There are deep problems with most business culture thinking, and its assumptions that we fail to question from its self-serving myths. Various articles use the myths to talk about better and alternative uses of climate mitigation efforts, and so they are used to “maybe” paint Greta Thunberg as “wrong”.
By association, such myths are really being used to attack the climate activism movement, and climate science itself. But it never matters really which person or movement is attacked by the myths, the global predicaments we find ourselves come entirely from workings of the myths themselves.
The first common global business culture problem, strongly evidenced in this article, is that success of human business is narrowly defined and limited entirely by its self-serving concern of “dollars created” and “economic growth” and “increased trade” for the self-selected receivers of benefits, the short term growth system winners. Business as usual ignores all of its external system dependency and consequences. Business as usual leaves out all longer term system effects.
All of growth myth favourites of industrial civilisation serve only their own growth oriented parts of the systems.
Everything is modified by business systems to become more growth serving parts or destroyed, in order to feed them. This monomania increases the accumulated wealth and supplies for the business-connected privileged, which is the ultimate positive feedback of the growth part of this cycle.
All growth is growth of our “ecological footprint”, and encourages further human population growth, as we draw down faster on Earth’s resources, including the destruction of formerly long term self-renewable ecosystems.
A part of value of every equivalent dollars of GDP ever created, our accumulated wealth, requires us to continue our global total energy consumption and therefore greenhouse gases system accumulation of our civilisation. This is known as the “Garrett Relation” — Our current Power consumption is proportional to our current accumulated wealth. We cannot hope to keep our planet in the state that it nurtured us, and at the same time keep altering its material and climate states with our growing energy and resource extravagance.
As the saying goes, you cannot both have your cake and eat it. As we live in a complex system of systems, we ought to heed what we already know about them. To reduce power consumption, requires the abandonment of the most privileged levels of wealth, or reduction of rate of use of current energy consuming wealth.
Our inability to do this becomes the extinction failure of “homo colossus”. We are the most privileged and biggest consuming people on the planet. The most wealthy are those in direct control relations of the business command centres of our world, who are reducing all of the life conditions and systems on our biosphere.
The only thing likely to save any part of the failing ecological systems that still support civilisation, is a rapid oncoming collapse of civilisation itself. Due to our widespread alterations, perhaps the most fortunate fact is the long recovery time of the biosphere will likely not bring about ever again the once-only conditions favourable to growth of this fossil fuel powered industrial human civilisation. We won’t be allowed to repeat our mistakes.
From the long term viewpoint, efforts of business culture to keep fossil fuelled industrial civilisation from collapse are misguided, as collapse to a non-fossil fuel using system is the only place left to go. Survival on much lower wealth is possible, as half the world already manages this.