The Cause of and Response to the Ecological Crisis

I recently attended an online course on Climate Leadership at a leading Irish University. I was deeply frustrated with the course content because, as seems to be the case with most ‘mainstream’ climate action, the proposed solutions to the ecological mess we have gotten ourselves into seem to involve doing more of the things we are doing to cause the mess in the first place. Specifically, the idea that we look at our aggregate consumption and ask the simple question, “Why do we consume so much?” was not dealt with and was not on the table for discussion. It was expressed that economic growth can be ‘decoupled’ from our material usage by the production of lots of new infrastructure and products to replace the ones we already have. In short, the underlying theme was that we can produce our way out of climate change with renewable infrastructure, electric cars and recycling. This, unfortunately, is what passes for climate action in the mainstream of our society. Our consumption, and the reasons for it, are inconvenient truths.

While I didn’t expect much depth from the course – it was a ‘microcredential’ that I took up for the purposes of validating prior learning and connecting to like-minded people – the foundational context for how and why we have climate change was non-existent. Loosely quoting: “climate change happens because of the burning of fossil fuels”; “climate change happens because of land-use-change”. These things are not untrue, but they are secondary rather than primary causes of climate change. The reasons why we burn so much fossil fuel and convert so much land to production are the primary causes of climate change.

Every aspect of the course emphasised taking a systems approach and yet we did not look at the system that is causing the ecological crisis and we did not look at the systemic consequences of the proposed solutions. In this essay, I present that system and the inappropriateness of our responses to the damage it is causing. Hopefully, this will educate others but, at the very least, it will preserve my sanity in the face of responses to climate change and biodiversity loss that are rooted in the orthodoxies of the system that is causing those things.

I fully realise that I am a heretic in almost any group of people I sit with these days. I’m never really on the collective page. I think that is down to having a mind that always asks how and why and follows trains of information and logic to some sort of satisfactory conclusion. But the extent to which the course I attended was embedded in the current destructive paradigm left me, as I said, deeply frustrated. There was no time or space to bring the issues to the surface. So this essay is my response. The “what’s missing” that makes the difference between education and orthodoxy.

I will write in more detail of the mainstream proposed responses to climate change later but, firstly, I would like to outline the primary cause of the ecological crisis, which is our consumption, and to show that that consumption is driven by the supply-side rather than the demand-side of the economy.

The Map

In describing the causes of climate change, I have, for a while, been considering what is the correct lens through which to look at the aggregate problem. The rapid climate change we are currently experiencing, and the related biodiversity loss, are most certainly being caused by humans. The science has landed. But is that individual humans acting independently, human culture, our economy, or civilisation? All of these are valid lenses through which to examine the causes of recent and near-future ecological changes and all are interlinked but, in terms of our consumption, it is our production system that is most-directly responsible for the scale and destructiveness of our consumption of the life and life-systems of Earth. So it is this lens that I shall use here.

The system map that accompanies this essay is titled, ‘Productionism Under Capitalism’. This is because I am looking at a particular type of production system as it exists today in most countries. The Soviet Union was productionist in its own way as is China under its ‘socialist market economy‘ or ‘state-capitalism’. Free-market economies are not unique in delivering ecological destruction but the production system outlined in the map is the primary model, and therefore, the primary driver of ecological destruction, in today’s world.

Like any map, this map is an abstraction. Many things that could be included are missing. Primary amongst these things are the flows of energy and finance throughout the system. In terms of the vehicle analogy that I use, they might be considered the fuel and fuel-delivery system. Energy is used more intensively in the production and consumption parts of the system but is, nonetheless, present everywhere.

Finance is also “consumed” or generated in all parts of the system. I have avoided presenting it on the map because I wish to address the material throughput and resource usage that drives the ecological crisis without getting bogged down in the economics of the system, which are far from uncontested. The matters of capital and debt are dealt with in relation to the ‘drivers’ of the system because it is from this part of the system that the growth imperative is derived.

I have only included government in relation to its function as a consumer, showing how its consumption feeds back into the system and towards end users. Governments are, of course, enablers of the entire system through setting and enforcing (or sometimes not enforcing) laws with regard to property, finance, trade, labour rights, environmental costs, etc. The actions of governments in this respect might be considered to be the canvas on which the map is drawn. The government is far from neutral in its facilitation of the system and is itself invested in the growth paradigm as well as being swayed by the constant lobbying to which it is subjected; both of the legal and illegal types. And governments are not uniform, so what is legal or tolerated in one jurisdiction may not be in another.

The system map, with the possible exception of my colour choices, is agnostic in relation to the outcomes of the system. While I assert that the aggregate externality of the system, the uncounted effects, is the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves, the map could just as easily be used to assert that it is through innovation in the production system that we have the wealth of goods and services that are now available in our societies. If we waited for consumers to come up with all the new products and services we consume and the ways of producing them, economic and technological progress would be very much slower than they are.

Such an interpretation would be entirely correct. The inventiveness of the system does not lie with the end users, the consumers, but with those who create new products and product types, and those who work to create the demand for the new products and product types.

Plausibly, the map might also be used as part of a discussion on why Soviet productionism failed while Western productionism succeeded. The system does what it does well, i.e. produces lots of goods and services. What it does less well is treat people and planet with the respect that both deserve. The map has nothing to say about those.

Historically, financial innovation has also contributed to the rise in human productivity by giving special privileges to the subset of money known as ‘capital’, allowing further abstraction and flexibility in the use of money through ideas encoded in law such as limited liability and corporate personhood. These also serve to protect capital from losses and responsibility for its actions, especially in today’s world where capital can flow untraceably across borders, through shell companies and tax havens.

Regarding what I will say about actions like ‘net zero’ and recycling being part of the solution and not the solution, it is the externalities of this system that are the problem. I don’t propose to offer a solution here. I simply wish to create a frame through which the problem can be viewed. There are other frames, but this one is my focus for now.

What the Map Shows

Some notes are in order.

What we might normally consider to be our production system lies across the bottom of the map. This is the ‘linear process’ from extraction through to disposal although, as I explain later, it is anything but linear in practice. However, the material resources that flow through this system and eventually become waste and pollution do generally follow a linear path.

The light grey lines and arrows show the flow of material resources through the system. Consumption of one sort or another happens throughout the system: hence the thick lines / arrows from the consumption node back through the linear process (extraction uses products created by the system), forward to disposal (likewise) and consumption by government, which distributes to the production system itself and to end-users (consumers). Transport, which uses products and energy, happens throughout the system and could be far more complicated in its directionality. Here, it shows the transport of material resources through the linear process and also as part of end-user consumption. ‘The Engine’ also consumes resources as part of its operation.

The circle containing the different types of consumption is a spotlight used to discuss what consumption is and how it happens. It is not a separate part of the system: in fact, it is fully integral to every part of the system. This is discussed primarily from a consumer point-of-view but, again, it is representative of the whole system’s consumption.

The red lines and arrows represent information flow. The ‘Engine’, in the tooth-shaped grey section, is primarily concerned with knowledge, processes and innovation of one sort or another. It is an information system. So, for instance, production innovation produces plans and processes that are conveyed into the linear process, which takes those plans and makes them into products and implements the processes. The arrow coming from the centre of the ‘Engine’ section indicates that it is this part of the system that decides what gets produced, how it gets produced and how much gets produced.

That information is then handed off to producers who demand processed, and hence, raw, materials from earlier in the production process. Sales feeds back into production through the information system. The grey double-arrow between consumption and disposal is there because disposal itself is a type of consumption: we consume resources in order to dispose of our waste.

The double arrows between marketing, technological innovation and product and service development show that these parts of the information system work together, often in iterative processes, to decide what gets produced, feeding back and forth what is technologically feasible to produce, what consumers (of all sorts) can be convinced to buy, and designing those products and services. The line with the question mark represents the traditional view that the production system just responds to consumer wants and needs, questioned later, whereas it is the direct connection between market research and consumers that makes decisions on what is actually to be produced. This is not driven by consumers.

Promotion and sales are informational in nature. Consumers are subjected to constant promotion: principally advertising but also, in the longer run, through the creation of societal norms around consumption. It is through sales that products (and services) pass from production to consumption.

The ‘drivers’ are the ‘why’ of the system. Why, in particular, must we keep increasing production when we absolutely know that our consumption is causing the destruction of life on Earth? This, again, is an information exchange relating to where and how financial capital is invested. In the case of governments, a government may decide directly what gets produced, such as infrastructure-development, or it may just stimulate the economy through the transfer of money. However, at all times, the communication from the drivers is return on investment, which is the driver of growth. Information gets fed back into this part of the system through financial markets, statistics and rates of return on investment.

There will be more detailed discussion below on many of these aspects of the overall system. It is, I feel, worth noting that the essay is derived from the map and not the other way around. I started with the linear process from extraction through to disposal and the map grew from there as I tried to understand why it works the way it does.

Also worth noting is that system functions are not necessarily distinguished or separate from each other in the real world as they are shown in the map. Many different functions can be present in a single business or even carried out by a single person. Systems are wonderfully messy.

