The fairy tales of eternal economic growth

People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are dying, ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.’ Gretha Thunberg
 
The above quote is what this young girl said in her speech on Climate Change at the UN. Do they sound familiar? Anyone can relate to her words about economic growth? Who does not want economic growth? In this little island, everything is about economic growth, growth at all cost, because if you don’t have economic growth, how to pay million dollar salaries to the employees? And how to have easy economic growth? Grow the population by importing all the wildlife you can find to fill up every inch of earth on this island. When they are here, they need to have housing, services, food, cars, entertainments etc etc, ie they need to eat and consume goods and services. All these activities adds to one thing, economic growth!
 
But one problem, their activities would also lead to higher uses of plastic bags and plastic straws, and these are not good for climate change. So we must all work very hard to cut down use of plastic bags and plastic straws. Get it?
 
In Greta Thunberg’ speech she gave a scathing attack on world leaders for betraying the young people through a lack of action on climate change. She added. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood through your empty words…The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you.
 
How can the world leaders fail them when they are working so hard to provide better life for them through eternal economic growth? Is there a contradiction, is there a lie? Economic growth is the panacea of everything good in life, the more growth the better, never mind if it means stuffing 20m people in this little piece of rock. It is good.
 
When Adam and Eve were the only two living beans on earth, there is aplenty in everything, fresh air, food, green forests, no plastics, little waste and all the natural resources for the two beans to enjoy. Now the world’s population is 6b and growing because world leaders need more human beans to increase economic growth. Soon there will be 7b, 8b or more people sharing the earth, consuming all the resources, eating all the fishes in the ocean. Poisoning the ocean with plastic waste, nuclear waste etc etc. Temperature rising.
 
Not to worry, it would not happen to us. Don’t listen to this Greta Thunberg. She does not know how good economic growth is. You want your HDB flat to be worth $1m? If your answer is yes, you must want economic growth. You must want 10m, 20m people in this island. Please support the no holds bar immigration policy to bring in more and more people, then we can build more and more properties to house them, more shopping centres, more hawker centres and food courts, more reservoirs, more power stations….and more plastic bags.
 
A lot of serious thoughts have been put into this formula of more people equal more economic growth. No one can deny economic growth. Let’s go for it, Greta Thunberg or no Greta Thunberg. We know what is good for us, the residents of this little piece of rock. And we will share this piece of rock with more wildlife, the more the merrier.