Financial Development is the Flawed Metric for Our Time — International Points

Opinion by Kirsten Stade, Alan Ware (saint paul, minnesota)Friday, Might 23, 2025Inter Press Service

SAINT PAUL, Minnesota, Might 23 (IPS) – As the USA lurches towards isolationism and authoritarianism, its political issues are actually bleeding into pocketbook anxieties that Trump’s insurance policies will torpedo financial progress, each domestically and globally.

The UN forecasts a slowdown in international financial progress because of Trump’s damaging tariff and commerce insurance policies. Although shares rallied because the US suspended some tariffs, and a few analysts are spinning the numbers positively, financial progress indicators have turned decidedly destructive.

US GDP shrank 0.3% within the first quarter. Moody’s downgraded the USA’ credit standing citing burgeoning US debt and an unfavorable debt-to-GDP ratio.

In most international locations, GDP is an indicator of a society’s success — although it contains issues like navy growth, oil spill cleanups, and jail development. Growthism goes principally unchallenged and passes for a rational guideline for governance and proxy for human well-being.

But it ignores necessary issues like local weather change, biodiversity collapse, and air pollution that are the results of infinite financial progress, and which threaten the survival of humanity and the thousands and thousands of species with whom we share this planet.

Financial progress is not only failing as an indicator of human progress. It’s failing as an indicator of financial well being. The overwhelming majority of financial progress in recent times has accrued to the highest 1%. In the meantime charges of progress in wealthy international locations have been slowing for many years whereas international debt continues to rise extra quickly.

Understanding why requires understanding the central position of low cost vitality in fashionable civilization. Roads, bridges, sewers, airports, and {the electrical} grid have been all constructed on the again of low cost vitality and supplies.

With the invention and extraction of fossil fuels 200 years in the past started the fashionable industrial period, and a frenzy of human enterprise that will not have in any other case been potential.

Now upkeep of all this infrastructure has come due. These roads, bridges, sewer and water techniques are disintegrating and require costly and ongoing upkeep, on high of latest development to supply for rising populations and economies. However the vitality and supplies required for all this are now not as simple to come back by.

Skyrocketing debt is a declare on future sources, as all financial exercise relies on minerals, wooden, clear water, and naturally fossil fuels which might be more and more scarce and costly.

Rising dangers of local weather catastrophes add additional to escalating prices, as skyrocketing owners insurance coverage provides to the price of housing. In opposition to this backdrop, prospects for continued financial progress look bleak certainly.

These realities are largely absent from mainstream discourse about financial progress, suffocated beneath infinite proclamations of religion in human ingenuity. Development proponents are keen on invoking a seamless “inexperienced vitality transition” with out acknowledging that electrical energy is barely 20% of world vitality demand, and important constructing blocks of progress – metal, cement, fertilizer, and plastics – are manufactured utilizing fossil fuels in processes that can’t be decarbonized at scale.

Renewable applied sciences themselves require huge quantities of those supplies of their development, together with hint minerals like lithium, cobalt, and different metals whose mining ravages ecosystems, pollutes water, exploits youngster labor, and requires huge inputs of fossil gas vitality.

Renewables boosters fail to acknowledge that with fixed inhabitants progress there has by no means been an vitality transition, solely vitality addition. At the same time as uptake of “renewable” applied sciences has expanded since 2000, international coal use went up by 80% over the identical interval.

Relatively than take care of this, progress fanatics espouse boundless religion in human innovation. However innovation is slowing based on many measures, and has achieved little to alter the price of life’s necessities: meals, housing, transportation, well being care, and training have confirmed remarkably immune to breakthroughs that will decrease costs or enhance high quality. As certainly one of Donald Trump’s favourite progress proponents, Peter Thiel, argues, we’re seeing innovation in bits, not atoms.

AI is probably the final bastion of hope for continued financial progress, with allegedly limitless potential for locating new sources of vitality and driving manufacturing whereas minimizing capital and labor prices. For all of the hype, although, actual breakthroughs in supplies and vitality stay to be seen from AI, which is just a way to turbocharge extraction of finite supplies that may nonetheless run out, solely sooner.

In the meantime, AI information facilities guzzle fossil gas vitality and require billions of gallons of water to chill all that frenetic digital exercise.

Little doubt there are nonetheless some methods we are able to squeeze a bit extra financial progress out of a system already in ecological overshoot and demanding extra of the planet than it has to provide or can regenerate. However additional progress would require additional ravaging nature and the world’s poor, already pushed to the brink.

Is that really one of the best path to enhance human well-being, particularly for essentially the most impoverished who’re essentially the most immediately impacted by additional exploiting and depleting the land, water, bushes and minerals?

Finally, the query is just not how we are able to tweak the expansion system to extend it indefinitely. It’s whether or not we’ll face catastrophe introduced on by financial and environmental collapse and all its consequent human struggling, and to make the selection to shrink our inhabitants and economic system.

It is whether or not we’re clever sufficient to decide on simplicity over extra and relationships over commodities. Continued financial progress advantages the few already on the high, however acutely aware, gradual contraction allows the fundamentals of life for all. The selection must be clear.

Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and Lead Author on the NGO Inhabitants Stability. Alan Ware is a researcher and author who cohosts Inhabitants Stability’s OVERSHOOT podcast.

IPS UN Bureau

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