AT Dedev - CNDI 2024

Economic Growth Good
2ACs
2AC – Overview
They concede too much to get to their impact turn
The rest of the affirmative gets to extinction before any of their structural uniqueness claims and impacts
Extend your impact
2AC – Growth Sustainable
Growth is sustainable – answers environmental and other warrants – decoupling, dematerialization, innovation, and tech solve environmental/resource concerns and Jevons Rebound is wrong – government regulation and fiscal policy solve financialization and inequality warrants
McAfee 19—(principal research scientist and codirector of the Initiative on the Digital Economy at MIT, PHD in business administration from Harvard, MS in mechanical engineering from MIT, unrelated to the other McAfee). McAfee, Andrew. 2019. More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next. Scribner.
What’s behind the broad and deep dematerialization of the American economy? Why are we now post-peak in our consumption of so many resources? In the next chapters I’ll present my explanation of the causes of dematerialization. First, though, I want to give a short explanation of what the causes are not. In particular, I want to show that the CRIB strategies born around Earth Day and promoted since then for reducing our planetary footprint—consume less, recycle, impose limits, and go back to the land—have not been important contributors to the dematerialization we’ve seen. Since Earth Day, we have demonstrably not consumed much less or gone back to the land in large numbers. We have recycled a lot, but this fact is irrelevant because recycling is a separate phenomenon from dematerialization. Much more relevant than recycling are the limits we’ve imposed in a couple of areas. The history of these limits is instructive because it helps us separate great ideas (limits on pollution and hunting animals) from truly terrible ones (limits on family size). All, Consuming The C part of the CRIB strategy—a plea for us to consume less for the planet’s sake—has largely fallen on deaf ears. To see this, let’s look at change in the real GDP of the United States. It grew by an average of 3.2 percent per year between the end of World War II and Earth Day. From 1971 to 2017, it grew by an annual average of 2.8 percent. Population growth also slowed down after the postwar baby boom, but it remained positive. America’s population increased by an average of 1.5 percent a year from 1946 to 1970, and by 1 percent annually from 1971 to 2016. So while we have slowed down some, we certainly haven’t come close to embracing degrowth in our population or consumption. But the American economy has changed significantly since Earth Day and has become relatively less oriented around making and building things. Services, ranging from haircuts to insurance policies to concerts, now make up a much larger share of the economy than they did in 1970. US personal consumption of services has risen from 30 percent of GDP in 1970 to 47 percent in 2017. So, has the decline in resource use come about because we don’t make or consume as many products as we used to? No. While it’s true that products have been declining in relative terms (in other words, as a percentage of total GDP) compared to services, our total consumption of products has still been increasing in absolute terms. So has our industrial production—the total amount of things made in America. What’s more, the United States has not recently shifted away from “heavy” manufacturing. We still make lots of vehicles, machinery, and other big-ticket items, just as we used to. But we don’t make them the same way we used to. We now make them using fewer resources. To see this, let’s add a line showing US industrial production to our graph from the previous chapter of GDP and total metal consumption. This updated chart makes clear that the country hasn’t stopped producing things. Instead, America’s manufacturers have learned to produce more things from less metal. So to summarize, growth of consumption has in some cases slowed down in recent years. But growth in resource use has done much more than slow down—it has reversed course and is now generally negative. We have not as a society embraced degrowth. Instead, we’ve done something far stranger and more profound: we’ve decoupled growth—in consumption, prosperity, and our economy—from resource use. Early in the Industrial Era, the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville published his 1835 book, Democracy in America. One of the first major investigations into the character of the then-young country, it remains one of the best.I De Tocqueville observed almost two centuries ago that the people of the United States liked their things: “In America, the passion for material well-being… is general.… Minds are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s little comforts.” What’s new is that providing for our needs and comforts now requires fewer materials, not more. Recycling: Big, and Beside the Point Recycling is big business: 47 percent, 33 percent, 68 percent, and 49 percent of all the tonnage of aluminum, copper, lead, and iron and steel (respectively) consumed in the United States in 2015 came from scrap metal rather than ore taken from the earth. Similarly, almost 65 percent of paper products came from recycled newspapers, pizza boxes, and so on rather than from felled trees. Yet recycling is irrelevant for dematerialization. Why? Because recycling is about where resource-producing factories get their inputs, while dematerialization is about what’s happened to total demand for their outputs. Paper mills, for example, get their raw material from two main sources: recycling centers and forests. American consumption of output from all paper mills combined has been declining since 1990, the year of peak paper in the United States. This decline is purely a matter of how much total demand there is for paper; it has no direct relationship to the amount of recycling taking place. But is there any indirect relationship? How much would our total consumption of resources such as paper or steel change without recycling? It’s impossible to answer with certainty, but my intuition is that if recycling didn’t exist, our total consumption of resources such as aluminum, copper, iron, and steel would be declining even more quickly. This seems counterintuitive; the conclusion is supported by a simple chain of reasoning. Recycling metals makes economic sense exactly because it’s cheaper to melt down and reuse scrap than it is to dig