EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY, JUNE 7, 2021

There Are No Limits to Growth in an Anti-Entropic Universe

June 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—Today’s hysterical warnings of a coming cataclysm of climate change are only the latest expression of the anti-human religion of modern environmentalism created in the 1960s and 1970s. They share with the false 1972 prophecies of The Limits to Growth both an intent to use supposedly scientific models to justify policy objectives chosen for other reasons, and a wild rejection of the most characteristic quality of the human species. That quality is the creativity that allows us to achieve over historical time—in what are essentially instantaneous transformations from the standpoint of evolutionary time—the development of new resources and an improving ability to create a more nurturing synthetic environment.

Anti-entropic growth characterizes the universe as a whole.

The dawning age of mammals replaced the majority of the far inferior reptiles, not because of an external event, but because the mammalian life was characterized by a higher energy-intensity than the reptiles, and by the creation of a more stable internal environment (warm-blooded endothermy) that supported more specific and powerful biochemical reactions.

So too does the human species develop new resources by discovering new principles—transforming uranium from a mostly useless yellow rock to the most concentrated form of fuel. So too does the human species develop the improved synthetic environment of a platform of physical infrastructure that allows individual business and productive processes to thrive in a medium of efficient transportation, healthy people, and plentiful energy.

If we are to learn from nature, it is not in seeking to maintain the present condition of the world’s (far from ideal) climates, flora, and fauna. Taking a longer view reveals a biosphere characterized by change, by an increasing intensity of life.

To stop growth is to destroy society. Lyndon LaRouche brilliantly polemicized against The Limits to Growth on precisely this basis, and wrote decades later about the characteristic of economic growth: “In general, the potential productivity of an economy is limited on the higher side by the energy density of the basic modes of energy production used by that economy. The higher the energy density the cheaper the energy can be in terms of social costs of producing energy, and the more abundant the energy available for expanding the economy. The step-by-step advance from a full-scale fission energy economy into a fusion energy economy, is the unique path of development, which enables our nation and the world to increase the effective rate of capital formation into the next century and beyond. It is the only policy which leads to this successful survival of our civilization.”

Nature and the human soul cry out: progress is the truest substance!

The evil fools who attempt, today, to create a global imperium, as an enforcement mechanism for the crushing of energy and productivity inherent in their so-called “climate” goals, are attempting the impossible. Humanity cannot cease to grow, without ceasing to exist as humanity. Although this modern British financial-“environmental” imperialism cannot succeed, the question before us is whether we will reject its false idols and lead a renewed, impassioned cultural movement based on the human individual being imago viva Dei.