More Inconvenient Truths

In a report sponsored by the UK government, and bearing his name, Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank stated that "our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century". In the report he also warns that we are too late to prevent any damaging consequences from climate change.

Responding to the report, Richard Lambert, Director General of the Confederation of British Industry stated that “Provided we act with sufficient speed, we will not have to make a choice between averting climate change and promoting growth and investment”. While this conclusion could be accurate, it is based on the twin assumptions that growth rather than stability is the way forward and that we will act immediately, making the right moves and choices. It assumes that we can have our cake and eat it.

Our pursuance of growth at all costs is a major contributing factor in this mess. Growth should not be a non-negotiable factor in our economic policies. The end-game of growth is that companies have produce more and more, and consequently pollute more and more. Is the cost of growth really worth paying?

Whether or not we as a species can act sensibly is debatable and evidence so far is not good. The failure of the world of business in particular, and that of society in general, to take the threat of global warming seriously has already brought us to this impasse.

We continue to embrace, without question, the utterly wasteful concept of “planned obsolescence” first mooted by Brooks Stevens in the 1950’s. Although the average person will have nothing to lose by a return to manufacturing goods designed to last – and perhaps paying a little more for them – there is little impetuous to do so.

Few of us pay sufficient attention to energy wastage in our homes, despite the fact that remedying this waste will have minimal impact on our precious “quality of life”. Any recently produced piece of domestic electronic equipment will have an on/standby switch in place of on/off switch – forcing those who want to cut waste to unplug these devices from the wall socket. I can not see any evidence of public pressure to reintroduce the less wasteful but perhaps less couch-potato-friendly on/off switch.

Yet more of us choose, usually for infantile and ostentatious reasons, to drive fuel-guzzling four-by-four off-road vehicles even when those same vehicles will only ever be used to drive our increasingly obese children to school. Some people even believe that to be ‘free’ means having the right to consume as much as they wish and to pollute as much as they wish. Those same people are normally those who won’t even utter a whimper when their true freedoms are taken away under their noses.

We continue to tolerate the lunacy of shipping food and beverages thousands of kilometres when precisely the same food or beverage is available locally. Beppe Grillo, the Italian comic, gave an excellent example of this when he showed how bottled water produced in the south of Italy was being shipped to the north, where ample supplies of locally produced mineral water were already available. Some may defend this profligacy as ‘choice’, but in reality you are defending a choice between two things are for all intents and purposes identical – with the exception of labelling.

While I agree that it is impossible to avoid the deleterious consequences of climate change, I would suggest that to allow economics to dictate the remedies will hamper attempts to limit the damage. We can prevent our demise and that of the majority of species we share the planet with, and minimise the worst of the impact of global warming, but in order to do so we have to stop trying to fit our environmental action around established economic principles – putting the cart before the horse. Forget saving the planet – the planet will survive long after our demise – if we are to save ourselves and the world we live in now, we must act without compromise on the environmental front and then revisit the economics, shaping our future economic system around the steps we need to take to survive.

The long-term targets proposed by the Stern report may be sufficient to protect economic growth, but are unlikely to deliver the sort of environmental impact to stave off climate changes that will spell disaster for large swathes of populations in the developing world, and perhaps even for many of those in the developed world too.