Richard Heinberg

Within the first sentence of his book, author Richard Heinberg clearly states his central assertion--economic growth as we know it is over. Heinberg, a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, goes on to explain in detail and in language understandable to those who are not economists the evidence that supports his claim. He provides an overview of how our dependence on economic growth evolved and then details the circumstances that have brought growth to an end. He points to three factors show more responsible for growth’s end—resource depletion, environmental impacts, and systemic financial and monetary failures. He provides evidence of how each of these factors has stymied growth and why we cannot expect economic growth to resume.

This is a scary read. Heinberg paints a bleak picture of what we can expect as our current economic assumptions hit environmental and financial realities. However, he also provides hope. He outlines three strategies that individuals need to pursue to prepare for the end of growth—disengage from consumerism, get out of debt, and become more self-sufficient. Collectively our highest priority needs to be maintenance of social cohesion. Local communities must unite to solve the problems brought by mounting economic and environmental challenges. Heinberg describes experiments already being undertaken by communities to create new economic models. Throughout the book, Heinberg refers to enough printed resources to fill a bookcase.

This is an important book. Heinberg challenges us to examine our economic assumptions and to transform how we individually and culturally define success and happiness. Resisting current economic realities will heighten the future pain we experience as individuals and as a society. There is hope, however, if we can set a course toward sustainability that upholds the integrity of our living planet. show less

This book covers much of the same ground as James Howard Kunstler's the Long Emergency (2006), but shows much greater precision and professionalism, and strikes a humanist rather than a misanthropic tone. Heinberg's core argument runs something like this: 1. Our global economy relies on perpetual growth, which is an illusion. Under the influence of that illusion, we've allowed debt in all forms -- household, corporate, governmental -- to swell to unsustainable levels. 2. While the 2008 Great show more Recession reflected the partial bursting of a housing bubble, it also marks the end (or beginning of the end) of growth, because: (a) the world is experiencing peak oil (and peak extraction of other resources), and in fact arriving at that peak is part of what caused the recession; or (b) even if peaking of resource extraction didn't cause the recession, it will make it impossible to relaunch the economy and unwind debt, and sooner or later the debt crisis will cause a massive global economic contraction. 3. Innovation and substitution can't save us because we've reached the practical limits of both of those.

Chapter 5 suggests possible implications for the world economy over the next several years. Chapters 6 and 7 are essentially bibliographic essays outlining a range of macro policy solutions and individual household approaches to weather the coming economic storms. Heinberg believes it's not too late to save civilization, but he's skeptical that our existing governments and power structures will take needed actions on a national or international scale, so individuals and communities need to prepare now to sustain themselves.

As you might guess, the linchpin of Heinberg's argument is his belief (articulated in chapter 4) that innovation and efficiency cannot punch a way out of the world's debt overhang and resource constraints. But this part of his argument, it seems to me, is deeply flawed, in at least two respects. First, Heinberg suggests that everything we do falls into a few categories of activities -- communication, transport, trade, and manufacturing -- and we have approached the limit of doing these things quickly and cheaply. But that misconceives innovation, for which the key measure is the ratio of human time required to produce a given quality of life. The whole point of sustainability is that we have vast room for improving this ratio. Given the huge externalities in our current economy, there's a lot of opportunity left to use the same or greater time for a much, much higher quality of life. For example, Heinberg notes that few consumer products (like shampoo) have significantly changed in the last several decades; advances mostly reflect tastes driven by marketing. But wouldn't it be a significant step forward - with a positive return for society -- for companies to redesign shampoo to omit endocrine-disrupting chemicals? (And anyway, why should advertising-driven changes in tastes, or, for that matter, planned obsolescence of consumer goods, not be used to carry growth in a steady state economy?).

