Ewen-Street Ian: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Ewen-Street Ian: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3320] 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 Earlier today the Prime Minister Bill English and Winston Peters all talked about sustainable economic growth. Tonight I want to talk about why they are wrong and why sustainable economic growth is a physical impossibility. It is impossible basically because of how we measure it.  
When we talk about economic growth we talk about gross domestic product (GDP). GDP measures everything that we spend money on in the economy. It does not differentiate between positive things that we spend money on like providing housing clothing education food and other things like that or bad negative expenditure like wars keeping people in prison environmental disasters and the cleanup thereafter. But the worst thing about GDP is what it does not measure. It does not measure for instance the value of volunteer work and of parenting and in an environmental sense it does not measure the value of clean air fresh water minerals in the ground or the existence of virgin fisheries. Those things are treated as externalities by our economic processes. At the other end of the economic scale after the clean air fresh water etc. has been through our economy it is churned out at the far end as thousands of tonnes of waste every week. It comes out as pollution toxics global warming and the overcrowding of humans. Except for the cost of depositing pollution those outcomes have no value.  
As the economy grows—this will be a revelation for some people—it gets bigger. As it gets bigger the externalities also get bigger so the stress on the environment also becomes greater. One of the characteristics of economic growth is that it has a doubling time. That is because it is an exponential function. For the benefit of the intellectually unemployed amongst us I say that it is not a linear growth but growth at an increasing rate. So if we have 4 percent economic growth which the Prime Minister was rabbiting on about today we will have a doubling time of 17 years. In other words the economy will be twice as big as it is now in just 17 years’ time and if we have 5 percent economic growth that time will reduce to 14 years. So as the economy grows the pressure on the environment becomes greater and greater. One cannot have exponential growth into a finite environment—not unless the radius of the earth starts getting bigger. It is not possible.  
Today the Prime Minister talked about the need for more power stations. She said that yes the economy is growing we need to keep it growing at 4 percent a year and we need more power. If we follow the analogy through then if we have our economy growing at 4 percent every year by the year 2020 we will need twice as many power stations as we have now. By 2037 we will need four times as many power stations and by 2054 we will need eight times as many. So in 51 years’ time we will need eight times as many power stations as we have now. That is absolutely farcical.  
For those people who cannot visualise what I am talking about I want them to think about the old quiz about the bacterium in a bottle: if a scientist puts a bacterium in a bottle at 10 o’clock in the morning the bacterium replicates itself every minute and at 11 o’clock in the morning the bottle is full when was the bottle half full? The answer of course is at 1 minute to 11. At 2 minutes to 11 the bottle was a quarter full at 3 minutes to 11 it was one-eighth full and at 4 minutes to 11 it was one-sixteenth full. [ 
Interruption 
] If somebody smart—like my colleague Lynda Scott—went to her fearless leader at that stage and said there would be a space problem her boss would say to her that she was intellectually unemployed and had a psychiatric problem but not a space problem though. He would tell her the bacteria had been there in the bottle for 56 minutes and fifteen-sixteenths of the space was still left. But in another 4 minutes the space would be gone.