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Two Global Crises, Ethics Renewal, and Governance Reform
 Andrew Brennan
and
Y. S. Lo
La Trobe UniversityMelbourne
Introduction – two global crises
Humanity is faced with two global crises of prosperity. Each one raises questions about the predominantways of life in contemporary consumer societies, and the ways in which our value, motives, behaviours andcapacities are moulded, if not determined, by the various systems of transaction in which our lives are set.The first is the deepening problem of climate change – one which until recently was met with corporate andgovernment denial, confusion, and disorientation. Responses to scientific warnings have been widely held byscientists to be inadequate to the problems faced in a world with rising sea levels, failing crops, water scarcity, intensifying storms and the other damaging effects of a changing climate. Likewise, radical criticsand a minority of journalists themselves have long been critical of the biased reporting of climate changeissues.However, public opinion and beliefs on the issue have changed during the last ten years. The idea of contracting industrial countries’ carbon emissions, aiming for convergence, if not equity, across the globe in per capita emissions, now appears to have achieved some credence in both the mainline media andmainstream social and political movements of the rich industrial countries. Moreover, talk about carbon taxesand caps have entered the standard vocabulary of politics, with both US presidential candidates in the 2008election advocating at least a 60% reduction below 1990 levels by 2050 in the United States’ own carbonemission. While conservation groups and many scientists have criticized the Australian government for advocating a greenhouse gas reduction of not more than 80% over 2000 levels by 2050, at least discussionsabout climate change have now entered mainstream public debate in Australia after years of being the focusonly of academics, scientists and other minority groups.Talk is one thing; action another. What we want to draw attention to here are the reasons given for action – the motives. The press release for the official Australian government review of climate change, conducted byeconomist Ross Garnaut states: “Without strong, effective and early action by all major economies, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their enjoyment of life and increasingly of their prosperity” (Garnaut
Media
2008). Debate around the report centred on levelsof atmospheric carbon expressed in parts per million by volume (ppmv), with particular focus on whether targets should be 450 rather than 550 ppmv. The report itself indicates that at an atmospheric carbon targetof 450 ppmv, the Great Barrier Reef would be severely bleached and damaged, while at 550 ppmv “therewould be a disappearance of the Reef as we know it” (Garnaut 2008, 127). As far a species loss is concerned,the report also indicates that “the 550 ppmv outcome would lead to a greater incidence of species extinction.Under the expected temperature outcome from the 550 ppmv scenario, 12 per cent of species are predicted to be at risk of extinction. This percentage is reduced to almost 7 per cent under the 450 scenario” (Garnaut2008, 11). Not surprisingly, critics of the Garnaut report have pointed out that the environmental cost of the 550strategy is unacceptably high. Clive Hamilton, one of Australia’s best-known radical economists and greenadvocates, points out that the Garnaut review seems to lack even a convincing economic rationale. Accordingto Hamilton, using Garnaut’s own figures, the economic difference between aiming for 550 ppmv rather than450ppmv by 2050 is actually very small. Australia’s GNP is set to double, Hamilton argues, by 2040. Byadopting the 550 strategy, that doubling is deferred by two years to 2042. With a 450 ppmv target, thedoubling will take just another six months beyond that. Over the whole century, the difference between thetwo strategies is economically negligible. Hamilton writes:
Even to ask whether it’s worth waiting an extra six months for our incomes to double in exchange for a much better chance of averting climate chaos is bizarre. To conclude, as Professor Garnaut has, that the trade-off is notacceptable to the Australian community is possible only if economic growth has become a fetish.Does anyone believe that Australians would be less happy if they had to wait an extra six months before they
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 became twice as rich? The absurdity of the situation set out in the Garnaut report suggests our obsession witheconomic growth is so powerful that we are unwilling to contemplate sacrificing a tiny amount of consumptionto sharply reduce the risk of irreversible damage to the Earth’s climate. (Hamilton 2008)
What provokes the ire of Hamilton, the Australian Conservation Foundation, and a host of other critics, is thetone of a report in which economic measures are used as the only key measure of worth. Among the termscentral to Garnaut’s analysis are “enjoyment of life” and “prosperity”. The principal “costs” of climatechange and global warming are taken to be economic ones, associated with “revenue”, “tourism” and lostopportunities for “growth”. The last few decades of environmental ethics has seen the language of 
intrinsicvalue
,
moral standing 
, and
rights
being deployed as a way of representing why natural things matter beyondhuman utility and consumption. While writers have argued that what is at stake in conserving them is of greater moment than human prosperity, Garnaut’s report is silent on all these topics. It counts the “non-market values” associated with the environment as being worth separate listing and noting only. Such valuesare not conceived as providing any reasons or motives for government policy and action. In fact, the reporthas real difficulty in dealing with “non-market values”: it is as if the author lacks the language in which tospeak about or represent them properly.There is also a second, apparently more acute, crisis of human prosperity, one immediately concerned withmaterial goods, pleasure and wealth. This is the collapse of financial markets around the world in the second part of 2008. It started with the failure of the sub-prime loans market, which then triggered a cascade of credit freezes, market shocks, takeovers and bankruptcies that has not only led to the partial nationalizationof previously private companies and banks, but also to further use of the language of catastrophe. Terms like“meltdown” and “Armageddon” have been used by journalists to capture the sense of panic associated withthe massive downward movements in stock markets all over the world.Government injections of liquidity into national financial systems all over the world have shown that even inan era of intense globalization the nation state is alive and well, and capable of taking significant economic,financial and political action. This would hardly be worthy of comment were it not for a range of globalization theorists and academics who have been engaged in recent years in celebrating – rather  prematurely – the demise of the nation-state (see, for an influential source of this view, Appadurai 1996). Thefinancial crisis of 2008 has, among its many other consequences, led to the recognition that nationalgovernments have major roles to play not only in internal political and economic matters, but also in waysthat affect the global economy. It has also been a stark reminder that there are many basic conditions for ahealthy and flourishing industrial society. While theorists of many kinds have advocated the importance of asustainable environment, social justice, open and democratic decision-making, and a whole range of other factors, the current financial crisis has drawn clear attention to the necessity for a reliable and responsiblefinancial sector.In a striking difference from the response to climate change, the funds voted to restore financial health and build up confidence in banks, finance houses and companies around the world have been enormous and have been made available with impressive rapidity. In doing so, political leaders have themselves taken a stanceon values obligations and social responsibilities, and some of them have also spoken in detail about suchthings. The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, commented: “It is perhaps time now to admit that we didnot learn the full lessons of the ‘greed is good’ ideology. And today we are still cleaning up the mess of the21st Century children of Gordon Gekko.” Declaring that “we've seen the triumph of greed over integrity,”Rudd stated the credit crisis revealed a lack of values among corporations and executives (ABC 2008). In asubsequent speech to the Press Club, the Prime Minister “denounced the comprehensive failure of extremecapitalism that caused the crisis and now turns to government to prevent systemic failure … As agovernment, as a nation, we must respond to the twin evils which are of the root of this malaise: greed andfear” (Grattan and Medew 2008).
