Ted made important points but he was not critical enough about what was presented as science in Saral Sarkar's piece, especially this "equation":
"The whole truth is succinctly stated in the equation:
I = P x T x A
where I stands for ecological impact (we can also call it ecological destruction), P for population, T for Technology and A for affluence. All these three factors are highly variable."--- Saral Sarkar
This so-called equation is utterly meaningless unless units are specified. The unit of population P is no doubt people. The unit of affluence A could be reasonably be dollars per person or perhaps dollars per person spent per unit time. But what are the units of technology T? And what are the units ecological impact I? An "equation" like this might have some poetic value, but it is scientifically vacuous.
Sarkar also writes,
"..."renewable energies" are neither clean nor renewable, and 100 percent recycling is impossible because the Entropy Law also applies to matter."
Again this is pseudo-science. Until the emergence of humans on this planet there was 100 percent recycling between animals and plants and the environment, but by Sarkar's logic this could not have been possible because it would violate the "Entropy Law" (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics). It doesn't. The highly ordered state of this planet (including the presence of life!) is thermodynamically possible because of the low entropy radiation coming in from the sun and the high entropy of infrared radiation emitted by Earth into space. Essentially a high degree of disorder is emitted out to space through that radiation. This not only makes life possible, it even orders the climate system. The entropy of the universe as a whole is increasing, but this does not apply to all parts of the universe, including Earth. There is a substantial scientific literature about this. See for example some of the chapters and references in this MS thesis:
Entropy production of the earth system, by Suanne Oh. There are no doubt practical limits to recycling, but the cause is not entropy.
Sarkar is right that perpetual population growth on a finite planet is impossible, and that the human population must be limited for survival of the biosphere. Infinite expansion on a finite planet is imposssible. He also acknowledged that capitalism has contributed to population growth in this passage:
"No doubt, capitalism-together with the development of technologies, especially agricultural and medical technologies – has largely enabled the huge growth of human numbers in the last two hundred years. But human population growth has been occurring even in pre-capitalist and pre-medieval eras, albeit at a slower rate. Parallel to this, also environmental destruction has been occurring and growing in these eras."
But this does not go nearly far enough. It is capitalism that drives both climate change and environmental destruction, and it drives population growth. The highest population growth rates in human history coincide with the capitalist era as the table on
page 111 of my book shows. The dramatic increases in growth rates appear starting in 1500, about the time that modern capitalism emerged. It should be noted that many factors affect population growth, not just economic systems. For example, as resources to sustain growth reach planetary limits, population growth rates will likely decrease and may eventually become negative, even with capitalism.
It is hardly surprising that capitalism should spur population growth. Effciencies and growth of food production naturally lead to population increases. Capitalism also tends to benefit from an increasing population because markets expand with population, and so does the labor pool. An expanding labor pool lowers the cost of labor thus increasing profits, and that engenders economic growth. In addition, capitalism invariably leads to highly concentrated wealth and widespread poverty, and the highest birth rates are correlated with poverty.
If the population stopped growing, there would, for example, be little demand for new housing, and with fewer new households, purchases of furniture and appliances would plummet. The construction industry would collapse and pull down numerous other industries with it. Unemployment would soar. Population growth and capitalism constitute a positive feedback loop, reinforcing each other.
Piketty’s
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, analyzes how the long term concentration of wealth in capitalist societies depends on population growth. The basic idea stems from a comparison of the rate r of the return on capital to the rate g of growth of the economy as a whole. If r > g for an extended period of time in a capitalist society (the most important example being the entire world), then Piketty's analysis shows that wealth can become so concentrated that the society becomes unstable and prone to revolution [Piketty, pg 263].
Mathematically, the rate g is a sum of two terms: the per capita output growth rate and the population growth rate. In any capitalist economy, as Piketty explains, economic “growth always includes a purely demographic component” [Piketty, pg 72]. Thus, r is likely to be much larger than g when there is zero or negative population growth, and capitalism becomes more unstable because of excessive concentration of wealth.
According to United Nations projections, the global population growth rate is expected to fall to 0.4% by 2030 and decrease further to 0.1% in the 2070s. Under these circumstances, Piketty estimates a global growth rate g between 1% and 1.5% and a rate of return r on capital of 4% or 5%, so that r will be much larger than g. The conclusion is that without intervention against the mechanisms of the free market, wealth concentration will reach unprecedented levels and destabilize the global capitalist system. That is indeed an ominous scenario. If humanity permits capitalism to continue, the destruction of the environment and the biosphere will be catastrophic.
David Klein