Defining “Productionism”

It’s questionable as to whether or not we need yet another ‘ism’ in our lives but I feel this one is necessary in order to shift the focus of climate action from the individual to the system. Much of climate action is framed as being the responsibility of individuals: “recycle”, “take shorter showers”, “eat less meat”, “fly less”, etc., etc. In fact, the whole concept of measuring our ‘carbon footprint’ was invented by a fossil fuel company, British Petroleum (BP), in order to distract from their own expansion of fossil fuel extraction and to individualise the responsibility for mitigating climate change. My favourite online article on that type of distraction comes with the heading, “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals”. (It is available on The Guardian online.)

It matters not one bit if we as individuals decide to reduce our own individual impacts without there being systemic change. We do need to change our individual behaviours and consumption but we need to do those things within a system that is pointed in the right direction: not a system that is constantly manipulating us to consume more. Currently, in our individual actions, we are tethered to a juggernaut that is accelerating in the other direction and which shows no signs of slowing down. The word ‘productionism’ needs to exist in order to counter the individualisation of responsibility that is implied by the word, ‘consumerism’.

So, what is ‘productionism’? A succinct definition from ChatGPT, arising from our discussions (complete with telltale em dashes):

At its core, productionism is the belief that expanding productive capacity—whether in terms of goods, services, or national power—is the essential pathway to progress, prosperity, and societal stability.

And also the pathway to environmental salvation according to the mainstream trope.

There is a related word, ‘productivism’, that is used by some people to mean much the same thing as the definition of productionism above. However, there is a moral connotation to productivism in relation to the value of work that I do not wish to include here:

[Productivism is] an ethos in which ‘work’, as paid employment, has been separated out in a clear-cut way from other domains of life [and that work] defines whether or not individuals feel worthwhile or socially valued.

Anthony Giddens

This moral connotation is in itself a part of the problem within a productionist system because the alternative lives that we might live without the work we do as both producers and consumers are erased from our visions of the present and of our futures.

The word, productionism, has also been used in a similar form in relation to agriculture:

“Productionism” can be understood as a “philosophy that emerges when production is taken to be the sole norm for ethically evaluating agriculture” (Fouilleux et al., 2017, p. 1,659). As a discourse of food systems change, it reduces the matter to the sole purpose of increased production through productivist means, e.g., through greater use of chemical agricultural inputs, hybrid seeds, mechanization, and increasing digitalization to support large-scale food production (Fouilleux et al., 2017).

Greta Juskaite, Ruth Haug

The term is also closely related to the idea of ‘growthism’:

[…] growthism is the belief that measurable productivity and growth are the purpose of human organization (e.g., work), and that “more production is necessarily good”.

Wikipedia

I may be splitting hairs but, again, I feel that there is a moral connotation to the term growthism that I wish to avoid in describing the production system. I may change my mind on that at some time as, due to the driving forces, it is simply a fact that the system as-is requires growth in order to function, and that requirement is supported by a growthist mindset.

As said previously, I don’t consider productionism to be an exclusively capitalist pursuit. The former Soviet Union was all of productivist, productionist and, eventually, growthist in its pursuit of economic development and modernisation. In The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith described the nexus of power in 1960s-70s America as being between government, corporations and the education system. He asserted that American corporations were not genuinely subject to market forces and described the interaction with government and the education system as being part of a ‘planning system’. In his readings from other authors and his own observations from his travels in the Soviet Union, he felt that the planning system was not wholly different to the relationship between the government and the ‘state enterprises’ that fulfilled the role of large corporations in the Soviet Union.

In short, after possibly too long spent discussing the term, I use the term ‘productionism’ because it is a collective, systemic counterpoint to the individualisation of responsibility represented by the word ‘consumerism’.

Consumption

A detailed description of what consumption actually is might appear to be labouring the point but there is a very distinct point to be made. That point is that consumption is based in material reality: the resources that are extracted, processed, shaped, burned, transported, used and disposed of within our system of production and consumption.

Many of the externalities of the production system, those things that are not counted, such as deforestation and marine pollution, are also based in material reality: the system leaves a trail of destruction behind it, the consequences of which may also be considered to have been consumption by the system.

Consumption is the use of resources including metals, rocks, plants, animals, energy, etc. that are taken into the system and, most usually, come out at the other end as waste. It is the material throughput of our system.

Me

It is important to note that consumption is not something that is solely carried out by individuals as consumers. While it appears logical that, ultimately, the system relies on end-user purchases and consumption, the production system itself consumes vast quantities of resources. For instance, organisations that engage in the extraction of raw materials use equipment, buildings and energy resources that have already been created or extracted by the system. These resources are created or extracted by the production system and consumed as part of the process of the creation of end-user consumer goods. This consumption happens the entire way through the production system, including at the point of disposal of used-up and unwanted products.

Governments are also major purchasers and consumers of the products of the system. While governments consume products and services themselves – stationery and road-building services for example – the ultimate consumption of government purchasing is either directed back into the production system by things like the creation and maintenance of infrastructure or to the consumption of individuals and groups of people.

The purchase of the end-products and -services of the system, by individuals, groups or governments, pay for all the consumption that takes part within the production system because, logically, anything a producer spends is recouped by the onward sale of their products and services.

It should be emphasised here that those in the driving seat are themselves also consumers and that the resources that the profits and growth in wealth that flow from the system are spent either on current consumption or on future consumption by reinvestment in the production system. Their roles as producers, or the drivers of production, and as consumers are separate, however, and so consumption is not linked to ‘the drivers’ of the map.

Product Consumption

It seems simple, doesn’t it? A toaster, a jumper, a car, a phone? These are products.

However, if we think of the toaster as the sum-total of all that has gone into bringing it to a kitchen counter, the energy used while toasting bread and the end-of-life journey once it no longer functions (or the owner has replaced it with a cleaner, less disfigured version), then it is not quite so simple.

There is a relatively commonly-used idea of ‘embodied energy’ in products. This is described by yourhome.gov.ie (following a cursory Google search) as:

a calculation of all the energy that is used to produce a material or product, including mining, manufacture and transport.

Less-commonly used is the idea of ‘embodied resources’ as a measure of all the resources, as materials and energy, that are used during the production and distribution of a product. As an aside here, but, I feel, an important one; even if the energy used along the way all comes from renewables, renewable energy sources also have embodied materials and energy that are consumed and the materials are currently mostly unrecyclable in any meaningful sense. Whilst renewable energy is definitely better, it still does not come free of environmental costs.

So, back to the toaster: a non-exhaustive list of what is ‘embodied’ in the toaster at the time it arrives on a countertop.

There are the materials of which the toaster itself is made:

• Steel – usually for the toaster’s outer casing and internal structural frame;
• Nickel-chromium alloy – used for the heating elements;
• Copper – used in the wiring and electrical contacts;
• Zinc or aluminium – sometimes used in die-cast components, like levers or internal fittings;
• Phenolic resin or other thermoset plastics – used in the outer casing and knobs, especially those parts that users touch because they’re heat-resistant and electrically insulating;
• PVC or similar – for insulation on wiring;
• Ceramics – Sometimes used as insulators around heating elements, depending on the design;
• Rubber or silicone – for feet or pads to prevent slipping;
• Electronic components – including a range of materials: silicon, gold, tin, lead, etc.

All these materials have been extracted from the earth and processed, so the toaster embodies a part, albeit a minute part, of the following from extraction and processing:

• Drills, blasting equipment, heavy loaders;
• Conveyor belts, haulage trucks, railway systems;
• Coke ovens (for coal processing);
• Blast furnaces (to smelt iron with coke and limestone);
• High-temperature furnaces for smelting nickel;
• Basic oxygen furnaces or electric arc furnaces;
• Rolling mills (for shaping steel);
• Foundries and steel plants;
• Cooling towers, dust collection systems;
• Crushing and grinding mills;
• Flotation tanks or pressure acid leach systems;
• Refining plants;
• Electrolytic cells (nickel refining);
• Electrorefining plants;
• Sulphuric acid plants (for leaching processes);
• Cryolite processing systems;
• Oil rigs, gas extraction facilities;
• Pipelines, oil tankers;
• Refineries (fractional distillation towers, crackers);
• Petrochemical plants producing monomers like ethylene and propylene;
• Polymerisation reactors;
• Injection moulding machines;
• Extruders for wiring insulation;
• Mining camps, worker housing, admin offices;
• Transport infrastructure: roads, rail, ports, bulk carriers;
• Power plants: coal, gas, hydro, nuclear (depending on region);
• Water treatment plants;
• Waste storage: slag heaps, tailings dams, landfill;
• Security infrastructure: fencing, surveillance;
• Pollution control systems: scrubbers, filters, chimneys.

There’s lots more, but I’m sure you’ve got the idea. Thanks to ChatGPT for the lists.

The toaster’s materials pass from processing on to production where there are machines, buildings, computers, desks, etc., etc., all themselves the results of extraction and production processes. At each step of the way, materials and ‘subsidiary products’ (i.e. those used in production) use energy as part of the extraction-to-production process and use energy, vehicles and transport infrastructure as part of the movement of materials through the system.

The list of countries involved in the supply chain is likely to contain most or all of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, DR Congo, France, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA, Vietnam.

And, if the toaster was bought online, it embodies part of the technological infrastructure that supports the internet: servers, cooling equipment, buildings, more computers, switching centres, masts, fibre optic cables and even a part of the device you used to complete the purchase.

