Looming (Anthropogenic) Ecological Disaster: The IPCC Report

[Sukla Sen]

The earth's ecology performs two major life-sustaining functions: (i) as a vast, but not unlimited, reservoir of useful resources and (ii) a huge - but, again, not limitless, sink to absorb harmful wastes - solid, liquid and gaseous, almost without exception, produced by the living inhabitants of the planet.

In the event, both the extraction of non-renewable resources and dumping of waste products are, almost entirely, the doings of humans - in course of their "economic activities".

While in pre-industrial societies the "economy" used to grow only at simple rates, "industrial civilisation" has changed all that. Now it grows at compound rates and so do (broadly) the rates of "extraction" and "dumping".

In case the "economy" grows @3%, it doubles in (less than) 25 years, (more than) 4 times in 50 years, 16 times in 100 years and 256 times in 200 years.

Incidentally, the long term growth rate of the "global economy" is round about 3%.

The earth's life-sustaining "ecology" has now, as a result, started to collapse.

That's, precisely, the very long and short of it.

<<The second draft of the IPCC Group III report, focused on mitigation strategies, states that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe). It also confirms our previous reports, covered by CTXT and The Guardian, that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years”. The new leak acknowledges that there is little or no room for further economic growth.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://mronline.org/2021/08/23/leaked-report-of-the-ipcc-reveals-that-the-growth-model-of-capitalism-is-unsustainable/>.)