What makes an economy healthy?

A persistent theme in economic reasoning is to fail to define what is meant by 'the economy', and in particular its conception of economic health. Here are four possible definitions of economic health, of which only the first (and until the recent boom, the second) seems to be taken at all seriously by politicians:

1. Monetary measures of economic activity such as GDP or profitability. This is essentially a financial view of the economy.
2. Then there is the definition of economic health based on the so-called real economy. This involves measuring how well we are achieving the creation of the right mix of goods and services to maintain the economic system itself - as measured by growth, profitability, government income from taxation, employment levels, international competitive position, and so on.
3. Then there are measures of how well the economy contributes to creating a healthy society. This would include measures of human well-being, social solidarity, and so on.
4. Finally (so far), there are measures of how well the economy contributes to creating a sustainable society. This takes into account society's position in the natural world.

Note that, in Definitions 3 and 4, I say that these measures 'would' be used. It's not that such measures don't exist - on the contrary, we seem to be awash with studies of human happiness these days (a great deal of it summarised in The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett 2009). However, such measures have no impact on actual economic management, so they hardly count (yet).

Definitions 1 and 2 - the 'financial' and 'real' economy definitions - look very similar, in that the definition of health itself remains much the same, with only the diagnostic differing much. Yet the differences are fundamental, for when economic health is measured and managed exclusively in terms of money (GDP, profit, and so on), booms will always turn pathological. And that is exactly what we got, of course, as soon as the momentum was dominated by those with no other grasp of the economy than as a device for making money - the investment bankers, the corporations whose profits come primarily from treasury operations, and so on. And of course, our economically naive politicians followed suit - endlessly grovelling to these alleged Masters of the Universe -and so, of course, ensuring that they would indeed be the true masters of our economy.

All the same, measuring economic health in terms of the second, 'real' economy definition of economic health means limiting ourselves to another strictly economic definition. This one is taken from a previous age when the link between the economy and society was not taken for granted and even economists did no believe quite so slavishly in markets, or even profitability, as a measure of economic health. This post-War era was was killed by globalisation, though the final coup de grâce was administered by Thatcher, Reagan, the Chicago School of economics and the Washington Consensus adopted by the IMF, World Trade Organization, World Bank and many national governments.

The strength of the 'real economy' definition of economic health is that it does at least tether the economy to society. Of course, business itself was constantly bucking against it, but fortunately the post-War social consensus was that society needed to be actively managed and the economy was not the same as business. When that ceased to be true - when national economies suddenly found themselves confronted with global competition and national businesses were allowed to shift capital and operations offshore - and big business discovered that it held all the important cards, the post-War social consensus promptly collapsed. The financialisation of the economy followed all but automatically, and the rest is history.

Hence also the weakness of the second, 'real economy' definition of economic health - that it ties the economy to society but does not define it in terms of what it does for society. So although politicians and economists regularly insist on the social connection, this is seldom more than verbal reassurance. Conversely, little attention was paid to what would happen if national economies were internationalised while there was no global consensus, let alone global political apparatus, for managing an increasingly global economy. As usual, the economists (a body of intellectuals blessed with 20:20 hindsight) completely failed to predict what happened next.

So as soon as the circulation of capital and resources starts to enter new circuits, the entire political class was thrown into disarray, excepting only those for whom it was axiomatic that markets should be allowed to determine everything (Thatcher and Reagan) and those for whom capitalism had always been suspect (socialists, etc.). The immediate effects were that everything was sacrificed in the name of an extremely narrow definition of economic health (implicitly Definition 1, of course) - the privatisation and marketisation of the public sector, tax breaks and subsidies for fabulously wealthy corporations and individuals and, far from the economy serving society, coming to see society as being reduced to an appendage to the economy. Happy days indeed.

It was twenty years before the new market/Washington consensus was able to dominate the entire political spectrum (at least as far as parliamentary politics was concerned), but there was never much doubt that it would.

So the second definition of political health was always unstable. As for the third - the creation and maintenance of a healthy society - it never really got a grip on economics. At a rhetorical level, of course, it was always argued, even by the most extreme market enthusiasts, that the full marketisation of the economy would benefit us all. But that merely meant that connection was assumed - the same as definition number two. On the other hand, the actual method chosen to hand it over - handing over society's key assets to big business, deregulating markets, and so on - not only assumed that Definition 3 could be achieved by equating it with Definition 2 but all but made it inevitable that the economy itself would quickly lapse into Definition 1 - the source of our current woes.

