According to the philosopher John Gray: "The project of promoting maximal economic growth is, perhaps, the most vulgar ideal ever put before suffering humankind." It's also suicidal. Because of the way we live, more growth means consuming more oil, coal and gas, and clogging the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which remains for a century, heating it up. As the Financial Times screams: "Drive for growth 'will ruin planet'." Yet this scary prediction was news-in-brief, and duly vanished down the memory hole, despite it stemming from officials, whose views most often frame the headlines.