Growth is unsustainable and finite – all available evidence, physics, and law of entropy prove

Andrea Vetter, Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, “The Future Is Degrowth”, Verso Books, Pages 77-78, 2022,

Technological progress and non-fossil energy sources (such as the sun, wind, water, or biomass) cannot beat the entropy law in the long term, especially since resources and land are inherently limited. From this analysis, Georgescu-Roegen deduced that if we begin from an analysis that is grounded in the laws of physics, we can only conceive of an economy that consumes less and less energy and material, since nothing can be 100 per cent recycled and since capturing renewable energy depends on material resources, which are themselves limited. Georgescu-Roegen also formulated initial thoughts on the form such an economy must take, anticipating some of the central degrowth proposals. Thus, it is no coincidence that the word décroissance, although Georgescu-Roegen did not use it himself, first became known through the title of a 1979 French translation of his writings titled Demain la décroissance.

These arguments highlight two basic facts. First, every economy is embedded within an environmental context and therefore is subject to natural laws such as those of physics and thermodynamics. Second, an economy that grows endlessly must make trade-offs with regard to material and energy use, since each form of energy has different characteristics in terms of storage, material intensity, renewability, transportation, and the time and space they require. While this does not prove in itself that endless growth is impossible, it shows how, the bigger an economy, the more difficult it becomes to maintain, and the more difficult it becomes to switch to more sustainable forms of energy that are not as dense, concentrated, and transportable as fossil fuels, without reducing overall energy use. This insight applies to all economic systems, not just our own.9

Vaclav Smil, in his recent book Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, brings the study of physics and economics of growth to a new level. In a wide-ranging analysis of growth in multiple systems – from the biological to cities to economic trends – Smil underlines that, in all systems, growth may look to be exponential but eventually tends to have decreasing growth rates until it reaches its material and thermodynamic limits. Thus, societies currently experiencing growth may have the impression that things will continue as they are, but they usually are just within an exponential curve that will eventually flatten, or even result in whole-scale collapse. More broadly, Smil’s work demonstrates in exhaustive detail how all economic activity, regardless of social organization, is subject to material, ecological, and physical limitations. In essence, his argument, which aligns closely with that of Georgescu-Roegen, is that all available evidence suggests that growth is finite. Any society that relies on compound rates of economic growth will eventually face ultimate limits, which manifest themselves in the breakdown of the complex ecosystems upon which growth relies. Smil stops short, however, of suggesting models for how to avoid collapse; and, what’s more, his work does not take into account the role played by ideology and hegemonic, interlocking social dynamics in perpetuating growth. As we underline throughout this book, an important aspect of the degrowth framework involves combining a material analysis of the growth of the economy with an understanding of its structural roots.10

Another problem, related to the one highlighted above, is that increasing economic complexity also locks in future material and energetic throughput. For example, as more infrastructures organized around fossil fuels (such as highways and container shipping ports) are built, the more society becomes ‘locked in’ to non-renewable sources of energy, and the more work it takes to disassemble that system and create a system based on renewable energy. These mutually reinforcing dynamics of growth become increasingly coupled to each other, making it more and more difficult to change energy sources but also to address the increasing disorder (through pollution, environmental degradation, and social strife) created by a reliance on a single, highly concentrated source of energy – in our economy’s case, fossil fuels.11