Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg is currently putting the finishing touches to his new book The End of Growth, which is set for publication by New Society Publishers in August 2011.
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and Twitter . | INTRO: The End of Growth The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling:Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with. The "growth" we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy...and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 1, PART 1: Economics for the Hurried - 1 The first economists were ancient Greek and Indian philosophers, among them Aristotle (382-322 BC)—who discussed the “art” of wealth acquisition and questioned whether property should best be owned privately or by government acting on behalf of the people...Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 1, PART 2: Economics for the Hurried - 2 As money was gradually (and finally completely) de-linked from physical substance (i.e., precious metals), the creation of money became tied to the making of loans by commercial banks. This meant that the supply of money was entirely elastic... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 2, PART 1: The Sound of Air Escaping If the previous chapter had been written as a novel, one wouldn't have to read long before concluding that it is a story unlikely to end well. But it is not just a story, it is a description of the system in which our lives and the lives of everyone we care about are embedded... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 2, PART 2: Limits to Debt Let’s step back a moment and look at our situation from a slightly different angle. Take a careful look at Figure 1, the total amount of debt in the U.S. since 1979. The graph breaks the debt down into four categories—household, corporate, financial, and government...Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 2, PART 3: Stimulus Duds, Bailout Blanks In response to the financial crisis, governments and central banks have undertaken a series of extraordinary, dramatic measures. In this section we will focus primarily on the U.S. (the bailouts of banks, insurance and car companies, and GSEs; the stimulus packages of 2008... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 3, PART 1: Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return The 2008 crude oil price, $147 per barrel, shattered the global economy. The “invisible hand” of economics became the invisible fist, pounding down world economic growth to match the limitations of crude oil production. —Kenneth Deffeyes (petroleum geologist)... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 3, PART 2: How Markets May Respond to Resource Scarcity: The Goldilocks Syndrome Before examining limits to non-energy resources, it might be helpful to consider how markets respond to resource scarcity... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 3, PART 3: Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return - Water There is now widespread concern among experts and responsible agencies that freshwater supplies around the world are being critically overused and degraded, so that water scarcity will increase dramatically as the century wears on... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 3, PART 4: Earth's Limits: Why Growth Won't Return - Food In addition to water, people need food for their very existence. Thus food is also essential to economic growth...Industrial societies have skirted what would otherwise have been limiting factors to food production... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 3, PART 5: Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return - Metals & Other Minerals Metals are essential for energy production; for making factory tools, transportation vehicles, and agricultural machinery; and for building the infrastructure of highways, pipes, and power lines that enables modern civilization to function... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 3, PART 6: Earth's Limits: Why Growth Won't Return - Climate Change, Pollution, Accidents, Environmental Decline, and Natural Disasters Accidents and natural disasters have long histories; therefore it may seem peculiar at first to think that these could now suddenly become significant factors in choking off economic growth. However, two things have changed... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 4, PART 1: Won’t Innovation, Substitution, and Efficiency Keep Us Growing? While efficiency and substitution are key to our efforts to adapt to resource limits, they are incapable of removing those limits, and are themselves subject to the law of diminishing returns... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 4, PART 2: Energy Efficiency to the Rescue The historic correlation between economic growth and increased energy consumption is controversial. To what degree is it possible to decouple the two?... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 4, PART 3: Business Development: The Cavalry’s on the Way "Many of the big, resource-consuming trends of the near past are soon coming to an end in terms of their ability to attract investment and cover the cost of resources for development, production, and implementation."... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 4, PART 4: Fight of our lives: Moore's Law vs. Murphy's Law The idea that technology will continue to improve dramatically is often supported by reference to Moore’s law...So why hasn’t the same thing happened with energy, transportation, and food production during this period?... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 4, PART 5: Specialization and Globalization: Genies at Our Command Most economists regard division of labor and globalization as strategies that can continue to be expanded far into the future. To think otherwise would be to question the possibility of endless economic growth. But there are reasons to question this belief...Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 4, PART 6: Won’t Innovation, Substitution, and Efficiency Keep Us Growing? - Conclusions The near-religious belief that economic growth depends not on energy and resources, but solely on increasing innovation, efficiency, trade, and division of labor, can sometimes lead economists to say silly things... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 1: Shrinking Pie: Competition and Relative Growth in a Finite World Is the central assertion of this book—that world economic growth is over—already disproved? How else to explain China’s continued exuberant expansion, or signs of recovery in the U.S. in 2010?...Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 2: The China Bubble: An Export-Led Development Model The fundamental economic model that China has depended on for the past couple of decades was borrowed from Japan, and consists of producing low-cost export goods to fund investment at home...Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 3: The China Bubble: Demographics: Old/Young, Rich/Poor, Urban/Rural One of China’s leaders’ biggest fears, expressed repeatedly in public pronouncements, is that the nation will grow old before it grows rich (Japan, in contrast, got rich before it grew old)... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 4: The China Bubble: Economic Growth’s Last Stand? China is likely the site of world economic growth’s last stand...When China sputters, the quickening slide of the global economy will be clear and obvious to everyone... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 5: The Shrinking Pie: Currency Wars Since the economic crisis began, stresses in trade between the U.S. and China have led to unfriendly official comments on both sides regarding the other nation’s currency... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 6: The Shrinking Pie: Post-Growth Geopolitics As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the world’s diminishing resources—fossil fuels...Resource wars have been fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase.... Read more | |
 | CHAPTER 5, PART 7: The Shrinking Pie: The End of “Development”? The priorities of poor nations have just changed. From here on, competing in the global economy will recede in importance; the primary challenge will be to adapt to post-growth world economic conditions and ever-worsening environmental challenges.... Read more | |
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Also, watch Richard's December 2010 video Museletter about the writing of the book.
