Economic growth will destroy everything

• Everyone wants everything. How is that going to work? 
• Economic growth promises that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs.The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.
• The planet that sustains us is already bursting through the physical limits. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic etc all are driven by rising consumption. 
• Growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative.
• Simple Lifers who seek to resist growth & its impact will be silenced, especially by the media. 
• Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, we use a million plastic bottles a minute, worldwide.
• Green consumerism is not a solution for planetary survival. There is no significant difference between the ecological footprints of people who care about their impacts and people who don’t.
• Those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not.
• Environmental awareness is higher among wealthy people. The richer we are, the bigger is our ecological footprint, regardless of our good intentions. The green consumers mainly focus on behaviors that have relatively small benefits.
• People who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays abroad that cancels their environmental savings 100-fold. 
• People who have gone green in no way enable them to overlook their greater impacts.
• None of these means that we should not try to reduce our impacts, but we should be aware of the limits of the exercise. Our behaviour within the system cannot change the outcomes of the system. It is the system that needs to change.
• World’s richest 1% produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%. 
• If everyone aspires for higher incomes, how the earth will support its impacts.
• As growth outpaces efficiency, the total use of resources keeps rising. Efficiency with its physical limits, decoupling from the use of essential resources is impossible.
• A global growth rate of 3% means that the size of the world economy doubles every 24 years. This is why environmental crises are accelerating at such a rate. Yet the plan is to ensure that it doubles in perpetuity. 
• Perpetual growth is unsustainable on a planet that is not growing.
• Poorest 60% of the world’s people receive only 5% of the additional income generated by rising GDP. A $111 of growth is required for every $1 reduction in poverty. On current trends, it would take 200 years to ensure that everyone receives $5 a day. By this point, average per capita income will have reached $1m a year, and the economy will be 175 times bigger than it is today. This is not a formula for poverty relief. It is a formula for the destruction of everything and everyone.
• Those who see an indefinite rise in consumption as normal and necessary, are beserkers, destroying the prosperity of future generations.
• Green consumerism, material decoupling, sustainable growth are all illusions, designed to justify an economic model that is driving us to catastrophe. The current system, based on private luxury and public squalor, will eventually impoverish us all.
• We need a different system that establish the parameters by which we judge its health. We need to build a world in which growth is unnecessary, a world of private sufficiency and public luxury. And we must do it before catastrophe forces our hand.

The rising rate of homelessness in places like San Diego
is one of the signs of growing poverty in the United States.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem 

brings us face to face with another problem ... Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The only benefit of the rapid economic growth is millions of people are lifted from impacts of extreme poverty. The rest of the benefits are illusory. In the late last century, unfettered capitalism in the United States led to rapid economic expansion. This was characterized by widening class disparities and profound economic insecurity among the poor. Today, forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care.