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The pivotal assumption of the theory is that war is the result of conflicting economic interests. By economic interests I refer to the acquisition of natural resources, the control of the routes through which these resources are transported, the expansion into new markets, the establishment of monopolies and the maximization of profits in general. Ethnic, religious and cultural differences, the spread of democracy and human rights, ideology in general have often been cited as the reasons behind warfare. To my view, these are pretenses used to justify and legitimize war, not the real causes of it. The primary players in the strategic game of safeguarding economic interests are private corporations. The word private here means that these companies are under the control of individuals and serve their interests alone.4 The word "corporation'1 encompasses the following: enterprise, company, business. As a result these words can be used interchangeably without altering the meaning of sentences. State-owned companies also constitute strategic players but their importance in the game of securing economic interests is significantly limited due to the following reasons. First, their nature is not the same with that of private companies. Their purpose is not to maximize profits but rather to redistribute wealth through taxes, since their often loss-making operations are aimed at providing inexpensive basic goods and are funded by tax revenues. Second, their number is significantly lower since states directly control a very limited number of companies (mostly public utilities companies). An exception is centrally planned economies which are admittedly few. The thesis of what I call the capitalist war theory is that private companies are the cause of wars. The causality is simple and runs in the following way Corporations exert considerable influence over governments (T. Green. 2012: S. Amin, 2010). Their main strategic goal is to maximize their profits and thus they must secure as many economic interests as possible. In order to do so the use of government institutions is both cheap and efficient. Consequently, they use their influence over these institutions to shape both domestic and foreign policy of capitalist states. The first step is the assumption of a plutocratic form of governance in capitalist societies and is taken as granted/ The second is also taken as granted (I expect that few would disagree on that claim). The third point needs elaboration. A corporation has two ways of gaining influence over government. The first is by buying it: in most cases through the legitimate process of financing electoral campaigns and less often through various forms of bribery. The second is through the revolving doors phenomenon: the same individual is an official of the state and also holds a post in the private sector (not necessarily at the same time). The assumption that both of these ways (and especially the second) are both very cheap and very effective is not a radical one to make. Through a war corporations obtain access to natural resources previously owned by competitors. This is always cheaper than using the market to obtain them (especially in the case of rare resources). If the above three points are true, then the fourth necessarily follows. The last requirement is that the capitalist state is also a developed one. Economic development is inseparable from industrial development which is a necessary requirement for the existence of sustaining military capabilities. More importantly, economic power contributes to the rise and survival of powerful corporation which are also, by definition, a requirement for the existence of a plutocratic system. Thus war can be understood as conflict between states that are under the influence of a number of individuals serving their own interests. I would like to make clear at this point that I do not claim conflict of capitalist economic interests to be the sole cause of war. It is simply the most important. Moreover, it is not capitalism in its broadest sense of free, unregulated markets that causes wars. Rather, it is the combination of capitalist and plutocratic practices that do so. Although theoretically these two concepts are different, in practice they go hand in hand The accumulation of capital brings with it immense economic power which is used in turn to amass even more of it. The explanatory power of the capitalist peace theory can be demonstrated by looking at the foreign policy of the U.S.A. during the cold war period. The U.S.A. intervened extensively in almost every country of Central and South America. A region rich in natural resources, it constitutes a valuable target for any government under the influence of corporations. The economic interests of U.S. companies would be greatly harmed if regimes unfriendly to the interests of private capital established themselves in Latin American countries. Socialist regimes constitute such unfriendly regimes since their policy when it comes to the exploitation of resources is the establishment of state-owned enterprises. Through military intervention the U.S.A. did not acquire new territories, they established regimes friendly to U.S. corporate interests (with the Pinochet regime being the most infamous one). Another more recent example is the war of Iraq. The U.S.A. intervene to rearrange ownership of natural resources from the hands of the Iraqi capitalists to those of the U.S. Keep in mind that it is perfectly rational for one capitalist state to attack another since it is not a matter of ideology but one of economic interests. If capitalist states do not attack each other it is not because they share the same norms and values. It is merely because it is in their interest: they are allies (e.g. NATO states), or it would be mutually destructive (think of the U.K. attacking France).

Much has been made of last week’s report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, led by former Mexican President Felipe Calderón and famous climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern. The report’s conclusion that we can have our cake and eat it too — that is, that we can “create lasting economic growth while also tackling the immense risks of climate change” — quickly became a popular talking point for mainstream economists and politicians. But to think that it has anything to do with actually avoiding catastrophic climate havoc is to misinterpret the entire premise of this New Climate Economy (NCE) project. The study, called “Better Growth, Better Climate,” is mostly about economic growth. In the short summary that makes up the homepage of the report’s sleek-scrolling website, the word “growth” appears 62 times, five more than “climate.” But this growth-oriented thinking doesn’t actually create a road map for saving the climate, and even the New Climate Economy writers acknowledge it: The question the project has sought to explore is not “how can greenhouse gas emissions be reduced?” … but “how can economic decision-makers achieve their principal goals while also reducing their impact on the climate? So, basically, the report is about how green investment and policy can stimulate economic growth, not stop global warming: On their own, these measures would not be sufficient to achieve the full range of emissions reductions likely to be needed by 2030 to prevent dangerous climate change. But now, thanks to the misunderstanding of a few wishful thinkers (notably New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), seemingly everyone at the recent U.N. Climate Summit took for granted that growth and climate action necessarily go hand-in-hand. Even the usually sane Guardian bought into the irrational exuberance, broadcasting, “The world can still act in time to stave off the worst effects of climate change, and enjoy the fruits of continued economic growth.” One pundit goes so far as to credit Wall Street for enabling the transition to a green economy and climate-stable future, telling “hippies” to back off and let the oligarchs handle the business of saving humanity. But growth-glorifying free-marketism has a dreadful track record for reducing emissions. Never mind that Elon Musk’s low-carbon brainchildren are crushing it on the stock exchange, gross domestic product — the thing that’s getting bigger when we talk about growth — is a terrible barometer of prosperity. So, yes, pouring a ton of money into solar and wind and other clean energy would create economic growth in the short term. But even so-called “green growth” comes at a cost, notes Richard Heinberg of the (aggravatingly hyphenless) Post Carbon Institute: The rapid build-out of renewables constitutes an enormous infrastructure project that will itself consume significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy. … The faster we push the transition, the more fossil fuels we’ll use for that purpose, and this could lead to the extraction of more tar sands, fracked tight oil and shale gas, deepwater oil, and Arctic oil. It’s not underinvestment in cleantech that’s changing the climate; it’s carbon emissions. Duh. So, the bigger question — the one that the NCE report strategically skirts — is this: Can we grow economically while we achieve climate stability? This question has been the focus of researchers experimenting with ways to stay within the global carbon budget, defined as the total fossil fuels we can burn and still maintain a 50-50 chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia estimates that staying under the arbitrarily agreed-upon 2-degree ceiling in a way that allots poor countries their fair share of the carbon budget (a big share, since their historical emissions are relatively tiny) would require rich countries to reduce emissions by 10 percent per year. No countries are even setting targets consistent with such steep reductions, much less actually decreasing carbon emissions at that rate (or at all, from a consumption perspective). As for pulling off that sort of emissions downsizing with economic growth intact, look at recent history: These days, we’re not bringing down global carbon emissions at all while the economy’s growing. Since 1995, global energy-related carbon emissions have decreased just one year, 2009, which also happens to mark the only year in that stretch when global GDP decreased. Coincidence? Growth in global GDP and in energy-related CO2 emissions U.S. Energy Information Administration Anderson is not alone in concluding that preventing calamitous climate ruin will require wealthy countries to downsize their economies. Here’s researcher Samuel Alexander, who studies sustainable societies at the University of Melbourne in Australia, from a blog post: The unpalatable truth is that, for developed nations, continued economic growth as conventionally measured is incompatible with climate stability. Indeed, a safe climate requires that we now need a phase of planned economic contraction, or “degrowth.” … This does not simply mean producing and consuming more efficiently and shifting to renewable energy, necessary though these changes are. It also requires that we produce and consume less – a conclusion that few dare to utter. Fortunately, the extent of wasteful overconsumption in the developed nations means that degrowth can actually be in our own interests, if we manage the transition wisely. If that leaves your head spinning, not to worry, I’ll write more about degrowth and what that could look like in the future. But first, back to that pesky NCE study. Why all the confusion? Remember that the NCE report is about climate action not climate protection. That is, the report looks at economic benefits of climate-friendly investments, not at the economic realities of fixing the climate. Lord Stern, the big-name economist on the study’s commission, already knows that the necessary deep emissions cuts can’t be made while growing the economy. In his well-known Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change from 2006, the limit for carbon reductions in the company of growth was set at 3 to 4 percent a year. He also acknowledges that, historically, emissions decreases of larger than 1 percent per year have coincided with periods of upheaval or recession — when, by definition, there is a negative growth rate. Maybe Stern found some new hopeful evidence to contradict his previous findings. Or maybe the numbers in this latest report have been thoroughly massaged to make them more palatable to politicians and businessfolk. All signs point to the latter. Perhaps the real message of the NCE report is: You can act on climate and still get elected! Looking a little deeper, even the NCE report hints that a green-painted version of business as usual won’t cut it: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has projected that if current trends continue, as the global population grows from 7 billion in 2010 to more than 9 billion in 2050, per capita consumption will more than triple, from about US$6,600 to US$19,700 per year, and global GDP will nearly quadruple, requiring 80% more energy. Sustaining growth at that scale will only be possible with radically new business models, products and means of production. The call for radical change is promising. Now we just need to switch the priority from sustaining growth to sustaining the stable climate. Otherwise, a century from now, our fancy new low-carbon economy will be up to its transit-hub high-rises in simmering acidic seawater.

