Environmentalists have been asking some pretty tough questions of economists for the last 50 years.
In Natural Capitalism Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken point out that of every 100 units of raw material that goes into our industrial system only 6 per cent is still in use after six months. So 94 per cent is waste!
Or think about this: with just 5 per cent of the population, North Americans consume 33 per cent of the world's resources. So if everyone else in the world consumed as much as we do, we'd need another six planets to provide!
Clearly we can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. As one of my mentors, Thomas Berry used to say: Economics, as it is currently practised, is a form of pathology:
Ask any economist and they will tell you that GDP growth is good. So if more people get cancer, that's great, because spending on health care increases. When BP's rig in the Gulf of Mexico spills 4.9-million barrels of oil that's great because BP has to spend billions cleaning it up -- so GDP grows.
And when the U.S. goes to war in Iraq and Afghanistan that's FANTASTIC because the lifetime spending due to that war will be somewhere between 2.7- and 6-TRILLON dollars, according to Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that more cancer, catastrophe and war are not good.
Herman Daly, the former Senior Economist for the World Bank asks, is GDP measuring wealth or ilth?
Can any economist say that more cancer, more childhood asthma, more oil spills, more pollution in China, more species extinction, more tropical rain forest destruction, and more war represents more prosperity?
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