OMNI
ECONOMIC GROWTH ANTHOLOGY #4,
September 3, 2022
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and ECOLOGY
GROWTH, EXPANSION the Dynamo of Capitalism #4
Earlier Newsletters
(#1, June 17, 2016, http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/06/growth-watch.html
#2, July 10, 2016, https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/07/growth-watch-2.html
#3, October 20, 2018, https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2018/10/omni-growth-watch-newsletter-2.html
#4 TABLE OF Contents:
PART ONE: ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE, 2016, 2019, ideologically biasedmainstream advocate of neoliberal capitalism, enemy of climate
2016 XNA Parking Deck $30 million.
2019 12% rise in traffic NWA. See George Monbiot’s corrective, “Love Flights.”
Access highway to be improved.
Welcome gas and oil Boom includes some smog.
Plastics Boom.
Coal down but some new mines.
PART TWO: RECENT COMMENTARY ON GROWTH from AROUND THE WORLD
Erald Kolasi. “Energy, Economic Growth, and Ecological Crisis.”
Conor Payne and Chris Stewart. “The end of growth? The capitalist economy & ecological crisis . “
Juan Bordera, et al. “… IPCC reveals that the growth model of capitalism is unsustainable.”
Jason Hickel. “Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance.”
Gray Maddrey. “Class Struggle Or Degrowth?” (Rev. of Climate Change as Class War by Matthew Huber).
John Bellamy Foster, et al. “Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?”
Alberto Torres. “Get rid of the GDP in comparing nations.”
TEXTS
PART ONE: ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE, 2016, OCTOBER 2019
ADG CHEER-LEADING THE NWA ARKANSAS DYNAMO OF GROWTH
ARKANSAS AIR TRAVEL UP UP AND AWAY
Despite the heavy CO2 and other toxic emissions from burning airplane fuel, NW Arkansas air travel is booming. Read Monbiot’s chapter, “Love Flights,” in his book Heat.
Ron Wood. “Parking Deck Approved for XNA.” NADG (March 17, 2016). “$30 Million Structure to Add 1,400 spaces, house car rental companies.”
Zach Wichter. (NYT News Service). “Airports Expand, Improve.” “Air travel is growing in popularity across the world, and the global aviation system is undergoing projects big and small to keep up.” “’We’re forecasting that traffic will double in the next 17 years. . . .Millions more people will be traveling.’”
“Passenger Traffic at State Airports Rises.” NADG (May 21, 2019). At both the National Airport in LR and the Regional at Highfill in NWA. A 12% jump in NWA.
Ron Wood. “State Offers Airport More Help on Road.” NADG (June 30, 2019). Accompanied by “By the Numbers”: “Enplanements are up 12.6 percent”; “Parking revenue is up $371, 000”; “Fuel taxes are up $91,000 over budget projections.”
NATIONAL OIL AND GAS EXPANDING
David Warren (AP). “Oil Boom Gets Blame for Dirty Texas Air.” NADG (5-12-19). “The production of oil and natural gas in west Texas is booming….the Permian Basin, which extends into New Mexico, is one of the most productive hydrocarbon regions in the world,” thanks to “horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. In another two years the basin will account for about 40% of all U.S. production….”
GLOBAL PETROCHEMICAL/PLASTIC PRODUCTION GOING BALLISTICS
Fran Alexander. “Not So Happily Ever After.” NADG (July 16, 2019. “Plastic production is accelerating.” “…n the space of one year…petrochemical production facilities grew by more than 25 percent.” “…plastic production is expected to almost quadruple “ by 2050. . . .”with industry planning on spending $47 billion on new plastics production…over the next decade.”
AND EVEN SOME COAL
Will Wade. Bloomberg News. “New Coal Mines Popping Up.” NADG. While coal for general electricity has “declined precipitously in the U.S. despite a revival push by President Donald Trump,” metallurgical coal is thriving.
ARKANSAS SHAREHOLDERS AND GOVERNOR JUBILANT
Martin Crutsinger. “Economy Defies Warning Signs. Buoyed by Shopping, GDP Expands by 2.1% in Third Quarter.” NADG 12-21-19.
Wickline and Moritz. “Governor Takes Oath, Promotes ‘Growth Agenda.’” NADG (1-16-19). “Remember, the voters supported a growth agenda.”
Nathan Owens. “Tyson Reports ‘Solid’ Results, Acquisition Plans.” NADG (2-8-19). “…plans to acquire poultry operations in Thailand and Europe for $340 million….”
Nathan Owens. “Tyson to Build Meat Plant in Utah.” NADG (March 11, 2019.) A $300 million meat and pork “ plant in Salt Lake City to meet “the growing demand” out West.
