1. Fewer new cars were registered on Britain’s roads this year.
2. The supermarket chain Tesco has posted its lowest growth figures for 20 years.
3. The British arms company BAE Systems is facing a wave of redundancies.

All of these were reported in the business section, in sombre journalism full of words like ‘disappointing numbers’, ‘weakness’, ‘lacklustre performance’. Why? Because things are supposed to grow. Companies are supposed to get bigger every year. Sales can only ever go up. Market share can only ever expand.

This is a problem, because if we actually follow through on that, it takes us to places we don’t want to go. “Healthy” end of year growth figures are celebrated, but is anybody pausing to ask what happens if those figures continue unquestioned, year after year?

• Read the rest of this article at Postgrowth.org

Another great viral from Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute. This is the five minute summary of Richard’s latest book, The End of Growth, which I reviewed here.

Economics without growth has returned to the agenda more recently. Thirty or forty years on, it’s no longer speculative. We’re not talking about future scenarios, we’re talking about the visible realities of price spikes, shortages, a destabilising climate and a global economy on a knife edge. Look back at those graphs in The Limits to Growth, and you’ll see the forecasted peaking of industrial society falls right about now.

The word ‘unsustainable’ is itself future facing, denoting the impossibility of sustaining something in the longer term. At some point, the practice in question must therefore move from being unsustainable to being unsustained. So Richard Heinberg is calling it: this is that moment. We were warned that sooner or later we’d hit the limits to growth, and now we have. The warnings, he argues, were “a message appropriate to the 1970s and 80s. We didn’t change direction then, and now we are nearing or at the point of declining energy, declining freshwater, declining minerals, declining biodiversity… and a declining economy.”

Heinberg made his name as a peak oil communicator, but peak oil only gets a short section here. The killer factor that makes this the beginning of the end for economic growth is debt. The cheap energy of fossil fuels has driven growth economic growth for over a century, but it is the debts that we’ve run up in the latter decades that make future growth impossible. The US spends 20% of tax revenues just paying off the interest on its debts. Millions of American homes are underwater, consumer credit the millstone around our necks. Having piled billions into bailouts and stimulus packages, there’s nothing left in the kitty to handle the transition that climate change and resource depletion requires.

And that means that growth is pretty much over. There will still be growth, a year here, a quarter there, but sustained long term growth isn’t possible under current circumstances. It relied on debt and fossil fuels, and we can’t secure enough of either to continue. Instead, we need to focus on making the transition to a post-growth economy, that is re-localised, resilient, and that serves human needs.

Needless to say, this is not a popular message. Even now reviewers will be sharpening their quills in readiness to tear Heinberg’s argument apart. It’s a matter of principle. To say that growth isn’t possible, or isn’t desirable, is a matter of economic excommunication. (As Tim Jackson says, politicians “physically recoil” when he tells them the title of his book, Prosperity without Growth.) But that doesn’t mean Heinberg is wrong, and the book deals with all the obvious ripostes (efficiency, decoupling, innovation, etc).

If you’ve been following the post-growth conversation, this book is a must read, putting the economic and environmental limits together to suggest that ‘peak debt’ is just as much a threat as peak oil. If you’re new to post-growth economics, it’s not a bad place to start either. It is meticulously researched and well argued, if a little technical in places. It is bold, wise, and profoundly counter-cultural. Yes, it’s gloomy, but it’s also full of ideas for making things better, and people and movements already headed in the right direction. The End of Growth is likely to be the most hated and ridiculed economics book of the year, but the chances are it’s the most important too.

Here’s MP Richard Benyon’s reply. Note what order the definition comes in:

On 28 February, the Government set out their vision of sustainable development as an approach which allows us to realise our vision of stimulating economic growth, tackling the deficit, maximising well-being and protecting our environment. This should be achieved without negatively impacting on the ability of future generations to do the same.

Progress should mean working within the Earth’s limits to ensure that people aren’t just well-off financially, but happy and healthy. It means closing the gap between the very rich and the desperately poor, because progress can’t just mean the improvement of the lives of 5% of the population. Progress means peace, and cooperation, and more beauty in the world. It means figuring out a way to live on the planet so that our children and our great-great-great grandchildren can enjoy the same wilderness we’ve enjoyed, and not just in a zoo or on television. Progress should mean that we put our collective energy into elevating our spiritual and emotional growth, instead of protesting against this or that political party or the latest atrocity against nature and humanity. Increasing beauty, happiness and well-being of all: I’ll take that sort of progress over the latest high-tech, plastic entertainment gadget any day.

Margaret Emerson, Four reasons why progress isn’t always progress

HT STWR

Since infinite growth in a finite universe is illogical, I believe a post-growth economy is actually inevitable sooner or later. We’ll get there eventually, hopefully by planning it and steering ourselves there, rather than ending up there by painful default. The occasional growth reports that I put together here are really a sort of check-up on our progress, intentional or otherwise, towards that post-growth society.

So in review, here’s January’s economic health check on the UK economy.

• The Office of National Statistics recently announced its latest quarterly growth statistics, and Britain’s economy shrank by 0.5% in the last three months of 2010. This was due in large part to a severely cold December, but growth would have been “flattish” even without that.

• New inflation figures were also released, clocking in at 3.7%. This too was higher than anyone expected. Since wages have stagnated, it means that we’d actually be getting poorer as individuals even if the economy was growing.

• Inflation means there’s too much money in the system, which is counter-intuitive when the banks are apparently reluctant to lend. The way to control inflation is to raise the price of money – the interest rate. That’s still being held at a record low at the moment of 0.5%. This is a huge dillemma for the monetary committee. If they raise interest rates, it will be more expensive to invest, and low investment means lower job creation at just the time when the government needs aggressive expansion to offset its budget cuts.

• The FAO’s Food Price Index is at an all time high, and the price of oil tipped back towards $100 a barrel because of concerns over Egypt’s stability (and thus access to the Suez Canal).

• Data from this morning shows the average house price falling o.1% in January.

In response to this welter of bad news the government has promised a “budget for growth” in March.

“Humankind is in a box. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to satisfying the most basic requirements of human dignity. And in much wealthier societies, people need growth to pay off their debts, support liberty, and maintain civil peace. To produce and sustain this growth, they must expend vast amounts of energy. Yet our best energy source — fossil fuel — is the main thing contributing to climate change, and climate change, if unchecked, will halt growth.

We can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This contradiction is humankind’s biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it’s a challenge we can’t possibly address.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon writing in Foreign Policy magazine’s series on ‘unconventional wisdom‘.

In it, he calls for a global growth pact to secure recovery and ensure ongoing economic growth.

Stronger, more sustainable growth will not happen just by hoping for Asian consumer spending to rise. Nor from simply hoping for private investment to recover swiftly and strongly. It will require an agreement among the economic powers of the world, bigger, more imaginative, and more lasting than even the Marshall Plan for Europe: a constantly updated plan for economic growth.

He also calls for “a new academic discipline of global growth economics”. I’m calling for that too, but I don’t think we mean the same thing.

CASSE’s Brian Czech describes the report as “the single most complete collection of steady state policy initiatives, tools, and reforms in the literature. That alone makes the report worth its weight in steady state gold.”

Browsing it this morning, it’s certainly a valuable contribution to making the steady state economy more visible, showing what it looks like and how we get there. I was pleased to find a couple of my ideas made the cut too.

You can also watch videos of all the presentations on the CASSE website.