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krypto2000 said:
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The Ecstatic said:
Capitalism requires infinite growth to function. Infinite growth is not a sustainable model with climate change looming.


Can you prove this? I'm not sure that is true, it may be, but it doesn't ring as inherently true to me.


Ya, I was thinking the same.

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VroomerMcZoomers said:

Falcon91Wolvrn03 said:

krypto2000 said:

The Ecstatic said:

Capitalism requires infinite growth to function. Infinite growth is not a sustainable model with climate change looming.

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Can you prove this? I'm not sure that is true, it may be, but it doesn't ring as inherently true to me.

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Ya, I was thinking the same.

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The money supply has to constantly expand or debts will no longer be able to be serviced.  It's just math.

Notice that in 1962 debt was just a little more than twice the supply of money. In 2012, it’s almost exactly four times as much

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The problem arises when the people with the money lend it to "the nation", in other words the populace, with interest.

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Yes, this is a problem in that what this class of people lend is money they don't need right now, money they don't even miss.  In that scenario, the rich sacrifice nothing but they get the fruits of someone else's sacrifice.

At this point, gaslight victims often start saying how the economy wouldn't function without the extension of credit, so the rich are doing us a great service and deserve to be rewarded for their noble idleness.

To whom I say...the public is perfectly capable of issuing it's own credit and does not need a decedent crue of high-rolling freeloaders to do it.

But the problem is even deeper than that.  Most credit that is injected into the economy is from bank loans.  Bank loans are not drawn from pools of saved money, they are literally newly created money.  When you get a loan from the bank, the moment the contract is finalized, the money supply expands by the amount of the loan.

And when you repay the loan, the money supply shrinks by that amount.

But, get this, because of interest, it means that there can never be enough money in existence to repay all loans, and besides, if such a thing were to somehow happen, virtually all the money in existence would disappear.  The banks are literally demanding that more be returned than was created.

Of course that's impossible, and the only way to keep one step ahead of the whole mess going down is to forever keep issuing loans so that the money supply expands and there is enough to pay interest on past loans.  So debt continues to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow, and grow for ever and ever amen.  It must, or the system collapses.  The system is doomed to collapse eventually anyways, because the ratio of debt to money keeps growing.  The amount of existing money compared to debt keeps shrinking and shrinking

At some point, the required interest payments alone will exceed the money supply, and the system will not function any more.

So,  this scenario guarantees we are never going to get to the end of history if that means some peaceful resolution to our struggles.  It places mankind's  march of progress on a hamster wheel that is bound to seize up eventually.



 

krypto2000 said:

You're right that it is viable to maintain current energy levels, but when you start talking about bots roaming the planet and growing food in sky scrapers with artificial lighting you're talking about a massive increase in energy production.

This trend also follows human nature. If energy become essentially free we're going to naturally utilize a lot more of it which none of these models take into effect when factoring in the effects on the climate.

This is speculation, but I feel it's worth considering that we track CO2 and its correlation to global temperatures simply because it is a metric in which we can. While water vapor is in practice a much bigger driver of climate change we have no way to measure it throughout history, so as it stands we do not know to what degree correlation is distinct from causation here.

In other words there is a direct correlation with CO2 release and water vapor/total green house gasses, but it would be a fallacy to believe that simply because we then stop CO2 emissions that in turn means we stop the production of green house gasses in the same way that it would be a fallacy to believe that removing alcohol removes a persons desire to drink. To reiterate this is purely speculation on my part based on my own understanding, but I challenge someone to prove me wrong.

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The bank lends you 100, you agree to pay back 110. You use that 100$ to generate 200$ worth of goods. You pay back the bank 110$, you keep 90$. 10$ of money enters the moneytary system and no debt remains.

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Enlil said:

You missed the best answer:  Prepare for the end.

Humans aren't going to fundamentally change the way they live.  They aren't going to suddenly set aside their immediate desires in service of some long-term good.  That's not the way we're wired. 

Even if it were, it's too late.  If we reduced carbon emissions to zero right now, the planet would continue to warm for another 40 years.  Since zero emissions is an unattainable goal anytime soon, that only means that warming will continue for longer than 40 years and at a faster rate.

Tl;Dr: We're fucked.

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VroomerMcZoomers said:

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The bank lends you 100, you agree to pay back 110. You use that 100$ to generate 200$ worth of goods. You pay back the bank 110$, you keep 90$. 10$ of money enters the moneytary system and no debt remains.

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The $200 used to pay you for the goods you produced was created the same way as the $100 you got from the bank.  Somebody out there got this newly created bit of money the bank miscalls a 'loan' and it is demanded that they too repay more than was created.

In this economy with three players...the bank, you and the one who bought your goods, there was a total of three hundred dollars within it.  And a demand that $330 be repaid.

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That's not how all currency within the moneytary supply necessarily was created though, that is how it is now created. Regardless I will contend that in so far as reasonable limits of this discussion goes we should probably assume the system has always worked as it does now which if you have zero or negative net worth it effectively has.

Ie, it's a pyramid scheme, plain and simple. You can tell how invested someone is in it by how adamantly they will defend it, or of course how naive they are, the two are not mutually exclusive .

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That's not how all currency within the moneytary supply necessarily was created though, that is how it is now created.

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The Ecstatic said:

Alright I didn’t read any of the thread I made. What’s the plan, folks?

A majority say new system. Tell me about your system.

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