Economic Growth, Is Richard Heinberg Correct?

A blogger at The Telegraph made this observation:


"It is a fact that nothing, not even the universe itself, can grow for ever. Why is it then that we pretend that the economy can grow ad infinitum?

Without growth our present financial system fails and we have reached the point where further growth is no longer practical, unless we destroy everything we have and start again as we did in 1939-45. We urgently need to start looking for an alternative but instead the powers that be prefer to patch up the old system. This approach is bound to fail.

You can see the cracks appearing in today’s version of capitalism, where governments use taxpayer’s money to bail out failed companies and some companies are considered too big to fail. This is not recognizable as the capitalism of earlier times, in fact it is more similar to the communism of the Soviet era.

A new economic system, or a world war, will come eventually and we could save ourselves a lot of heartbreak if we started to develop it as soon as possible.
 
This is what the IMF should be discussing."