A gamble that may yet cost us the Earth

WORLD VIEW:IN THE middle of this economic whirlwind people are reaching out for ways to explain the events and put them in historical perspective. It is widely regarded as the deepest crisis capitalism has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s; but if that is so we are only in 1930, not yet in 1933. Much worse may yet be to come.

In that case we need to consider how realistic is a return to the previous model of consumption-led and debt-fuelled growth which produced this convulsion. Can its waste of natural and human resources be afforded any longer? Have the limits of that system been reached? What alternatives are available?

Limit comes from the Latin limes, a boundary. Applying the term to the economic system, and linking it to the far riskier changes in global climate and ecology, recalls the 1972 Club of Rome report entitled Limits to Growth. Published by an exclusive and well-connected think tank based in that city, it argued that the world could not afford indefinite and unrestrained economic growth. If this was not curbed and redirected it would eventually lead to environmental and economic collapse.

The study was widely criticised by economists and disregarded by most governments (although Jimmy Carter took the issues seriously enough to commission a huge report published in 1980 which reached many of the same conclusions). It was also faulted for neo-Malthusianism because it seemed to echo the English political economist Thomas Malthus’s famous conclusion in the early 19th century that population growth outstripped the available food resources and must therefore be curbed.

Productivity increases and innovation proved him wrong over the next 100 years, and many argue that they can continue to do so. But the report does provide a benchmark to measure changes in the years since it was published. In his book The Enemy of Nature – The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (2007) Joel Kovel lists them as follows (2002 figures), showing conclusively how few of its lessons were learned – and how dangerous it will be to have similar changes by 2050.

Thus, the human population has doubled to nearly seven billion; oil consumption from 46 million barrels a day to 73 million; natural gas use trebled to 95 trillion cubic feet; and coal extraction increased from 2.2 billion metric tonnes to 3.8 billion.The global motor vehicle population almost tripled to 730 million and air traffic jumped by a factor of six.

The rate at which trees are consumed to make paper doubled. Human carbon emissions increased from 3.9 million metric tonnes annually to an estimated 6.4 million – despite awareness of global warming, not perceived to be a factor in 1972. Species are vanishing at the highest rate in 65 million years. Fish are being taken at twice the rate as in 1970. Forty per cent of agricultural soils have been degraded. Half of the world’s forests have disappeared and half of the wetlands have been filled or drained.

Another researcher, Graham Turner of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research organisation in Australia, has concluded that such changes are in line with the report’s overshoot and collapse argument.

Similar conclusions are drawn by writers in a special issue of New Scientist magazine (October 16th) entitled The Folly of Growth, who argue that if we are serious about saving the Earth we must reshape the economy fundamentally and radically question the growth assumption.

Gus Speth, an environmentalist who worked for years with the Clinton administration, now concludes that the fundamental problem is “today’s capitalism, with its overwhelming commitment to growth at all costs, its devolution of tremendous power into the corporate sector, and its blind faith in a market riddled with externalities. And it is also our own pathetic capitulation to consumerism.”

Tim Jackson, an economist with the UK Sustainable Development Commission, shows that if we are serious about eradicating global poverty we must imagine a 2050 world whose nine billion people can all aspire to a level of income compatible with a 2.5 per cent growth in European income by then. The carbon content of economic output must be reduced to just 2 per cent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the EU if current targets stand.

The huge challenge involved is underlined by Martin Wolf in a Financial Times supplement on climate change and business (December 2nd). Emissions from high-income countries need to fall by a factor of five – or by 10-15 times if they expand two or three-fold by 2050.

This economic system will not be discarded lightly, nor its growth assumption easily overturned. The alternatives are not necessarily neo-Malthusian, since it is possible to imagine a more sustainable world with different priorities operating on more steady state principles. Jackson’s prosperity project (www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/redefining-prosperity.html) explores how to do that.

Another perspective is put forward by the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales: “Mother Earth is ill. Humankind is capable of saving it if we recover the principles of solidarity, complementarity and harmony in contraposition to the reign of competition, profits and rampant consumption of . . . resources.” He notes that while the US and the EU allocate $4,100 billion to save the bankers from a financial crisis they themselves have caused, programmes on climate change get 313 times less, that is to say, only $13 billion. His demands on next year’s Copenhagen climate summit are a welcome call for radical action.

pgillespie@irish-times.ie