Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 83
Although he apparently did not know of Soddy’s work, economist
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen later made many of the same
points about the relation of entropy to economic growth in his
monumental but widely ignored The Entropy Law and the Economic
Process (1971). “Every Cadillac produced at any time,” he wrote,
“means fewer lives in the future.” Given our expansive nature and
the laws of physics, our fate, he concluded, “is to choose a truly
great but brief, not a long and dull, career” (p. 304). Or as John
Ruskin once put it more poetically: “the rule and root of all economy—that
what one person has, another cannot have; and that
every atom of substance, of whatever kind, used or consumed, is
so much human life spent” (p. 192).
We are running two defi cits simultaneously, and we must solve
them together. If we fail to do so, nature will take its course. This
will require a great deal of rethinking, and it will not be easy. But
the present economic collapse is too far-reaching and the threat of
climate disaster too real to do otherwise. Taken together, they indicate
that we are nowhere near as rich as we once presumed. We have
been living far beyond our means by drawing down natural capital,
rather like a corporation selling off assets in a fi re sale and calling
the proceeds profi t. The housing bubble, dishonest accounting, and
the use of unaccountable fi nancial instruments like derivatives are
merely the tip of a far larger problem that includes the failure to
account for carbon emissions and the loss of species diversity.
The ideas that lead us to the brink are the equivalent of junk
bonds and derivatives, unsecured by real assets and ungrounded in
reality. There are better ideas by which to order our economic and
ecological affairs, based on the principle that “for every piece of
wise work done, so much life is granted; for every piece of foolish
work, nothing; for every piece of wicked work, so much death”
(Ruskin, p. 202).