It takes a lot of very long and complicated processes to bring a toaster to a kitchen counter.

And it doesn’t end there because there is energy used as part of the ‘consumption’ (use) of the toaster. And the use of that energy consumes part of the infrastructure that delivers that energy, the extraction of the fossil fuels used to generate the energy, or the materials and energy used to create the solar panels or wind generators.

And so on, etc., etc.

As an aside, the reason that there is a ‘transport’ arrow around both product and service consumption on the map is that, in the case of cars, scooters, motorbikes etc., the transport and associated energy use are part of the consumption of the good.

I do have to say, I am quite impressed by how the system manages to marshal all these resources just for a humble toaster (and for all the other products that it creates). However, there is just the little matter of externalities: the climate change and biodiversity loss that result from the sheer volume of products that we produce and consume, very many of them far less life-affirming than a piece of toast for breakfast.

Service Consumption

The real reason I want to zoom in on consumption is because of narratives around “buy experiences, not things” and “virtual consumption” which are touted, in some quarters at least, as more benign forms of consumption because they’re not so materialistic in the sense that they are not ‘things’.

When we look at service consumption, which is mostly delivered to us by humans in some way (although increasingly delivered by autonomous systems) we tend not so much to see the material basis of our consumption. However, when we travel on a plane, we engage in the consumption of physical resources within the production system, as our toaster does, and also in end-user products themselves. For instance, when we go on holiday abroad and stay in a hotel, we consume not only the jet fuel that carries us and the aeroplane to our destination but also a part of the airport, a part of the aeroplane, a part of the air traffic control systems, a part of the parking lot where we leave our car for a week or two, part of the resources used in the maintenance of the airport and the aeroplanes and the traffic control system. We also use part of the resources used in the creation, use and maintenance of all these parts of the system.

When we stay in a hotel, we use parts of all the physical resources that are used to make our stays there comfortable: the buildings themselves, furniture, bedding, plates, glasses, swimming pools, saunas, cookers, washing machines etc. (and part of all the energy and infrastructure that has been used to make these things).

Our experiences when using services are always in some way, usually in most ways, rooted in energy use and the products of the production system. While some experiences have a far better resource-to-satisfaction ratio than others, all services and consumer experiences are still rooted in material reality.

Virtual Consumption

The case of digital consumption is a special case. This is because a) we are encouraged to think that digital consumption is less environmentally impactful than physical consumption and b) our time on the internet is constantly monitored for marketing purposes. Most of us are constantly advertised at and the internet looks set to become the primary sales channel in the near future. Our ‘consumption’ online feeds very directly into further consumption, sometimes of the digital sort, but also of the material product and service sort.

In the same way as with a toaster or a holiday, our time online is reliant on physical infrastructure by way of materials and energy passed through the production system and includes our devices, the energy used to power both our devices and the entire system that brings content to those devices. Ultimately, the idea that our digital consumption is somehow “greener” than our real-world consumption does not hold up to a closer analysis. Sometimes, in individual usage cases, it is, but more generally, the system uses far more resources than it saves.

Again, I have nothing against the technology. In fact, I really like it. The idea of having the world’s knowledge at my fingertips is like living in the future. The ability to travel back through the history of all the music I have ever listened to is just amazing. I would say that my extended chats with ChatGPT about the environmental crisis and what to do about it are probably, currently, my own greatest contribution to environmental degradation.

Virtual consumption in some respects might be really useful for us in helping solve the ecological crisis, but is not the solution. It is very much part of the problem.

Other Consumers

A little tangent here in terms of ‘other consumers’ that occurred to me as I was thinking and researching; in terms of nature-conservation and restoration efforts that themselves consume products and services, who might we say that the ‘consumers’ are? It might be bears or frogs or birds or trees that are the actual beneficiaries of consumption. Or we might say that it is the people who initiate the conservation efforts in the first place. I can’t really say for sure but one reason for the tangent is to acknowledge that there are fringe cases that don’t quite fit into the above descriptions of consumption.

More important, however, is the idea that we will need to produce and consume quite a lot if we are to mitigate climate change and restore nature, including production and consumption to restore nature. Simply giving up doing nothing is not a viable alternative to the production system unless we want civilisation to collapse. I’m actually not entirely against the notion of that: the life of Earth is greater and worth far more than our civilisation. However, I would by far prefer that we extract ourselves from this situation gracefully and urgently by producing the right things in the right amounts rather than bringing on collapse through unnecessary overproduction, the exhaustion of the resource base and the destruction of large swathes of life on our planet.

Consumerism

What is “consumerism”?

A short answer. Quoting myself:

Consumerism is the work that people are induced to do on behalf of the production system to create space for more production, for growth, and for the extraction of profit.

Short answers can be true but also not very enlightening. So let’s have a look into that.

Quoting myself again, from elsewhere, on the origin of consumerism:

In his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, the eminent British economist, John Maynard Keynes, discussed the future of work and productivity. Keynes predicted that advances in technology and productivity over the following hundred years would reduce the need for long work hours, ultimately allowing people to work as little as 15 hours per week. Keynes anticipated that society would have to find a way to share the remaining work equitably, as increasing efficiency would mean that less labour would be needed to meet human needs and desires. Spreading the work around would be as much about giving people purpose in life as it would be of giving them a means of earning.

Between swings and roundabouts, Keynes was fairly accurate in his growth predictions.

But we didn’t do that.

And this followed by the words of economist Victor Lebow in 1955:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats – his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.

These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.

Classical economics describes us as creatures with a limitless want for more. However, anthropologists tend to disagree and assert that, beyond sufficiency, humans prefer leisure time to more things. Largely, the advent of consumerism has been induced through the engine of the production system, as described below, for the purposes of the drivers of the system, as also described below. We have gone the way of Lebow rather than the way Keynes.

I used to think of the word ‘consumer’ as simply a shallow, ‘economic’, ‘media’, way to refer to ‘people’. It was when a friend described the push for more electric cars as a ‘consumerist response’, though, that I decided to look more deeply into the subject. It was while investigating the origins of consumerism that I happened upon Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self, which explored the origins of consumer culture as a deliberately constructed way of living, serving simultaneously to control the masses and to boost the economic system. As Curtis introduced:

This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.

I would caveat that Curtis’ work is the best reason I have seen so far for the existence of ‘historiography’: the study of how history is written and studied. He presents alternative views on historical events and movements that are very compelling, frequently centering different main characters to those traditionally favoured in our dominant historical narratives. This calls into question the narratives we already believe in, particularly the ‘powerful man’ kind that is so prevalent at the moment. Interesting, compelling – yes! But not necessarily ‘true’ in any absolute sense.

However, from engaging with the work of Curtis and others, the idea that consumerism as we know it now is a deliberate creation is very much beyond doubt. The ways in which we are manipulated to want more, to purchase more, and to consume more leave the classical economic idea – that advertising and marketing merely inform us of what is available and respond to consumer demand – in the rubbish bin where it belongs.

In the words of Paul Mazur, a leading Wall Street banker, in 1927:

We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. […] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.

To what extent we might call this a ‘conspiracy’, I simply do not know.

In truth, the visions of Lebow and Mazur might have been perfectly compatible with Keynes’ vision if there had been an oversight of the economy that was primarily concerned with human wellbeing, of which the wellbeing of nature is very much an interest. The inducement to greater consumption might have brought us to a place where there was plenty for all without threatening life-writ-large on the planet. We can still arrive at such a place if we choose.

However, the system is addicted to growth and the growth of the system is not primarily aimed at increasing the wellbeing of humans or, in any way, concerned with the health of the natural world.

Consumerism is the work that people are induced to do on behalf of the production system to create space for more production, for growth and for the extraction of profit.

The Linear Process

By ‘the linear process’, I refer to the line of nodes at the bottom of the map from extraction to disposal. It is anything but a linear process. It is systems within systems within systems criss-crossing the globe. As alluded to with the toaster above, the linear process gathers materials from all across the globe, moving them around, subjecting them to processes, moving them onwards again, creating the systems that create the end products in the process.

Even the toaster in your home, presuming you have the former and hoping the latter, is sitting in a system. Your home takes energy in from the outside world by way of direct sunlight, electricity, gas, oil and renewables. Ultimately, the source of all those types of energy is the sun: gas and oil as the energy captured and stored by ancient plants; renewables from the current or recent energy emitted from the sun. Even if you are connected to nuclear power, the atoms that fuel the nuclear reactions were created in ancient stars, most or all of them at the point when those stars went supernova. And your home gives up energy by conduction, convection and radiation, interacting with outside systems in constant energy flows. We could also look at a home in terms of financial flows, resource usages of various sorts or even the social systems of the people that live there. And this is just the tiny part of the global system where the toaster ends up for a while.

And so it is with the entire production system. Layers and layers of complexity across space and time, interacting with the Earth as it is now, as a result of how it has been in the past, and influencing the future states of the planet. While the large-scale geological forces of the planet are currently beyond the effects of what we might do, the future health of the planet’s life systems are very much being impacted by, and in danger from, our production system.

Which all is to say, “it’s complicated”. But the linear process is nonetheless a useful way to look at our resource usage, how we take the material and living matter of the planet and turn it into waste, usually, but not always, having ‘used’ it in the interim.

As has been said previously, consumption takes place throughout this process. At every stage, products of the system are used as part of the processes of the system. Extraction uses diggers, explosives, roads, vehicles, buildings, fuel etc., etc., etc. Processing uses machinery as outlined above in relation to the toaster. The systems along the way all use pens, pencils or electronic means of communication. And so, the zig-zag arrow at the bottom represents resources and products travelling backwards and forwards through the system. The resource usage of the production system is directly related to the volume of final products and services. The more we consume as end-users, the more resources the production system itself consumes.

A potential node that might be considered to be missing on this part of the map is that of distribution: the ways of physically getting products to consumers. However, distribution happens throughout the system as materials, products and fuel resources are moved back and forth, facilitating the production process. Tracking distribution on this part of the system map accurately would result in squiggly lines that would obscure everything else. Distribution is not, in any case, something that just happens as part of ‘sales and distribution’.

The materials of any part of any thing that we use go through a linear process from extraction to disposal. There is some amount of circularity in the system but it is currently minimal and, as a proportion of the whole, negligible. It is not at all likely to significantly reduce the throughput of materials in the near future.

Extraction

Extract: remove or take out, especially by effort or force

(Oxford Languages)

Extraction in our production system involves that which we would immediately think of: mining for minerals and fuels from under the ground. It also involves the extraction of fresh water: from rivers, from lakes and from aquifers (bodies of permeable rock which can contain or transmit groundwater). It involves the extraction of nutrients from the soil by way of growing plants. It involves cutting down trees for lumber for ‘wood pellets’ for burning or simply to clear the land on which they live so that we can use the land for agriculture, for living on, or so that we can get at the resources that are underneath those trees.

Extraction can be very energy- and resource-intensive itself, consuming many resources along the way. And in a growing system, the more resources that we use within the system, the more resources we need to use to extract those resources. And the more we extract resources, using up the easier-to-get-at deposits, the more resources that we again need to use in order to extract yet more again.

As an example, in 1925 the ‘Energy Return on Investment’ for oil extraction was somewhere between 50:1 and 100:1. That meant that the energy of 1 barrel of oil was necessary for the extraction of between 50 and 100 barrels of oil. It takes energy to get energy. Today, conventional oil extraction is somewhere between 10:1 and 15:1 barrels extracted per barrel used. For shale oil, it is between 5:1 and 7:1 and for tar sands it is between 2:1 and 5:1. On average, extraction of 100 barrels of oil takes around 10 barrels of oil, up to ten times more energy than a hundred years ago. This pattern goes not just for oil, but for very many of the resources that we extract. The more we take, the harder it is to get the next amount, the more we need to use to get it.

And for all of those 100 years, ‘peak oil’ – the point at which we have used up most of the oil and extraction declines – has repeatedly been predicted. But we have not reached it yet. And it is the one thing that we might start using less of in the near future under current predictions. Coal use is still growing year-on-year with plans for expansion. Shale gas, produced by highly toxic hydraulic fracturing – ‘fracking’ – is really looking on the up as a ‘transition fuel’ and also as a major input to plastic production.

This is before we even begin to consider the costs of extraction for the ‘green energy transition’. And yet growth is the only game in town. We are not planning to cut down on these destructive extractive processes. We plan to increase them. Probably vastly.

A brief spin through the environmental costs of our extraction processes:

• Habitat destruction and the death of animal and plant life from mining, logging and drilling, including the destruction of entire species;
• Water pollution: the runoff from mines and processing, leaching toxic metals and chemicals into rivers and groundwater;
• Water scarcity: rivers are running dry and aquifers depleting. This will have severe consequences for humans, not to mention the fish and other aquatic life that lose the very air they breathe;
• Soil degradation: the erosion and loss of fertility of soil from heavy machinery and the chemicals we use to promote plant growth and kill ‘pests’;
• Marine dead zones: from the runoff of soil and chemicals from agricultural land;
• Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel extraction, releasing significant carbon dioxide and methane;
• Air pollution: dust, diesel emissions, and chemical releases that affect air quality and contribute to climate change.

That really is just a quick list and refers to our extraction processes only.

And remember, the more we use, the more we need to use to get what we want and the damage keeps escalating.

Processing

The separation, combination, purification, etc. of the resources we extract. The toaster tells us much of what we need to know here. Although we do more than just smelting and separating. Our intensive agriculture is a way of processing the soil through plants. Our animal feeds are a way of processing (mostly) plants through animals. (We also feed animals back to themselves – even to their own species. I won’t even engage here with the casual cruelty that we inflict as part of the food-production process.) As with all of the system, it is ingenious and destructive.

Here, of course, we have externalities in terms of pollution: greenhouse gas emissions (both from melting metals and burping cows), air pollution, water pollution, land pollution and the associated costs to nature and to humans.

A classic example of such pollution is of the run-off of industrial pollution into a river. This kills fish, plants and the microbial life of the river, leaving it devoid of life. The pollution travels downriver and eventually to the sea, where it kills more and also disrupts life and lifecycles. This is a very distinct loss to the fish, plants and microbes that have their lives cut short and also their now-never-existing descendants. It’s also to the detriment of those other creatures that depend on the river for drinking water and food and to those creatures that might absorb the toxic waste that gets into the soil and the water table. Lastly, it is also a distinct loss to the humans who receive benefits from a clean and living river.

And very much, I mean ‘lastly’. That is not because I am a human-hater: I have read that they do exist. As a species, we are doing precisely the sort of thing that would be expected of a species with our cognitive abilities. We are smart enough to destroy the basis of our existence and are doing so. The question is, “Are we smart enough to preserve the basis of our existence?” And are we humble enough to realise and accept that we are no more important than any of the other species with whom we share this planet? We are engaged in the process of destroying life for everyone else as well as ourselves.

Production

Making things. Lots of them. More and more and more. It seems that the currently-implied idea is that growing the economy and turning the world’s poor into consumers will lift them out of poverty. But with our current consumption rate of 1.7 times of the rate at which the Earth can replenish resources and the aim of all major economies to keep growing, it is hard to think how we can sustain current levels of consumption, never mind lift the world’s poor out of poverty by doing more of it.

Sales

I’m going to skip through sales for now as I consider it to be primarily informational in nature. Needless to say, though, the process of getting products to their end users is vast in scale and carries a considerable footprint in terms of material and energy usage.

Consumption

See above.

Disposal

What can we say!? I had to step away from the keyboard on arriving at this point as the whole matter is simply deflating. There is, on my writing list, the beginnings of an essay on how the system, ingeniously, has conned us into paying extra for our pollution without in any way resolving the problem of our pollution. I think the best I have heard said on this matter is that “there is no such place as away”. Nothing that we throw away goes to nowhere.

All along the production process, we have externalities – the costs that are not counted because they are to be paid by other people, other creatures, in some other place and at some other time. We have sent an awful lot to ‘away’ but now the costs are being counted: in terms of rising sea levels and crashing levels of biodiversity; in parts-per-million concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; in the rates at which the ice sheets are disappearing; in the reduction in global tree cover; in the amount of plastic in our bodies and our brains. The belief in ‘away’ is coming back to get us.

Ideas of circularity are good. Recycling, per se, is not a bad thing. I have been diligent for many years in that respect. But we are producing ‘more’ at such a rate that we can not keep up. Circularity is not designed-in from the outset. Particularly in terms of plastics, recycling is largely a myth that allows us to keep on consuming ever-more with a clear conscience. In the same way that measuring our carbon footprints is the invention of a fossil-fuel company, plastic recycling is the invention of the plastics industry. For those interested, I refer to an article from NPR, ‘How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled’. NPR is a media outlet noted as slightly left-leaning but also criticised for being unduly influenced by the corporate stakeholders on its board: all-in-all a publication that can be trusted to have a balanced view on the matter.

The Engine

This area of the map, technological innovation, production innovation, product development, marketing, promotion and sales form a subsystem that is the engine of growth. Finance matters too, of course, as the decision-making process on how to allocate resources but we could not have a modern, technological society with such a variety and volume of products and services without this engine of growth.

The subsystem, as also with the drivers, is primarily information-driven. The inputs to this system are finance, knowledge, education, research and ideas. Its outputs are knowledge, techniques, processes and beliefs that allow for production and consumption to increase for ever and ever until the resource base finally runs out or we drown / suffocate (delete as appropriate) in our own pollution.

While it consumes plenty of resources and does have material outputs to the rest of the system – for instance prototypes or artwork – it is information flows internally and to and from the rest of the system that allows this subsystem to be so successful and allows the greater system to provide us with the cornucopia of products and services that are available in a modern, wealthy, society.

It is truly ingenious and has given us things that we might genuinely call ‘progress’ but the driving force has meant that it has, in line with Lebow’s and Mazur’s vision, really just given us more and more things. On delivering the benefits of what can be said to be an ideal human existence for the many, it has been somewhat less successful.

Where to start!? What order?

As with the ‘linear system’ of the production process, there is much interaction amongst the components of the subsystem and, in this case, the boundaries can be very blurred. For example, user interfaces on sales websites (i.e. the “Buy with One Click” button on Amazon) can be considered to be any or all parts of the subsystem: the development of a product to assist sales; technological innovation in website design; massive-volume split-testing as part of marketing; the ‘promotion’ of sales simply by removing ‘friction’ with a ‘better’ colour for the button; or as part of the sales process itself. In general, the areas are overlapping and every part of the subsystem interacts with every other part so the separation into distinct activities will have many exceptions that, nonetheless, does not negate their definition as distinct activities.

Technological Innovation

I’ll start with tech innovation, not because it is the most important part of this subsystem, but because it is the one that is most obvious. We wouldn’t be where we are today – whatever we think of where we are today – without technological innovation. That applies not only to the ‘high technology’ that we think we have now, but all the way back to the taming of fire, the storage of grain and the invention of money (the latter often described as a ‘social technology’).

From Oxford Languages again:

Technology: the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.

It occurs to me that, perhaps, education and scientific research should also have nodes in the system map as they very much contribute to the development of the system as a whole. Certainly, the system could not have achieved its current state without these. On the other hand, are these aspects of human culture that are also ‘mined’ to be brought into the system in the way ancient sunlight is mined by way of coal and oil to acquire energy?

Additionally, education and research are funded by governments with the specific aim of moving technology forward and it does produce the goods. Unfortunately, said governments are often complicit in socialising the costs of such research while the benefits are privatised. I am conflicted on the matter but will leave them out for now.

What I would say about the progress of technology is that, on aggregate, the more technology we use, the more resources and energy we use, the more resources and energy we can make use of and onwards and upwards in a vicious cycle. Techno-optimists, who see technological progress as our salvation when it comes to the ecological crisis, seem to uniformly miss the fact that it is by way of technological progress that we have arrived at an ecological crisis. Which is not to say that we have to give up technological advances, but technology as the producer of ever more gadgets and ever-faster obsoletion is just not useful given where we find ourselves.

Right now, the best technology we have for solving our environmental problems is billions of years old: biology. Principally, the right trees in the right places: the complex ecosystems that grow in native forests, sucking carbon back out of the air and reintegrating it into the stuff of life, reversing our collective efforts in the opposite direction. And restoring marine ecosystems so that they also do the same.

Product and Service Development

Things! Material things, experiential things, virtual things. Ever more and more things and types of things to tempt people into purchasing. Some things are developed to meet real human needs but most are invented to fulfil wants, whether those wants are innate or, more usually, generated by the genius in the system, which I will come to shortly.

I can’t count the number of times I have seen food preparation gadgets on sale in the centre aisles of the local supermarket only to think, “I have a knife”. And, thanks to the University of YouTube, I know how to use it. The technology it gives, and the technology it takes away.

A colleague of mine who was trying to work her way into the arts told me that she had a degree in product design. However, she couldn’t face a life of designing things to break. Planned obsolescence and disposability are probably the biggest sins of this part of the system. The shiniest example is our phones. Even when the hardware lasts, the software bloat of systems upgrades and security patches will eventually slow them to a crawl and force an upgrade.

Subscription models and bonus schemes are also innovations of this part of the system, locking us into paying for products whether we use them or not. It is all very clever but it is driven by the need to bring new products to market to grow the system rather than to satisfy real human needs or wellbeing.

Production Innovation

Yes, it works. More stuff, more cheaply with less human involvement allowing for more sales, growth in production and more profits. Yay! But!?

Marketing

And here we have the combustion chamber, the heart and lungs of the engine. I really don’t know much about engines so will admit to having picked that up off a Google search for “what is the heart of an engine”. Or maybe we might describe it as the central processing core. It is here that “consumer need” is created. It is the most important interface between consumers of all sorts and what gets produced by the system.

Marketing forms an interface between the idea-generation in technological, product and service development and the potential consumers for the products and services, be they government, corporate or individual. A definition from The Open University (bolding of type is mine):

Marketing is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. Marketing differs from selling because:

‘Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.’ (Levitt, 1960)

In other words, marketing has less to do with getting customers to pay for your product as it does developing a demand for that product and fulfilling the customer’s needs.

Or, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith:

The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products. On no other activity, religious, political or moral, is he so elaborately, skillfully and expensively instructed.

While marketing does mine people’s needs and wants, and there is constant communication back and forth (think Facebook tracking how long you look at ads online or focus groups that uncover what you might want or buy if it were available), its function is not to make people happier or more fulfilled. In fact, making people happier or fulfilled is not a useful outcome to the system because then people won’t buy more.

As for the question mark on the system chart pointing to product and service development. To what extent do consumers, or not, drive the engine of growth? Do consumers beat a path to the doors of producers and demand an avalanche of cheap disposable plastic clothes and packaging? Do consumers envision the toxic sludge of social media that hijacks their endocrine systems, mines their brains, and splits their society into entrenched, hateful, opposing camps? I think not. The existence of these things is due to innovation within the production system: innovation in products and product types; innovation in production processes; and innovations in the physical and financial structures that facilitate the distribution of these products. There is interaction, of course, but it is the people within the production side of the system that are driving innovation and growth. The consumer is just the end user that needs to be managed so that they do their appropriate work on behalf of the system.

The function of marketing is to participate in the creation of new products and services and product and service types (including those for the system itself), to evaluate the potential for selling those products and services and to devise the ways in which consumers can be persuaded to buy them.

Me

Many books have been written on how that is done.

Promotion

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

Will Rogers

Sales

I will take a little more time here to explain the part of sales within the information system that helps build a foundation for later discussion on the drivers of growth.

There are many tropes that spring to mind when I think of sales, principally to do with the sale of cars. For instance, the stereotypical second-hand car salesman, grifting unsuspecting customers into purchasing cars that are unsafe, have had the mileage-counter reduced or have a much more limited lifespan that might be apparent: facts that the salesman knows but the customer doesn’t; a situation described by the term ‘information asymmetry’. Another example is that of reverse-selling: for instance, the sales rep shows a potential customer a vehicle that is far more expensive than they can afford and then plays on their vanity by showing them “a model that is more in your price range” to get the customer to spend more than they can afford.

Not all sales is this dishonest, of course, but it does have a reputation for being more about extracting the cash than satisfying real human need.

My reason for showing some examples is to identify that what is at play is belief. Belief about the vehicle itself, about the state of the vehicle, about the customer’s status and sense of their status, about what a vehicle is actually worth.

At a more fundamental level, the exchange of ownership when a sale is made is also a belief. Ownership is a belief that humans engage in in relation to property in its various forms: be it cars, land, water, money or intellectual property. We are not the only creatures to which the idea of ownership applies. When we observe territorial behaviour in other species, their defence of, or appropriation of, territory can be seen as actions that relate to a sense of ownership. It is quite deeply rooted, not in all cultures, but certainly in the dominant productionist ones. When we exchange cash or numbers representing money for an item, the transfer of ownership from the seller to the new owner is an agreement about who the item ‘belongs’ to before and after the transaction. Receipts, contracts, etc. are just representations of that belief.

Less fundamental, and marginally less pervasive, is the belief in money. I have engaged in some formal study of economics in the past and I remember the quip:

If you put all the economists in the world end-to-end, they wouldn’t reach an agreement.

In putting forward my own definition of what money is, I am certain enough that there will be detractors. So, be it.

I think of money as an agreement. It is an agreement about the relative value of things and the representation of that value. The agreement is founded on the belief that the money, in whatever form, can be exchanged for things that are considered of equal value to the amount of money being exchanged. We build enormous complexity on the basis of that agreement but, fundamentally, it is just belief.

In the words of Benoit Mandelbrot, famous for his work on fractals in mathematics:

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

And the reason I take the time to talk of these beliefs here is, firstly, to show sales as being firmly informational in structure. Yes, things do move around; things ‘change hands’. There is, as always, a huge amount of infrastructure involved and energy used in the process, online or in real life. But ownership and money are beliefs on which our entire economic system is founded.

Secondly, ownership and money are foundational to other beliefs, customs, and laws about the ownership and distribution of resources that form the drivers of the production system.

The Drivers

If I were to name a single driver of the system as a whole, then that driver would be growth. The system is addicted to growth and that growth is consuming life on our planet and turning it into products, services and pollution.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Edward Abbey

In fact, the growth ideology has become so pervasive that the term ‘growthism’ has been coined to describe it. Growth is an unquestioned good in our society. Across the pond from where I live, the UK Labour Party is promising growth to solve the economic problems of a country that is suffering deep inequality with chronic deprivation for some of the population. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are warning of a reduction in growth due to the tariff war being engaged in by the USA under Donald Trump. In Ireland, we are warned that “growth may be affected by the US tariffs”.

Growth will save us from evil and deliver us unto the promised land, world without end, Amen.

Me

Except, as I said …

But that growth has several components: components that have also, as I have said previously, contributed to the cornucopia of goods and services that are available to the wealthy of our planet.

What are those components? Let’s have a look at the main ones.

Capital Return

I briefly referred to capital in the introduction to the map, mentioning how capital is money with special privileges. Let’s have a look at those privileges, which again, like money and ownership, are beliefs; these ones most generally encoded in law, or practically facilitated by laws and treaties.