The poorest and least developed regions are the areas in which ethnic minorities live; these make up around 60 per cent of Chinese territory. These districts are dependent on agricultural yields and are therefore particularly affected by deforestation (Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan), desertification (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia) and glacier melt (Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai). In the autonomous Uyghur region of Xinjiang, for example, scarce water and land resources are already the principal cause of disputes between different ethnic groups (Giese and Sehring, 2006). In addition, the Chinese government’s modernization policy for the autonomous regions based on economic development and resource extraction has bred political and ethnic conflict that continues to simmer (Heberer and Senz, 2006b). Social disparities among the population, increasing extraction of resources to underpin the economic upswing, and the effects of climate change threaten to further exacerbate these internal Chinese conflicts and beget the risk of growing political instability. In addition to the conflicts in the interior of the country, the regional security situation is becoming increasingly tense. Tensions are growing as a result of migration from China to neighbouring countries such as Russia and Mongolia, and as a consequence of the resource and raw materials policy pursued by China and by Chinese companies in adjoining states (e.g. Mongolia, Russia, Central Asia) (Barkmann 2006; Sidikov 2006; Umbach 2006). China’s need for resources also forms the background to territorial disputes over the islands of the South China Sea and disagreements between China and Japan (Heberer and Senz, 2006a). In addition, there is significant crisis potential in China’s relationship with Taiwan. The pursuit of national interests in dealings with neighbouring countries can, in the long term, serve to exacerbate conflict. This effect is heightened if the ‘nationalist card’ is perhaps played in an attempt to stabilize the state and maintain the Communist Party’s power (Klenke, 2006). A central challenge to China’s problem-solving capacity lies in the need to tackle not only social problems but also the environmental consequences of economic growth. The loss of arable land, the decline in soil quality and pollution of air and water are already giving rise to costs amounting to around 8 per cent of GDP (Economy, 2004). Every year millions of people fall victim to natural disasters; many of these are dependent on state aid. The health consequences of environmental pollution (e.g. ‘cancer villages’) are serious, and the number of protests is growing. The Chinese government has so far succeeded in presenting itself as capable of solving these problems. In fact, its position and legitimacy is built on its promise to develop and modernize the country, to solve the pressing social and ecological problems and to ensure political and social stability (Heberer and Senz, 2006b). The government’s goals and options for action in the face of these challenges are ambivalent; Chinese politics has broken away from Marxist-Leninist ideology and is based on pragmatism. The new innovative and technocratic political elite continues to focus primarily on economic development. The Chinese leadership, however, is to an increasing extent including ecological goals among its aims, particularly through the environmental authority SEPA. It has started to measure ‘green GDP’, for example, and has introduced measures to increase energy efficiency and expand renewable energies (SEPA, 2006; Schumann, 2007; Richerzhagen, 2007). The ‘Communist party state’ of the People’s Republic of China is not a homogenous structure but represents a system of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ (Lieberthal and Lampton, 1992). Within this system, a range of stakeholders exert influence on political decisions and their implementation – central government, the provinces, local government, the military, new social strata, new social organizations, etc. In many respects, the goals of central and local government conflict. For example, the implementation of environmental legislation often founders in the hands of administrative bodies at the lower level that evade the regu lations in the interests of local economic development (Lan et al., 2006; OECD, 2007a). Awareness of regional and global responsibility for environmental issues appears to be slowly growing (Wenk, 2007; Schumann, 2007). Negotiation and less coercion are now important tools of political consensus building and decisionmaking within China. A civil society movement is slowly emerging and giving rise to China’s own environmental NGOs. On account of the prevailing political structures, however, they are still fragmented, often locally oriented and not entirely independent of the government in the western sense. Provided that they do not pursue explicitly political goals, the state supports such organizations because they often contribute to solving concrete social problems. Overall, though, the party state is set against a splintered and weak civil society that is at present unable to challenge it effectively. 7.7.3 Conclusions The major environmental changes to be expected in China as a result of climate change are increasing soil degradation and the loss of arable land, an increase in extreme weather events and periods of drought and increasing water scarcity. The effects will, however, vary in different parts of China. Nevertheless, existing ecological and social problems in the cities and rural areas could escalate, undermining the dynamism of the economy and ultimately affecting the political stability of the country. The south will be confronted with an increase in flood disasters, severe weather events, storms and landslides. The main problems in the north will be water scarcity in summer and an increase in droughts – with subsequent harvest failures – as a result of glacier melt and precipitation variability. The rural population will bear the brunt of climate impacts. Compounded by ethnic tensions, poverty and social disadvantage, these regional developments could have a destabilizing effect on the entire country and on neighbouring states. Since rural exodus as a result of environmental degradation is already being observed, it is very likely that internal migration will increase further and will represent one of the central challenges of the coming decades (Heberer and Senz, 2006b). Further significant risk and conflict potential arises from the concentration of the economic infrastructure in the densely populated river deltas of the east coast. The rising sea level and an increase in flood disasters, possibly also driven by more powerful typhoons, could cause major damage both to industrial facilities – thus striking at the heart of the Chinese economy – and to residential areas in which millions of people live. The potential for conflict would be considerable. The anticipated problems present a major challenge to the political structures and the legitimacy of the Chinese government both internally and externally. Externally China, with its growing economic strength and global political weight, is not only becoming a serious competitor of the United States but is also being seen increasingly as a key player in matters of international climate policy. Tough international disputes are emerging over responsibility for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions; such disagreements put the international system under pressure and can lead to tension in foreign policy matters. At home, the Chinese leadership runs the risk of being overstretched by the combined effects of heightened environmental problems, social polarization and economic and political liberalization. The political elite has recognized this problem and begun to develop mechanisms to protect against and deal with environmental problems and climate impacts. However, the government’s capacity to control and manage the situation has struggled to keep pace with modernization and the dynamism of economic growth (Richerzhagen, 2007). As regards preventing internal conflicts from escalating into violence, much will depend in future on whether the current balance between economic capability, the state’s ability to govern, and social acceptance or the ‘willingness to suffer’ of parts of the population continues to prevail (Heberer and Senz, 2006b). The ability to adapt to the anticipated climate impacts could thus be a crucial factor in China’s further development.

