The climate development will be even more detrimental than we had expected. It also said so in yesterday’s Zeit (online) and Süddeutsche. That seems plausible to me, because it is exactly what I and many people around me notice.
Here is a citation:
This is the first time in human history that we approach a state of affairs where our own striving after growth and prosperity will collide with our planet’s capacity.
Regardless, what I hear both from the powerful and those who criticize them (!) is that the call for growth gets louder and louder. They even revert to calling for growth with borrowed money. For me, growth means more noise, more consumption, more waste, more air pollution, more mania …
Mind you, asking for more growth is perfectly in order – if we were to agree on a new “growth formula”:
Growth is if the emission of carbon dioxide and the use of raw materials decline!
From my – now already quite long – life, I remember various criteria for economic development:
When I was young, it was the number of register tons transported by rail. In the simplified version, this read: the more coal we transported (and used up), the better the economy was doing. Of course, seen from today’s perspective, this seems nonsense.
Later, the number of houses and flats built became the indicator. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? Building houses is not just economically relevant, there are also the subsequent investments, such as for furniture and much more. But that, too, no longer works.
Around the turn of the millennium, the media was what the evaluation of the economy was based on. The more money the editors and TV stations received, the better their predictions about the economic growth. But woe if the stream of money spent on adverts dwindled. It was seen as an unquestioned sign for the economic situation going down the drains.
Mind you, I never quite understood it. On the contrary. To me, this concept sounded stupid. Because if the demand is truly booming, then I can easily economize on the advertising, can’t I? Only if the market is truly saturated (like mostly in Middle Europe), I have to invest a lot in advertising. And then you will have a hard time with growth. At least that is what you would think.
In the future, you will have to measure the economic development of an economy by how well it does when it comes to minimize its need for fossil energies and other raw materials. The result, however, will have to be modified according to what you save by exporting dirty industries to third countries. Of course, the motto “we emit less carbon dioxide because the industrial work that causes pollution is transferred to other countries” is not globally goal-oriented.
Sustainable energy and a closed circle for re-cycling raw materials will also stimulate a truly high-quality, but different growth.
Because in many areas, doing without the seemingly “cheap fossil energy” and the excessive use of raw material will have to be replaced by human intelligence and labour. And, as we all know, both is rather expensive with a tendency towards being over-priced where we live.
Mind you, this is not because people earn too much, but because the much-praised right to property is a little neglected when it comes to your income from labour. Where income gained through non-self-employed labour (that, too, is property!) is concerned, the fiscal authorities are more than a little liberal, taking away rather a handful. This happens regardless of the right to material and intellectual property today being rooted in our society as never before. In fact, more often than not it seems to have mutated to become a “human right to protection of acquired possession”.
Well, the unlimited right to intellectual and ”real“ property is also one of those paradigms that might be worth thinking about, just like the “growth” dogma. Otherwise it might easily happen that the social evolution breaks out with full power.
And when all is over, all that is left for the next and following generations is to lament about a merciless ecological (world-wide) dictatorship in a completely destroyed environment.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
In my book the most important things I have are myBREATHING, myWATER, myFOOD, mySILENCE and, last not least, myLIFE, which, ideally should not be threatened by environmental catastrophes. Besides, what is also important in my life are myFAMILY and myCHILDREN. Meaning that my children and grandchildren should not find themselves in the middle of unnecessary climate catastrophes.
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