But even if Definition 3 could have been enforced by political control over the economy - a doubtful proposition, given the lack of clear understanding by mainstream politicians and economists of how capitalism really works - it is now clear that this would not have been enough. For centuries we have paid little attention to society's impact on nature, even though it has sometimes reached the point where a civilisation has effectively committed environmental suicide.

Nor was this simply a matter of ignorance. We have had the materials for a true environmental science for as long as there has been a science of any kind. Liebig and others were already explaining how we were constantly undermining the natural basis for society in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not hard to see or understand: you measure some basic facts, such as how much (literal) crap is being poured into the sea instead of being pumped back into the land, that told you how quickly you were depleting the soil, and that told you how long we could go on like this.In economic terms, the problem was that no strictly economic measure of well-being was going to capture society's ultimate sustainability if if did not measure the long-term, inter-generational impact of economic activity.

Basically, economic metrics look equally benignly on social 'bads' and goods, just so long as someone was paid to create them, and ignore both when no one is paid either to create them or clear them up. Nor do they generally take into account how we squander resources, not only using up what should be our children's heritage but even turning what one would have thought were inherently renewable resources such as fresh water and fertile soil and seed into non-renewable resources.

The reason we didn't pay attention to this kind of insight was simple but not obvious. Even while we were creating the science needed to understand just how unsustainable our economic system was, the economic system itself was throwing up both theoretical and practical barriers to understanding this fact. On the one hand, economic theory was claiming that a combination of market-driven efficiency and resource substitution meant that the economy would take care of all these problems automatically, so they did not need to be managed by anyone else, and society could blithely look the other way. On the other, by the time the size of this mistake was clear, we were too committed to an economy that was driven by constant growth to be able to see or admit that we were indeed in deep trouble.

So major studies of the (un)sustainability of the economy start to be published in the nineteen sixties and seventies - Only One Earth, The Limits to Growth, and so on - and here we are, four decades later, still unable to take them in. Rather, the dissonance between any realistic solution to the problems of environmental sustainability and capitalist economic viability have rendered the problem too complex, the forces aligned with the wrong answer too powerful and those charged with solving the problem have been rendered too scared, too confused and too weakly equipped to deal with it.

The Coming Shortage Of All The World's Most Important Industrial Metals

To read André Diederen's deeply scary presentation, 'Metal minerals scarcity and the Elements of Hope' (presented at the ‘Peak’ Summit, Alcatraz, Italy, June 27, 2009 and republished by Business Insider), click on the title of this post.

In essence: all the major metals on which western economies rely will peak within the next few decades. And then... To quote verbatim the conclusion:

1. Less affordable mass electronic products
2. Forget large-scale conversion towards alternative energy sources
3. Forget large-scale electrification of land-based transport
4. Chemical compounds will become more expensive
5. Construction and machining will become more expensive
6. Metals scarcity will aggravate energy scarcity

I think 2, 3 and 6 are quite enough. But there will be no Copenhagen for resource depletion until it is far too late, because all the key resources are owned by corporations or national governments. The USA and EU are especially exposed, and especially exposed to China - an almost equally scary idea.

As for Diederen's proposed solution:

1. Use less or “managed austerity”
2. Longer product lifetime
3. Recycling and reuse of materials
4. Substitution of materials
5. Develop adapted new products
6. Stockpiles

Hard to see how any of this can be achieved under the current economic regime:

1. Use less or 'managed austerity' - In a production/consumption-driven capitalist economy?
2. Longer product lifetime - As above.
3. Recycling and reuse of materials - Possibly, but the maths of exponential growth means this will only put of the peak by a few years. Has no one learned from the Limits to Growth?
4. Substitution of materials - With what? How often can metallic materials be replaced with non-metallic materials? Sometimes...
5. Develop adapted new products - OK if these can be made profitable - and do not themselves involve any of the key materials. Hard to imagine.
6. Stockpiles - Given the above, what will there be left to stockpile?

Finally, the effect of materials shortages and the domination all this hands to undemocratic governments and global corporations will be to undermine the possibility this very solution ever being carried out.