In many regions, it is already raining less often but harder. According to The Physical Science Basis, trends from 1900 to 2005 show significantly increased precipitation in many regions, including eastern parts of North and South America. More intense and longer droughts have occurred over wider areas worldwide since the 1970s, especially in the tropics and sub- tropics. Sea surfaces have become warmer, and wind patterns have changed. There is also more evaporation from the ocean. These processes alter precipitation patterns on land, bringing more moisture to some areas and diminishing it in others. A long drought followed by an intense downpour is a recipe for multiple disease outbreaks, says Paul R. Epstein, a physician and associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Epstein is a reviewer for the forthcoming IPCC Working Group II report. During droughts, water availability is diminished, and water quality is often degraded, for example as people share water with livestock. Then heavy down- pours can cause sewers to overflow, and rain runoff washes microbes off farms, lawns, and streets into drinking water supplies. A number of studies have shown a correlation between heavy downpours and outbreaks of waterborne diseases such as cryptosporidiosis, giardiasis, and cyclo- sporidiosis, according to Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions, a November 2005 report that Epstein co-edited. A drought followed by flooding also encourages rodent and rodent-borne disease outbreaks as rodent populations boom in the wake of replenished water supplies. Rising temperatures and extreme weather could also affect the breeding and spread of ticks that carry Lyme disease, according to Climate Change Futures. Perhaps most widely documented is the association between intense flooding and explosion of mosquito populations, creating outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases in humans.

Alan Robock's contention that there has been no real scientific debate about the 'nuclear winter' concept is itself debatable (Nature 473, 275–276; 2011). This potential climate disaster, popularized in Science in 1983, rested on the output of a one-dimensional model that was later shown to overestimate the smoke a nuclear holocaust might engender. More refined estimates, combined with advanced three-dimensional models (see http://go.nature.com/kss8te), have dramatically reduced the extent and severity of the projected cooling. Despite this, Carl Sagan, who co-authored the 1983 Science paper, went so far as to posit “the extinction of Homo sapiens” (C. Sagan Foreign Affairs 63, 75–77; 1984). Some regarded this apocalyptic prediction as an exercise in mythology. George Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology protested: “Nuclear winter is the worst example of the misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory,” (see http://go.nature.com/yujz84) and climatologist Kerry Emanuel observed that the subject had “become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity” (Nature 319, 259; 1986). Robock's single-digit fall in temperature is at odds with the subzero (about −25 °C) continental cooling originally projected for a wide spectrum of nuclear wars. Whereas Sagan predicted darkness at noon from a US–Soviet nuclear conflict, Robock projects global sunlight that is several orders of magnitude brighter for a Pakistan–India conflict — literally the difference between night and day. Since 1983, the projected worst-case cooling has fallen from a Siberian deep freeze spanning 11,000 degree-days Celsius (a measure of the severity of winters) to numbers so unseasonably small as to call the very term 'nuclear winter' into question.

This event, known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, happened only about ten million years after the dinosaurs were smashed by an asteroid impact. This ‘hyperthermal’ period took place quite suddenly (in geological terms)—in less than 2000 years—and lasted for about 170,000 years before the planet again cooled. The heat spike was accompanied by a major wipe-out of ocean life in particular, though most small land mammals survived. Investigating the records of old marine sediments Zeebe was able to show there had been a sharp, 70 %, leap in atmospheric CO 2 concentrations at the time. However, he concluded there was only sufficient carbon available to force the climate to warm by 1–3 °C and that some other mechanism must have been triggered by the initial warming, which then drove the Earth’s temperature to fever pitch, up by another 4–6 °C (Zeebe et al. 2009). This process is the ‘ runaway global warming ‘ which now menaces us.

The significance of PETM is that it appears that about the same volume of carbon was dumped by natural processes into the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans as humans are currently dumping with the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of the world’s forests—about 3 trillion tonnes in all—and it was this that triggered the hyperthermal surge in planetary heating.

The world’s forests are dwindling at a rate of 6.6 million hectares a year, and deserts are spreading across 12 million hectares of fertile farmland, every year. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says:

Deforestation and forest degradation continue to take place at alarming rates, which contributes significantly to the ongoing loss of biodiversity. Since 1990, it is estimated that 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses, although the rate of deforestation has decreased over the past three decades. Between 2015 and 2020, the rate of deforestation was estimated at 10 million hectares per year, down from 16 million hectares per year in the 1990s. The area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990.6

Although bad-to-worst case scenarios remain underexplored in the scientific literature, statements labeling climate change as catastrophic are not uncommon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called climate change an “existential threat.” Academic studies have warned that warming above 5 °C is likely to be “beyond catastrophic” (50), and above 6 °C constitutes “an indisputable global catastrophe” (9).

Current discussions over climate catastrophe are undermined by unclear terminology. The term “catastrophic climate change” has not been conclusively defined. An existential risk is usually defined as a risk that cause an enduring and significant loss of long-term human potential (51, 52). This existing definition is deeply ambiguous and requires societal discussion and specification of long-term human values (52). While a democratic exploration of values is welcome, it is not required to understand pathways to human catastrophe or extinction (52). For now, the existing definition is not a solid foundation for a scientific inquiry.

