**Growth Bad – Topshelf

Unsustainable – Energy

It’s unsustainable—energy increases alone as a result of growth lead to extinction, even if they somehow solve carbon dioxide

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, for example, chides natural scientists for thinking of growth as a "crude, physical thing, a matter simply of producing more stuff." They fail to appreciate, he suggests, that growth is about innovation and deciding which technologies and resources to use.

Allow me to explain why I am one of those scientists who are preoccupied with the physical. Economists are correct in saying that growth doesn't necessarily require more pollution, more carbon pumped into the atmosphere or more deforestation, even though we're getting all of the above today. Humans can learn, and we might figure out how to grow differently in the future, separating the benefits from the environmental costs.

There's just one crucial exception: energy.

Growth inevitably entails doing more stuff of one kind or another, whether it's manufacturing things or transporting people or feeding electricity to Facebook server farms or providing legal services. All this activity requires energy. We are getting more efficient in using it: The available data suggest that the U.S. uses about half as much per dollar of economic output as it did 30 years ago. Still, the total amount of energy we consume increases every year.

Data from more than 200 nations from 1980 to 2003 fit a consistent pattern: On average, energy use increases about 70 percent every time economic output doubles. This is consistent with other things we know from biology. Bigger organisms as a rule use energy more efficiently than small ones do, yet they use more energy overall. The same goes for cities. Efficiencies of scale are never powerful enough to make bigger things use less energy.

I have yet to see an economist present a coherent argument as to how humans will somehow break free from such physical constraints. Standard economics doesn't even discuss how energy is tied into growth, which it sees as the outcome of interactions between capital and labor.

Why does using ever more energy matter? For one, it feeds directly into all the bad things we're trying to stop doing -- polluting, destroying forests, wiping out habitats, covering the planet with an ever-denser network of roads. Our energy use -- either by design or by accident -- always ends up changing the environment in one way or another.

Then there's the issue of climate change. Even if by some miracle we act to fix carbon-dioxide levels soon, that won't actually be a lasting solution. If energy consumption follows the historical trend, by 2150 or so the waste heat alone will warm the Earth as much as carbon dioxide is doing now. We'll have yet another global warming problem.

I'm not sure how economics broke free from the laws of physics and biology. Maybe we'll eventually leave the planet and live among the stars, escaping the limits of our Earth. Those dreams aside, the physical limits to growth apply as much to us as they would to a colony of bacteria expanding into a jar of sugar water.

The irony is that economists love to talk about trade-offs and constraints. There are no free lunches, they like to say. Yet when it looks as if the unbridled optimism of economic growth itself is running into a wall, they prefer to look the other way.

Unsustainable – Heat

The planet cannot sustain economic growh at the rate we are continuing at, the oceans will literally boil due to energy consumption, not just because of CO2

(Theo, Can the world get richer for ever?, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31868506

Since the dawn of the industrial age, the world has been steadily getting wealthier, despite setbacks such as the Great Depression and the more recent global financial crisis. We make more, sell more and consume more than ever before. Yet, according to the United Nations, nearly three billion people still live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) per day. So, how can we raise living standards for those who still live in poverty? The answer, according to most governments, is rapid economic growth. Growth is seen as a panacea for a great many ills. It creates jobs, erodes debts and raises living standards. For politicians, it also generates votes. It is almost universally seen as a Good Thing. Journalists are complicit in this. We frequently describe rapid growth as "robust". Slower growth is "anaemic" and an economy in recession is often portrayed as "sick" or "ailing". 'Boiling the oceans' Yet there's a problem here. We live on a finite planet, but growth is exponential. So an annual increase in gross domestic product (GDP) of 3% might not sound like much - but it means an economy will double in size every 23 years. Continued growth could cause long-term damage to the planet So does this matter? According to Tom Murphy, professor of physics at the University of California San Diego, it definitely does, as economic growth goes hand in hand with increasing energy consumption. "From a physical point of view, if we grew at 3% a year, in about 400 years' time we would actually be boiling the oceans - not because of global warming and CO2, but just because of the heat that is a natural by-product of the energy that we use," he says. These physical constraints, Prof Murphy says, will start to have an impact - for example, by creating cycles of boom and bust - and will make long-term growth impossible.