Systems of positive feedback 
We believe that both the ecological and the financial crises are products of the same system of positivefeedback loops. Locked inside these loops is a peculiarly single-minded kind of actor, one whose basichedonistic features are exploited and perverted so as to feed the continual operation and growth of thesystem. These features are of course central features of human nature, ones which are fed and exaggerated
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 by the system under which many people now live. Globalisation has effectively strengthened this alreadyrobust structure of positive feedback loops by rapidly expanding its territory of persuasion. Common labelsfor such a system are “consumerism” and “capitalism”. Both labels miss a crucial aspect of the system, onethat is best captured in the popular label
affluenza
(De Graaf, Wann and Naylor 2005) and its popular definition as an illness characterized by addiction, anxiety, depression and
ennui
(James 2007).The notion that we are infected by the system of commodities within which we live our lives, measure our status and seek ever more elusive satisfactions, can be traced back to critical postmodern theorists such asStephen Pfohl and the notion of the “parasite café” (Pfohl 1990). The term ‘affluenza’ usefully captures theinvoluntary nature of both our exposure to, and damage by, the toxic structures that infect us. While thelabels ‘capitalism’ and ‘consumerism’ capture the material aspect of the disease (particularly the giganticscale of production and consumption of material goods, and the hugely accelerated imbalance in theaccumulation of material wealth) the word ‘affluenza’ points to the fact that the disease is suffered by theaffluent in their addictive pursuit of capital and consumption, at the cost of destroying welfare, theenvironment and individual health.Affluenza is a product of systems that are rich in available resources, hence able to thrive and multiply on theaddictions cultivated in consumers. At the same time, these addictions are focused by the system on a rangeof pleasures and satisfactions that are – in comparison to the capacities of normal human beings – relativelynarrow. The result is an atrophying of higher sensitivities, a loss of the richness of lived experience and itsreplacement by repetitive satisfactions based on material goods. Alongside this are symptoms of addiction – typically a failure to recognize the scale of the problems we face, optimism about our ability to get out of deeper and deeper problems, borrowing from the future, and an unrealistic and exaggerated sense of future profits and satisfactions.All bubbles burst in the end, and so – we maintain – will the system that drives and promotes the frenzy of affluenza. The system is inherently self-destructive, and that means that if we do not find a means of controlling it, we will find ourselves the losers. Containing the environmental damage, the damage to our sense of community and dignity, and the other harms wrought by our present state of disease anddysfunction, will not be easy. But that, we argue, is the challenge for environmental ethics in an age of changing climate and financial crisis. The questions posed by the two crises just described are similar inuncomfortable ways. Just as no-one knows for sure what will revive a failing financial system, so no-oneknows for sure whether the world can survive the ecological meltdown – a literal one, given the loss of glaciers and icepacks under the effects of global warming.The difference in response to the two crises shows that at both global and national levels there is anasymmetry in thought, sentiments and action about the two challenges. The financial collapses led to co-ordinated and urgent political action to try to save heavily indebted financial systems, even in the face of criticism from voters concerned about giving financial help to those who had been the agents of the collapse.Headlines complained about rewarding bad behaviour and the spotlight turned on the huge salary paymentsand share allocations received by chief executives. Despite these doubts, the G7 finance ministers cametogether to endorse huge spending and showed their leadership by putting real money into collapsingsystems.By contrast, very little by way of real resources, real oxygen or real amelioration has been pumped into thedeclining and much more seriously stressed global environment. This asymmetry requires some explanation.Many scientists, conservationists and philosophers found it baffling that it was so hard to get species loss,water scarcity, pollution, climate changes and other environmental crises onto the public agenda in the first place. They have wondered why there has been such a successful degree of evasion, denial and procrastination about these things. Can it be because we can see our money suddenly lose value, while we donot in the same way see the slow disappearance of species or experience a sudden reduction in environmentalresources. In the case of individual people, unfitness and failing health creep up in cumulative ways thatavoid triggering alarms. Bankruptcy, or massive financial losses can – like a heart attack – happen of asudden and trigger just the panic and fear to which Kevin Rudd makes reference.While there is truth in this way of looking at things, a deeper account takes us to the point that moneymatters because consumption matters. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, we are now raised as consumers:
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