It is frequently claimed that technological change can reduce resource depletion and therefore increase carrying capacity. However, the effects of technological change on resource use are not unidirectional. Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use. These are associated with the phenomena referred to as the Jevons Paradox, and the "Rebound Effect" [Polimeni et al., 2008; Greening et al., 2000; Ruth. 2009]. For example, an increase in vehicle fuel efficiency tends to enable increased per capita vehicle miles driven, heavier cars, and higher average speeds, which then negate the gains from the increased fuel-efficiency. In addition, technological advances can enable greater resource extraction and throughput, which then appears as increases in the productivity of other factors of production. As Daly points out, much of the increase in productivity in both agriculture and industry in the last two centuries has actually come from increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput [Daly. 1991]. A decline in the price of a resource Is usually thought to reflect an increase in the abundance of that resource, but in fact, it often reflects that the resource is simply being extracted more rapidly. Rather than extend carrying capacity, this reduces it. Over the long-term, per capita resource-use has tended to rise over time despite dramatic technological advances in resource efficiency. Thus, the sign and magnitude of the effect of technological change on resource use varies and the overall effect is difficult to predict. Therefore, in this generation of HANDY, we assume that the effects of these trends cancel each other out. The model will be developed further to allow the rates of these technology-induced trends to be adjusted in either direction.

Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it’s generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three. Each time, it’s the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them. There are now, for example, complex forms of investment such as credit-default swaps that make it possible for investors to bet on the possibility that companies will default on repaying loans. Such bets on credit defaults now make up a $45 trillion market that is entirely unregulated. It amounts to more than five times the total of the US government bond market. The large potential risks of such investments are not being acknowledged.

This is not to suggest that the UK is alone in facing the severity of the current crisis. On the contrary, in an increasingly globalized world, it was difficult for any country to escape the recession. Even those economics — like Germany, Japan and China — which retained strong manufacturing sectors, largely avoided consumer debt and delivered strong public sector surpluses, still suffered. During the last quarter of 2008, Germany's economy sank faster than any other European nation, contracting by 2.1 per cent." Ironically, Germany had found it hard to increase domestic consumption fast enough over the preceding decade. Unable to persuade its own consumers to spend, it had achieved growth by building a strong manufacturing sector and exporting to countries like the US where consumers were still prepared to spend rather than save. But when credit collapsed and consumer spending slowed everywhere, these export markets dried up too, hitting the German economy harder than most. Differences in the structure of economic growth hold some interesting lessons for the challenge of devising a sustainable economy. We'll return to the implications of this in later chapters. What's clear for now is that the roots of the economic crisis are much deeper than one particular country's dalliance in the banking sector or another's reliance on export markets. In fact, they lie at least in part in the concerted effort to free up credit for economic expansion across the world. In The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, George Soros traces the emergence of what he calls a 'super-bubble' in global financial markets to a series of economic policies to increase liquidity as a way of stimulating demand. Loosening restraints on the US Federal Reserve, de-regulating financial markets and promoting the securitization of debts through complex financial derivatives were also deliberate interventions. Their overriding aim was to promote economic growth.15 In short, what emerges from all this is that the market was not undone by isolated practices carried out by rogue individuals. Or even through the turning of a blind eye by less than vigilant regulators. The very policies put in place to stimulate growth in the economy led eventually to its downfall. The market was undone by growth itself.

Despite declining energy and carbon intensities, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have increased by 80 per cent since 1970. Emissions today arc almost 40 per cent higher than they were in 1990 — the Kyoto base year — and since the year 2000 they have been growing at over 3 per cent per year (sec Figure 5-3). Figure 5-3 docs illustrate some relative decoupling: the world GDP has risen faster than carbon dioxide emissions over the last 18 years. But there is no absolute decoupling here. And a surge in world consumption of coal has increased the rate of growth in carbon dioxide emissions since the year 2000. What's true for fossil resources and carbon emissions is true for material throughputs more generally. Figure 5.4 illustrates direct material consumption for the same five OECD countries shown in Figure 5.1. Despite very clear evidence of relative decoupling in the earlier figure, there is far less evidence here of an absolute decline in material consumption. The best that can be observed — in only a couple of countries — is something of a stabilization in resource requirements, particularly since the late 1980s. But even this finding is not entirely to be trusted. The problem is that its difficult to pick up all the resources embedded in traded goods. The measure shown here — direct material consumption — docs its best to identify traded flows of specific resources. But it misses out on the resources (and emissions) used to manufacture finished and semi-finished products abroad. This question is important precisely because of the structure of modern developed economics, which have typically tended to move progressively away from domestic manufacturing. Unless the demand for consumer goods also declines, more and more finished and semi-finished goods need to be imported from abroad. And since concepts like direct material consumption omit such accounts, Figure 5.4 underestimates the resource requirements of developed economics. Correcting this failing calls for more sophisticated resource and economic models than arc currently available. In the case of carbon dioxide, however, several recent studies for the UK have confirmed that national accounts systematically fail to account for the 'carbon trade balance*. In other words, there arc more (hidden) carbon emissions associated with UK consumption patterns than appear from the numbers we report to the United Nations (UN) under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). In fact, this difference is enough to undermine the progress made towards the UK*s Kyoto targets. An apparent reduction in emissions of 6 per cent between 1990 and 2004, as reported under UN FCCC guidelines is turned into an 11 per cent increase in emissions, once emissions embedded in trade arc taken into account." Without more detailed work, it's difficult to know whether this pattern is true more generally for material resources. But given the trend away from manufacturing in advanced economics, it's clearly wise to view Figure 5-4 with some caution. There is an outside chance that some stabilization of resource consumption has occurred. But Figure 5.4 doesn't provide a lot of confidence in absolute decoupling, even within the richer nations. Ultimately, in any case, what count most in terms of global limits arc worldwide statistics. Both climate change and resource scarcity arc essentially global issues. So the final arbiter on the feasibility of absolute decoupling — and the possibilities for escaping the dilemma of growth — arc worldwide trends. Figure 5-3 confirmed a rising global trend in fossil fuels and carbon emissions. Figure 5.5 shows the global trend in the extraction of another vital set of finite resources — metal ores. What's striking from Figure 5.5 is not just the absence of absolute decoupling. There is little evidence of relative decoupling cither. Some improved resource efficiency is evident in the earlier years, but this appears to have been eroded more recently. Particularly notable is the increased consumption of structural metals. Extraction of iron ore, bauxite, copper and nickel is now rising faster than world GDP. Reasons for this are not particularly hard to find. China's hunger for iron ore is well-documented." As the emerging economics build up their infrastructures, the rising demand for structural materials is one of the factors that put an upward pressure on commodity prices during 2007 and the first half of 2008 (sec Chapter 2, Figure 2.2). The impact on certain non-metallic minerals is just as striking. Worldwide cement production has more than doubled since 1990, surpassing growth in world GDP by some 70 percentage points. Global resource intensities (the ratios of resource use to GDP), far from declining, have increased significandy across a range of non-fuel minerals. Resource efficiency is going in the wrong direction. Even relative decoupling just isn't happening

Having used the word “entropy” in the previous sentence, I should try to explain what it is. All living and non-living things (and hence all human economies, whether or not economists pay attention to the fact!) obey the laws of thermodynamics. The second law, in particular, introduces the concept of entropy and the idea that the entropy of a closed system must either remain constant or increase, but never fall. Entropy is a measure of how “special” a particular arrangement of parts is — the lower the entropy, the more “special” the arrangement. Life is “special.” To illustrate this concept of “specialness,” imagine first a set of red and blue gas molecules, fifty of each say, bouncing around in a room. Which is more likely: (A) that all 50 red molecules will be in one half of the room and all 50 blue in the other half, or (B) that some roughly even mixture of red and blues will be present in both halves? Scenario B, is the less “special” and more likely one, but why? The answer is that there are many ways of arranging the molecules to have “some roughly even mixture” of red and blue — a great many pairs of molecules can be swapped between the halves without making a difference. However, with the perfect red and blue split, if any molecule is swapped with a partner in the other half of the room, then each half gets “contaminated” with one molecule of the “wrong” color — such a swap does make a difference. Hence what we see tends to be an equal mixture of each color, just because there are vastly many more ways of seeing an equal mixture. Now I can state the notion of entropy precisely — the entropy of such a set of molecules is a number that is large when there are many ways of swapping pairs of molecules and getting the same overall state, and small when there are few ways of swapping them and getting the same overall state. Explicitly, an entropy S is given by Boltzmann’s entropy law: S = k log W Here k = 1.38 x 10−23 joule/kelvin (Boltzmann’s constant), W is the number of ways of swapping the components of a state (say red and blue molecules) without making an overall difference to that state and log W means “the natural logarithm of W” — the power you have to raise Euler’s number (e = 2.718) to in order to get W (for example if W is equal to e then log W is equal to 1, because e to the power 1 is e). That little equation of Boltzmann’s explains a huge number of phenomena. For example, why do hot things tend to get colder and cold things hotter? Easy — bring a hot thing and a cold thing into contact and it’s like the red and blue molecules all over again — there are many, many more ways for hot molecules and cold ones to get mixed together equally than for them to stay separated into a hot part and a cold part. So the temperature equalizes. Another example: why do balls bounce lower and lower, but never start bouncing higher and higher? Easy — after they’re done falling, ball molecules are moving more, on average, than floor ones. During each bounce, there are more ways of sharing out this motion randomly amongst the ball and floor than there are of keeping all the faster molecules in the ball and all the slower molecules in the floor. So this sharing out is what happens, and the ball eventually stops bouncing. The opposite case — a ball spontaneously bouncing higher and higher — never happens in practice because it is so unlikely. That’s how you can tell a film is being played backwards; everything that happens is so unlikely that it is never seen to happen in practice. These examples demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics: the total entropy always increases and never decreases because of how incredibly unlikely a decrease is. What about life and entropy? A living thing has a very low entropy compared to its surroundings, because there are not many ways of swapping its constituent parts and leaving it in an invariant state. For example, swapping molecules between your heart and brain wouldn’t leave you in “an invariant state” — it would kill you! In fact, coming into thermodynamic equilibrium with your surroundings is also known as being dead! Next question: how is life able to maintain this low-entropy state, in apparent defiance of the second law? Well, life is part of the Earth-sun system. We can regard this as “a closed system” to a very good approximation — a vast ocean of space separates it from other systems. But the Earth alone (plus moon, of course!) is not “a closed system.” The sun — a nuclear fusion reactor — provides the Earth with a constant input of low-entropy “organized” energy in the form of high-intensity photons (particles of light). Plants use this energy to make food which animals (including humans) eat, keeping the low-entropy-maintenance machinery of life running. The Earth-sun (plus moon) system, of which the human economy is a sub-system Save for a few ocean vent ecosystems, this low-entropy input from the sun makes all life on Earth possible, and hence all human economies (again, whether or not economists pay attention to the fact!). When we humans burn reserves of oil and coal laid down over millennia in a geological eye-blink, we are liberating the low-entropy energy captured from ancient sunlight and buried deep underground. The second law of thermodynamics has profound implications for our economic systems. A constant stream of low-entropy energy from the sun is required to maintain life’s organized state. Without this “entropy gradient” the machinery of life would soon wind down, like the bouncing balls or mixing molecules did. So in order to prolong life on Earth, we should try to use this vital low-entropy input as efficiently as possible, to recycle it through all sectors of the economy. We should certainly not waste it and assume that we will be able to increase our use of it more and more and more, forever. Unfortunately, most mainstream economists don’t seem to have heard of the second law of thermodynamics. Perhaps this isn’t really their fault, since it’s not in their textbooks. But it should be. It governs all life and all systems on Earth, including the economy. As our leaders in business and government race to implement misguided economic models that are not founded upon the laws of thermodynamics, and as nation after nation refuses to question the pursuit of never-ending economic growth, we draw closer to a fate that will end in tears for the human race. I worry that the tears have already begun falling.

