tied to metal, it's debt. that's misleading. he assumes money must be printed with an attached interest. that too, is misleading. i understand pinning his argument against growth to endless consumption. i agree. but assuming all money is debt whether we like it or not is fundamentally what is wrong with our economy because it's defined by our monetary policy: money as debt, debt as money.
We must measure progress on what we need, not GDP, I'm talking a pancake-based global economy. My Dad 60 yrs ago bought it all on the never never. I tried summing TofuBeets hamster but ran out of paper, so I had a genius wave and bought a hamster, Mr. Fluffy, July and I fed him to double weekly but last Tuesday he broke into the fridge himself, I have no food and he won't give me the TV remote back. Heinberg does not address this problem.
There's no reason to believe that degrowth will not result in mutual aid, instead of the common assumption of "resource wars", at least in the medium to long term.
Heinberg's good, but hasn't yet realized that we may not be limited by this earth's resources. Myopic focus on the tradition of overshot carrying capacity blinds you to the spectacular changes taking place in things like graphene, genomics, AI and robotics, imminent space travel and mining, virtualising of physical things so they used 1% to 0.1% of the energy, crowdfunding that shortcuts projects. Anyone reading this is encouraged to watch the movie The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurtzweil.
@@BruceThomson Ray K is delusional and zo are you. humanety fucked up soo bad. But then your reation was from 8 years ago. WE ARE LIMITED BY EARTHS RESORCES
@@BruceThomson 9 years later I still don't see all that prophesized space travel and asteroid mining happening. What I see is a war already going on in a neighbouring country and most other countries arming themselves preparing for war. All the while inflation is in the double digits region. We are fucked unfortunately.
Technology is not energy nor is it ressources. This is a common misconception. Technological improvements have never reduced ressources and energy consumption in fact they have always increased it. More efficient machines only bring more machines to work, meaning working on efficiency ratios while not working on total number of machines is not useful to reducing the impact of economic growth, efficiency gains left unchecked will result in faster ressource depletion and higher energy needed to power all. As technology becomes more complex, so does the number of ressources needed increase, electric cars require 75 elements from the periodic table, smarthphones require about 52 elements, and very few can replace them or could do so in the future, the only "viable" options are space mining or increasing the number of known elements, both are unrealistic at short and mid terms, and even at long terms. If you believe in space mining even on the long term I suggest you get yourself back to earth cause space exploration and mining at industrial scale are a long shot from becoming reality even more than nuclear fusion, by then we will have destroyed all biodiversity, depleted all known ressource's reserves, polluted all grounds/water/air areas/bodies, climate would have changed so dramatically, by then entire countries would become incapable of sustaining life, oceans would be empty of fish and polluted by plastics, water levels would flood entire countries and destroy our internet ocean cables which is no small detail, etc. Our destruction of the environment necessary for our existante and modern society goes much faster than any technological solution or even just "half" solutions we can find today and in the future, you need to add all of the destructions taking place together and all the limits weare reaching amd compare it to technological development and deployment to realise that even at current innovation rates and future rates, our destruction rates are much higher and will continue to increase faster, because our technological "solutions" require more ressource extraction, more complexity, more machines, etc. And as I said, technology still requires energy and ressources to exist and work, and in a world economy growing at a 2% rate per year, even if we could in an imaginary world make space mining possible, because of the exponential increase in demand for ressources every year, in a few centuries, even the entire solar system's ressources would be insufficient, because your economy doubles every 35 years meaning the moment you require the entire earth's ressources formed for the last 400 millions years, in a single year, you will need 2 entire earths every year, 35 years later, not counting that for those 35 years you require the entire earth ressources formed in 400 million years every year, after 35 years twice that. This is a battle against earth bringing us to a battle against the universe we can't possibly win.
Almost 10 years later this couldn't be more relevant 🙃
Translation: WE ARE FUCKED!!!😆
An excellent explanation of why a "Cancer Cell Economy" will ultimately collapse with catastrophic results. Unfortunately, the U.S. and the world's economy is in fact based on this flawed model.
9 years on it's still a great analysis
Listen, all of this may be true, but we have to keep producing more stuff to sell so rich people can have more money, or they won’t give the rest of us jobs.
We dont need to work much at all today, if we just turn our backs to the mindless consumption, which purpose is only to give the consumer a short dopamine rush so that he will do it again, and again, and again.
Spending time with family and fiends, and exploring the world life and universe with our minds, and enjoying culture, takes hardly any resources at all, yet gives us long lasting feelings of satisfaction and joy because it produces seratonine inside of us. Humans today are doing it all wrong.
"We need to be measuring more of what we actually want - not just GDP."
I think they got so accustomed to their greed, that they refuse to even consider the reality that the sun is setting on their system. They mastered how to accumulate wealth before, but it is incompatible with scarcity. They don't know how to do anything else, so they struggle to hold on to the past.
Mr Heinberg your argument seems to be outstandingly pertinent and cogent. Thank you for your impressive work.
11 years on and the world population has increased by 1> billion to reach 8> billion. Capitalism has no reverse gear nor does it have any brakes, hopefully some passengers have seat belts and can survive the crash well enough to pick up the pieces and start again.
i graduated PhD Forestry UBC, we graduate students ex. the economists SPENT many discussion periods at the Grad Student seminars discussing this ... No one has listened deeply since ... so now the problem is much more complex and possibly insoluable
Humans won't understand until they are affected. Even with nuclear power i think we won't be able to solve the problem. Im too optimistic tho
10 years on we're still heading for a cliff with our foot on the accelerator.
