Environmental limits to economic growth:
An economy that forever chases more is destined to fail.
The economy is a sub-system of the environment. All of the inputs to the economy come from the environment and all of the wastes produced by it return to the environment. As the economy grows it requires more resources and discharges more wastes.
Since we live on a finite planet with limited resources it is
not possible for the economy to grow forever.
For the vast majority of human history the size of the economy was small compared to the size of the biosphere. But over the past century or so the economy has grown massively and the balance has shifted. Between 1900 and 2005 world economic output increased by a factor of 24 from $2 trillion to $47 trillion.
This incredible increase in economic activity has resulted in an equally incredible increase in the use of resources and energy. Humanity now uses eleven times as much energy and eight times the weight of material resources every year as it did only a century ago.
Recent research indicates that humanity has transgressed three of nine “planetary boundaries”. These boundaries define the safe operating space for the planet. By transgressing them we risk causing abrupt and catastrophic environmental change.
Other environmental indicators such as the ecological footprint suggest we are in a state of “global ecological overshoot”. We are harvesting resources like forests and
fish faster than they can be regenerated and producing wastes like CO2 faster than they can be absorbed.