Economic Growth Is Killing Our Planet

We the people have the power to save or destroy our planet with our dollars.  Learn how you can take practical actions to save our planet with environmentally responsible spending.

Julie Smith, 9/12/26

This is a summary of Chapter 25, The American Dream, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

Let’s face it.  Money is at the bottom of everything.  It buys everything we need.  It buys everything we don’t need.  It pays for our food.  It pays for our homes.  It pays our utility bills.  It buys our cars.  Or a bus pass.  Or an Uber ride.  Or a plane ticket.  Clothes.  Stuff.  We need money to survive.  We need money for security.  Insurance to protect all that stuff we bought.  In case there’s a fire.  Or a flood.  Money has paid for all the fossil fuels that are well on the way to ruining our planet.   It pays the ultra-rich so they can afford to spew thousands of times more CO₂e than the rest of us.  And if we continue down this path, money will destroy our planet in the end. 

This is why we are going to have to rethink our current economic system of capitalism that relies on constant monetary growth.  We have to change because we can’t continue to constantly increase our consumption of the raw materials and fossil fuels from our planet.  This is a huge deal that’s been kicked around for at least the past century among progressive thinkers in developed countries across the globe.  How do we handle money?  How do we redefine our monetary system, and what do we do about capitalism, that’s completely defined by perpetual monetary growth?  It’s complicated.  But, it doesn’t have to be painful.  Or impossible.  If we’re sensible about it.

Sadly, it turns out that we humans tend to view success in terms of growing wealth, everybody from the poorest to the richest wants more, and the main way we tend to accommodate that is by trying to make more money.  That means providing more products or services, which requires more resources and more customers.  There is a disincentive from an economic standpoint to do what we really need to do in order to save our species, which includes reducing population and consumerism.  We are taking ourselves out with our own attitude.  We are our own worst enemy.  For car companies to grow they need to make more cars, for energy companies to grow they must provide more energy, for Walmart to grow they need to keep building more stores and selling more cheap shit.  To sell more stuff they need to both convince people that they need more stuff, and then the material and energy resources need to be extracted from the planet and brought together to make the stuff.  And on and on and on and when does it stop? 

To really turn our planet around, we absolutely must give up on economic growth, and measure success in ways that are actually good for humanity and the planet in the long term.  There are a lot of great ideas out there.  One thing is certain: we can’t keep overconsuming our planet’s biocapacity by 170% and expect to leave anything decent for future humanity.  It’s just flat-out not physically possible.  The concept of a free market economy is a farce anyway.  I mean, is a market really free with subsidies, campaign donations, unequal distribution of wealth, and exploitation and domination of other species and the weak?

If we continue to grow, we’ll be left with a hot unlivable planet, and destruction of population will be relatively sudden and ugly as we plummet to extinction in just a generation, along with the other species in the web of life on this planet.  Waiting will only result in a collapse of industry that will be worse than if we make gradual changes in a sensible and proactive manner.  And embrace degrowth.

It’s long been known that economic inequality is unhealthy for society at all levels.  Countries with large income gaps between rich and poor have poor environmental ethics and low biodiversity.  They also tend to have more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drug use, obesity, prisoners, school dropouts, community breakdown and lower life expectancy.⁵  It turns out that income equality is even more important than national wealth when it comes to social welfare and happiness.  It doesn’t matter if a country is rich or poor, if income inequality is low, people are happier.  When large corporations dominate the economics and squeeze out the number and diversity of small and medium local businesses, we consumers lose our freedoms and our choices, as our dollars leave our community to pay for the rich to get richer.  And richer.  And richer.

In the U.S., the wealthiest 1% get 20% of the income overall.⁹  In the past 40 years, economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.¹⁰  In 2025, the Wall Street Journal reports that the top 0.1% of U.S. households reached 23.3 trillion, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion.¹¹  This has been driven by supply-side economics, a conservative philosophy that really began to take hold during the Reagan administration.  However, instead of the promised benefits of lowered prices and higher employment through deregulation of major industries, all this philosophy has done is transfer insane amounts of money from basic working people to a few really greedy individuals, who are now trampling freely over the rest of us while trashing our planet.  And, we’re making it easy for them by buying our stuff from them.

With the ultra-rich, it’s never enough.  Take the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune.  They own at least three superyachts worth $500 million that emit about 2,000 times the annual emissions of a single American.^14,15  And then there’s Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Whole Foods, raking in $18 billion annually, with his share of yachts, at least four private jets that he flies all over the world in, multiple mansions and that $50 million wedding.  Don’t you just love getting gouged so you can help pay for the next leer jet?  And the extra CO₂ emissions?

In Figure 5, the horizontal axis is cumulative percent of U.S. households, and the vertical axes are cumulative annual income and cumulative annual CO₂e emissions.  This shows what the entire population in increasing pay ranges makes and emits in a year.  The lowest paid 20% of households bring in a total of $500 billion and emits a total of 170 mmt of CO₂e, which is only 3.8% of the total CO₂e that our country emits.  90% of our households account for $10 trillion in total U.S. income, while emitting half of the total CO₂e.  The top 10% of the households account for another $10 trillion of income, and the other half of our national emissions. 

To my point, half of this country’s income goes directly to 10% of the population, the 10% wealthiest people, who emit half the U.S. emissions with their extreme lifestyles that are paid for with their obscene salaries.  And we’re paying them to do it when we consume their products.  Which is why I don’t shop at Amazon or Whole Foods, preferring to get my groceries from local grocers like Leever’s, Nude Foods and Lucky’s.  These are locally owned stores, and you can trust me when I say that their owners don’t have their own Leer jets.  In fact, Leever’s and Nude Foods are employee-owned.

I don’t know about you, but with this reality I find it impossible to respect, admire, honor or envy the extremely wealthy when they are trashing the planet that we share at our expense.  They are disgusting and greedy examples of humanity, and should be disdained, reviled, shunned and shamed, and treated like the vermin they are, much like how the extreme right is attempting to brainwash us into treating our treasured and precious diversity in this country.  But that’s just me.  Instead, the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion are being redacted from Federal documents as we speak.  And here we are.

To be clear, the whole point of this section is the extreme corruption and gross overconsumption among the extremely wealthy, to the detriment of the rest of us, and in particular to our environment.  To save our planet, we’re going to have to figure out how to put a stop to this rot.  And as consumers we can choose not to buy from them.  Without customers buying their products, one can only assume this would eventually put a dent in their obscene profits, decrease the absurd top/bottom ratios in income, and increase social satisfaction and happiness in the long term.  Oh, and severely reduce our collective carbon footprint.

We have global monopolies in industrial agriculture and pesticides that are poisoning our planet and supplying less responsible grocery stores like Costco, Walmart, Kroger, Safeway and others that carry primarily “conventional” food.  Four giants, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus control 75% of global grain, and six agrochemical companies control 75% of the world’s fertilizer and pesticide market.³⁵

              From 2002 – 2010, a network of anonymous U.S. billionaires had donated nearly $120 million to groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change.  This doubt campaign caused a conservative rebellion against Barack Obama’s environmental agenda that ruined any potential of congress taking action on climate change.^36,37  Which explains why not much happened on climate in Obama’s term.  Obviously, these were mainly oil companies, including Exxon-Mobil.  This is why it’s on us to get ourselves off fossil fuels and onto renewables as soon as we can.

We the people are the ones paying for all this corruption and destruction.  We pay for advertising, junk mail, lobbying and excessive campaign funding that bribes politicians to obey big corp’s whims to keep them rich and the rest of us controlled, while trashing our planet.  We also pay for the mitigation of global warming, flood control, sea level rise, extreme weather events and wildfires.  Does that feel fair?  And we’re not even the ones using the most carbon with all our wants and needs.  Even if we eat beef and consume solely conventionally grown food and drive a Hummer.  It’s the top 1% of the richest people on the planet who are spewing 50% of the carbon with their massive homes, private jets and extravagant lifestyles with lots and lots of stuff.  However, if we eat industrial beef and food and drive an ICE, it's still our fault for buying the products.

We pay the cost of all the advertising to cram endless stuff that we don’t need or want in our faces whenever we buy the products.  We are paying for the merchants of doubt who are paid by the money we spend with big corp to brainwash us.  Now that you know, are you going to continue to support this dogma, or use your own common sense and think for yourself and change your purchasing choices to help rather than continue to push our planet in a direction of imminent destruction?

