3 ms·

At 5% growth energy usage will consume whole universe in about 3000 years. Economic growth might not stop in next 10 or 100 years, but natural limits exist and

• onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Sure - at some point - there won't be enough atoms in the universe to store numbers large enough - but money is funny. You can get 5% GDP growth without any actual growth by just devaluing dollars by 5% more than you measure inflation. Theoretically, there's nothing stopping people from paying more money for monkey JPEGs indefinitely. Physically, there's limits to how efficient things can get.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  Growth doesn't require increased energy usage at all. To the contrary, if you figure out a way to manufacture the same widget X but using 25% less energy, that's economic growth. Long-term economic growth is primarily a phenomenon of increasing human efficiency which is enabled mainly via improved education which leads to ongoing technological progress. Sure we need energy to heat our homes and grow our food and power our transportation and build our phones and so forth, but those needs are not growing exponentially whatsoever. Homes in the developed world, for example, are becoming more energy efficient rather than less.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    At some point it does though. There are limits to what you can create with limited energy.
• fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  Economic growth includes things like “improved product quality” and is already decoupled from carbon output. There may be some fundamental limit to economic growth, but in order to show that, your argument probably has to have a form like: “humans can only produce this much utility”