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 biased mainstream 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 NADG
reports 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 priority
has 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 to https://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
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