Patrick Emerson wrote a reply in the Oregonian on Aug. 8, 2010, in response to Jack Hart’s OpEd on the “fallacy of growth,” titled “Economic growth: The planet’s poor need sustainable expansion.”
Emerson has three primary crititiques of Hart’s assertion that growth is a fallacy:
- 1) “Hart’s views reveal a wealthy-country bias about what growth means and fail to appreciate the perspective of poor countries.”
- 2) “His characterization of growth is also inaccurate and perpetuates a common misconception about economic growth — that it necessarily means resource depletion.”
- 3) “Finally, his anti-growth agenda would leave the world more imperiled: Economic growth represents the world’s best hope to meet the challenges of the future.”
Emerson provides examples supporting his three contentions that show how Hart’s definition of “growth” is overly simplified. With this over-simplification, Hart is then able to characterize growth, in general, as fallacious. However, with an over-simplified definition of growth, Hart has actually engaged in a fallacy himself — the “straw man” fallacy, whereby a contrasting point of view is misrepresented so that it can be refuted more readily.
In contrast to Hart, Emerson sees “sustainable growth” as a solution to poverty and inequality:
- Developing countries present a key challenge to a sustainable future because their growth often comes at a high environmental cost. When more than one in every 10 children dies in infancy, it is hard to prioritize the environment. It behooves the developed world, then, to create the proper incentives — through carbon taxes, technology transfers, grants and aid — so the poor countries of the world can achieve growth through sustainable practices.
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Sustainability History Project 
First of all, I like how both authors’ names are poet’s names.
Secondly, I don’t really think Mr. Emerson managed to counter-argue Hart’s piece. While I agree that it isn’t written from the broadest perspective, that doesn’t do anything to change our overall needs – nothing we do for efficiency and sustainability will be enough to counter resource needs, even if developing nations develop and their populations stabilize. The population part of the equation is simply too high, and there is a thermodynamic limit to just how efficient we can be. At some point you get diminishing returns, because building and maintaining more efficient systems itself requires greater energy input.
However one characterizes growth, there is a baseline resource draw for every human living what we consider a comfortable life.
At any rate, I do think development in developing nations is key, and important for stabilizing the world’s population. Hans Rosling gives an interesting talk on this here: