**Growth Bad – Topshelf


**Growth Good** Growth Sustainable



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**Growth Good**




Growth Sustainable



Sustainable – 2AC




Growth is infinite, every time humanity has come close to running out of something, a more efficient alternative is created


Ridley 14 [April 25, 2014, Matt Ridley, "The World's Resources Aren't Running Out," WSJ, http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156, online, RaMan]

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption. "We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund). But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty. Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls. That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less. This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm. It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on several assumptions: little technological change, an end to the 50-year fall in population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per capita income and not much improvement in the energy efficiency of the economy. Basically, that would mean a world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and oil, leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold increase in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by 2100: not so many more people needing much less carbon. In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist, estimated that the planet could hold 13.4 billion people, a number that most demographers think we may never reach. Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion, with no sign of converging on an agreed figure. Economists point out that we keep improving the productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years, world-wide. Ecologists object that these innovations rely on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are being used up faster than they are replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be maintained, let alone improved. In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina estimates that if everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need 2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just couldn't grow enough food for more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough food to support 10 billion people. Economists respond by saying that since large parts of the world, especially in Africa, have yet to gain access to fertilizer and modern farming techniques, there is no reason to think that the global land requirements for a given amount of food will cease shrinking any time soon. Indeed, Mr. Ausubel, together with his colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that, even with generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000. (So long, that is, as we don't grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.) But surely intensification of yields depends on inputs that may run out? Take water, a commodity that limits the production of food in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the year 2000 proved grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as experts had projected 30 years before. The reason was greater economy in the use of water by new irrigation techniques. Some countries, such as Israel and Cyprus, have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation. Combine these improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide, and it is highly unlikely that fresh water will limit human population. The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling. Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out. The economist and metals dealer Tim Worstall gives the example of tellurium, a key ingredient of some kinds of solar panels. Tellurium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust—one atom per billion. Will it soon run out? Mr. Worstall estimates that there are 120 million tons of it, or a million years' supply altogether. It is sufficiently concentrated in the residues from refining copper ores, called copper slimes, to be worth extracting for a very long time to come. One day, it will also be recycled as old solar panels get cannibalized to make new ones. Or take phosphorus, an element vital to agricultural fertility. The richest phosphate mines, such as on the island of Nauru in the South Pacific, are all but exhausted. Does that mean the world is running out? No: There are extensive lower grade deposits, and if we get desperate, all the phosphorus atoms put into the ground over past centuries still exist, especially in the mud of estuaries. It's just a matter of concentrating them again. In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula called IPAT, which stated that the impact of humankind was equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied again by technology. In other words, the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have. Many ecologists still subscribe to this doctrine, which has attained the status of holy writ in ecology. But the past 40 years haven't been kind to it. In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more. Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land. In 2006, Mr. Ausubel calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage). Haiti is 98% deforested and literally brown on satellite images, compared with its green, well-forested neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The difference stems from Haiti's poverty, which causes it to rely on charcoal for domestic and industrial energy, whereas the Dominican Republic is wealthy enough to use fossil fuels, subsidizing propane gas for cooking fuel specifically so that people won't cut down forests. Part of the problem is that the word "consumption" means different things to the two tribes. Ecologists use it to mean "the act of using up a resource"; economists mean "the purchase of goods and services by the public" (both definitions taken from the Oxford dictionary). But in what sense is water, tellurium or phosphorus "used up" when products made with them are bought by the public? They still exist in the objects themselves or in the environment. Water returns to the environment through sewage and can be reused. Phosphorus gets recycled through compost. Tellurium is in solar panels, which can be recycled. As the economist Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1980 book "Knowledge and Decisions," "Although we speak loosely of 'production,' man neither creates nor destroys matter, but only transforms it." Given that innovation—or "niche construction"—causes ever more productivity, how do ecologists justify the claim that we are already overdrawn at the planetary bank and would need at least another planet to sustain the lifestyles of 10 billion people at U.S. standards of living? Examine the calculations done by a group called the Global Footprint Network—a think tank founded by Mathis Wackernagel in Oakland, Calif., and supported by more than 70 international environmental organizations—and it becomes clear. The group assumes that the fossil fuels burned in the pursuit of higher yields must be offset in the future by tree planting on a scale that could soak up the emitted carbon dioxide. A widely used measure of "ecological footprint" simply assumes that 54% of the acreage we need should be devoted to "carbon uptake." But what if tree planting wasn't the only way to soak up carbon dioxide? Or if trees grew faster when irrigated and fertilized so you needed fewer of them? Or if we cut emissions, as the U.S. has recently done by substituting gas for coal in electricity generation? Or if we tolerated some increase in emissions (which are measurably increasing crop yields, by the way)? Any of these factors could wipe out a huge chunk of the deemed ecological overdraft and put us back in planetary credit. Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University in Austria is a rare example of an ecologist who takes economics seriously. He points out that his fellow ecologists have been using "human appropriation of net primary production"—that is, the percentage of the world's green vegetation eaten or prevented from growing by us and our domestic animals—as an indicator of ecological limits to growth. Some ecologists had begun to argue that we were using half or more of all the greenery on the planet. This is wrong, says Dr. Haberl, for several reasons. First, the amount appropriated is still fairly low: About 14.2% is eaten by us and our animals, and an additional 9.6% is prevented from growing by goats and buildings, according to his estimates. Second, most economic growth happens without any greater use of biomass. Indeed, human appropriation usually declines as a country industrializes and the harvest grows—as a result of agricultural intensification rather than through plowing more land. Finally, human activities actually increase the productio (sometimes too much, causing algal blooms in water). In places like the Nile delta, wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing human food. If I could have one wish for the Earth's environment, it would be to bring together the two tribes—to convene a grand powwow of ecologists and economists. I would pose them this simple question and not let them leave the room until they had answered it: How can innovation improve the environment?