out and process ore. Without this scrap, a ton of metal would probably cost more, all other things being equal. And as a general rule, we use less of a thing when it costs more. So it seems most likely to me that we’d use less metal overall in a hypothetical zero-recycling economy than we do in our actual enthusiastic-about-scrap-metal-recycling economy. This does not mean that I think metal recycling is bad. I think it’s great, since it gives us cheaper metal products and reduces total greenhouse gas emissions (since it takes much less energy to obtain metal from scrap than from ore). But recycling, whatever its merits, is not part of the dematerialization story. It’s a different story. Back to the Land Is Bad for the Land The back-to-the-land movement is a fascinating chapter in the history of American environmentalism, but a largely insignificant one. There were simply never enough homesteaders and others who turned away from modern, technologically sophisticated life to make much of a difference. Which is a good thing for the environment. As Jeffrey Jacob documents in his book New Pioneers, the back-to-the-land movement in the United States began in the mid-1960s and continued into the next decade. According to one estimate, as many as 1 million North American back-to-the-landers were living on small farms by the end of the 1970s. This, though, was a weak current against the strong tide of urban growth; the number of American city dwellers increased by more than 17 million between 1970 and 1980. Going back to the land might have been widely discussed, but it was comparatively rarely practiced. We should be thankful for this because homesteading is not great for the environment, for two reasons. First, small-scale farming is less efficient in its use of resources than massive, industrialized, mechanized agriculture. To get the same harvest, homesteaders use more land, water, and fertilizer than do “factory farmers.” Farms of less than one hundred acres, for example, grow 15 percent less corn per acre than farms with more than a thousand acres. And bigger farms get better faster. Between 1982 and 2012 farms under one hundred acres grew their total factor productivity by 15 percent, whereas farms over a thousand acres grew theirs by 51 percent. So more homesteaders would have meant more land under cultivation, more water and fertilizer used, and so on. Second, rural life is less environmentally friendly than urban or suburban dwelling. City folk live in high-density, energy-efficient apartments and condos, travel only short distances for work and errands, and frequently use public transportation. None of these things is true of country living. As economist Edward Glaeser summarizes, “If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete.… Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.” And if homesteaders decide not only to ignore Glaeser’s advice but also to leave modernity further behind and heat their homes with coal or wood, they do still more environmental harm. Coal home furnaces create lots of atmospheric pollution, much more than comes from other kinds of fuel. Poland, for example, today has 80 percent of all homes in Europe that burn coal, and thirty-three of the Continent’s fifty most polluted cities. And burning wood means chopping down trees. A lot of them. It’s almost certainly the case that the English turned to coal for home heating in the middle of the sixteenth century because they’d cut down such a huge percentage of their trees that the price of wood skyrocketed. So if we care about the environment, we should probably be glad that the back-to-the-land movement stalled out, and that industrial-scale, high-yield agriculture has become the norm. A comprehensive review published in Nature Sustainability in 2018 concluded, “The data… do not suggest that environmental costs are generally larger for [high-yield] farming systems.… If anything, positive associations—in which high-yield, land-efficient systems also have lower costs in other dimensions—appear more common.” Imposing Limits: The Worst Idea, and the Best One Of the four elements of the CRIB strategy, the drive to impose limits has by far the most checkered history. It yielded both the most harmful strategies, and the most helpful ones. The Population Implosion In 1979 the government of the People’s Republic of China announced its new family planning policy, which soon became known as the one-child policy. It was enacted despite the steady decline in the country’s birth rate throughout the 1970s. But after reading Limits to Growth, A Blueprint for Survival, and other books limning the looming dangers of unchecked population expansion, the missile scientist Song Jian came to believe that even faster birth rate reductions were required. He became the architect of the new policy, the main effect of which was to limit ethnic Han Chinese families to a single child. Exceptions to this restriction included giving some couples the right to a second child if their first was a girl, but the one-child policy soon became a central fact of Chinese family life. It is hard to see it in a positive light. After the policy was officially abandoned in late 2015, journalist Barbara Demick wrote its unflattering obituary: “Family planning became a powerful bureaucracy, with officials who terrorized parents. They beat and burned down the houses of people who violated the family-planning limits. They snatched over-quota baby girls from the arms of their mothers and gave them to orphanages, which in turn put them up for adoption, earning a three-thousand-dollar ‘donation’ for each baby.” The Chinese government maintains that approximately 400 million births were prevented by the one-child policy, but this is probably a large overestimate. As the economist Amartya Sen points out, “The additional contribution of coercion to reducing fertility in China is by no means clear, since compulsion was superimposed on a society that was already reducing its birth rate.” In their 2013 essay “How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?” the demographers Wang Feng, Yong Cai, and Baochang Gu compared the policy unfavorably to two of their country’s great twentieth-century convulsions: the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. They wrote, “While those grave mistakes both cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected quickly afterward. The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined family and kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children