George Monbiot, in his Guardian column today, is right about the big picture. We are indeed in denial about the threat to the planet of climate change, resource depletion and pollution. His tireless insistence on this fact is much-needed.

However, he misleads readers in identifying economic growth, and specifically that in the already advanced countries, as the environmental threat. In fact it is an exacerbating factor. The real problem is the existing volume and the structure of production. It’s easy to show this with a little basic arithmetic. [Read more…]