We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Green Capitalism: The God that Failed

Click here to access article by Richard Smith from Real-World Economics Review Blog.

I regard Richard Smith as one of the leading authors who best exposes the fatal flaws in capitalism. He authored the foundation article for this website entitled Capitalism and the destruction of life on Earth: Six theses on saving the humans.

Smith in this brief article introduces his new book entitled Green Capitalism: The God that Failed. (Unfortunately for people like me who prefer to read hard copies, this one is published only in a digital format [for $10].) With reference to this new book, he writes:
I show that the theorists and proponents of no-growth or de-growth like Herman Daly or Tim Jackson are correct in arguing that infinite economic growth is not possible on a finite planet but that they’re wrong to imagine that capitalism can be refashioned as a kind of “steady state” economy, let alone actually “degrow” without provoking economic collapse. There are further problems with this model, which I also investigate. I show that the theorists and proponents of “green capitalism” such as Paul Hawkin, Lester Brown and Frances Cairncross are wrong to think that tech miracles, “dematerialization,” new efficiencies, recycling and the like will permit us to growth the global economy more or less forever without consuming and polluting ourselves to death.