Limited liability. Through companies, partnerships, and other means, the personal assets of investors are protected beyond their initial investment. This means that, if the corporate or other entity causes damage that is greater than the capital the company holds, the owners are not responsible for the balance.

As an example, that the Sackler family has been held financially responsible for some of the damage of the opioid crisis is very unusual. The company they own, Purdue Pharma, has been held criminally liable along with some misdemeanour charges against senior executives. However, the owners themselves have been protected from criminal liability and will likely continue to be so even though they have profited from what is not unreasonably described as mass murder in the name of profit. Legality is not a guide to morality.

Corporate personhood. Corporations can own property, sue and be sued, and have some of the legal rights of individuals. This further shields the owners from personal liability, as in the case of the Sacklers above.

Access to credit. Capital owners have easier, cheaper access to large-scale borrowing than individuals.

Capital can gain tax advantages through deductions, loopholes, and lower corporate tax rates (including moving intellectual property to and through Ireland where the government will spend millions of euro and years in court in order to avoid taxing it).

Political influence. Corporations, investment funds, etc. spend large amounts of time, effort and money lobbying to shape laws in their favour.

Shell companies allow ownership and profit to be hidden, often shielding wealth and avoiding taxes. These are particularly useful in an age where international movement of capital is so-well facilitated by international treaties. Capital can hop across a few different borders through shell companies in a very short amount of time and be all-but-untraceable.

Asset shielding. Complex legal structures protect wealth from creditors, lawsuits, and regulation, again including the transnational movement or domicile of capital in countries whose laws are set up to protect foreign capital.

Risk externalisation. Companies can pass social, environmental, and financial risks onto the public. Think bank bailouts and the “too big to fail” principle.

These privileges, including the removal of restrictions on capital flows that have been made under the neoliberal agenda, are at the core of modern capitalism. If capital gets in trouble, i.e. is unprofitable, it can skip the country and pop up freshly laundered elsewhere and carry on its merry way. It can get handy bailouts if it has overstretched itself. When it is profitable, it gets to walk away with the gains. When it is not, it is protected by government and by law.

Yes, the investment of capital has allowed our productive capacity to grow enormously. The abstraction of money into a form that is free to take risks with reduced consequences has very much facilitated the growth of the global economy. But, as Keynes also said in the essay referred to above:

The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

He felt that one hundred years would be enough for us to get beyond the capitalist phase but we are more deeply embedded in it than ever before as more and more of nature and of our culture becomes monetised and used for capital accumulation.

And that has now become urgent. Because capital drives the growth that is consuming life on the planet.

How?

Capital requires a return-on-investment, i.e. profit. Capital is not invested to stay static or reduce. As a logical certainty, capital invested in a steady-state or degrowing economy will, if it is reinvested and maintains its returns, eventually absorb all the income in the economy.

Imagine an economy that produces the same amount of goods at the same cost each year on an ongoing basis. In this imaginary economy, capital is equal to five years of income (i.e. national income is €1bn, capital stock is €5bn). This ratio maps well on to reality (although the total income is for a very small country). Capital invested in year one will gain say, a 5% return on investment – that is €250m or 25% of all income. In year two, that would be €262.5m (26.25%). Year five would be just under €304m (30.4%); year ten – €388m (38.8%), year fifteen €495m, just shy of 50% of all income in the economy. At this compounding rate, capital would reach a point of absorbing all income after thirty years (102.9% of it).

There are reasons this wouldn’t or couldn’t happen. Not all capital would be reinvested. The owners of capital are said to have a ‘low marginal propensity to consume’, i.e. they don’t spend much in proportion to what they own, so a large proportion would likely be reinvested. Taxation reduces the aggregate rate of accumulation although, as we have seen, capital can be quite good at tax avoidance. The return on capital might diminish in a stagnating economy, but it would still draw more and more of the income to itself. If capital were to absorb too much of annual income, the circulation of money with which to purchase the products and services of the production system would severely diminish: therefore consumption would collapse, causing the production system itself to collapse. Not to mention creating widespread misery and social unrest because income distribution relies primarily on the functioning and growth of the production system.

The easiest and best way for capital to maintain its return without collapsing demand, and hence its own growth, is through growth in the production system. Capital’s requirement for a return drives growth.

Debt-based Money

In modern economies, most money is created by commercial banks in the form of debt. More than 90% of the money in circulation at any given time is debt-based. This money is created when a bank issues a loan and puts money into a borrower’s account. In effect, the money is created out of nothing. The borrower gains an asset – the credited money – and a corresponding liability by way of the obligation to repay the loan with interest.

The interest on the loan must be paid using money that wasn’t created as part of the original loan. This has to be found elsewhere in the economy, either through economic growth or rising asset prices.

The money spent from loans initially increases demand and fuels growth. But the repayment of the debt causes a corresponding reduction in demand as money is taken back out of the economy. To avoid shrinking the money supply, causing a recession, new loans must continually be made into the system.

If new borrowing only replaces the loans being repaid, the economy will stagnate, which tends to worsen inequality and lead to social tensions. If the interest collected by banks is simply reinvested or lent back into the system, it can behave like capital, taking an increasing share of the income of the economy over time. Eventually, this can lead to a collapse in demand and a corresponding economic crisis.

Debt-based money depends on growth to remain stable. Debt-based money drives growth.

Government Debt

On the “positive” side, government debt can fund increased productivity and demand in the economy through investment in infrastructure, education and training and in research and innovation. It was in this manner that Keynes envisioned governments supporting an economy that was in, or sliding towards, recession. Running surpluses or buying back debt during a boom to avoid overheating the economy is the other side of that coin but, all too often, governments prefer reduced taxes, expanded services and giveaway budgets, thus locking themselves into high levels of debt.

In market economies, governments usually commit to carrying debt and primarily service the debt (pay interest on it) through tax revenues. If the economy stagnates or shrinks, tax revenues decline relative to debt service costs which drives governments to either stimulate the economy towards growth or to cut spending, the latter of which can be very unpopular with voters and can also lead to further contraction of the economy.

So government debt, in its ‘positive’ sense, drives growth. And, in its ‘negative’ sense, drives more growth unless governments opt for the malaise of austerity which, as we have seen in recent history, causes many problems in society and is mostly avoided by those who value re-election.

I can well imagine Keynes’ scattered remains trying to reconstitute themselves on the Downs above Tilton in order to come back to undo the misuse of the wonderful economic tool that he gave us. He clearly saw a purpose to growth: that it would solve “the economic problem”; that it would set us free. Instead, that tool is being used to lock us into a system that is bringing on the end of the world as we know it.

Poor Distribution

I acknowledge the poor distribution of resources here as I feel it would be remiss to leave it out. Whether poor distribution is a driver of growth or not is an open question in my mind. However, when growth slows or the economy stagnates, we get a reallocation of resources in society as capital continues to demand a return. “Don’t waste a good recession” is a commonly-used phrase in the business world. There’s even a website dedicated to training people to make the most of the one that may be on the way. Anyway, amongst other things, a recession presents an opportunity to extract more from workers and a justification for downsizing a workforce without reducing overall productivity of a firm.

This, however, has the result of reducing the demand for certain types of products – unemployed people change their eating habits. This can create contagion in the system whereby reduction in demand for some products reduces demand for other products (i.e. the demand for agricultural fertilisers drops when food sales drop). Without intervention, recession deepens as reduced demand travels through the system like falling dominoes.

It is for this reason that one of the main purposes of government intervention in the economy is to create jobs. Jobs facilitate the circulation of money in the system and stimulate demand. What is created by those jobs tends to be rather irrelevant from the government’s point of view as long as the economy returns to growth. That the jobs themselves will contribute to continued ecological destruction is of lesser importance than the considerations of growth and the election cycle.

It is possible that a type of ‘Green New Deal’ could move us away from productionist growth and, at the same time, deal with the distributional problems that would arise out of abandoning the growth-above-all-else paradigm. However, the visionary thinking and action that might match Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original New Deal is sorely lacking and the measure of GDP, which proved so useful to Roosevelt’s government, has become the master rather than the servant of public economic policy.

The avoidance of the consequences of poor distribution, whilst maybe not a driver of growth in itself, is certainly a consideration when exploring why our societies are so productivist and invested in the idea of ‘workism’; why creating jobs is such a priority.

Capital Gains Prioritised over Wealth Generation

Our age of disposability might seem to be driven by ever-greater convenience for the consumer: we don’t have to wash things, care for them, repair them or bring them to others for repair and so on. However, this disposability is driven by the need for growth. Providing us with products that last would reduce our overall consumption: there’s only so much we can own and store at one time.

This is not a new problem. Nineteenth-century commentators such as William Stanley Jevons and John Ruskin condemned the production of shoddy goods for the poor – the replacement of which served to keep them poor and locked into participating in industrial production. Poor-quality goods might take marginally fewer resources to make but they often last a lot less longer and, therefore, end up costing more-per-use than more expensive and well-made goods.

In the twenty-first century, our society abounds with shoddy goods that are designed not to last. Single-use items are ubiquitous. Use, throw. Maybe into the recycling bin to make us feel good about it. Fast-fashion items are often considered single-use or close-to. Christmas jumpers are for Christmas nights out – part of the cost of a night out – and subsequently make their way along with all sorts of other wear-once items to the dumps of Africa or the clothes mountains in Chile’s Atacama Desert. ‘Consumer products’ are deliberately designed not to last; whether that is through designed disposability, designed obsolescence or designed-to-stop-working.

The aggregate effect of this disposability is that we are constantly throwing things away and replacing them with new versions, maximising income and production while reducing our long-term wealth.

As an example, let’s examine the resources and costs involved in 10-year’s smartphone use on two different production / consumption models. For transparency, the numbers here are from a chat with ChatGPT with “numbers drawn from Life Cycle Assessments by Fairphone, Apple, Greenpeace reports, and generalised data”.

Model A is a mid-range phone at c.€800. The average lifespan for such a device is 2-3 years and so, over ten years is likely to cost c.€3,200 for the use of a functional device. Energy used in materials extraction and production will produce 70-85kg CO₂-equivalent per phone and use around 12,000 litres of freshwater. (CO₂-equivalent is the amount of carbon dioxide or other chemicals that cause equivalent damage in the atmosphere.) Over ten years, the production of phones produce 280-340kg of CO₂-equivalent and use around 48,000 litres of water.

Model B is a high-quality, repairable, device with an upfront cost of €1,200: significantly higher than Model A but not prohibitively so. With repairs to the battery and screen at a reasonable estimate of €500 over the ten years (it is built to last), that might bring the total cost to €1,700, slightly more than half of the cost of four Models A. In resource usage, the initial CO₂-equivalent for extraction and production would be roughly similar but repairs and replacements would constitute only 20% more across time, giving a total of 85-105kg of CO₂-equivalent, almost 70% less than four Models A. Similarly, total water usage would be about 15,000 litres, also about 70% less than the Models A.

So, designed obsolescence, software bloat, marketing of shiny new toys, etc. cause us to spend twice the money but, more significantly, use three times the resources to have the functionality of a smartphone over ten years.

This applies not only to smartphones and fast fashion, but to almost everything we use. The churn of products and their deliberately-short lifespans serve to keep the system going and extract greater capital gains. In the pursuit of more income, we are deliberately overextracting and throwing away resources that could serve us, and life on Earth, far better. We are prioritising the accumulation of an abstraction – capital – over the accumulation of real material wealth that would genuinely leave us better off.

Imagine differently. The almost-legendary Kenwood Chef of some friend’s grandmother that is still running strong in the 2020s, perhaps even raising Theseus’ paradox: if all the parts of the Kenwood Chef (or ship as he envisioned it) have been replaced, is the Chef still the same Chef that it was when new. We absolutely have the technology to make consumer products, clothes, phones, furniture, vehicles that last for a very long time and through which production can increase the wealth that we have available to us whilst reducing our impact on the environment. It is a choice that we have if we choose to make it.

Designed obsolescence and disposability are themselves drivers of growth within the system but they are themselves driven by the need to keep the system inflated and to keep returns flowing to capital. They are not designed for our wellbeing or for the long-term accumulation of wealth for the whole of humanity. They are certainly not designed to treat nature as anything other than a resource to be raped and plundered.

When the young people on climate marches chant, “System change, not climate change”, this is the system that needs to change.

The prioritisation of financial income over material wealth drives growth.

The Economy as Belief

To return to the opening of this section, I described the ways in which capital is privileged above ‘ordinary’ money through means such as limited liability, corporate personhood and international trade treaties. All of these things are beliefs and agreements. We may have paperwork to go with them and act as if they are true and, as long as we so act, they are, in a very real sense, real. These privileges of capital are built upon beliefs about ownership and money to facilitate the extraction, processing, production, sales, consumption and disposal of natural resources and the very stuff of life itself. The resources are real; the machinery and factories are real; the products are real; the oil and coal and windmills are real; but all processes are held together by a belief system and agreements that allow the system to function in the way that it does.

The ‘economy’, as we know it, is a belief system with attached material objects and consequences. Quite simply, if we are to avoid an ecological catastrophe, we need to believe differently.

Mainstream Climate Action is Productionist

I will return now to the presentation of climate change and its solutions on the course I attended. On reflection, the presentation was very much in line with what I consider to be ‘mainstream climate action’. It was operating within the current consumerist paradigm and narrative. It was interesting to meet this in an academic context where I would have expected more in the way of critical thinking and digging down into the common tropes that now surround the issue of climate change.

Essentially, as I have mentioned, we did not look at the system, or systems, that are causing climate change and the interlinked biodiversity loss. The solutions which represent mainstream climate action involve doing more of the things that are causing the problem in the first place. That is not to say that these actions are not part of the solution, but they are not the solution. They are isolated from a larger systemic view and, I would say, very deliberately so, because the climate agenda has been hijacked by those with a vested interest in continued growth regardless of the consequences.

The foremost item on the missing list on the course was the idea of aggregate consumption. We were encouraged to look at the ‘overshoot’ chart and website. Overshoot is based on the idea that the Earth can regenerate resources that we use and can absorb our pollution at a certain rate. Beyond that rate, we are destroying the living systems of the planet. Currently, we, as a civilisation, are using up the Earth’s resources at 1.7 times the rate at which the Earth can regenerate those resources. In Ireland, we are at 3.3 times that rate. It is our consumption, in aggregate, that is the cause of the issues. As I like to put it:

Climate change is us and our stuff and us moving ourselves and our stuff all around the place.

I have been told that this is an oversimplification. While it definitely is in a nutshell, I actually don’t see what lies outside it. Perhaps, it ignores the ‘anthropogenic’ (human-caused) aspect of our current situation. On a geological timescale, climate is constantly changing, with wide variations in temperature, sea level, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, etc. Our current, ‘stable’, climate has only been around for around 12,000 years and even then we’ve had a couple of ‘mini ice ages’ along the way. However, in terms of our current predicament, it is our resource usage that is the source of the problem. All the changes we are making through burning fossil fuels, changing land use, and destroying ecosystems for the resources that lie in or under them flow into the creation, use and disposal of products of some form or other.

The burning of fossil fuels, for instance, is causing a rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But why are we burning the fossil fuels? We burn fossil fuels in the extraction and processing of materials, in the manufacture of products and in the consumption and disposal of those products, with fossil fuels burned all along the way in transporting the materials and products from one place to another.

In this sense, the burning of fossil fuels is a secondary cause of climate change, the primary causes being production, consumption and disposal. There are tertiary causes of climate change also, such as the melting of the polar icecaps and the Arctic tundra which respectively reduce the amount of sunlight being reflected back into space and release large amounts of methane trapped under the permafrost. (The latter is currently one of those ‘known unknowns’. We know the methane is there but we don’t know how much of it there is, at what rate it will be released back into the atmosphere, or what the cascading effects might be on other life and climate systems.)

The desertification of land also contributes to atmospheric carbon and, in some cases at least, this is happening due to changing weather systems and rainfall patterns. While some or many of these tertiary causes are now locked in and will carry on their way quite regardless of how we change our ways, they still all come back to the same original cause: us and our stuff and us moving ourselves and our stuff all around the place. It should be blindingly obvious to all of us that we need to tackle the root cause of these climate changes but, for some reason, and that reason is very identifiable, we don’t.

It is our consumption and manner of consumption – of materials, of stored energy by way of fossil fuels, of land, of the very stuff of life itself – that is the cause of climate change. But the thought that we might do something to reduce our consumption, to bring ourselves back within the boundaries of what the living systems of the planet can actually cope with, is simply not on the table. Instead, mainstream climate action proposes that we produce our way out of the problem in exactly the same way that we have produced ourselves into it.

Simply put, we need to reduce our consumption, take a break, get things sorted out and then see where we are. The term, ‘simply’ here, I will completely agree, is a huge oversimplification of what it represents for us to actually achieve such a goal. We are locked into a system that is predicated on growth and rearranging that system could lead to disasters of all sorts: civil strife, riots, starvation, large-scale movement of people, war. But, nonetheless, it is a simple truth. The problem is our consumption: the solution is to reduce our consumption.

Another simple truth to match that is that our economic system, our civilisation, is currently aimed firmly in the direction of consuming our most important resource: life on Earth. Collectively, we are consuming that life and turning it into products and services and, if we don’t turn about, it will reach a point where the life systems can no longer support civilisation or, in outlying scenarios, human life itself. The result of continuing along our current path is likely to be disasters of all sorts: civil strife, riots, starvation, large-scale movement of people, war.

And even what I write here displays a human-centred bias that is grounded in our civilisational worldview. It’s worth acknowledging here that there are people who are not grounded in this particular civilisational worldview but, in practicality, those people are very few compared to those of us who are absorbed within a worldview that sees humans as the centre of all things. Our civilisational belief generally sees the planet and the life of the planet as existing for us, for us to use, to sustain us, to give us what we need and want without regard to the fact that we have no greater claim to the planet than any of those other creatures – animal, vegetable, mycelial, bacterial, even viral – that make up life on Earth. We are of this planet and it is not ours to destroy, especially for the sake of large flat-screen TVs, SUVs and weekend breaks in Venice.