Sustainable – Markets

Dedevelopment relies on a flawed market analysis, infinite growth is possible


Ridley 14 [April 25, 2014, Matt Ridley, "The World's Resources Aren't Running Out," WSJ, http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156, online, RaMan]

While current economic growth seems to do more good than harm for overall environmental quality, worries about the effects of growth on the environment make a lot of sense. The early stages of economic growth brought much environmental damage, and countries like China and India are now going 28 THE NEW ZEALAND INITIATIVE through what the developed world experienced 50–100 years ago. Pollution is real and can sometimes require government regulation as a solution. By contrast, worries that the world will run out of critical resources make far less sense, while arguments that economics cannot handle scarcity make no sense at all. In 1972, the Club of Rome predicted that the world would run out of oil by 2003 if oil consumption did not slow down, and by 1992 if consumption continued to grow. Opponents of suburban expansion tell us that farmland will become too scarce if urban growth is not limited. In the early 2010s, there were worries that China was monopolising access to a few ‘rare earth’ elements necessary for high-tech manufacturing, with the potential to strangle Western access. And David Attenborough says only madmen and economists believe infinite growth is possible in a finite world.53 All these stories ultimately rest on mistakes about how markets work. Economist Harold Hotelling explained the economics of non-renewable resources in 1931.54 Imagine you owned a large deposit of a non-renewable resource – say, iron. Imagine further that the only thing in the world that you cared about was profits. How fast should you pull all your iron out of the ground and sell it? The naïve answer – as fast as you can! – is not right. In fact, it is an answer that throws away money. Pulling everything out of the ground in a hurry is generally more expensive than a slower approach. Suppose you could either mine all the ore this year, all the ore next year, or some this year and some next year. Hotelling showed that miners would pull ore out of the ground until the profits from mining this year, plus interest on those earnings, were the same as the profits expected from mining ore next year and selling it then. Miners then will not simply extract ore as quickly as possible. Instead, they will weigh up current interest rates, current production costs, expected future production costs, and expected future prices. Even when the only thing they care about is profit, tomorrow’s profits count, too. And $1.05 in profits tomorrow is worth more than a $1 profit today, if the interest rate is less than 5%. In the simple Hotelling model, the world never runs out of any resource. The prices of all resources slowly increase over time, in line with interest rates, THE CASE FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH 29 unless technological innovation changes the costs of mining or makes it easier to use less of the resource. What does this mean in the real world? It means we need not worry much about running out of things. As relative scarcity increases, so too does relative price. Companies have no incentive to try and pull everything out of the ground now if they expect prices to rise, and increasing relative scarcity drives prices upwards. As prices rise, technology adapts both to increase the effective supply of the commodity – by making previously unfeasible reserves viable – and to figure out how to use alternative, relatively less scarce materials instead. As oil prices rose from the mid-1970s and consumers demanded more fuelefficient cars, substitutes for oil were found and previously uneconomical reserves became worth exploiting. Rising oil prices first encouraged innovation in the Alberta oil sands, then brought us massive amounts of cheap natural gas through hydraulic fracturing. And the rare earths crisis fizzled to nothing as the threat of increased prices both encouraged manufacturers to consider other alternatives and provided incentives for new rare earths mining outside China.55 If urbanisation ever turned any substantial amount of farmland into subdivisions, the consequent rise in the value of farmland and price of food would both encourage innovation in improving crop yields and in developing denser urban living environments. None of these innovative responses to price changes would have surprised Julian Simon. In The Ultimate Resource, Simon argued that while physical resources are finite, human ingenuity in using those resources is infinite.56 Doom-laden predictions of scarcity end-times might sell papers, but they consistently fail because they ignore our capacity to improve.