whose well-being will be seriously jeopardized.” History, in short, will judge this government-imposed limit on family size harshly.II Rational Restrictions Imposing limits on family size is a terrible idea for reasons both practical and moral. But it’s an excellent idea to impose limits on pollution, and on hunting some animals and selling products that come from their bodies. Such restrictions have yielded the great triumphs of the conservation and environmental movements in America and other countries. In 1970, the same year as the original Earth Day festival, the United States established the federal Environmental Protection Agency and made major amendments to 1963’s Clean Air Act. This was the start of a cascade of laws and regulations aimed at reducing pollution and other environmental harms. These have worked amazingly well. For example, atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide in the United States have dropped to levels not seen since the first years of the twentieth century, and other kinds of air pollution have also dropped sharply. From 1980 to 2015, total emissions of six principal air pollutants decreased by 65 percent. As lead was banned from paint and gasoline, the concentration of that element in the blood of young children dropped by more than 80 percent between 1976 and 1999. Because lead retards brain development during youth, these declines are tremendously important. According to one study, American children in 1999 had IQs that were on average 2.2 to 4.7 points higher than they would have been had lead concentrations remained at their 1970 levels. More work certainly remains, but thanks to the limits imposed on pollutants, America’s soil, air, and water are all much cleaner than they were on Earth Day. The conservationists who grew concerned in the early years of the twentieth century about what hunting was doing to the populations of many animals were the predecessors of Earth Day’s environmentalists. Conservationists were spurred to action by the shocking extinction of the passenger pigeon. That such an abundant bird could be eradicated stunned many and spurred new laws restricting trade in animal products. The first of these was the Lacey Act, passed by Congress in 1900 and named for John Lacey, a Republican representative from Iowa. As he said during debate on the bill, “The wild pigeon, formerly in flocks of millions, has entirely disappeared from the face of the earth. We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction, which may serve as a warning to all mankind. Let us now give an example of wise conservation of what remains of the gifts of nature.” The Lacey Act and its successors imposed three kinds of limits on taking and consuming animals. First, hunting of some animals was fully banned. Protected species include the sea otter, which was protected by a 1911 international moratorium; the snowy egret, which was ruthlessly hunted for its gorgeous plumes until passage of the Weeks-McLean Law Act in 1913; and dolphins and manatees, which were sheltered by 1972’s Marine Mammal Protection Act. Second, many limits have been imposed on when and where animals can be hunted. Sport and food hunting are illegal in most national parks, for example, and duck, bear, deer, and many other animals have well-defined hunting seasons. Third, bans have been imposed on the commercial trade in many animal products. The most sweeping of these is probably the nationwide ban on the sale of hunted meat. You may see venison or bison meat at a butcher’s counter or on a menu in America, but it always comes from a ranch, not a hunt. These imposed limits have brought many iconic American animals back from the brink of extinction. North America now has more than half a million bison, for example, and over three thousand sea otters live off the coast of Northern California. Some previously threatened animals have come back so well that they’re now widely considered pests. People in many American neighborhoods today feel that there are too many white-tailed deer, Canada geese, and beaver. The story of dematerialization is not the story of following the CRIB strategies. Except for the excellent idea of imposing limits on polluting and pursuing animals, these strategies were ignored (we didn’t embrace degrowth and stop consuming), abandoned (we stopping going back to the land), irrelevant (dematerialization has nothing to do with recycling), or deeply misguided (China’s attempt to limit family size was a huge mistake). So how did we finally start getting more from less? How did we become post-peak in our use of so many resources? The next three chapters will take up this critical question. CHAPTER 7 What Causes Dematerialization? Markets and Marvels The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped. —Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England, 1851 If CRIB strategies aren’t responsible for the large-scale dematerialization of the American economy that has taken place since Earth Day, then what is? How have we got more from less? I believe that four main forces are responsible, and that it’s helpful to think of them as two pairs. In this chapter we’ll look at the first pair, then take up the second in chapter 9. Capitalism and technological progress are the first pair of forces driving dematerialization. This statement will come as a surprise to many, and for good reason. After all, it’s exactly this combination that caused us to massively increase our resource consumption throughout the Industrial Era. As we saw in chapter 3, the ideas of William Jevons and Alfred Marshall point to the distressing conclusion that capitalism and tech progress always lead to more from more: more economic growth, but also more resource consumption. So what changed? How are capitalism and tech progress now getting us more from less? To get answers to these important questions, let’s start by looking at a few recent examples of dematerialization. Fertile Farms America has long been an agricultural juggernaut. In 1982, after more than a decade of steady expansion due in part to rising grain prices, total cropland in the country stood at approximately 380 million acres. Over the next ten years, however, almost all of this increase was reversed. So much acreage was abandoned by farmers and given back to nature that cropland in 1992 was almost back to where it had been almost twenty-five years before. This decline had several causes, in

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