The climate crisis, mad people and economists.
Friday, 24 September 2010 by jamesangel
Faced with the twin crises of the global economy and the global climate, politicians and economists worldwide have embraced a ‘grow and hope’ strategy: let’s just get back on the noble track of economic growth – the process of endlessly getting richer – and hope for the best. But grow and hope solutions that aim to stop climate change whilst maintaining economic growth cannot possibly work. If economic growth continues, we will be unable to avoid runaway climate change - natural disasters, resource wars and species extinction on unprecedented scales.
The EU’s climate change target is to limit the increase in global temperature at 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels (in fact the science tells us we need a more radical 1.5 degree target, but that’s for another rant.) ‘Growth Isn’t Possible’, a recent report published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) think-tank, shows that meeting the 2 degrees target whilst maintaining growth cannot be done. The report calculates that if the global economy was to maintain growth at a relatively low 3% growth rate, in order to meet the 2 degrees target, the global economy’s carbon intensity – the amount of C02 released per dollar made - would have to fall by 95% by 2050.
Grow-and-hopers have to be hoping, specifically, for this 95% fall in carbon intensity. Now, the ‘green growth’ lobby have always seen techno-fixes as the answer to our prayers – we’ll keep getting richer and leave it to those brilliant (bit nerdy though) scientists to sort us out. I doubt, however, that even the most ardent techno-fixer would have claimed, prior to the NEF report, that we could hope for technological advances sufficient for a 95% cut. Of course, this is exactly what ‘grow and hope’ proponents will be claiming now.
However, we’ve seen no evidence of any technology-fuelled falls in carbon intensity as of yet: the carbon intensity of the economy remained effectively unchanged between 2002 and 2007. And there’s no sign of significant improvement when the techno-fix industry’s most hyped-up ideas are scrutinised. According to the Director of the US Geological Survey carbon capture and storage won’t be commercially viable on a widespread scale until 2045 – too late for us! As for biofuels, if the UK were to use oilseed rape and corn biofuels instead of petrol and diesel we would need 36 million hectares of land to grow it – 650 per cent more than all the arable land in the UK! What about nuclear? David Flemming, in ‘The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy: A Life-Cycle in Trouble’ argues that the world’s endowment of uranium ore is now so depleted that the nuclear industry will never, from its own resources, be able to generate the energy it needs to safely store its waste (the waste must be cooled in what is a very energy intensive process).
Worse still, we’ve got to account for the ‘rebound effect’: increases in efficiency are accompanied by increased consumption. Suppose we invent a new energy-efficient car that gets more km from a litre of petrol than before. One of these cars is going to save me a fair bit of money, meaning that I’m going to be able to buy more stuff. Indeed, an analysis of domestic energy consumption before and after the installation of energy saving devices has shown that only half the efficiency gains are translated into genuine reductions in carbon emissions.
We must accept then, that techno-fixes cannot deliver the improvement in carbon intensity that we need. Environmental campaigner and writer Danny Chivers has summed up the techno-fix-and-growth strategy perfectly: ‘Your house is on fire, so you sit down in the living room and start drawing up designs for a giant wall-smashing robot.’
Our only option, therefore, is to give up economic growth. But what does this mean? Grow and hopers tell us that we need growth to alleviate poverty. They tell us we need growth to make us happy. They’re wrong on both counts.
Let’s take the poverty myth first. As is noted in ‘Growth isn’t Possible’ ‘Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 worth of growth in the world’s income per person, just $0.60, down from $2.20 the previous decade, found its target and contributed to reducing poverty below the $1-a-day line.’ Trickle down economics has failed – instead of poverty being alleviated, what we’ve seen is the rich enjoying faster cars, more holidays and bigger TVs. There are more than enough resources in the world to ensure that everyone has their basic needs met – poverty isn’t a problem of scarcity, but of distribution.
Moving on to the second myth, GDP (the metric used to measure growth) is a notoriously bad indicator of wellbeing. Research conducted by NEF reveals that although the UK’s GDP has doubled since 1980, people’s satisfaction with life has hardly changed. Doing away with growth isn’t going to mean doing away with the things that really make us happy – flourishing relationships; artistic creativity; strong communities; healthy lifestyles; educating ourselves; personal freedom. In fact it will mean lots more of those things – in a zero-growth economy, we’d work less and have more time to do the things we love.
This might sound like hippie bullshit, but I bet there’s a guilty part of you that wants to agree. Parents tell their kids that money doesn’t matter, but spend hundreds on their Christmas presents. After seeing ‘Trainspotting’, I bet you agreed to ‘Choose Life’ instead of ‘…a fucking big television…washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers’. But we leave the cinema to return to consumer paradise. Doing away with growth will just mean practicing what we preach – let’s embrace this!
Kenneth Boulding said that ‘Only mad men and economists believe in infinite growth in a finite world’. Andrew Simms, the head of NEF, illustrates this wonderfully by recalling an encounter with one such mad man economist. How, Simms asked, when the human race has used up the last of the Earth’s natural resources, will economic growth continue? Our mad man’s response: ‘We’ll exploit asteroids!’ Simms is calling for both pragmatists and utopians in shaping the ‘bold transition’ to the new economic system we so urgently need. Please: be a pragmatist, be a utopian; don’t be a mad person, don’t be a (grow and hope) economist.