Growth solves all resource shortages and makes itself sustainable – we can grow for thousands of years


Worstall 12(Tim Worstall, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith institute in London, expert on rare earth elements, "We are nowhere near hitting 'peak oil', because we keep inventing new ways of extracting the stuff", 7/6/12, blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100018350/so-thats-the-end-of-peak-oil-then//Aspomer)

Peak oil always was a silly thing to panic over and now we've the UK's very own High Priest of the Church of Gaia telling us so. George Monbiot used his column this week to point out that we're not running out of oil and the wells are not going to run dry anytime soon. Supply is increasing rather nicely. As he says: The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that. Any economist could have told him that. Resource constraints are always an economic problem: solved by the price mechanism. It was never true that we would run out of oil – it just gets more expensive. At a higher price, people use less and go and hunt for more. Both have happened: the amount of oil (or energy of any kind) used to produce one dollar of GDP has been falling for decades now. Techniques to extract more have been developed as those prices rise. And I'm afraid that people don't seem to understand the implications of those new techniques. Take the Macondo field drilled by BP. Yes, a disaster in the Gulf: but also the deepest well ever drilled. Having developed the technology to drill so deeply we have not only discovered one new oil field – we've also discovered a whole new Earth that we can explore for oil. That part of the entire globe that between 4,000 and 5,000 feet below the surface. Inventing fracking does not mean just extracting gas from Pennsylvania or oil from the Bakken. It means prospecting the whole planet again for such deposits. New technologies mean we have invented whole new planets to explore for resources. This does not apply only to peak oil or peak gas. There are those out there who worry about peak copper, peak indium and even peak tellurium (an odd one when we use 125 tonnes a year and there's 120 million tonnes in the crust). None of these are geological problems, they are all plain and simple economic ones. This is not to say that the world is free from problems. As Monbiot points out, if you care to worry about such things, having so much more oil might boil us all. But we already know the solution to that, a simple carbon tax. For we are not running out of the things that are subject to the price system. We are finding problems with things like the atmosphere, clean water, fisheries, which are not subject to it. The answer is therefore to introduce the price system to those natural resources so that we don't run out of them.

Sustainable – Self-Correcting




Growth is sustainable, self-correcting and innovative


Seabra, 14-

Leo has a background in Communication and Broadcasting and a broad experience which includes activities in Marketing, Advertising, Sales and Public Relations, writes about technology, digital media, sports, travels, food and sustainability, 2/27, “Capitalism can drive Sustainability and also innovation,” http://seabraaffairs.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/capitalism-can-drive-sustainability-and-also-innovation/