Motesharrei 14 {Safa, Bachelor degrees in Engineering and Physics (Maryland), Masters in Physics and Mathematics (Maryland), Research Assistant at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics/Public Policy (Maryland), This report was co-written with Eugenia Kalnay (meteorologist and a Distinguished University Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at Maryland), “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies,” National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, 3/19, }

The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see the scenarios for an unequal society in section 5-3), where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid, which helps to explain why economic stratification is one of the elements consistently found in past collapsed societies. Importantly, in the first of these unequal society scenarios, 5.3.1, the solution appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate (6.) and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature. Despite appearing initially to be the same as the sustainable optimal solution obtained in the absence of Elites, economic stratification changes the final result: Elites' consumption keeps growing until the society collapses. The Mayan collapse —in which (Herniation never recovered even though nature did recover— Is an example of a Type-L collapse, whereas the collates in the Easter Island and the Fertile Crescent —where nature was depleted— are examples of a Type-N collapse. In scenario 5.3.2, with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites. It is important to note that in both of these scenarios, the Elites —due to their wealth— do not suffer the detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners. This buffer of wealth allows Elites to continue “business as usual" despite the impending catastrophe. It is likely that this is an important mechanism that would help explain how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). This buffer effect is further reinforced by the long, apparently sustainable trajectory prior to the beginning of the collapse. While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it. Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory "so far" in support of doing nothing. The final two scenarios in this set of experiments, 5.3.3 and 5.3.4. are designed to indicate the kinds of policies needed to avoid this catastrophic outcome. They show that, in the context of economic stratification, inequality must be greatly reduced and population growth must bee maintained below critical levels in order to avoid a societal collapse [Daly, 21)08].

On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product. What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don't usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud. The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way. Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us – and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement – are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in "progress", as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace "sustainable development" rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet. I think this is simply denial. The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism and a deeply embedded cultural attitude to "nature"; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source that is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have used it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return. What do you get? We are starting to find out. We need to get real. Climate change is teetering on the point of no return while our leaders bang the drum for more growth. The economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth to function. And who wants it tamed anyway? Most people in the rich world won't be giving up their cars or holidays without a fight. Some people – perhaps you – believe that these things should not be said, even if true, because saying them will deprive people of "hope", and without hope there will be no chance of "saving the planet". But false hope is worse than no hope at all. As for saving the planet – what we are really trying to save, as we scrabble around planting turbines on mountains and shouting at ministers, is not the planet but our attachment to the western material culture, which we cannot imagine living without. The challenge is not how to shore up a crumbling empire with wave machines and global summits, but to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse.

Evidence continues to mount that industrial civilisation, driven by a destructive and insatiable growth imperative, is chronically unsustainable, as well as being grossly unjust. The global economy is in ecological overshoot, currently consuming resources and emitting waste at rates the planet cannot possibly sustain (Global Footprint Network 2013). Peak oil is but the most prominent example of a more general situation of looming resource scarcity (Klare, 2012), with high oil prices having a debilitating effect on the oil-dependent economies which are seemingly dependent on cheap oil to maintain historic rates of growth (Heinberg, 2011). At the same time, great multitudes around the globe live lives of material destitution, representing a vast, marginalised segment of humanity that justifiably seeks to expand its economic capacities in some form (World Bank, 2008). Biodiversity continues to be devastated by deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction (United Nations, 2010), while the global development agenda seems to be aiming to provide an expanding global population with the high- impact material affluence enjoyed by the richest parts of the world (Hamilton, 2003]. This is despite evidence crying out that the universalisation of affluence is environmentally unsupportable (Smith and Positano, 2010; Turner, 2012) and not even a reliable path to happiness (Lane, 2001; Alexander, 2012a). Most worrying of all, perhaps, is the increasingly robust body of climate science indicating the magnitude of the global predicament (IPCC, 2013). According to the Climate Tracker Initiative (2013: 4), the world could exceed its 'carbon budget' in around 18 years, essentially locking us into a future that is at least 2 degrees warmer, and threatening us with 4 degrees or more. It is unclear to what extent civilisation as we know it is compatible with runaway climate change. And still, almost without exception, all nations on the planet - including or especially the richest ones - continue to seek GDP growth without limit, as if the cause of these problems could somehow provide the solution. If once it was hoped that technology and science were going to be able decouple economic activity from ecological impact, such a position is no longer credible (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011). Technology simply cannot provide any escape from the fact that there are biophysical limits to growth. Despite decades of extraordinary technological advance, which it is was promised would lighten the ecological burden of our economies, global energy and resource consumption continues to grow, exacerbated by a growing population, but which is primarily a function of the growth-orientated values that lie at the heart of global capitalism (Turner, 2012).

