■
SCRATCH the surface of free-marketcapitalism and you discover somethingclose to visceral fear. Recent events provide agood example: the US treasury’s extraordinary$800 billion rescue package was an enormouscomfort blanket designed to restoreconfidence in the ailing financial markets.By forcing the taxpayer to pick up the “toxicdebts” that plunged the system into crisis, itaims to protect our ability to go on behavingsimilarly in the future. This is a short-termand deeply regressive solution, but economicgrowth must be protected at all costs.As economics commissioner on theUK’s Sustainable Development Commission,I found this response depressingly familiar.At the launch last year of our “RedefiningProsperity” project (which attempts to instilsome environmental and social caution intothe relentless pursuit of economic growth), aUK treasury official stood up and accused mycolleagues and I of wanting to “go back andlive in caves”. After a recent meeting convenedto explore how the UK treasury’s financialpolicies might be made more sustainable,a high-ranking official was heard to mutter:“Well, that is all very interesting, perhapsnow we can get back to the real job of growing the economy.”The message from all this is clear: anyalternative to growth remains unthinkable,even 40 years after the American ecologistsPaul Ehrlich and John Holdren made someblindingly obvious points about thearithmetic of relentless consumption.The Ehrlich equation,
I
=
PAT ,
says simplythat the impact (
I
) of human activity on theplanet is the product of three factors: the sizeof the population (
P
), its level of affluence (
A
)expressed as income per person, and atechnology factor (
T
), which is a measureof the impact on the planet associated witheach dollar we spend.Take climate change, for example. Theglobal population is just under 7 billion andthe average level of affluence is around $8000per person. The
T
factor is just over 0.5 tonnesof carbon dioxide per thousand dollars of GDP – in other words, every $1000 worth of goods and services produced using today’stechnology releases 0.5 tonnes of CO
2
intothe atmosphere. So today’s global CO
2
emissions work out at 7 billion × 8 × 0.5 =28 billion tonnes per year.The Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC) has stated that to stabilisegreenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at areasonably safe 450 parts per million, we needto reduce annual global CO
2
emissions to lessthan 5 billion tonnes by 2050. With a globalpopulation of 9 billion thought inevitable bythe middle of this century, that works out atan average carbon footprint of less than0.6 tonnes per person – considerably lowerthan in India today. The conventional view isthat we will achieve this by increasing energyefficiency and developing green technologywithout economic growth taking a serioushit. Can this really work?With today’s global income, achievingthe necessary carbon footprint would meangetting the
T
factor for CO
2
down to 0.1 tonnesof CO
2
per thousand US dollars – a fivefoldimprovement. While that is no walk in thepark, it is probably doable with state-of-the-arttechnology and a robust policy commitment.There is one big thing missing from thispicture, however: economic growth. Factor
We can rely on renewable technologies to help usavert climate change without sacrifices to our lifestyles,right? Not according to sustainable developmentadviser
Tim Jackson
, who reckons our leaders are just too chicken to tell us the truth
What politiciansdare not say
Profile
Tim Jackson is professor of sustainable developmentat the University of Surrey, UK. His research focuses onunderstanding the social, psychological and structuraldimensions of sustainable living. He is also a member of the Sustainable Development Commission, which advisesthe UK government.
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| NewScientist | 18 October 2008
www.newscientist.com
Artist Barbara Kruger getsto the root of the problemin her 1987 artwork
Beyond growth
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