Reader Alexander Ač of the Czech Republic (blog here) put a question to European commissioners discussing climate change adaptation and mitigation: key messages from the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report and implications for policy and decision making.
Whew! — a long title, but very official sounding.
There is a video at the website linked-in above, but I can not embed it. This Q&A took place at the 2:44:20 mark. If you watch the video, you can jump ahead to that point. Here is a partial transcript.
Alexander Ač — I have a very short question. The Club of Rome told us 40 years ago that growth is not sustainable. It's a shocking result. And another one is that we know that ... we are in ecological overshoot. So why are we still speaking about economic growth?
Anders Wijkman, moderator — I guess I should answer because I am co-president of the Club of Rome [but turns to panel]. Anyone? Connie?
Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action — I think that the key question is not "growth or not", it is which kind of growth, and I must say that any agenda, any initiative that starts with a global approach saying that we should stop growth is [doomed] to fail. And we can have many big discussions [waves hands] about why that is, [but] I just think that it would end exactly as it ended in the 1970s.
So I think that a forward-looking strategy is much more to have a broader discussion in society [about] how we can change the growth patterns, how can we change the kind of growth, how can we make it truly sustainable. That would also mean a debate in our kind of societies in Europe about a more qualitative kind of growth, for instance, a growth that comes with jobs and not a jobless growth, so there are many interesting discussions there.
My advice would just be forget about no-growth because we would end up in the old North/South paradigm, and of course a lot of people, [for example,] the countries in Africa Claus [Sorenson] was referring to would say "how come you're saying stop growth now when it's our turn?"
So the thing we must do is find a smarter, more clever and sustainable kind of growth.
To hear another answer to Alexander's question, watch the video.
We begin by noting that a "sustainable kind of growth" is literally an oxymoron. We can guess that this is a reference to very energy-efficient, job-creating "green growth" using all sorts of alternative energy technologies (solar, wind, hydro-electric, etc.). We also note that continuing growth of human economies will inevitably lead to more destruction of the biosphere, which is ultimately the reason why more growth ("sustainable" or not) is a death sentence for millions of other species and perhaps Homo sapiens itself within the next few centuries.
But let's look at the details.
What did Connie Hedegaard just tell us? First off, she said that growth is non-negotiable in the developing (non-OECD) world. And that's OK because social justice demands it. Remember, China is far and away the largest source of CO2 emissions on Earth. So the main rationale for not questioning the Goodness of Growth is social justice on a global scale.
Not only will this growth be green, but this growth will create jobs in the European Union, as opposed to the kind of "growth" the EU has now where hardly any jobs are created. But even as social justice lags in the EU, the main inequities to be fixed revolve around the great wealth disparity between the global "North" and the global "South" (assuming this latter includes China, which is well north of the equator).
Although economic justice and social progress generally are not among humanity's strong points, the task of mitigating climate change, which itself seems impossible while economic and population growth continues unabated, has now been made much, much harder because we've added an additional seemingly impossible requirement for universal socioeconomic justice. I discussed some of these issues in Confusion In The Twilight (look at the views of Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows).
Thus social justice requires economic growth to continue in the global "South" and requires growth of the "sustainable" kind in Europe, and, eventually, in the developing world too
So really, beneath all of these reasonable sounding rationalizations, these Europeans are talking about building some kind of sustainable BUT growth-fueled utopia where humanity's biggest self-created problems get fixed.
That sounds like a Tall Order to me
The moderator Anders Wijkman finishes off the reply to Alexander's question. At the beginning, I am paraphrasing.
... efficiency using current technologies is the first objective.
And then you and I ... of course ... can enter into a more philosophical discussion about where the outer limits [of growth] are. And the original message of the Club of Rome was not that everything was hopeless.
Notice that Wijkman equates hitting the limits on growth with things being "hopeless."
Rather, [the message] was that we could organize society in a different way so that we would not reach those limits. And that to me is the problem, we have not listened enough to that part of the message.
The conclusions of the Club of Rome in the 1970s have always been a red herring. Forget about the Club of Rome. Lots of water has flowed under the bridge since 1972. Given all that's happened during those 42 years, if we were going to listen to the Club of Rome's message, that already would have happened. And remember, the scientific world discovered global warming some years after the original report on limits to growth. And the public got the message some years after that. The Club of Rome didn't know the half of it.
There's been ample time for humanity to act as the Bad News comes rolling in, but little has changed. Humans have made only trivial modifications to their behavior over those 42 years, even long after they knew about global warming. There is endless talk of the need for change, but the EU commission on climate change adaptation and mitigation is still telling us that Growth Is Good. Only the rationalizations behind this ironclad message have changed over these past 42 years. If Growth is Good, humans do not need to change their behavior in non-trivial ways.
Leaving aside all the convenient rationalizations, I can only conclude that, for humans, economic growth is not negotiable—period. I have also concluded that striving for growth in economies or populations—these are bascially the same thing—is bound up in instinctual behaviors.
But that's me talking. You know all the facts and their reasonable interpretation. You read what Connie Hedegaard said in response to Alexander's question. You read what Anders Wijkman said.
You are entitled to conclude what you are entitled to conclude. And leave the "hope" out of it
Great job, Alex. I know you didn't get the answer you wanted, but at least we can see the rationales of the thinkers trying to "lead" us.
Hedegaard's use of the developing world to argue that growth isn't sustainable is a straw man argument. We could raise the living standards in the developing world significantly if we really wanted to. The problem is the high living standards and resource/pollution levels of highly developed and rapidly developing countries. What Hedegaard is really saying is the we can't limit growth in those latter countries, using developing countries as a justification. It's perverse in that the highly developed countries are actually significantly holding back the development of poorer nations by loan tactics, forced privatization (thereby creating Western/Chinese control of much of their land and resources), and subsidization of developed country resources and products (we subsidize corn, forcing a lot of Mexicans out of agriculture, for instance). We're basically raping the poorer nations to prop up our own growth.
The real story behind the non-negotiability of growth (in addition to human behavioral characteristics) is the simple fact that most of the West's money doesn't actually exist. It's digits on computers and debt. You can't service debts and keep the value of non-existent money without growth. It sadly makes a steady state economy in this era impossible. If we honestly tried it, the banking sector would collapse, and the effects would shake everything down to the ground.
Those in true control of money (the 1% of the 1%) largely set up this system to benefit themselves, and now we're in a situation were we can't change it without collapsing it. The people on the panel are talking about keeping but tweaking the system to make it fairer, but it's farting in the wind, really.
Posted by: Jim | 05/11/2014 at 03:01 PM