A second, related problem is that Heinberg is focused on the wrong scale -- he argues that we're reaching the limits of positive returns on improving individual goods and services. But we use goods and services in systems, or as part of a lifestyle, and the relationship between the individual goods we buy and their collective impact on our lives is not linear. Changing a few goods can radically shift how they collectively work in our lives, and which we value the most. That opens up new vistas for growth. For a simple example, think about the difference between a walkman, an ipod, and an iphone. For Heinberg, these would appear to simply be a progression of improvements in the same basic functional unit: a portable audio player. But in context, the ipod offers a huge quality of life improvement over the walkman that means it is actually used differently (people stop buying cassettes; they may even give up having a distinct home stereo system). The iphone adds layers of efficiency by bundling the audio function into a tool that does a bunch of other things at the same time. And, in the process, the transition has created entirely new economic niches - for example, services like Pandora or Spotify. I don't know whether ipods or iphones have a smaller life-cycle resource footprint per unit of quality of life than a walkman, but I can see how they might, particularly factoring in the elimination of cassettes and cds in favor of digital recordings. It's particularly frustrating that Heinberg misses this point about scale, since he discusses (skeptically) Amory Lovins' claims about the prospects for gains in energy efficiency. One of Lovins' central insights is that true innovation isn't a matter of climbing a cost curve; it's breaking through a curve to find a new state. Heinberg doesn't address this perspective, but without an answer for it, he hasn't closed off the prospects for continued growth.

Overall, while I don't buy the 'coming collapse' argument, this is the best version I've seen of it. The chapters on public policy and local level solutions is also worthwhile for the introduction they provide to other current thinkers and writers. Heinberg is clearly plugged in to these alternative perspectives on the US and global economy, and serves as a good guide to them. The book is not particularly useful on environmental issues; Heinberg cites natural disasters caused by climate change as another reason current patterns of growth are unsustainable, but he does not really discuss how greenhouse gas emission reductions will emerge from or contribute to either a business-as-usual collapse or a managed economic contraction. show less

As a person, I generally like Richard Heinberg, and wanted to like his book. But often I found myself infuriated reading this. The book itself has a textbook-like sterility to it, with many infoboxes and charts giving more specific detail on certain topics. And the writing feels robotic, as if written from the perspective of an alien from another world looking impersonally down on the world. Beyond that the language is clearly calculated to avoid alienating the typical middle class reader. show more It seems clear that Heinberg deliberately skewers the strength of his own expertise in order to keep people from panicking.

For instance, the thesis of the book, as the title suggests, is that economic growth has come to an end. Although one might assume that means the economy is headed towards a decline, he studiously avoids saying this in any clear terms. He actually seems to try to comfort his readers by suggesting that we can manage something of a steady-state economy, if one with a different series of assumptions and values than the current systems. He neglects to consider that what we're actually looking at is an economic crash of unprecedented speed and magnitude, in spite of the consistency of this idea with his own research.

But where Heinberg frustrates me the most is when, after noting a few of the ways in which our way of life is killing the planet, he writes:

"Declining oxygen levels, acidifying oceans, disappearing species, threatened oceanic food chains, changing climate-- when considering planetary changes of this magnitude, it may seem that the end of economic growth is hardly the worst of humanity's current problems. However, it is important to remember that we are counting on growth to enable us to solve or respond to environmental crises. With economic growth, we have surplus money with which to protect rainforests, save endangered species, and clean up after industrial accidents. Without economic growth, we are increasingly defenseless against environmental disasters-- many of which paradoxically result from growth itself." He goes on to say that "the end of economic growth cannot be counted on to solve the environmental problems that growth has previously generated".

The first absurdity to strike me in the above passage is when the author says that "we are counting on growth" to solve our environmental crises. I don't know about Richard, but I'm certainly not counting on growth to solve anything. And although some people absolutely do believe this, that is largely because people are heavily invested in this system, and believe they can destroy the planet and live on it, too. Also, Heinberg tactfully ignores that far more capital is used to destroy rainforests, kill endangered species, and cause industrial disasters than to solve them. If we genuinely want to stop these disasters, we're going to need to reduce the power of capital, and reduce our total energy usage, by whatever means necessary. As for his statement that we cannot count on the end of growth to solve our environmental problems, this is true. The problem is too dire to count on any proposed solution. That's exactly why we need to do everything we possibly can as soon as we possibly can. Bringing fossil fuel economies to a dead stop, ending deforestation, and restoring prairies and wetlands will not absolutely, without a doubt, stop climate change from becoming runaway and devastating the planet's biosphere, but it sure sounds a far more reasonable avenue than hoping some magical technological solution will come along if we just hold our breath long enough. Certainly, the author tactfully avoids making any effort to show how his own proposals will help to prevent environmental calamities, let alone to proactively solve them. show less

This book has such important implications for the future I plan to give a copy of it to my financial advisor.

The book effectively uses representative and systematic data to argue we are in ecological overshoot and economic overshoot. Either one is alarming; together they sound a critical alarm; if only it can be heard!

The author distinguishes between economies—the exchange of goods and services—and economics—a money-based model of an economy. Fractional reserve banking, debt-based show more currencies, and displacing externalities allow the two to diverge significantly. As a result, our financial accounting systems are giving us false signals.

We live in a world with ever-increasing levels of financial debt—public and private. We are also depleting the earth’s natural resources, including fresh water, fertile soil, forests, marine ecosystems, biodiversity, fossil fuels, minerals, and pollution sinks. Since debt represents a promise of future repayment of labor and resources the book argues it is inevitable that the aggregate promises to repay will eventually exceed the available resources for repayment. In fact, that may have already have happened.

He argues convincingly that “we have created an economic machine that needs debt like a car needs gas,” and that “the existing market economy has no ‘stable’ or ‘neutral’ setting: there is only growth or contraction.”

Economics relies on several premises which are clearly false:
1) Growth can continue indefinitely,
2) Externalities can be safely ignored,
3) Natural resources represent income that increases as they are extracted rather than capital which depreciates as it is depleted, and
4) Resources can be substituted for one another with infinite flexibility.

He concludes “…the world economic system is held together largely by the belief and faith that it will continue to grow. It’s a confidence scheme, in the purest sense.”

Limits to ecological growth are well documented in the book: global marine seafood capture peaked in 1994, global oil production is probably past its peak, and we are approaching peak coal, peak water, and peaks for several key minerals. Unfortunately efficiency, substitution, innovation, and other technological magic are insufficient to close the gap between our present consumption and earth’s limits.

As these limits are recognized more broadly, competition to retain a large slice of a shrinking pie will intensify. This is likely to unfold as increased struggles between nations, competition among world currencies, old vs. young, rich vs. poor, consumption and opulence vs. conservation and flourishing, short term opportunists against long-term thinkers, and along other lines of conflict. Planning can reduce the chaos while denial, delay, and panic will aggravate the disputes.

He concludes: “We have accumulated too many financial-monetary claims on real assets—consisting of energy, food, labor, manufactured products, built infrastructures, and natural resources” to ever be repaid. This leads to his rather bleak default scenario—his prediction of what will happen if leadership remains absent. It features various forms of debt-jubilees—schemes to discharge debt—with various big-time winners and losers.

Compared to other literature on limits to growth, I find these scenarios grimmer. I hope this is only his hyperbole, but I fear it is his expertise and candidness.

Our post-growth world needs to meet several criteria:
1) The economy must be steady-state and not one that relies on growth,
2) Renewable resources will be harvested at a rate slower than they are replenished,
3) Non-renewable resources will be extracted at declining rates, supported by increased rates of recycling,
4) Human population will stabilize at a level supported by these sustainable practices.

To help us imagine life after growth the last chapters describe several communities experimenting with sustainable economies designed to increase well-being and happiness rather than GDP.

The transition will be difficult, but the sooner we start, the better options we have. “All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint,” he states before asking, “The crucial question is, how serious will that crisis have to be to get our collective attention and force us to change our behavior?”

Unfortunately deniers addicted to unsustainable growth are unmoved by facts. I am concerned the well-presented facts and well-drawn conclusions of this important book will do nothing to influence those invested in preserving their obsolete and dangerous world views. show less