Hello from the future. BTW times aren't fun....
I think we should all go back to button-down shirt collars like I had in 1966 and really fascinating colour combinations by recycling our ties. It's better to light a candle.
What a great lecture!
Collapse
How many people gotta go?
no you dont understand, look
1 pound doubled is 2 pounds, thats after one week, after the following week it is 4 pounds, then 8 pounds, then 16 pounds, then 32 pounds, repeat this process 52 times and you will reach some ridiculously enormous number, its not as simple as just multiplying 1 pound times 52..
What color is your hamster? That's going to affect the total answer.
GDP/ consumer spending is not a metric that measures true social progress. The problem is that people still think money has any real value/ worth and wealth. Money is nothing more than numerical figures on a balance sheet and bookkeeping entries. Fractional reserve lending where banks create debt based money out of thin air charged with interest
Like The Long Emergency.
You have to wonder the mentality behind the mineral and gas/oil energy industry. Where the mining industry is very comparable to the economic returns or the lack of returns between fracking and industrial mineral mining where these companies are making big losses just to stay viable and continue operating. Like Richard mentions it’s like a giant pyramid schemes. Pyramids which will inevitable come crashing down
in the beginning, he sets the parameters of the argument by assuming that if money isn't tied to metal, it's debt. that's misleading. he assumes money must be printed with an attached interest. that too, is misleading. i understand pinning his argument against growth to endless consumption. i agree. but assuming all money is debt whether we like it or not is fundamentally what is wrong with our economy because it's defined by our monetary policy: money as debt, debt as money.
We must measure progress on what we need, not GDP, I'm talking a pancake-based global economy. My Dad 60 yrs ago bought it all on the never never. I tried summing TofuBeets hamster but ran out of paper, so I had a genius wave and bought a hamster, Mr. Fluffy, July and I fed him to double weekly but last Tuesday he broke into the fridge himself, I have no food and he won't give me the TV remote back. Heinberg does not address this problem.
There's no reason to believe that degrowth will not result in mutual aid, instead of the common assumption of "resource wars", at least in the medium to long term.
You are correct, your hamster would be 2 trillion tons or to be exact 4,503,599,627,370,496 pounds.
34:25
ok wow now I know your just trolling
Lies
fool
Heinberg's good, but hasn't yet realized that we may not be limited by this earth's resources. Myopic focus on the tradition of overshot carrying capacity blinds you to the spectacular changes taking place in things like graphene, genomics, AI and robotics, imminent space travel and mining, virtualising of physical things so they used 1% to 0.1% of the energy, crowdfunding that shortcuts projects. Anyone reading this is encouraged to watch the movie The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurtzweil.
fool
@@janklaas6885 Why? =)
@@BruceThomson
Ray K is delusional and zo are you.
humanety fucked up soo bad.
But then your reation was from 8 years ago.
WE ARE LIMITED BY EARTHS RESORCES
@@BruceThomson 9 years later I still don't see all that prophesized space travel and asteroid mining happening. What I see is a war already going on in a neighbouring country and most other countries arming themselves preparing for war. All the while inflation is in the double digits region. We are fucked unfortunately.
Technology is not energy nor is it ressources. This is a common misconception. Technological improvements have never reduced ressources and energy consumption in fact they have always increased it. More efficient machines only bring more machines to work, meaning working on efficiency ratios while not working on total number of machines is not useful to reducing the impact of economic growth, efficiency gains left unchecked will result in faster ressource depletion and higher energy needed to power all. As technology becomes more complex, so does the number of ressources needed increase, electric cars require 75 elements from the periodic table, smarthphones require about 52 elements, and very few can replace them or could do so in the future, the only "viable" options are space mining or increasing the number of known elements, both are unrealistic at short and mid terms, and even at long terms. If you believe in space mining even on the long term I suggest you get yourself back to earth cause space exploration and mining at industrial scale are a long shot from becoming reality even more than nuclear fusion, by then we will have destroyed all biodiversity, depleted all known ressource's reserves, polluted all grounds/water/air areas/bodies, climate would have changed so dramatically, by then entire countries would become incapable of sustaining life, oceans would be empty of fish and polluted by plastics, water levels would flood entire countries and destroy our internet ocean cables which is no small detail, etc. Our destruction of the environment necessary for our existante and modern society goes much faster than any technological solution or even just "half" solutions we can find today and in the future, you need to add all of the destructions taking place together and all the limits weare reaching amd compare it to technological development and deployment to realise that even at current innovation rates and future rates, our destruction rates are much higher and will continue to increase faster, because our technological "solutions" require more ressource extraction, more complexity, more machines, etc. And as I said, technology still requires energy and ressources to exist and work, and in a world economy growing at a 2% rate per year, even if we could in an imaginary world make space mining possible, because of the exponential increase in demand for ressources every year, in a few centuries, even the entire solar system's ressources would be insufficient, because your economy doubles every 35 years meaning the moment you require the entire earth's ressources formed for the last 400 millions years, in a single year, you will need 2 entire earths every year, 35 years later, not counting that for those 35 years you require the entire earth ressources formed in 400 million years every year, after 35 years twice that. This is a battle against earth bringing us to a battle against the universe we can't possibly win.