Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Is there a more climate-friendly way to assess the state of our economies?" video.

Infinite growth on a finite planet is obviously a capitalist fantasy. We can all live well on this planet but only if we share the wealth more fairly and only if we stop expecting to exploit nature more and more indefinitely.
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@s1nn1ck A permanently growing GDP with more goods and services sold every year, forever. This is only conceivable if the share of gdp in goods started falling and the share of gdp in services rose rapidly. But this has never happened consistently for any significant period in history. Expecting it to happen now is capitalist fantasy and propaganda.
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@s1nn1ck Literally every mainstream economist and politic party is saying it. Growth is fundamental to our entire model of economics. If you can find a single mainstream politician in power or close to it who says that we should stop growing the economy, then it will the first that I have ever heard. You won't find one. If we continue to grow the economy based on goods then we will continue to exploit the limited resources of the planet at unsustainable levels, causing catastrophic destruction as we go. We are already well beyond sustainable rates of exploitation of the very basics of life like land and water and soil. There is a dream of getting to a more circular economy, and that would be a great thing, but no government is taking it seriously. We recycle 9% of our plastic. Plastic is easy to recycle but we waste 91% of it once it has been used. The same or worse is true for most materials. And even if we got to a more circular economy, that would not allow for growth, only maintenance of the same level of economic activity. So the basic calculus of capitalism is broken when it comes to the environment. And we are now seeing the effects of that flaw in the system. Capitalism is like a cancer. It exists to grow the wealth of those with capital. It will commoditise and exploit every single thing it can find until they are used up. And it is now so effective at doing that to the planet's natural resources that they are literally running out and our ecosystems are collapsing. And how did capitalism respond to the threat of planetary destruction due to climate change 30 years ago? It spent the next 30 years making the problem much much worse. It's a failed system. We need a better one that doesn't serve capital as it's ultimate master and beneficiary, but instead serves people and the living planet that is all our home.
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