Very few 'elements of hope', I think.

http://www.businessinsider.com/energy-and-mineral-production-on-a-permanent-downward-spiral-2009-12#economies-are-growing-exponentially-which-is-the-root-cause-of-resource-strain-1

Undertanding stocks and flows: The bathtub metaphor

I’m currently studying for a master's degree in Business Strategy and the Environment at Birkbeck College in London University, and have been very struck by how basic concepts of environmental science are relatively poorly understood – even by our lecturers. A god example is the question of ‘stocks and flows’, which is fundamental to understanding carbon emissions. Nigel Lawson also illustrated his ignorance of this relationship in his recent sceptical tract, so here is a useful metaphor. I did not invent it (in fact it’s a basic model for all sorts of ‘stock and flow’ processes), but here goes.

Imagine that you are lying in the bath. You are up to your nose in water and more is still pouring in through the taps. But don’t worry – your nose is level with the overflow pipe, and as much water is flowing out again as the taps are letting in. But only just – the overflow can handle what is coming in right now but no more. So you are, for the moment, perfectly safe.

But what if the taps are opened just a little more? Leaving aside the very little room for manoeuvre further ‘adaptation’ of your bathtub ‘environment’ allows you, the fact is, an increase in inflow will not be met by an increase in outflow. No matter how small the increase is, you are now in great danger, to the point where you must eventually drown.

Notice that this result does not depend on how much extra water flows in – even the smallest increment will get you in the end. It does not matter how much water was in the bath already or how large or small the maximum inflow and outflow are. As soon as the former starts to exceed the latter, by no matter how little, you will drown.

Likewise for humanity’s collective carbon emissions. Regardless of how much more carbon is emitted from other sources, if the environment is adapted to reabsorb only pre-industrial levels of emissions, then adding more will quickly (in nature’s geological timescale) start to swamp the system. The sizes of both nature's emissions and our own are irrelevant: even if the rest of nature emitted a hundred times as much carbon as humanity as a whole, the natural environment would still be drowning in carbon as soon as we started to increase the flow beyond what nature's carbon 'overflow pipe' is able to remove again.

The same would happen with increased natural eruptions of carbon from natural sources, of course, and we would still have to deal with the consequences. In fact there is good evidence that massive natural changes in carbon levels have profoundly affected the survival of many species. But most such natural intrusions into the natural carbon cycle are erratic and average out over time to quite small net changes.

Industry in by no means such a slight or incidental factor. Indeed, everything we know about our actions to date point to industry being the single most important factor in the emergence of quality complete new era – what Paul Crutzen has called the Anthropocene.

This era will certainly prove to be the most fatal in a quarter of a billion years for most species on this planet. And right at the centre of its effects will be the ‘bathtub’ effect of stocks and flows.

Stop Climate Change March, London, 5 December 2009

I went on the Stop Climate Change March last Saturday. Depending on who you believe, so did somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 other people.

Some interesting events straightaway. As we stand about in from Grosvenor Square, waiting for the off, I reminisce wistfully about the good old days of anti-Vietnam protests. Hoping he will share my nostalgia, I ask a middle-aged policeman whether we might not be allowed to sack the American Embassy. To my pleasant surprise, I am not arrested or (as far as I am aware) photographed. He replies simply, ‘Is it worth it?’ I am tempted to explain in some detail exactly what part the government and people of the United States currently play in our climate problems, but life is too short and the demonstration has started to roll down towards Piccadilly.

Almost immediately, we pass the Canadian High Commission and huge choruses of boos erupt – a mark of our enthusiasm for the Alberta tar sand projects. Yes, as George Monbiot noted the other day in The Guardian, the Canadians are finally the bad guys. Unimaginable in real life, of course, but then the Canadians no longer inhabit real life. Instead, their government has been hijacked by oil interests, while the great majority of real Canadians reject tar sands development as indignantly as they would slaughtering kittens. (I would say 'baby seals', but that would be a bit ironic with the Canadians.)

We pass by some of the most salubrious of London’s many salubrious properties, not to mention showrooms full of the fanciest of cars. I wonder what the average carbon footprint is around here. A bit more than the average American or Canadian, I suspect, and wonder exactly why popular protests do not focus on individuals and classes with environmentally obscene lifestyles as well as our cousins across the sea.

On down Piccadilly, skirting Trafalgar Square, and into Whitehall. As we pass Downing Street, I ask a policeman to ask Gordon Brown, our beloved Prime Minster, to come out, as his employers are here and want a word with him. The policeman is polite and at least a little amused, but feels unable to take my request forward. Apparently a delegation of representatives of the 100 or so organisations participating in the march got into No.10 to see Gordon, and no doubt reassuring platitudes were exchanged by all sides.

Which is a pity. Normally I have little confidence in our political class – not least because they still seem to be under the impression that climate change can be dealt with by the usual political wrangling. Nature, alas, does not negotiate, is unbeguiled by even the slickest of slogans and remains unimpressed by style and voter preferences. Yet I have the impression that climate change is just the sort of issue our beleaguered premier might be able to do something with, what with his apparently quite sincere (if recently wholly misplaced) moral enthusiasms.

Or maybe I should not be so easily fooled: for all his recent rhetoric, pretending to be a leader when you know full well no one is following you looks forthright and upstanding but risks little. It’s convenient for an unpopular politician facing the polls to be able to occupy the moral high ground (scarcely a position I expect the Tories to be able to occupy any time soon). I just hope he takes the problem seriously enough that millions will not have to move to a more literal high ground while he and his friends play games with the future of billions.

Prompted by a policeman remarking that if he weren’t on duty he’d join the march himself, I ask a couple of police officers whether they would join in if they weren’t on duty. Both reply that they’d be at home, looking after their children. I haven’t the presence of mind to suggest that that’s exactly what the march is all about, and I would like to know how they would have replied.

Do marches work? No. Or at least, no one could believe that they have much impact on their own, given how little was accomplished by at least twenty times as many people protesting about the war in Iraq. Will Blair ever be put on trial? No, of course not. But if he is, how many of the current crop would be up there with him? And what does that tell us about the likelihood that they will do anything substantial about climate change?

At 3 pm exactly we have the Great Blue Wave. Soon we are in Parliament Square. And straight past Parliament itself! Hang on, what’s the point of marching from one end of London to the other and then doing nothing? No great visible, audible protest? Why on earth not? Is it perhaps that the organisers couldn't get permission? Yes, that’s right, we need permission to express our opinion to our lords and masters about the way they are neglecting the planet. Which is, I suppose, as conclusive proof as you could want that they are indeed our lords and masters. And we go along with it, of course. Because, no doubt, we are British and middle class and jolly polite.

What do we want?
Modest and reasonable improvement!
When do we want it?
In due course!

Oh well. At least it’s quite interesting, having a ring side seat at the end of the world. I wonder what the average Roman senator felt like in about 450 AD?

Staring down the pipeline

A telltale sign of our various governments’ inability to grasp what the environmental problem actually is is the enthusiasm with which they embrace the possibility of a business-led solution. That it is specifically business-led view of the world is indicated by the specifics. For example, it is perfectly clear that a huge campaign of insulation would be a powerful, low-tech method of substantially reducing our collective carbon footprint at minimal cost and with a huge impact on key economic problem such as issues as employment.

But although this is an economic solution, it isn’t a business solution, so it won’t do. Well, not for central government anyway. Local government (such as Kirklees) is busy insulating, distributing energy-efficient light bulbs, updating boilers and otherwise making millions of one-off improvements in the countries’ carbon consumption. But that’s the problem: from business’s point of view, one-off is only one step better than ‘no step’. What business needs is a continuing stream of buyers who will need to come back over and over again.

But pandering to a growth-obsessed economy – which is to say, a capitalist economy – is precisely how we got into this mess in the first place: by creating an economic system that not only busily generated an endless pipeline of new demand (through marketing, built-in obsolescence, consumerism, and so on) but also is unable to survive if that pipeline is ever turned off. The current finance-driven crisis is only a taste of what would happen if demand for industrial products as a whole collapsed, or even stood still. That really would be a global crisis, and no amount of Asian savings would get us out of it, not least because the manufacturing-based Asian economies would be as badly affected as everyone else.

So the business necessity for an endless pipeline explains why it is that central governments (who, unlike local government, have both the power and the obligation to drive the capitalist economy as a whole) all but ignores one-off, ‘passive’ measures such as insulation. The scale of the effort that would need to be mounted is vast, but being a single shot, is not what business needs. So business programmes and journals, having finally got over their initial queasiness about green ventures, are looking at alternative energy, nuclear power, and so on – because they mean continuing streams of high-value sales that can be safely predicted to go on mounting and mounting for decades to come!

