Sustainable Economic Growth?

Is there really Sustainable Economic Growth?

With climate change have a bigger impact on the world everyday it begs the question: is Sustainable economic growth a reality? With more countries worldwide developing what chances are there that we, as a race, will not simply add to the pollution.

In reality there is very little chance. Everyday you hear about how the economic superpowers are changing parts of their industry to be more economically sustainable. But what's the point of changing to cleaner energy so far into the process of economic growth. The pollution caused by these superpowers has already seriously damaged the environment. Instead of focusing on how to be more environmentally aware when your growth has caused vast amounts of pollution in the first place, these powers should focus on how to help the other growing economies to be sustainable. With the BRIC economies growing at the fast rate they are and all the pollution problems in China, surely the most logical thing to do is to stop increasing the pollution that we cause. This graph shows how the CO2 we produce increases whilst the main economies grew.

This raises the question about when economic growth should be regulated. If BRIC economies are allowed to grow without regulations on pollution then we will destroy the planet. Therefore, it is shown that currently the concept of economic growth isn't realistically applicable to any growing economies in the past, present or future. In conclusion, at this current moment in time there hasn't been any clear demonstration on economies growing in a sustainable fashion so it is only possible to view sustainable economic growth as a concept and not as a practice, which is ultimately useless if we aren't to destroy our planet.