On listening to those campaign speeches

I am certainly not an economist, and often don't understand the discussions on the financial sector that I hear on the various news programs I listen to. But this is something I do know: nothing grows forever. This is a fundamental law. Something is "born" -- whether it be a planet, a biological species, an individual tree, or animal...or a nation, a national policy. It grows, sometimes slowly (like over eons), sometimes quite quickly, it matures, and eventually growth slows, eventually what begins to take place is the opposite of growth: signs of aging, illness, erosion, deterioration of one sort or another, depending on what the thing is. And, eventually, there's death, the end of the whatever. If it's not a complete death -- as in the case of most nations in the world -- it's the death of whatever is the current culture within that nation, so that what then begins to grow is a different version of that nation.

And this is what happens to absolutely everything. And yet, everybody is yelling: we need more growth, we've got to come up with ways to get the economy growing again. Building and buying more cars, more houses, more clothes, more electronic gadgets...an economy based on more and more (in other words, growth) of absolutely everything simply cannot continue forever. The planet, staggering under the weight of billions of people, more and more of whom are insisting on the same kind of economic growth that the industrialized countries have long taken for granted and insist must continue unfettered for them...well, the planet will simply buckle.

And yes, I do realize that plenty of other people have pointed this out before, beginning with 1972's The Limits to Growth, by Donella H. Meadows et al, continuing through the same group's updates of their original work, published in 1992 and 2004. A 2010 study entitled "A Comparison of the Limits of Growth with Thirty Years of Reality" concluded: "The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features… [of the Limits to Growth's] ‘standard run’ scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st Century."* So they've said it, these environmental and social scientists, based on their computer simulations and mathematical calculations, and I'm saying it, based on observation and common sense. But is anybody listening?

I honestly think President Obama, in his early pushing of alternative forms of energy, was acknowledging the limits to the growth of oil consumption as the backbone of our energy policy. But now he's singing the same song as everyone else, because that's what people want to hear, and this is an election year: we gotta grow, grow, grow...and quickly!  No time for research and development, no time to gradually get new kinds of industries, that would be aimed at more sustanable forms of energy, up and running.

And yes, I also know that this is what much of the "green" movement is all about, that there is a "sustainable growth" movement, both here and in Europe. But it's painfully small and lacking in power, compared with the hysterical push for unfettered growth.

So what do you supposed a collapse of the global system will look like?

*Turner, Graham. A Comparison of the Limits of Growth with Thirty Years of Reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series, (2010). Available at: http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf