The next APEC meeting, it was announced this week, will concentrate on the economic costs of global warming. Earlier in the week, a major new US government report opened up discussion on the economic impacts of declining global oil production—aka “peak oil.” So finally, after years of lingering in the backwaters of the independent media and small meeting rooms, the two issues have emerged front and centre as the two big drivers of future events in the world.

That means it must be time for the independent media to move on to the next big question: where do the solutions lie? It will take a long time for major government organizations and mainstream media to come around to reliable and honest answers, but let’s once again patiently lead them by the bridle to the watering hole.

Both big problems are the result of human industrial activity. But while modern industrial activity has been pursued by humans on a widespread basis for 300 years or more, the problems of resource depletion and environmental collapse have only recently developed. The problem therefore isn’t with human industrial activity per se, but rather with a certain level of that activity that humanity as a whole has gone beyond.

Scientific evidence seems to show that the further across that line we proceed, the faster resources will run out and the more degraded our environment will become. Scientists also suggest that if we somehow manage to step back over that line, both problems might be mitigated or at least manageably slowed.

It is constant and high economic growth that has put us over that line. If we hope to slow or halt our impending doom, we need to create economic shrinkage, or at least economic stasis.

But promotion of economic growth—more consumer purchases, more housing, more jobs, more energy uses—has long been defended as good government policy around the world, and for two main reasons: it is said to meet the needs of our growing populations, and it is said to meet their desires for improved standards of living.

But in Canada, as in most wealthy western nations, the natural rate of growth of the population has halted or is in decline. Canada has developed an immigration policy to import enough new bodies to sustain a robust growth in our population—a policy defended by the government on the grounds that the economy needs a growing population.

So which is it? Does a growing population necessitate policies aimed at expanding the economy, or does an expanding economy necessitate policies aimed at growing the population?

The other justification for policies aimed at creating economic expansion seem, this day and age, equally suspect. Is it still true that most Canadians want and need more goods, more food, and more energy? There are that five percent or so who are impoverished, but their relief seems more a matter for redistribution of existing wealth than for overall increased wealth since we also had about the same levels of impoverishment decades ago, and long before all recent wealth creation. Recent economic studies of happiness quotients suggest that, at our average level of income in Canada, additional income produces little if any increased happiness and satisfaction.

The fastest-growing sector of the food industry, for example, is to respond to consumer demand for food with low or zero calories. Likewise, more people are pursuing personal policies of less work, less income, and more leisure time. Ours may be the first generation in Canadian history that will be less prosperous than the previous one; we may also be the first generation that doesn’t mind that fact. We also eat less than they did too, and happily so.

Certainly younger families desire increased prosperity, but especially in the context of a rapidly aging population as we find in Canada, there are as many people who don’t mind a shrinking prosperity as their needs and wants decline. Overall, we may be a country that no longer needs or wants increased prosperity, generally speaking.

So neither a growing population nor a general desire for increased prosperity justify policies that attempt to generate a constantly growing economy. There is a third less acknowledged reason for such policies: the narrow interests of a relatively few investors who demand a healthy return on their investments.

The key feature of capitalism is the growth it promises in accumulated pools of capital over and above the rate of inflation (which works to erode the value of accumulations of capital). The only way in which returns can exceed inflation generally is if the economy expands. If returns fail to exceed inflation, these few investors are unsatisfied.

And so now we have zeroed in on the problem: the cause of resource depletions and environmental degradations—the two biggest problems today—is constant economic growth demanded by a few investors. It isn’t industrial activity, it isn’t population growth, and it isn’t desire for more general prosperity that is at the root of the two main drivers of events today. It is in fact only the demands of that slim minority among us who have sufficiently large accumulations of capital to enable them to generate substantial income for themselves through the relatively non-productive act of moving their investments around.

It has been argued that through pension schemes, RRSPs, and the like, we are all investors now, and that policies that promote the interests of investors serve us all. However, for most middle class “investors,” pension schemes and RRSPs are devices to protect their savings earned through legitimate work to cover their expenses in leaner earning years ahead in their retirement.

Previously, these investors were just as happy to park their savings in municipal bond issues, for example, that offered the added benefit of helping to build sewer and water systems and schools. The returns traditionally demanded and expected by this class of investor never had to be much more than the rate of inflation: protection of value was all that was needed. Growth of personal prosperity was expected to result from growth in working income generated through increased experience and productivity. This kind of investor is not chiefly preoccupied with the act of investing. They typically find a place for their savings they believe is secure, and leave their investments alone over decades and do not daily chase better returns elsewhere.

It is only those relatively few investors for whom the act of investing is their main preoccupation, and for whom returns provide their chief if not their only income, who are the problem. It is only the wealthiest 1 or 2% among us who live off income mostly or completely generated by returns on investment who create most if not all the pressure on policy makers to pursue policies that generate general and constant economic growth. It is only the demands of the wealthiest 1 or 2% who are the cause of the resource depletion and environmental degradation that are currently the biggest threats our global and local societies face.

Those top-drawer investors do bring some benefits to our economy, it is true. For example, they distribute resources around sectors more efficiently and with less ideological motives and cronyism than a state-directed system of investment would. And they promote keener competition among the companies vying for their investment dollars, competition which generally produces leaner and more efficient companies. So the question is, do the benefits they bring outweigh their costs to us, or do the costs outweigh the benefits they bring?

Certainly systems of complete state-directed investment, as in pre-1990 Russia and China, for example, produced far from stellar results compared to systems of nearly complete private-directed investment, as in the United States. But strongly mixed state-private systems, as in the Nordic countries, have produced results in many ways equal to and in some ways exceeding the results of the purely private systems.

When the main drivers of events in the world were the problems of national instability, economic development, and widespread joblessness, as they were immediately after World War II, the benefits of privately-directed investment clearly outweighed the costs. But now that the main problems are no longer instability, development, or poverty, but are instead resource depletion and environmental degradation, does it remain true that the benefits of privately-directed investment still outweigh the costs?

With what we have learned by now about the benefits of the dynamics of competition and efficient, non-ideological, allocations of resources, it may be possible to construct a heavily state-directed system of investment that successfully mimics enough of the private system as to achieve most of the benefits the private system offers. In many state operations like hospitals, for example, different departments are now set up in private competition-like systems against each other when it comes to winning budgets from the board. The result is that most of the benefits of a strictly private system—the efficient allocation of resources within the hospital and the leaner operations produced by competition for those resources—can now enjoyed by what are, accurately speaking, still state-directed systems.

The benefits of a privately-directed system of investment are no longer much greater than the benefits achievable by a modern, intelligently-constructed state-directed system of investment.

But the difference in costs between the two have become astronomical by comparison. The privately-directed system of investment is the cause of looming resource depletion and environmental collapse, both of which will drastically worsen basic conditions of life for most if not all of us 6 or so billion humans alive today. The costs of a modern, intelligently-constructed state-directed system of investment, by contrast, would only be reduced returns on investment for that 1 or 2% of the population who generate their main income from non-productive speculative investing.

There are no doubt benefits in coaxing Canadians to turn out lights they aren’t using, to buy Smart Cars, and to try out new City-painted bike lanes for their next commute. But, however arcane and convoluted the world of monetary policy is by comparison, the only possibility of achieving the kinds of changes required to meet the challenges of resource depletions and environmental degradation lies in changes to who directs most of the large-scale capital investments in our economy. If we leave all capital investment decisions in the hands of that 1 or 2% of us who are the investment class, no amount of turning off lights and riding bikes will save us.

What might save us is a coordinated global state seizure of investment capital out of the hands of that 1 or 2% who own it, and a redirection of investment decisions with that seized capital away from the generation of strong returns, which requires constant economic growth, and toward other purposes not requiring constant economic growth—like making art, for just one example.

We could begin with at least one Canadian federal political party advocating the seizure of energy resource-related capital investments to begin with so that we might start directing oil and gas developments away from more rapid depletion, and away from heavier environmental degradation, and toward more long-term sustainable, and more globally responsible, development. That would be a good start, however unlikely it is that even that modest a statement would ever be uttered by anyone in the House of Parliament, given the cloistered state of national politics today and the shrill reactionaries who fill up the national media in defence of the interests of that 1 or 2% who are wrecking everything with their greed.