There are those who say that if the world does not change their habits, even the end of economic growth, and assuming alternative ways of living, will be a catastrophe. “Our lifestyles are unsustainable. Our expectations of consumption are predatory.Either we change this, or will be chaos”. Others say that the pursuit of unbridled economic growth and the inclusion of more people in consumption is killing the Earth. We have to create alternative because economic growth is pointing to the global collapse. “What will happen when billions of Chinese decide to adopt the lifestyle of Americans?” I’ll disagree if you don’t mind… They might be wrong. Completely wrong .. Even very intelligent people wrongly interpret the implications of what they observe when they lose the perspective of time. In the vast scale of time (today, decades, not centuries) it is the opposite of what expected, because they start from a false assumption: the future is the extrapolation of this. But not necessarily be. How do I know? Looking at history. What story? The history of innovation, this thing generates increases in productivity, wealth, quality of life in an unimaginable level. It is innovation that will defeat pessimism as it always did. It was innovation that made life today is incomparably better than at any other time in human history. And will further improve. Einstein, who was not a stupid person, believed that capitalism would generate crisis, instability, and growing impoverishment. He said: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the true source of evil.” The only way to eliminate this evil, he thought, was to establish socialism, with the means of production are owned by the company. A centrally controlled economy would adjust the production of goods and services the needs of people, and would distribute the work that needed to be done among those in a position to do so. This would guarantee a livelihood to every man, women and children. Each according to his possibilities. To each according to their needs. And guess what? What happened was the opposite of what Einstein predicted. Who tried the model he suggested, impoverished, screwed up. Peter Drucker says that almost of all thinking people of the late nineteenth century thought that Marx was right: there would be increased exploitation of workers by employers. They would become poorer, until one day, the thing would explode. Capitalist society was considered inherently unsustainable. It is more or less the same chat today. Bullshit. Capitalism, with all appropriate regulations, self-corrects. It is an adaptive system that learns and changes by design. The design is just for the system to learn and change. There was the opposite of what Einstein predicted, and held the opposite of what many predict, but the logic that “unlike” only becomes evident over time. It wasn’t obvious that the workers are those whom would profit from the productivity gains that the management science has begun to generate by organizing innovations like the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone .. to increase the scale of production and cheapen things. The living conditions of workers today are infinitely better than they were in 1900. They got richer, not poorer .. You do not need to work harder to produce more (as everyone thought), you can work less and produce more through a mechanism that is only now becoming apparent, and that brilliant people like Caetano Veloso still ignores. The output is pursuing growth through innovation, growth is not giving up. More of the same will become unsustainable to the planet, but most of it is not what will happen, will happen more different, than we do not know what is right. More innovative. Experts, such as Lester Brown, insist on statements like this: if the Chinese also want to have three cars for every four inhabitants, as in the U.S. today, there will be 1.1 billion cars there in 2030, and there is no way to build roads unless ends with the whole area used for agriculture. You will need 98 million barrels of oil per day, but the world only produces about 90 million today, and probably never produce much more. The mistake is to extrapolate today’s solutions for the future. We can continue livinghere for 20 years by exploiting the same resources that we explore today? Of course not. But the other question is: how can we encourage the stream of innovations that will enable the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Africans .. to live so as prosperous asAmericans live today? Hey, wake up … what can not stop the engine of innovation is that the free marketengenders. This system is self correcting, that is its beauty. We do not need to do nothing but ensure the conditions for it to work without distortion. The rest he does himself. It regulates itself.


A2 “Buchanan”




Growth is sustainable – production can be increased without using more energy


Krugman ’14 (Paul, American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, “Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth, NY Times)

