GROWTH. IT’S A word rarely off the lips of our politicians and financiers. Growth is a the great panacea for all our ills. Growth is the only road out of here.
A few years ago there was no consensus among scientists regarding the damage humanity was inflicting on the planet. That is not the case now. The health and survival of the planet is under threat from growing consumption and production, and the vast majority of scientists now confirm that. Yet we persist with an economic and political system that requires constant growth.
We know that you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
The Stern Report (commissioned by the British Treasury) and then the IPCC report before Copenhagen both confirmed the scale of anthropogenic destruction being visited on the Earth. Both used very similar language to indicate, among other things, that we need to reduce emissions by 80 per cent in order to level off the damage already done to our planet home.
We need to reduce our emissions to one fifth of their present levels. And yet the Chinese and Indians build a new coal-fired dirty technology power station every few days. Emissions continue to increase. We are sacrificing our world and our children’s future at the altar of the free market.
If we used less fuel it would last longer. If we used less power we’d need less power stations. But we are not encouraged to be frugal – we are bombarded with inducements to be profligate. It’s how the system works. It is how it survives. As with the shark, it has to swim forwards to breathe. It is addicted to growth.
Either capitalism dies, or we die.
Before 2008 it seemed unlikely that the BFG (Borrowing Fuelled Growthism) could be tamed. The only alternative systems available seemed to be the failed experiment of communism or the rising tide of radical Islam. Neither an easy sell to the democratic west. So more business as usual.
Then 2008 showed the BFG for what it is – a discredited pyramid scheme that has, as do all pyramid schemes, begun to run out of suckers. A temporary fix had been found by opening up more and more creative lines of credit to allow more suckers to buy in at the bottom and sustain the flow of wealth to the few at the top. But that created a sea of debt -sub-prime and all his pals – that drowned the scam and gave us Lehman’s, and Anglo, and all those other names on that roll of shame.
And now the last gambit of Quantitative Easing has begun. It is the end game. History shows that printing money in quantity leads to massive inflation, and oftentimes, to war.
An alternative is slow to present itself. But we sort of know, don’t we, that we must find it. The world is beginning to polarise between the few who continue to profit from the demolition of the planet and the many who are feeling the stranglehold of austerity and are perhaps waking up to what we are in bed with.
It shouldn’t be too hard to wake the world up to the idea that our addiction to BFG is killing us. It shouldn’t be too hard to show the world that it doesn’t really reflect much credit on us that we are in bed with a system sustained by greed, growth, gambling, usury and debt.
But it is hard. Like divorce, however deeply we know it will be better for the children in the long run, we fear the jump into the unknown.
We will have to be strong, imaginative and very brave. We will have to remove gambling and debt from our financial life, for it is gambling and debt, and addiction to growth, that overheat our system and our world.
We will have to end hedge funds, short selling, speculation and share dealing – not a great loss. City traders don’t put food on our tables or shelter over our heads, however much they try to persuade us otherwise.
To make our change appealing, and to make a clean start, we will have to absolve all debt. We will have a government that cannot borrow but will provide services purely based on taxes levied. Business cannot borrow but will expand (if expand it must) on the basis of profits made. We will return to not-for-profit co-operative high street banks and insurance companies. We will stop measuring our quality of life against the size of our TV set. We will be self-sufficient and sustainable.
We will, because we have to.
Capitalism RIP.
Rob Heyland is an IFTA and BAFTA-winning screenwriter who has been honoured for shows including Between the Lines and Kavanagh QC. He lives in West Cork, where he has a small farm that is nudging towards self-sufficiency. He also helps to run the Kilcoe Writer’s Retreat.
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