What If the Global Economy Was a Giant Hamster?

This is one of the funniest takes I’ve ever seen on what it is the single most important topic in the green movement. Forget climate change, forget renewable energy, forget peak oil, forget green gadgets, biodiversity loss, endangered species, and every other thing TreeHugger publishes. Without addressing the quest for never-ending economic growth–meaning ever increasing consumption of natural resources, beyond the ability of the planet to regenerate those–all of those other important, pressing issues will not be solved, full stop.

But don’t just take such a grand statement from me. The New Economics Foundation’s latest report “Growth Isn’t Possible” lays things out:

This is the sort of thing that NEF has been working on for a long time, deconstruction the fetish all governments, most economists, financiers, corporations, and indeed (as a result) most people have with the notion of endless economic growth, and the assumption that this is a good and necessary thing. Forgetting to even ask whether this is possible.

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