1,161 Quotes About Economics

On a global scale, growth in energy demand is swamping growth in renewable capacity. All that new clean energy isn’t replacing dirty energies, it’s being added on top of them.

There is an enormous net flow of resources that goes from poor countries to rich countries. The patterns of extraction that characterised colonisation remain very much in place today. But this time, instead of being seized by force, those resources are being handed over by governments that have been rendered dependent on foreign investment and beholden to the growth imperatives of capitalism.

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow… and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite.

We will find ourselves plunging into ecological collapse well before we run into the limits to growth.

Our economic system is structurally dependent on growth, it serves the interests of the most powerful factions of our society, and it is rooted in a deep-seated world view of dominion and dualism that goes back some 500 years. This edifice will not yield easily. Not even to science.

If we want to have a decent shot at keeping temperatures under 1.5°C, we have to cut global emissions in half by 2030 and get to zero before 2050. It is impossible to overstate how dramatic this trajectory is. It means nothing less than the rapid and dramatic reversal of our present direction as a civilisation.

When we hear the phrase ‘clean energy’ it normally calls to mind happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind are obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production. In the end, the sheer scale effect of growth swamps even the most spectacular efficiency improvements.

Lashed to the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time.