Environmental pessimism makes strange bedfellows. We seem to be having a moment in which three groups with very different agendas — anti-environmentalist conservatives, anti-capitalist people on the left, and hard scientists who think they are smarter than economists — have formed an unholy alliance on behalf of the proposition that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is incompatible with growing real GDP. The right likes this argument because they want to use it to block any action on climate; some on the left like it because they think it can be the basis for an attack on our profit-oriented, materialistic society; the scientists like it because it lets them engage in some intellectual imperialism, invading another field (just to be clear, economists do this all the time, often with equally bad results.) A few days ago Mark Buchanan at Bloomberg published a piece titled “Economists are blind to the limits of growth” making the standard hard-science argument. And I do mean standard; not only does he make the usual blithe claims about what economists never think about; even his title is almost exactly the same as the classic (in the sense of classically foolish) Jay Forrester book that my old mentor, Bill Nordhaus, demolished so effectively forty years ago. Buchanan says that it’s not possible to have something bigger — which is apparently what he thinks economic growth has to mean — without using more energy, and declares that “I have yet to see an economist present a coherent argument as to how humans willsomehow break free from such physical constraints.” Of course, he’s never seen such a thing because he’s never looked. But anyway, let me offer an example that I ran across when working on other issues. It’s by no means the most important example of how to get by with less energy, and in no sense enough by itself to make that much difference. But it is, I think, a useful corrective to the rigorous-sounding but actually silly notion that you can’t produce more without using more energy. So, let’s talk about slow steaming. After 2008, when oil prices rose sharply, shipping companies — which send massive container ships on regular “pendulum routes”, taking stuff (say) from Rotterdam to China and back again — responded by reducing the speed of their ships. It turns out that steaming more slowly reduces fuel consumption more than proportionately to the reduction in speed. So what happens when you switch to slow steaming? Any one ship will carry less freight over the course of a year, because it can do fewer swings of the pendulum (although the number of trips won’t fall as much as the reduction in speed, because the time spent loading and unloading doesn’t change.) But you can still carry as much freight as before, simply by using more ships — that is, by supplying more labor and capital. If you do that, output — the number of tons shipped — hasn’t changed; but fuel consumption has fallen. And of course by using still more ships, you can combine higher output with less fuel consumption. There is, despite what some people who think they’re being sophisticated somehow believe, no reason at all that you can’t produce more while using less energy. It’s not a free lunch — it requires more of other inputs — but that’s just ordinary economics. Energy is just an input like other inputs. Some other points here: notice that we are not talking about having to develop a new technology; slow steaming is just a choice, not a technological advance, and in fact it doesn’t even require that you change the equipment — you’re just using the same ships differently. Given time to redesign ships for fuel efficiency, and maybe to develop new technologies, it would presumably be possible to ship the same amount of cargo with even less energy consumption, but that’s not necessary to make the case that growth and less energy can go together. So where does the notion that energy is somehow special come from? Mainly, I’d say, from not thinking about concrete examples. When you read this stuff you hear lots of metaphors about bacteria or whatever, nothing about shipping or manufacturing — because if you think about actual economic activities even briefly, it becomes obvious that there are tradeoffs that could let you produce more while using less energy. And greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the same thing as energy consumption, either; there’s a lot of room to reduce emissions without killing economic growth. If you think you’ve found a deep argument showing that this isn’t possible, all you’ve done is get confused by your own word games.


Energy is NOT a hard limit to growth – productive use of energy means we won’t run out


Worstall ’14 (Tim,  Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, “Mark Buchanan still isn’t Understanding Paul Krugman (Or Me) on the Limits to Growth”, Forbes)

As I’ve mentioned before when we get physicists trying to do economics then the result we end up with tends not to actually be economics. And so it is with Mark Buchanan’s rebuttal to Paul Krugman’s point about energy availability being a limit to growth. The problem is that Buchanan wants to insist that energy is going to be a hard limit to growth. Economic growth will just stop at one point for there’s not infinite energy and therefore there cannot be infinite economic growth. He’s simply not grasping the point that the economists are trying to tell him. Sure, the provision of energy is something that produces a restraint upon growth, no one at all is doubting that (just ask any economist whether free and unlimited energy would increase the growth rate. Given that it would that we’ve not got free and unlimited energy is obviously a restraint upon the current growth rate) but energy is not a hard limit on future economic growth. Buchanan’s response to Krugman’s mauling of his original argument is here: So, I can’t PROVE that higher GDP will always necessarily mean more energy used, but that’s the way it’s been so far, and even in the very recent past. Of course, I’d be surprised if a determined search through history couldn’t dig up a few special cases, especially over short periods of time, where GDP up and yet energy consumption went down. The point is that this doesn’t typically happen, especially for economic activity on national or global scales. Make things more energy efficient and we end up using them to consume more energy overall. That’s a broad empirical reality. Sure, we all agree that economic growth has meant higher energy use. No one at all is doubting that empirical reality. For we’ve only ever faced a restraint on our energy supplies, not a hard limit. We’ve always had to do some more work, dig up more coal, drill more oil, deploy more solar panels, in order to get that extra energy. And we’ve done so too. However, in order to insist that the availability of energy will at some point make further economic growth impossible you’ve also got to believe both of the following two things. Firstly, that there’s some limit to how much energy we can abstract from the system to do useful work. I’m perfectly willing to agree that CO2 emissions lead to a limit on the volume of fossil fuels we can usefully consume. But given insolation there’s no actual shortage of energy we could capture. Or, at least, not a shortage that’s of any importance at all or us on any human timescale. We could start to talk about 15,000 AD after another 13 millennia of exponential growth (an entirely made up number) and the like but I have great difficulty in believing that that’s something that should inform current policy debates. So I don’t actually believe that we face a hard energy limit anyway. But that brings us to the second: that if we do face a hard energy limit then growth will have to stop. And that’s where Buchanan isn’t listening. OK, let’s say he’s right. The efficiency with which we use energy rises over time but not as fast as economic growth. If we face a hard energy limit then there is obviously going to be a restraint upon that growth: we wouldn’t be able to grow the economy faster than we can increase the efficiency of energy usage in producing economic value. That’s just obvious. But all that does is mean that a hard energy limit is a restraint upon economic growth: that growth would still continue (sorry, could continue, there’s always the possibility that we’ll elect socialists and growth will stop) but at that slower rate at which we increase the productivity of the limited amount of energy that we’ve got. Buchanan’s just not understanding what he’s being told. That increasing productivity of energy use means that even if we’re limited to, say, 1,000GW of energy a year for the planet then we can still have economic growth. Because we will, over time, become more efficient at producing economic value from that 1,000 GW. Energy isn’t a hard restriction upon economic growth, it’s just a restraint.

A2 “Complexity”




Complexity is not a problem and it’s inevitable


Tainter 2009 (Joseph Tainter, professor of environment and society at Utah State University, “Interview with Joseph Tainter on Collapse,” 11/3/09 http://varnelis.net/blog/interview_with_joseph_tainter_on_collapse//Mkoo
So as civilizations develop, you conclude, they differentiate—for example, by creating highly specialized social roles—and build greater and greater levels of organization that require higher investment of energy to maintain. Eventually the marginal returns on investment decline and civilizations either figure out how to deal with that situation or collapse. You note that from the perspective of humans as a species and hominadae as a family, complexity is quite unusual. Most of our existence has been in small settlements or nomadic groups that have relatively little differentiation and low levels of complexity. Today we are living in the most complex society that has ever existed, yet we’ve avoided collapse thus far. Why is that? JT: Diminishing returns to complexity are probably inevitable, but collapse doesn’t necessarily follow. Collapses are actually not that common. There are several ways to cope with diminishing returns to complexity. One is to find energy subsidies to pay for the process. That is what we have done with fossil fuels. And it is a big part of why a future crisis in fossil fuels is the most important thing we should be worrying about.

A2 “Debt”




Debt won’t hurt us – their analysis misunderstands the debt


Krugman 12 (Paul, economist, 1-1-12, "Nobody Understands Debt" New York Times) www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html
In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit. This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least. Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now! Photo Paul Krugman Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics. But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size. Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments. This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways. First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation. Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves. This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history. But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think. It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

A2 “K-Waves”



Kondratieff wave theory empirically false

North 09 (Gary, economist and publisher and PhD in history from the University of California, Riverside, The Myth of the Kondratieff Wave, http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north725.html, 6/27/09, AD: 7/6/09)
THE K-WAVE These days, the Kondratieff Wave has a spiffy new name: the K-Wave. (I can almost hear it: "Attention: K-Wave shoppers!") The K-Wave is supposedly going to bring a deflationary collapse Real Soon Now. The Western world's debt structure will disappear in a wave of defaults. Kondratieff's 54-year cycle is almost upon us. Again. The last deflationary period ended in 1933. This became clear no later than 1940. World War II orders from Great Britain, funded by American loans and Federal Reserve policy, ended the Great Depression by lowering real wages. In 1942, price and wage controls were imposed by Washington, the FED began pumping out new money, ration stamps replaced the free market, the black market overcame shortages, and the inflationary era began. That was a long time ago. But the K-Wave is heralded as a 50 to 60-year cycle, or even more specifically, a 54-year cycle. That's the entire cycle, trough to trough or peak to peak. The K-Wave supposedly should have bottomed in 1933, risen for 27 years (1960), declined in economic contraction until 1987, and boomed thereafter. The peak should therefore be in 2014. There is a problem here: the cyclical decline from 1960 to 1987. It never materialized. Prices kept rising, escalating with a vengeance after 1968, then slowing somewhat – just in time for the longest stock market boom in American history: 1982–2000. OK, say the K-Wavers: let's extend the cycle to 60 years. Fine. Let's do just that. Boom, 1932–62; bust, 1963–93; boom, 1994–2024. Does this correspond to anything that happened in American economic history since 1932? No.
Empirics prove

North 09(Gary, economist and publisher and PhD in history from the University of California, Riverside, The Myth of the Kondratieff Wave, http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north725.html, 6/27/09, AD: 7/6/09)
You may think that I am devoting way too much space to this. But I want my readers to understand why Kondratieff was wrong in 1925. His popularizers were even more wrong in 1975–85, with their "idealized" chart, and their contemporary heirs' unwillingness to learn from the fact that the downward phase of the cycle is now 44 years late. It should have begun no later than Kennedy's administration: 1932+30=1962. This assumes that the original downward phase was due in 1932. It wasn't. It was due around 1926: 1896+30=1926. It should have lasted until 1956. But 1945–73 was a boom era, with mild recessions and remarkable economic growth per capita. Forget about a K-Wave which is going to produce price deflation. The Federal Reserve System remains in control. Sorry about that. It is creating new money. Long-term price deflation of 5% per annum is not in the cards or the charts – anywhere. I recommend that you not take seriously arguments to the contrary that are based on the latest updated version of the K-Wave. The K-Wave forecasted that secular deflation was just around the corner, repeatedly, ever since 1932. It wasn't.

A2 “Peak Oil”



Peak oil is false

Mead 12 (Walter Russell, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, 7/15/12, “Energy Revolution 2: A Post Post-American Post” The American Interest) http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/07/15/energy-revolution-2-a-post-post-american-post/
Forget peak oil; forget the Middle East. The energy revolution of the 21st century isn’t about solar energy or wind power and the “scramble for oil” isn’t going to drive global politics. The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 2oth centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century in which the location of the world’s energy resources and the structure of the world’s energy trade support American affluence at home and power abroad. By some estimates, the United States has more oil than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran combined, and Canada may have even more than the United States. A GAO report released last May (pdf link can be found here) estimates that up to the equivalent of 3 trillion barrels of shale oil may lie in just one of the major potential US energy production sites. If half of this oil is recoverable, US reserves in this one deposit are roughly equal to the known reserves of the rest of the world combined. Edward Luce, an FT writer usually more given to tracing America’s decline than to promoting its prospects, cites estimates that as early as 2020 the US may be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia. So dramatic are America’s finds, analysts talk of the US turning into the world’s new Saudi Arabia by 2020, with up to 15m barrels a day of liquid energy production (against the desert kingdom’s 11m b/d this year). Most of the credit goes to private sector innovators, who took their cue from the high oil prices in the last decade to devise ways of tapping previously uneconomic underground reserves of “tight oil” and shale gas. And some of it is down to plain luck. Far from reaching its final frontier, America has discovered new ones under the ground.

A2 “Population”



Growth results in lower population – Bangladesh study proves

Hasan 06 (Mohammad, Department of Finance and Economics, AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION TO DETERMINE THE LONG-RUN RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULATION GROWTH AND PER CAPITA INCOME IN BANGLADESH, http://www.bdiusa.org/Publications/JBS/Volumes/Volume7/JBS7.2-2-Part-1.pdf, 2/20/06, AD: 7/6/09)
This paper empirically examines the nature of the time-series relationship between population growth and per capita income growth using the annual data of Bangladesh within the framework of cointegration methodology. This study finds evidence of a long-run stationary relationship between population and per capita income. Our results also indicate a bi-directional or feedback relationship between population and per capita income. The results of a negative causality flowing from per capita income to population growth appear to indicate that per capita income tends to lower the population growth. Likewise, population growth positively contributes to the growth of per capita income.



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