“Tyson Starts to build $300M Utah Plant.” NADG (10-31-19
No mention in any of the above NADGreports that financially growth mainly benefited shareholders and contributed to the growing gap between haves and have nots.
PART TWO: GLOBAL COMMENTARY ON GROWTH, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND CLIMATE CALAMITY
Erald Kolasi. “Energy, Economic Growth, and Ecological Crisis.” Monthly Review (June 2019). “Karl Marx argued that capital cannot tolerate any limits, by which he meant that the drive for growth and the search for new markets are both necessary for the…survival of capitalism.” The financial oxygen for shareholders and therefore for CEOs is growth.
And thus they keep their gaze on the GDP.
Conor Payne and Chris Stewart. The end of growth? The capitalist economy & ecological crisis Originally published: Socialist Alternative on August 11, 2021 (Posted Aug 16, 2021).
Capitalism, Ecology, Environment, Marxist EcologyGlobal, IrelandNewswireDegrowth, Greed, Planned Economy, Waste
“…the cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system and its incessant drive to accumulate profits, and that the only way to solve the crisis is to struggle for a socialist world where human need, including a sustainable relation to nature, comes before private greed.” MORE (click on title)
Juan Bordera, et al. “Leaked report of the IPCC reveals that the growth model of capitalism is unsustainable.” Mronline.org (8-24-21).
Another leak of the UN report warns that the only known way to avert climate breakdown is to avoid any model which is based on perpetual growth.
By Juan Bordera, Fernando Valladares, Antonio Turiel, Ferran Puig Vilar, Fernando Prieto, Tim Hewlett (Posted Aug 23, 2021).
Originally published: CTXT (Contexto y Acción) on August 22, 2021. Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecology, Environment, Media, Political EconomyGlobalCommentary, NewsFeatured, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
The second draft of the IPCC Group III report, focused on mitigation strategies, states that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe). It also confirms our previous reports, covered by CTXT and The Guardian, that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years”. The new leak acknowledges that there is little or no room for further economic growth.
The undersigned scientists and journalists have analyzed a new part of the Sixth Assessment Report, which has been leaked to us by the same sources as last time—Scientist Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion Spain. In this leak the usual more timid positions can be found, but also prominent statements that would have been unthinkable not long ago.
To contextualize, let’s just remember: In 1990, the First IPCC Report stated that, “the observed increase [in temperature] could be largely due to natural variability”, and although subsequent reports put this position to rest, this Sixth Report eliminates any possibility of doubt, and leaves no room for the climate denial arguments which have been historically and amply financed by those who had the most to benefit from maintaining this narrative: the fossil fuel lobbies.
The leaked report mentions that indefinite growth must be renounced. Since radical transition is required, the key question is how can a shift away from models of perpetual growth be understood as a benefit and not merely relinquishment? Any transition must take into account historic differences in emissions between countries, differences between rural and urban worlds, and above all, the tremendous growing economic inequalities between the poor and increasingly obscenely rich. If these three dichotomies are not addressed, any transition will have more opposition than support, as the draft literally sets out: MORE https://mronline.org/2021/08/23/leaked-report-of-the-ipcc-reveals-that-the-growth-model-of-capitalism-is-unsustainable/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=leaked-report-of-the-ipcc-reveals-that-the-growth-model-of-capitalism-is-unsustainable&mc_cid=6eed8e795a&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
DEGROWTH
Jason Hickel. Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance. Mronline.org (8-31-19). (Posted Aug 30, 2019)
By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but rather abundance.
Originally published: Real-World Economics Review on March 2019 (Issue no. 87).
Ecology, Imperialism, Marxism, Political EconomyGlobalCommentaryFeatured
As the climate crisis worsens and the carbon budgets set out by the Paris Agreement shrink, climate scientists and ecologists have increasingly come to highlight economic growth as a matter of concern. Growth drives energy demand up and makes it significantly more difficult –and likely infeasible–for nations to transition to clean energy quickly enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. In recent years, IPCC scientists have argued that the only feasible way to meet the Paris Agreement targets is to actively scale down the … the global economy. Reducing material throughput reduces energy demand, which makes it easier to accomplish the transition to clean energy.
Ecological economists acknowledge that this approach, known as degrowth, is likely to entail reducing aggregate economic activity as presently measured by GDP. While such a turn might seem inimical to human development, and indeed threaten to trigger a range of negative social consequences, proponents of degrowth argue that a planned reduction of throughput can be accomplished in high-income nations while at the same time maintaining and even improving people’s standards of living. Policy proposals focus on redistributing existing income, shortening the working week, and introducing a job guarantee and a living wage, while expanding access to public goods.
