Must Growth Doom the Planet?

In an age of stagnation, it’s time to shift how we think about the limits to growth.
Subscriber Only
Sign in or Subscribe Now for audio version

Five billion years from now, the Sun will run out of hydrogen. Its core will collapse and its surface will expand to millions of times its present size. As Earth is engulfed in fiery apocalypse, all economic growth will come to an end, fulfilling, at last, the long-standing prophecy of many environmental scientists.

That endless economic growth on a finite planet is impossible has been a verity passed on from generation to generation of environmentalists as deep insight. Yet it is really little more than a tautology. Given its presuppositions — that growth is “endless” and the planet “finite” — the claim cannot be anything other than true.

Reviewed in this article
M.I.T. ~ 2019
634 pp. ~ $39.95 (cloth)

Subscribe today for as low as $24/year

Subscribers receive new issues weeks to months before articles are posted online.

SIGN IN TO ACCESS
Ted Nordhaus, “Must Growth Doom the Planet?,” The New Atlantis, Number 61, Winter 2020, pp. 76-86.
Related

Fall 2019

After Climate Despair

Notice: Undefined index: gated in /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/template-parts/cards/25wide.php on line 27
The hope for a global conversion to austerity has failed to stop climate change. What comes next?