Communists Support Economic Growth
YouTube transcript
Hello there
I just want to discuss the communist view of economic growth. Unlike the greenies, we communists fully support economic growth. It is really appalling that a majority of people on this planet live in dreadful poverty and most other people have pretty ordinary living standards. All of us should have spacious modern housing with water, sewerage, heating and cooling and all the mod cons like refrigerators and washing machines. And we all should have access to excellent transport and medical care.
Furthermore, and very importantly, you cannot base communism on shared poverty. It has to be based on shared prosperity. Greenies unfortunately don't agree with this view. According to them, providing everyone in the world with a half decent living standard would destroy the planet and anyway we can all be happy living the "simple" life.
History quite clearly shows the political implications of poverty. For example, as the Middle Ages illustrate it only requires a small band of thugs who would prefer to live off everybody else’s hard work and you end up with a very nasty class society. Also when assessing the experience of the Soviet Union, and the various regimes derived from it, it is important to keep in mind their backward economic conditions as a factor in determining how things turned out there.
With high levels of material prosperity, the benefits of having more than everyone else are far outweighed by the benefits of living in a society based on mutual regard rather than mutual antagonism - in other words communism rather than capitalism.
I think there are two questions we need to ask when looking at whether growth is sustainable. Firstly, are we constrained by our access to depletable resources? These resources include fuel such as uranium for nuclear power, metals such as iron and copper, and minerals such as phosphorous and potassium for agriculture. Secondly, as we grow are we going to have an unsustainable impact on the natural environment?
OK let's look first at depletable resources. While these are generally abundant, extracting them is going to become more challenging. We will have to dig more deeply into the ground to find them and when we do find them they will be in a form that requires more processing. Then in some cases we will eventually need to exploit resources on the ocean floor and further down the track extra-terrestrial sources such as the moon, the asteroid belt and Mars. These greater efforts will require increasing amounts of energy and capital equipment. However, we are nowhere near the situation predicted by the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth Report where they claim that most of our depletable resources will be devoted to their own extraction so that little is left for anything else including replacing worn out capital, with the result that the economy collapses. In fact at the moment the metals and other materials used in extraction are a tiny fraction of the total and the increased energy required in the future could be met from future generation of nuclear power plants which will rely on fuels that are abundant, readily accessible and will be used far more efficiently than they are at present.
To some degree our difficulties will be reduced by new technologies, for example better mining methods. Also our uses of resources will not grow as fast as the economy because of recycling and so-called de-materialization where we get the same outcome but with less material. Good examples are digital music distribution replacing CDs and making metals stronger so that less is needed for a given function.
OK question number 2. Can we grow without having unsustainable impacts on nature?
Let's start with forests. Does economic growth really require us to continue trashing them? No, certainly not. We can reduce our use of timber by relying on other materials for building construction and furniture. And we can greatly reduce our use of paper by relying on the electronic printed word and by the use of fancier toilets.
What about food production for a world with more people to feed and with lots of them wanting to eat more meat? I think the answer lies with new technologies that increase food production while requiring less land, water and chemicals. The breeding of better plants and farm animals will provide higher yields for given resources. Then there is so-called precision farming. This uses drones, GPS, satellite imagery and other technology to get the best result from every square inch of cropland while not wasting water, fertilizer and pesticide. We will also find ways to get round the high resource intensity of meat. These include producing meat and milk without the animal and also more palatable vegetarian meat substitutes. We can also expect to see the development of techniques to convert indigestible cellulose in plants into digestible starch. This means we will be able to eat the stalks and leaves as well as the grain.
Will an increasing population with more housing, infrastructure and factories have to mean an endless encroachment on the planet's land surface? I don't think so. With the help of cheap and plentiful energy and better construction methods and materials we will find it much easier to build to greater heights and also to dig underground.
Does economic growth have to mean an increasing waste stream of pollution into the air and waterways? Once again. No. To start with most air pollution is due to emissions from fossil fuels and will decline as we reduce or clean up their use. We can expect to see industrial pollution of our waterways reduced with cleaner technologies and more effective treatment and clean-up methods. The problems with domestic waste can be overcome through better separation, treatment and disposal.
What about greenhouse gases? The solution is the development and adoption of a range of emission free technologies. In the case of energy, there will be lots of ways of avoiding them. These include nuclear fission, enhanced geothermal and further down the track nuclear fusion. Renewable energy can also play a modest role.
Then there is the capture and storage or treatment of CO2 emissions. This could allow the continued use of fossil fuels and also industrial processes where CO2 is a by-product, in particular steel and cement production.
In the case of methane the other major greenhouse gas, there is a lot we can do to prevent it from leaking out of mines and landfill.
Of course it is all very well to argue that it is physically or technically possible to grow without trashing the environment. But is it actually possible under capitalism where environmental damage often does not affect the bottom line? I think we can expect quite a lot of trashing of forests and pollution of air and water as the poorer countries develop. Although, development in some regions will also see a number of reduced environmental impacts. I am thinking here of less reliance on wood for fuel and less soil depletion through more modern farming methods. Also newer technologies tend to be cleaner and tidier, and as countries get richer there is increasing political pressure to reduce environmental damage and remedy past damage.
However, the biggest source of uncertainty is greenhouse gas emissions. At the moment there are no technologies as cheap as fossil fuels. The claims that renewables are becoming close to cost competitive is nonsense particularly when you take the need for storage and transmission into account and the need to convert all transport to electricity. So there needs to be a lot more research and development to create alternatives. Bill Gates has been vigorously arguing for this. We must hope he can generate more action.
What effect will continuing CO2 emissions have on our ability to pursue the economic growth path? I am a bit of a luke-warmist so I am not expecting more than a temporary slowdown in economic growth as we deal with the consequences.
Even with the far from adequate effort we put into pure scientific research, I think we can still expect some very important breakthroughs in coming decades that will greatly boost our ability to deal with the material world.
See you next time.
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