The Logic of the Cell

On 9 November the world’s climate negotiators gather in Antalya for COP31, hosted by Turkey and chaired, in the negotiating rooms, by Australia. Somewhere in its halls someone will repeat the line every economist has had thrown at them: that infinite growth on a finite planet is the logic of a cancer cell.

It is older than social media. Edward Abbey, the desert anarchist of the American Southwest, was being quoted on it by 1970, and in an essay collected in 1988 he wrote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” He called the resemblance exact.

I teach finance, so I am one of the people the charge is aimed at. My honest reply is that it is half right, and that the half it gets wrong is the more interesting one.

The half it gets right is arithmetic. An economy growing at two per cent a year doubles roughly every 35 years. Keep that up for a thousand years and output is around 400 million times larger. No river, aquifer, mine or atmosphere scales like that. Anyone who says otherwise has confused a spreadsheet with a planet.

The half it gets wrong is biology. Cancer is not defined by growth. Children grow. Wounds heal by growing. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute estimate that a healthy body replaces some 330 billion cells every day. What makes a cancer cell lethal is not that it grows but that it has stopped listening to the signals that tell it when to stop.

Israel knows more about those signals than most countries. In the early 1980s Avram Hershko and his doctoral student Aaron Ciechanover, working between the Technion in Haifa and Irwin Rose’s laboratory in Philadelphia, worked out how a cell decides which of its proteins to destroy. It attaches a small molecule called ubiquitin, a tag the press would later call the kiss of death. Tagged proteins are fed into a cellular shredder, the proteasome, and the tag itself is unclipped and reused. The work won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first Nobel in the natural sciences for Israelis. When the tagging fails, cells can lose their brakes, and bortezomib, one of the first drugs built on the discovery, was approved in 2003 for the blood cancer multiple myeloma.

That is the better metaphor for an economy. A healthy body is not one that has stopped growing. It is one in which every part carries an instruction for its own disposal, and the disposal is built into the accounts.

In a market economy the tag is meant to be a price. Where a cost carries one, growth tends to discipline itself. Where it does not, growth behaves exactly as Abbey feared.

Israel supplies evidence for both. In 1965 Simcha Blass and Kibbutz Hatzerim founded Netafim to sell drip irrigation, which feeds water to the root rather than flooding the field. Israel now treats and reuses more than eighty per cent of its sewage, and that recycled water supplies around half of what its farmers irrigate with. That is growth that learned to listen: more food from water the country has already used once.

Then there is the Dead Sea, which is what growth looks like with no tag at all. For decades Israel, Jordan and Syria have diverted the Jordan River that feeds it, and mineral companies on both shores pump its brine into evaporation ponds to harvest potash. The surface now falls by around a metre a year. As the water retreats, fresh groundwater dissolves the buried salt, and the western shore has collapsed into thousands of sinkholes. Nobody set out to kill a sea. Each diversion was rational on its own terms. None of them carried a price for what it took from the lake.

So yes, someone should tell corporate economists something. Not that growth is a cancer, which is too easy and lets them dismiss the argument as a slogan. Tell them that growth without a disposal tag is. Carbon that costs nothing to emit, river water that costs nothing to divert, a seabed that costs nothing to strip: these are the places where an economy has stopped listening, and every one of them can be measured.

The defenders of growth say invention will rescue us, and Netafim is their exhibit. The critics say the planet’s limits are absolute, and the Dead Sea is theirs. Each side is right about its own exhibit. The real question for Antalya is which kind of growth we choose to reward, and whether we will attach the kiss of death to what we waste before the host is too sick to notice.

When the spa at Ein Gedi was built, it stood on the shoreline. As the water drew back, guests rode tractors and a little train to reach it, the track lengthened year after year. By the time sinkholes forced the spa to close for good in 2020, the sea was some four kilometres away. The building did not move. The sea did.