Core Idea
The conventional wisdom has sustainability as the moral North Star of our age, the engine driving a $2 trillion industry and making legions of consultants, bureaucrats, and executives feel noble as they shuffle ESG spreadsheets and parade their recycled slogans at global summits.
Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future is so ingrained that it’s become a secular gospel. Well-meaning folk recite it as doctrine. Multinationals print it on the side of every annual report like a magical talisman, the proof that a company cares, is virtuous, is fit for a decent society. It’s a concept designed to comfort, to elevate economic and environmental fixes into the realm of ethical necessity.
But let’s be real for a moment.
Sustainability, as preached and practised today, is a polite fiction. It is a myth for the boardroom, a marketing scheme for governments in need of a press release, and a seductive lullaby for those longing to believe that our collective binge of consumption, development, and growth can carry on forever.
Counterpoint
Here’s the illusion.
Sustainability suggests that maintaining present levels of consumption, technology, and population is possible indefinitely, if only we tweak policies and incentives. It’s a narrative built on denial of thermodynamics, denial of ecological time, and denial of psychology.
The comforting oxymoron of “sustainable development” imagines perpetual motion on a finite planet with a side of permanent growth, infinite abundance, and no reckoning.
What’s left out?
The physics for a start. Energy dissipates, matter decays, and every human economy runs headlong into planetary limits. Try asking a competent chemical engineer for the true definition of sustainability, and they’ll tell you that a cycle is sustainable only if
It can be maintained “forever” without loss of quality, and
the environment itself persists without cumulative degradation.
No economy, and certainly no global food system fueled by fossil subsidies, meets this test. The cozy ESG language ignores the bitter reality that nearly every “sustainable” system merely extends the countdown to resource exhaustion, treating the biosphere as an infinite sink for waste and extraction.
If your bank, government, or corporate overlord assures you that their operations are “sustainable,” they’re selling you folklore, not science. Every barrel of oil extracted adds heat and entropy to the system, every kilogram of plastic or fertiliser takes centuries to degrade, and every billion new humans tighten the vice.
The planet is not running on a virtuous cycle—it is burning through its inheritance.
Check this essay to see about the psychological issues…
Thought Challenge
Analyse any “sustainability” claim presented to you this week. For example, try an ESG report, a government policy, or a green start-up’s press release. Dissect the cycle behind it. Trace the inputs, the outputs, and the waste. Where does it break physics, the ecological timescale, the numbers? Name the dead cat… what is conveniently ignored?
Compare your household’s annual consumption (energy, water, food) to the notion of “forever.” How many generations could maintain your current habits before a resource, maybe soil, groundwater, or energy, runs dry or becomes unusable? Could the system be made cyclic, or is it only linear in reality?
Closing Reflection
Sustainability, as worshipped by the $2 trillion industry bearing the name and its acolytes, is not achievable. It is an elegant lie, an institutional mirage sold to postpone panic and preserve business as usual.
Humans are not managing a renewable resource; they are rifling through a one-time stash.
The honest path is to abandon impossible dreams, confront physical limits, and devise new ways to live within constraints. I know, it is a crazy idea.
Remember, if sustainability comforts, it’s not clarity. When it comes to energy and resources, clarity can make things uncomfortable.
Sustainable development is an oxymoron made for sedating public conscience, an “impossibility” that endures only so long as reality is ignored.
Evidence Support
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press.
TL;DR... foundational work demonstrates that the second law of thermodynamics constrains economic and ecological systems, ultimately setting physical limits on indefinite growth and sustainability. Georgescu-Roegen’s analysis frames all economic activity as inherently dissipative, challenging classic notions of recycling and circular economy.
Relevance to insight… crucial because it establishes the irreversible nature of energy transformation and material dissipation within the biosphere, directly refuting claims that sustainable development or permanent growth can persist on a finite planet.
Foley, J. A., et al. (2011). Solutions for a cultivated planet. Nature, 478(7369), 337–342.
TL;DR… dramatic increases in food production have come at high ecological cost, threatening planetary boundaries and leading to persistent hunger and waste. Addressing food security will require transformative changes in resource use, diet, and waste management.
Relevance to insight… the paradox of global co-existence of hunger and food waste, providing quantitative evidence and scenario-based solutions that reflect the insight’s claims about unsustainable practices and ecological limits.
Fairbairn, M. (2014). ‘Like gold with yield’: Evolving intersections between farmland and finance. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(5), 777–795.
TL;DR… the surge in farmland speculation due to financial market integration, showing that price decoupling undermines food production and food security. It argues that speculative land investment drives unsustainable consolidation and intensification.
Relevance to insight… financial speculation detaches land value from its productive capacity, supporting the insight that market forces erode the ecological foundation of future food security and sustainability.
Müller, D. B., et al. (2013). Patterns of iron use in societal evolution. Environmental Science & Technology, 47(7), 3291-3297
TL;DR… tracks global infrastructure and material flows, highlighting exponential growth in resource consumption with severe ecological impacts, especially linked to urbanisation and infrastructure build-out. The authors warn of “lock-in” effects and cumulative, long-term ecological costs.
Relevance to insight... a robust analysis of global resource use trends, this paper directly supports claims about the unsustainability of current infrastructure strategies and their catastrophic impacts on planetary systems.
Daly, H. E. (1990). Sustainable development: From concept and theory to operational principles. Population and Development Review, 16, 25–43.
TL;DR… critiques the compatibility of sustainable development and continuous economic growth, highlighting biophysical limits, resource depletion, and ecological realities that make indefinite development impossible. Daly calls for operational definitions and policies constrained by thermodynamic and ecological laws.
Relevance to insight… exposes the conceptual contradictions of sustainable development and calls for policy grounded in scientific realities—the very heart of the insight that growth paradigms are fundamentally unsustainable in the long term.