7pm Wednesday 17 November 2004
Hampstead Old Town Hall.
People, Planet and Politics
Is economic growth compatible with sustainability?
Let us be straight – the idea of restricting economic growth in the interests of sustainability would be treated by the present UK Government with derision. It would be laughed out of court before the arguments for it were even heard. So let’s get real: this idea will get nowhere politically at present.
That’s part one. However, part two is that this is an idea which over time, as the consequences mount irrevocably, is irresistible.
Politically, the only question is how long this period of time will be, and how we manage the transition from unquestioning reliance on growth to panicky awareness of the potentially catastrophic consequences of unsustainability. I am not hopeful on either count, but my own view is that we are nowhere near ascending to that cusp of change – indeed we are scarcely even in the foothills.
So will this change occur, and if so, how? In my view, the forces now confronting the world are likely increasingly to impose their own solution. Those forces are driven by over-exploitation of natural resources, over-population of a finite planet, and over-warming of the global atmosphere by greenhouse gases. Together these will, within a decade or two, enforce a fundamental change in the world economy and in human societies on a scale which governments, especially the US, have not even begun to come to terms with.
Irrespective of who controls Iraq or Saudi Arabia, global peak oil production will be reached around 2010-15, with half of the Earth’s available 2 trillion barrels already consumed by then. But rapidly escalating demand for oil from the fast industrialising Third World economies, especially China and India, will outstrip supply by almost double within three decades. Given the overwhelming dependence of industry, transportation, agriculture and military capability on oil, the dislocation this will cause to the world economy may well be without precedent.
Even more serious than the shortage of oil is the looming shortage of water. Half a billion people already live in regions prone to chronic drought. Within just two decades that number is expected to increase 5-fold, to between 2.5 – 3.5 billion people, between one-third and one-half of the entire world population. The implications for population displacement and refugee flows are again without precedent.
Fish play a fundamental role in the human diet. They provide for nearly a fifth of the animal protein consumed by developing countries. Yet nearly 50% of all fish stocks are fully exploited, 20% are over-exploited, and only 2% are recovering. On land, degradation and pollution annually take an increasing toll. Nearly half a billion people live in countries which no longer have enough healthy cropland to grow their own food. More than 5 million people die each year, including, shamefully, 2 million children, from diseases simply from drinking contaminated water. By destroying habitats on an increasing scale, we are bringing about an unparalleled loss of biodiversity – animal and bird species, plants, forests, the whole range of living things – on which ultimately the human race itself depends.
This whole process is driven by a widening and deepening industrialisation across the world and every more rapacious technologies of industrial extraction. It is also intensified by accelerating population pressures. It took about 150,000 years after homo sapiens left Africa to conquer the Earth for the world population to reach a billion. It has taken only the last 75 years for the world population to increase by 4 billion, including a billion in just the last 12 years. Given that globalisation has also spread the expectation and demand for higher living standards everywhere, with continually rising pressures on the Earth’s resources to deliver them, this is plainly not sustainable.
The most effective measure of non-sustainability is the ecological footprint. It relates the average biologically productive land available per person across the world to the average land area required per person to sustain present living standards. Currently there is a 30% overshoot which leads inevitably, and increasingly, to depletion of the Earth’s natural capital stock. As the World Wildlife Fund for Nature has wryly noted in their Living Planet report, at this rate in 50 years time we will be exploiting natural resources equal to two Earths. But as some have noticed, we only have one.
On top of all this is the steadily worsening phenomenon of climate change, threatening to make parts of the globe uninhabitable perhaps within the next century if the current burning of fossil fuels continues. This prospect is exacerbated by new evidence which has recently come to light. One is that the rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere – the main cause of global warming – is gradually rising. The other, more worrying still, is the risk of runaway feedback effects from the die-back of forests (predicted for the Amazon by 2050), the collapse of continental ice-sheets (Greenland and Antarctica), the release of billions of tons of methane hydrates trapped in the oceans, or the loss of ocean sinks.
This catalogue of evidence, and of future risks, may seem intimidating, but it is not inevitable. The Kyoto Protocol, with the adherence of Russia recently announced, will now come into force in 2005, representing perhaps the most complex and wide-ranging international treaty ever negotiated. However, since it will achieve at best only a cut of about 2% in greenhouse gas emissions of the industrialised country participants by 2010 compared to the baseline of 1990 (though without Kyoto it would probably have been an increase of 30% instead), its targets now need to be substantially raised if it is to achieve what the scientists say is necessary to arrest global warming, namely a 60% cut by 2050. But at least an enforceable goal has been set on which the rest of the world can now be encouraged to build.
But perhaps the greatest importance of Kyoto is that it has set a successful precedent of how the world can tackle the gravest ecological threats to human survival. What is now needed is a series of further international treaties which are aimed at preserving the biosphere within the limits of the carrying capacity of the planet. At present, the dominant realpolitik within the world economy is a powerfully deregulatory one designed to give ever greater freedom of action to transnational companies in an open globalised economy, on the implicit premise that there are little or no limits to the potential for exploitation of the Earth’s resources. But this model of turbo-prop capitalism which holds such sway is patently not sustainable.
The necessary new global agenda is to recognise the limitations and to act, with enforceable international law, to keep within those limits. If the new US Presidency is unwilling to accept this, and if the rest of the world supinely fails to take the lead, the Earth will exact its own price in securing those limits – only it will be a lot more painful.
That’s how I believe it will happen – ineluctable and relentless pressures exerted by the Earth itself. But if that is too fatalistic a view, what factors, if any, might bring the human race, and their Governments, to their senses before disaster strikes? I think there are at least four:
1. Trade sanctions against climate change offenders – not so fanciful. The US said it won’t take any action about climate change or any other overarching environmental constraint because it would cost too much, ie US free-riding gives subsidy to US producers, but the WTO forbids subsidies, and other countries can legitimately retaliate against them.
2. Kyoto, and maybe other multilateral environmental agreements in future, will incentivise the shift to alternative cleaner, greener, world economy, eg through clean development mechanisms. But the huge economic benefits of that will be confined to participants in the Kyoto Protocol, and maybe when economic benefits begin to flow once the Kyoto Protocol is ratified early next year, US business may well be demanding (whatever Bush says) that they do not lose out.
3. Contraction and convergence – ie if there is a limit in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere which we should not risk going beyond (?550ppm), the only way in which we will ever have any hope of getting the political argument to this across the world is via contraction and convergence. But if that were every achieved, it would be the most potent instrument yet to reconcile economic growth with what the biosphere can tolerate.
4. However much the risk to the world environment may be disregarded, the risk to the world capitalist system may concentrate minds much more closely. The number of natural catastrophes has tripled since the 1960s, but global economic losses from these events have risen 10-fold. The world GDP is rising by 3% per year, but re-insurance costs of protecting against these natural catastrophes is rising by 12% per year. The risk to the whole world economic system from the exponential rise in insurance costs will force a total re-think within a few decades.
