About

Welcome to the newly restored Freeing Growth website. This website contains a collection of resources discussing and proposing how best to save human civilisation as our primary energy supplies start to rise rapidly in price, and therefore so do the prices of fresh water, food, transport and all raw materials. Unlike other sites e.g. The Oil Drum this site is not concerned with alternative energy supplies or climate change - we assume that energy supplies will follow IEA projections and that climate change will follow IPCC projections i.e. we as a civilisation are completely and totally screwed. As far as we're concerned, they're split milk, so what is far more interesting is what to do about both.

If IEA and IPCC projections are even remotely accurate, then in the next twenty years at least two billion people are going to die from starvation (Vaclev Smil, 2001, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production). Most of these deaths will occur where the natural supply of fresh water is lowest, because transport of fresh water will have become too expensive (remember, expensive oil equals expensive fresh water and expensive shipping) and much of the present world population depends on food grown using water pumped unsustainably from deep aquifers and force fed with fossil fuel derived inputs.

We think it highly likely that the ensuing panic will bring in overwhelming and unstoppable calls for authoritarianism. We therefore spent our undergraduate years at the ancient and elite University of St. Andrews musing on how such a technologically enabled authoritarianism might look like. Would it look like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the 2006 movie Children of Men, or even the 2008 movie V for Vendetta?

But why stop at choosing from other people's visions of the likely future? Let us take Tyler Cowen's suggestion in his book Create Your Own Economy and ask the question:

What is the best form of authoritarianism?

Our best attempt to answer this question yielded:

• A system which generates sustained rates of economic growth in the 8-12% per annum range.
• A system which is utterly long term sustainable in every way. Instead of being based on maximising the rate of extraction of finite ores using finite energy supplies, this system grows the same way as the Universe does: via least-action thermodynamics.
• A system which allocates wealth and liberties to those who earn them instead of bestowing them as "rights" and "entitlements" upon those too ignorant or lazy to understand the responsibilities which come with wealth and freedom.
• A system which does not deliberately and intentionally consign the old and the poor to technological and educational inferiority, but grants and maintain equal opportunity to all insofar as differences in individual intelligence and personality permit.
• A system which restores God to (quite literally) the centre of all human endeavour, as just as the Ancients said, it is the loss of connection with God which deprives us from entering the Kingdom of God.
• And a system where communities and businesses govern themselves, because the proposed authoritarian system is a moral one where government's role is doing only what government is best at. Under our proposed system, there are only two types of tax: sin taxation and the depreciation tax.

Want to know more?

Purchase or download our Manifesto which summarises our proposals