As debates unfold around what these policies might look like and how to implement them, here I step back to consider the deeper economic logic of degrowth theory. . . .
By Gray Maddrey, Resilience (8-17-22). Popular Resistance.org (8-18-22). In his recent book, Climate Change as Class War, Matthew Huber argues that the ecological crisis is primarily caused by the capitalist mode of production, -more-
Without Class Struggle The Emancipatory Potential Of Degrowth Will Fail To Be Realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them.
In his recent book, Climate Change as Class War, Matthew Huber argues that the ecological crisis is primarily caused by the capitalist mode of production, especially the preponderant deployment of fossil capital, ‘the forms of capital that generate profit through emissions’. For many on the anti-capitalist left, this is a conclusion that hardly bears repeating. Nevertheless, Huber is right to centre the claim. Ecological collapse is accelerating and requires immediate action. While the global average of emissions must reach zero by 2050 to stay within 1.5–2 °C heating, in order to do this at pace, the parts of the world most responsible for emissions must reach net zero by 2030. But not only are we failing to make progress toward these goals, emissions continue to rise with no end in sight. Huber puts it bluntly: ‘We’re still losing.’
We’re still losing to capitalism—but why? Because, in the first instance, Huber emphasizes, we are not really fighting it. Capitalism is uniquely defined by its class structure: capitalists, the business owners and corporate boards of directors who organize production; and workers, those they hire to carry it out. While the capitalist class comprises a relatively tiny number of people, it dominates the working class in terms of property owned and legal authority over its use. In order to make a living, workers have no option but to sell their time to capitalists in the labor market. [But workers have potential power.] However, due to its relatively immense size and leverage at the point of production—through strikes and other forms of collective action—the working class has the potential to exercise its own form of power. This is where climate struggle must be located, Huber tells us: the sites of mass emissions. Capitalism can be fundamentally challenged by nothing other than class struggle, so only class struggle can fundamentally address the ecological crisis. In this historical moment, climate change is class war. MORE https://popularresistance.org/class-struggle-or-degrowth/
Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?
by John Bellamy Foster, John Molyneux and Owen McCormack
(Dec 01, 2021)
. . . .The hard truth is that we are already, due to the continuing destruction of the planetary environment by the capitalist world economy, facing deteriorating ecological conditions, which will, in the most optimistic IPCC scenario, continue to deteriorate this century. For example, there is absolutely no hope that sea level rise can be turned around (though it might be lessened) in this century. It will continue to rise to the end of the century, and possibly for a millennium depending on what we do and how soon. Much the same could be said of megastorms, desertification (dustbowlification), and so many of the other problems facing us. Our first priorityhas to be to decrease carbon emissions as fast as possible, which in the rich countries means now by double digits annually. This would require an emergency mobilization of the whole society and controls on corporate production. It would also require social and ecological planning. This might strike one as too extreme or too utopian, but such categories do not apply when we are in the midst of a planetary emergency, which promises to be extremely dangerous (or worse) for humanity as a whole, threatening all present and future generations.
In the very beginning of the ecological era, in the mid–1970s, the Marxist sociologist Charles H. Anderson wrote a book called The Sociology of Survival: The Social Problem of Growth, in which he addressed climate change, ecological imperialism, and the enormity of the environmental problem, arguing that humanity needed an ecological revolution if it were to survive. The book disappeared almost as soon as it was published, receiving little attention from the left. Anderson, who was clearly despondent, committed suicide shortly after. But if there was one social-scientific thinker who approached reality with a vision of what the earth was facing a half century ago, it was him. He was clear that society had to be changed at every level, that capitalism and imperialism had to be transcended through a movement toward socialism, or humanity would not survive—exactly what science is telling us today.
So far, the emphasis of the ecosocialist movement has rightly been on mitigation, in the hope that we can simply stave off disaster. But now the situation has changed, and we must enter the struggle on two planes at once. Not only do we have to take those actions to guarantee the survival of civilization and humanity, but we also need to take measures to protect populations in the present, because catastrophe, in one sense or another, is now at our door. For the complete interview go tohttps://monthlyreview.org/2021/12/01/against-doomsday-scenarios/
“Get rid of the GDP in comparing nations.”
Alberto Torres. A bright note: 100 countries have included in their constitutions healthy environments as a human right. Mar 19, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210316-how-the-human-right-to-a-healthy-environment-helps-nature
#3 https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2018/10/omni-growth-watch-newsletter-2.html
END ECONOMIC GROWTH ANTHOLOGY #4