Alexander 13 {Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs (University of Melbourne, Australia), Founder of the Simplicity Institute, “Ted Trainer and the Simpler Way: A Sympathetic Critique,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 25:2, 95-111}

The Global Predicament Trainer’s vision of The Simpler Way can only be understood in relation to his diagnosis of the global situation, which arises out of the “limits to growth” analysis (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 2004). While the figures and statistics on resource depletion and environmental degradation are well known (e.g., MEA 2005), Trainer maintains that their significance is not generally acknowledged or fully understood. The global economy, he argues, is far beyond the levels of resource and energy use that can be maintained for much longer (Global Footprint Network 2012), let alone extended to all people. Add to this situation the fact that the global human population is expected to increase to nine billion in the next few decades, and the magnitude of our problems becomes clear. “Our way of life”, he concludes, “is grossly unsustainable” (Trainer 2010a, 19). To make matters worse, there is also a mounting body of evidence indicating that the richest nations are experiencing a breakdown of social cohesion and a stagnating quality of life (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Lawn and Clarke 2010; Lane 2000), which implies that even if we could globalize and sustain consumer societies over the long term, we may not want to (Alexander 2009, 2011a).1 [CONTINUES TO FOOTNOTE] Trainer dedicates very little attention to the issue of overpopulation, which many will consider a significant weakness to his position. However, even if the world’s population stopped growing today (at 7 billion), the planet would remain dangerously overburdened by high consumption lifestyles, so focusing primarily on consumption has some justification [END OF FOOTNOTE] The problems, however, do not end there. In addition to the ecological and social issues just noted, Trainer joins many ecological economists (e.g., Daly 1996) in highlighting the absurdity of the prevailing attitudes toward economic growth. The growth project continues to define the global development agenda (Purdey 2010), despite evidence indicating that the existing global economy is already exceeding the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet (Global Footprint Network 2012). Although the intricacies of the critique cannot be detailed here, the growth project faces additional challenges from those who argue that the peaking of oil and the bursting of credit bubbles are in the process of undermining the very possibility of continued growth (Heinberg 2011; Alexander 2011b). In line with much socialist theory, the moral that Trainer draws from this analysis is that the affluence enjoyed in rich counties is built on a global economic system that is, at its core, patently unjust. It is a system that enables the rich countries to take far more than their fair share of the world’s resources, while depriving the poorest countries of the resources needed to live even a minimally decent existence. Not only that, rich nations work hard to entrench and maintain their empires using coercive aid contributions, trade power, “structural adjustment packages” and, whenever necessary, military force (Trainer 2010a, ch. 5 and 8). For all these reasons, among others discussed below, Trainer concludes that capitalism cannot be fixed or reformed; it has to be replaced. While Trainer is hardly alone in making that claim, the following sections show that he builds upon it in original ways.

The way of life we have in rich countries is grossly unsustainable. There is no possibility of all people on Earth ever rising to rich world per capita levels of consumption of energy, minerals, timber, water, food, phosphorous etc. These rates of consumption are generating numer-ous alarming global problems, now threatening our survival and the survival of other species. Most people have no idea of the magnitude of the overshoot – of how far we are beyond sustainable levels of re-source use and environmental impact. If all the estimated 9.8 billion people living on earth in 2050 were to consume resources at the pres-ent per capita rate in rich countries, world annual resource production rates would have to be about eight times as great as they are now.

For instance, the ‘Ecological Footprint’ analysis indicates that the amount of productive land required to provide one person in Australia with food, water, energy and settlement area is about 6.6 ha (Global Footprint Network, 2019). If 9.8 billion people were to live as Australians do, approximately 65 billion ha of productive land would be required. However, the total amount of productive land available is only 12 bil-lion ha. If we assume one third of this should be set aside for nature (see, e.g., Baillie Yang, 2018) the amount available for humans might be about 8 billion ha. In other words, our rich world per capita footprint is about eight times as big as it would ever be possible for all of the world’s people to sustainably share.

Finally, at the most abstract level, the struggle for greater wealth and power is central in the literature on the causes of war. ‘… warfare appears as a normal and periodic form of competition within the capitalist world economy. … world wars [end page 296] regularly occur during a period of economic expansion.’71 ‘War is an inevitable result of the struggle between economies for expansion.’72 Choucri and North say their most important finding is that domestic growth is a strong determinant of national expansion and that this results in competition between nations and war.73 The First and Second World Wars can be seen as being largely about imperial grabbing. Germany, Italy and Japan sought to expand their territory and resource access. Britain already held much of the world within its empire … which it had previously fought wars to take! ‘Finite resources in a world of expanding populations and increasing per capita demands create a situation ripe for international violence.’74 Ashley focuses on the significance of the quest for economic growth. ‘War is mainly explicable in terms of differential growth in a world of scarce and unevenly distributed resources … expansion is a prime source of conflict. So long as the dynamics of differential growth remain unmanaged, it is probable that these long term processes will sooner or later carry major powers into war.’75

Intellectual properties provide the foundation for much of our modern economy. They relate to both creativity and commerce.

Intellectual property rights include patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. They can promote innovation, and they help businesses protect valuable assets. Understanding these concepts and how they apply in different situations is critical for success, but the topic can be complex.