Of more than 500 global companies, 69% report higher-than-expected financial returns on climate initiatives.  McKinsey estimates that getting to net zero energy is a more than $12 trillion opportunity.  That’s right.  Opportunity.  Not Cost.  Boy we sure have been getting fed a bunch of baloney haven’t we?  Too expensive?  My ass!  From 2011 to 2020, investments in renewable power generated total returns seven times higher than fossil fuels (422.7% vs 59%).²⁹

              In the case of our own home conversion to all-electric solar-powered, we had to do some rewiring and even some roof fortification in our 1948 house to make it work, but all-in-all the entire cost was perhaps 10% of the current value of the home.  And now we’ll never have to pay for electricity or natural gas again.  Ever.  And we don’t even have to pay for gasoline, because we also charge our EV at home from our solar panels.  So, as fossil fuels get more scarce and harder and more expensive to produce, we’ll be just sailing along on our own power.  Until the panels fail in 25 years, at which point we’ll pay the maintenance costs to have them replaced, and the new panels will probably be far more efficient and cost-effective than the ones we bought the first time, because the technology is improving at an incredible rate, in the opposite direction of fossil fuels.  Also, we’ll just be replacing panels, which is a mere fraction of the all-in cost of the original installation. 

For new construction, installing electric instead of natural gas for heating and cooking is cheaper and safer.  If you’re looking at a new home, say, and your spec happens to be about 2,000 square feet, why not get a 10% smaller home, say 1,800 square feet, and spend the extra savings on an all-electric retrofit with solar panels?  I mean, are you really going to notice that 200 square feet?  I guarantee you’ll definitely notice the lack of utility bills.  Or get a 1,080 square foot home instead of 1,200 square feet.  See what a small difference that is?  For some serious savings in utilities and a severe reduction in your carbon footprint?  There’s even less house to keep clean.  How can that be bad?

Now let’s move on to the economics of contraception.  If all women who wanted to avoid a pregnancy had access to modern contraceptives, and all women and their newborns received proper care recommended by World Health Organization (WHO), unintended pregnancies would drop by 70%, from 74 million to 22 million.⁵⁴  That’s 52 million births annually, or about 0.65% of global population, which would greatly help in reducing our runaway population growth, which is key to saving our planet.  Added benefits would be a reduction in maternal deaths of about 200,000 women, and newborn deaths by 2.3 million.  All this can be done for about $39 billion per year, which works out to about $25 per woman of reproductive age, and as low as $7 per woman in developing countries.  This would permanently reduce CO₂e by 234 mmt per year, or 3.9% of current global emissions, a cost of $167 per mmt.  Think about that.  The annual cost would be similar to the fossil fuel subsidies at about 0.7% of the Federal budget, or Don Wood’s (Exxon-Mobil CEO) salary.  It’s about the least expensive carbon reduction there is, other than changing our eating habits.

At this point, we’ve overrun our earth’s resources and we’re already taking resources from future generations.  Because of this, ironically, we are actually reducing living conditions and increasing poverty as GDP grows.  A huge part of this, of course, is because as GDP grows, the rich actually get richer, at the expense of the rest of us.  GDP doesn’t really represent all of us.  So, the main people who would be impacted by de-growth would be mainly the ultra-rich parasites who are gouging the daylights out of the rest of us.  They are also the ones who are spewing the most carbon. 

Personally, it seems to me that the simplest method of measuring true success in this era of overconsumption would simply be to measure the single overriding issue we have, which is CO₂e emissions.  If that starts to drop, we’re doing better, and moving in the right direction.  Then, we could take the major contributors to emissions, population, construction, food, building energy, transportation, logging and waste, and work on those contributors, to reduce emissions in each category.  We work on the biggest contributors to each of the categories, for example, in agriculture, it’s the cattle and land management practices.  This is the basic strategy that big corp uses to optimize and reduce costs.  I learned it at Coors and it works.

In this book I think I’ve said we need to “stick it to big corp” dozens of times, and this is what I’m talking about.  The only way to knock back the insanity of executive salaries and bonuses and their associated insane carbon emissions is to avoid their products and publicly shame and humiliate them.  A lot.  All the time.  Ostracize them for showing off their extravagances and their waste.  This is already beginning to happen with many of these guys, because of their blatant support of a fascist candidate for President of the United States.  Yet another great possible measure of success would be to see these salaries begin to drop.  A measure of the top 20% of U.S. households emitting half the national CO₂e, instead of the top 10%, would be a step in the right direction, wouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, while I have no doubt that we can in theory get ourselves aligned with our planet fairly quickly with our own simple changes and new measures of what good looks like, I know in my heart that many of us will resist the change.  It’s what we do.  While we’ll all be forced to change eventually, as sustainable resources become the norm and unsustainable resources are phased out, the natural process is likely to take 50 or more years, which is too long.  If we wait that long, we’ll have a much more serious planetary disaster on our hands than we will if we move faster.

              A lot of viable ideas have been floated.

·       Pricing products to align with their true social and carbon impacts, basically the pricing in Table 3, column 5, (Chapter 25) which would make pretty much everything except organic vegetables and solar energy too expensive to buy. 

·       Impose a tax equivalent to the “social cost” of pollution, similar to the pricing in Table 3 (Chapter 25), and then let the market decide how much pollution is worth emitting. 

·       We could at least label things with their carbon footprint, put it on the label along with the nutrition information.  Of course, big corp would whine about that just like they whined about the original nutrition information requirements, since it would probably tap their profits by some 0.00000001% to administer the requirements.

·       Initiate a cap and trade system for carbon emissions.  California did this, and has successfully demonstrated that it’s possible to reduce carbon and still have economic growth.  They are considering reducing carbon to net zero by 2045.⁶⁰ 

·       Stop subsidizing industries that cause CO₂e emissions.  They should be able to make a profit on their own if they’re relevant and necessary.

·       Ban installation of new power plants and natural gas infrastructure to new development.  This avoids waste of resources and energy on construction that will be obsolete in the next couple decades.  It will also be a continued push in the right direction, towards renewable electricity.

·       Irresponsible companies that make irresponsible products should be required to “pay to play”, to clean up their own messes.  CEO’s of companies that fail to comply should be imprisoned under due process of law.  This was the original intent of the legislation put in place to protect our environment in the 1970’s.

·       Fines for polluting should be severely increased such that it’s uneconomical for businesses to choose to pollute and pay fines instead of installing pollution controls.

·       Tiered pricing for utilities, including energy and water, so that extreme users pay higher prices.  This is in common use now in several places, and it works.

·       Increase taxes on motor vehicle fuel to account for cost of carbon impacts to society.  Ultimately this would encourage more use of EV’s instead of ICE’s.

·       End the insanity of tax loopholes, offshore havens, profit shifting and special exemptions that allow big corps and the ultra-wealthy to get away with avoiding their share of taxes in the countries where they live and do business.  At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by the wealthy in tax havens globally, which is a loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue.  I mean, if Amazon is going to do business in the U.S., they can damn well pay their taxes like the rest of us.  It appears to me that Jeff Bezos can well afford it.

·       Even better, cap maximum earnings potential in order to minimize the top to bottom ratio of earnings, and create a more equal economy.  This could be done gradually over years.  At least tax the ultra-wealthy like the rest of us.

·       Require the wealthy to meet the same emissions goals as the rest of us, and tax the hell out of them for excess emissions that are beyond the global goals.  This way, they’d have to figure out better uses for all that money beside superyachts.

·       Ban or severely tax carbon-intensive luxury consumptions, like private jets, superyachts and frequent air travel.

·       Stop supporting toxic personal care, cleaning and pharmaceuticals by buying the products.  Instead, buy responsible organic products and pay a fair price for them.  This simple action would avoid a good $2.4 billion in costs to add tertiary treatment facilities to current wastewater resource recovery facilities.  It would also avoid an increase in carbon emissions of 0.8% of our current total carbon emissions for the electricity to run the facilities.  An obvious bonus is that when we make these kinds of responsible choices, not only are they cost-effective, they also take business away from the irresponsible companies that produce the toxins.  Oh, and we don’t kill the wildlife by poisoning the waterways.

My own reasoning on costs and benefits of saving our planet is simple.  If most of our agriculture is for livestock forage and feed, and most forestry is for single-use paper, if we stop consuming those, the cost should be negligible.  And, those changes aren’t what I would call actual sacrifices, so much as common sense.  Hilary and I do these now, and we don’t feel like we’re making a sacrifice at all.  It’s just a change.  For the better. 

Economic growth is killing our planet, and at the end of the day, we are beginning to see some needed changes in our thinking and how we do things.  But it needs to happen faster.  And it’s up to us consumers to make sure that it does.  It is up to us to protect our descendants who will have to live with the consequences of big corporations running wild, for good or bad.  And it will be our fault if we let them.  And we can take pride in changing this disastrous tide in our generation if we don’t.