It is in terms of consumption that this essay is ultimately founded. As should be uncontroversially clear, it is our aggregate level of consumption and the consequences that follow from that that are driving the ecological crisis. And, in our Zeitgeist, thoughts of consumption naturally lead to thoughts of consumers and consumerism. Which is a trap! Those thoughts lead to the individualisation of responsibility and keep us locked in a paradigm where we do not look at the real cause of the problem. As discussed previously, consumerism is a creation of the production system. Consumerism is a problem: it is a very big problem. But, like the burning of fossil fuels, focusing on consumerism ignores the primary cause. Consumerism is a supply-side creation. It is the creation of a system that is addicted to growth and that needs ever-increasing consumption in order to balance ever-increasing production in order to satisfy the drivers of growth. It is for this reason that I use the word ‘productionism’, so that we can look in the right place for the source of the problem and deal with the disease rather than treating the symptoms.

Returning to the content of the course I attended, I would like to give a couple of examples of the types of solutions offered that fly in the face of what we actually need to do to reduce our impacts. The first is in relation to the switch to electric vehicles. In particular, it relates to the sharing of an article in our initial course reading: ‘We need more scarce metals and elements to reach the UK’s greenhouse gas goals’. It is about the extraction of the minerals that we need to decarbonise transport on the way to net zero. Acquiring these minerals is seen primarily as a technical problem: one that is made more difficult by the expected doubling in the number of vehicles by 2050. That we should just make more and more vehicles is unquestioned. That we should perhaps, instead, move toward more communal and far-less resource-intensive ways of moving ourselves around is not broached. That we might decide to move ourselves around less is simply not in the ballpark. Because such solutions would involve a reduction in production, a reduction in growth and a reduction in capital return.

Not to mention that the acquisition of the resources for so many vehicles represents an egregious assault on nature and on the human rights of those who will be exploited, enslaved, displaced and even murdered for us to get our hands on those resources. We are headed for an emergency. From the point of view of future history, we are probably already in that emergency. And yet the response is to keep doing the same thing in a slightly greener version but dwarfing the mitigating effects with the scale of growth.

The second aspect of the course presentations I would like to address is recycling. A presentation by a psychologist on ‘nudge and sludge’ theory in relation to recycling quite frankly drove me over the edge. While certain materials, like steel, aluminium and glass, are almost infinitely recyclable, and there has been some success with these, most of the waste that we put in our recycling bins is not recyclable in any meaningful sense. The word ‘recycle’ means things going back into an earlier stage of the production cycle and being reused to create the same or similar products, thus obviating the need for further extraction. However, when it comes to plastics, the materials are not stable enough for repeated use and most of the very small amount that is ‘recycled’ is actually ‘downcycled’ in some respect. We have euphemistic ‘energy reclamation’ which is just burning the stuff, which, even if the airborne chemicals are captured, still leaves a toxic ash that is generally buried and will end up poisoning the water table at some future time. Much of the rest is channelled into new products and new product types, finding new ways to use the downcycled plastic so that recycling can be claimed as a success. Much of it goes into things such as plastic garden furniture and composite decking, placing plastics out in the environment where they can degrade and poison life, either disintegrating where they stand or going to landfill or incineration once they are done with.

And all this while virgin plastic creation, whether from fossil fuels or land-hungry bioplastics, is currently estimated to be on track to increase by 70% by the year 2050. This is not the circular economy. From what we have produced so far, we have plastic falling as snow in the Antarctic, plastic falling as rain in the Amazon, plastic and toxic metals in the environment in the countries to which we send our electronics for ‘recycling’, sea creatures and birds dying from starvation because their stomachs are full of plastic, plastic in our livers, plastic in our lungs, plastic in our hearts and plastic in our brains. We need to take a break and seriously downscale the production of new plastics until we actually know how to deal with this toxic, life-killing wonder material. It is poisoning us and the rest of life on our planet at every step of the way.

Recycling is a scam! And I wrote as much in the group chat before I had to leave the lecture early and go for a walk.

It is not that I don’t believe that we should switch the energy source of our motor vehicles, or that we should have no motor vehicles, or that we shouldn’t aim for as much circular resource usage as we can. But the narratives around electric cars and around recycling hide far more than they show. They are both currently excuses for continuing the growth of economies with a corresponding growth in our use of natural resources.

Personally, as I mentioned, I have been a diligent recycler for a long time; almost forty years at this stage. However, when I began recycling, there was a slogan. The slogan said:

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

It just so happens that reduce and reuse don’t contribute to GDP and so they have been abandoned. When I was young, we had return and reuse. Glass bottles were returned, cleaned and reused for the same products. I don’t know if they were then recycled at end-of-life but this was a hugely more resource-efficient system than we have today, even when it comes to glass recycling. A volunteering colleague who sells locally grown-and-pressed apple juice used to plead with buyers to take the larger plastic containers rather than the glass ones because single-use glass bottles are even more resource-intensive and, ultimately, damaging to the environment, than single-use plastic ones. Our patterns of production and consumption are resource-intensive and slightly greening them is not going to help. We need to get the message.

Reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce. Reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse, reuse. Recycle.

In roughly those proportions.

Net Zero. The Hymn of Mainstream Climate Action

We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings.

Anne Larigauderie, Executive Secretary of The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

And perhaps also, in the long run, in a systematic manner, exterminating all human living beings too.

The quote above came to me by way of Less is More by Jason Hickel, a book well worth a read for its description of the hegemonisation of everything by capital and the intense violence with which that hegemonisation has been carried out. However, it also appeared on the news site of rte.ie, my national broadcaster, under the heading, ‘World missing all targets to save nature, UN warns’. That was in 2020. Things have not improved since. We did have a brief respite from growth during the Covid-19 pandemic but the production system has been put back on track since then.

It appears, quite frankly, insane to me that we are on a path where doing more of the problem is being offered as the solution with no comprehensive theory of how that is going to work. We are waiting for some magic bullet to appear that will make everything okay and we can then just carry on as we are. But, in the meantime, we keep exacerbating the problem by carrying on just as we are – at an ever-increasing rate. More production, more things, more disposability. According to the UN International Resource Panel:

Resource extraction and processing make up about half of the total global greenhouse gas emissions and more than 90 per cent of land- and water-related impacts (biodiversity loss and water stress).

Simply reducing the throughput of the system is the most blindingly obvious starting point to reducing our impacts and yet that option is invisible, buried beneath an obsession with growth as the ultimate social and civilisational good.

And, contrary to the claims of numerous environmentalists and campaigners on other issues, our system isn’t broken. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do and ‘mainstream climate action’ proposes that it keeps doing the same things in the same ways and somehow the outcome will be different if we just buy ‘greener’ goods.

I’ve saved perhaps the very worst for last: “the drive for ‘net zero’”. This is presented as a panacea that will bring us to the promised land of sustainability. As one of my classmates pointed out immediately on hearing it, “That sounds like a single-dimension measure, just like GDP.” ‘Net zero’ ignores far more than it includes, just as GDP ignores far more than it includes. I was reminded of the very famous speech by Bobby Kennedy in March of 1968:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

What might Bobby Kennedy say of ‘net zero’ and the destruction it will entail:

Too much and for too long, we have surrendered the action that we must take to live well on our planet to the pursuit of ever-more growth. We have pursued the false solution of net zero so that the rich can go on being richer, abandoning the natural world and the rest of humanity to a “solution” that is just more of the same problem. Net Zero counts as good the outsourcing of emissions to other countries while claiming domestic progress and claims as good the biofuel production from crops like maize or palm oil that drive deforestation and hunger. It counts burning wood pellets from old-growth or natural forests for electricity, which increases emissions but is counted as carbon neutral. It counts monoculture tree plantations that dry out soil, reduce biodiversity, and increase wildfire risk; hydropower dams counted as ‘green energy’ despite flooding forests, releasing methane, and displacing entire communities. Net zero counts solar and wind farms on ecologically sensitive lands, trading of carbon credits on global markets, buying cheap offsets from poorly monitored schemes, replacing smallholder farms with carbon offsetting projects and the extractive and colonial violence used to secure minerals like cobalt and lithium.

Yet net zero does not count the health of the soil under which lie the minerals we will use for our shiny new electric world. It does not count the education and play of children who instead mine cobalt. It does not count the beauty of nature, untouched by mining and exploitation. Net zero does not count the bounty of aquifers, the clean water on which communities depend that will be polluted downstream of lithium brine evaporation or tailing ponds. It does not count the rich living soil of forests and plains, the lives of plants, animals, people and entire species that will be lost to our rapacious plunder of the Earth. Net zero does not count the dignity of the people who will work to extract our minerals, the wisdom of elders and their ancestral knowledge – the ways of life that will be destroyed; the criminalisation and murder of environmental protesters and human-rights defenders. It does not count the fairness of a just transition where the benefits of technology are to all humanity or the cost to all future generations of all creatures that inhabit this paradise we call home.

Me

We need to believe differently. We don’t just need to believe different things. We need to demand of our educational institutions that they teach us how to think, how to question, and not just peddle orthodoxy that prepares us for a life as production-consumption units for a system that is consuming the wonders of life on this cooling ball of metal and rock that we call home.

The universe could be teeming with life for all we know, but our planet’s life is the only life that we do know and we should celebrate it and live in it and live with it so that we and all of life on our home can thrive. If we do not make that choice, then that choice will be made without us. Life will ultimately prevail. We may not.