How much more ironic could it get? The solution to an environmental problem caused by uncontrolled growth is to give the people who got us here a whole new area into which to grow! Clever us. Likewise for the obsession with toys like electric cars: what purpose do they serve from an environmental point of view, given that the electricity they will run on will reduce the electricity available for genuinely social purposes such as heat and light. It isn’t very likely at the moment that we will be able to safely generate enough clean energy for those purposes in time to deflect our environmental problems, but we are talking about electric cars anyway. The odd allusion aside, we are not talking about public transport, reducing travelling for work and the many opportunities they would offer to clean up our planet ant, but rather methods for keeping an inherently unsustainable economic system in its present image. And why? Because that is what business needs. And what society needs? What the environmental needs? Who cares.

Of course, we need alternative energy and many other things for which the only solution is mass production by industrial methods. But what we don’t need is another turn of the very wheel that got us where we are today. There will be no solution to our environmental problems until we take a good clear look at the economic system we are relying on to deliver it.

The Limits to Growth

Just about the most convincing – and scary - book I ever read about the environment was The Limits to Growth. I would guess that everyone has heard of this book but my impression is that relatively few people have ever read it, or the two follow-up volumes. I read it when it first came out – almost four decades ago – and then again a few months back.

The book was written by a group of MIT researchers - Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens – and published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. The timing is interesting, as the first edition of The Limits to Growth is roughly contemporary with a number of other foundation texts in the overall environmental movement. 1971 saw the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which gave the growing concern with population growth a kick start. Then in 1972 Barbara Ward and the well-known anthropologists René Dubos published Only One Earth – a sort of semi-official UN report that attracted a lot of attention. And then in 1974, M. King Hubbard gave what was perhaps his most important summary of the position on oil and energy production, namely his testimony to Congress on the peaking of US oil production.

The reason I found The Limits to Growth so compelling – even more than Only One Earth or Silent Spring - was the simplicity and centrality of the question it posed and the directness of the method its authors used to answer it. Instead of endless facts and figures and yet another multi-faceted discussion of our environmental predicament, they simply asked what would happen if humanity at large continued with a small number of key trends:

• World population.
• Industrialization.
• Pollution.
• Food production.
• Resource depletion.

Their method was equally straightforward – so much so that, had I felt very doubtful about its validity when I first heard about it. They started with a very generalised model of these factors - the ‘World3’ model developed by Professor Jay Forrester (also from MIT). This is described in Forrester’s World Dynamics (published the previous year), which used a ‘system dynamics’ approach. This was really a very simple model - basically a suite of functional interactions (circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships, etc.) between what the modellers regarded as the key social and natural phenomena. World3 was based on large, long-term factors, which it defined in self-consciously simple and gross terms, without much detail. It made little attempt to explain why these interactions were as they were.

When tracking what happened when the trends they were interested in unfolded, the Limits to Growth team were not looking for trouble. They made strongly optimistic assumptions when in doubt, and took into account most of the qualifications critics usually offer about predictions of environmental doom and gloom – resource substitution, the power of innovation, and so on. On the other hand, they did assume that all these factors tend towards compound growth - which is to say, that they grow by a constant percentage, and constantly accelerate, not by a constant amount, which would lead only to regular increments of the same size. They also interact with one another, which has the effect of overshoots and disruptions in one undermining the others.

A typical outcome of the model went like this:

1. Population cannot grow without food.
2. Food production can only be increased by growth of capital.
3. Creating more capital requires extracting and processing more resources.
4. Discarded waste from resource extraction, refining and usage become pollution.
5. Pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.
6. So the system tends towards eventual collapse of both population and food production.

It’s crucial to understand that this collapse happens not only because a specific input is damaged or reduced (which might be ameliorated by resource substitution, innovation, etc.) but because the system undermines itself. That is, the initial success of the system destroys the conditions for its continuing success. This is, I think, why it makes relatively little difference to assume that we will eventually find far more resources than are currently expected, or that we can continue to have cheap energy.

The authors made multiple runs of the model based on different assumptions. Although, like most futurologists, they avoided claiming to be making strict predictions, the consistency of the outcomes is quite frightening enough.

The book analyses quite a few scenarios (though only a fraction of those actually run, apparently). The starting point was ‘business as usual’, which led to the following outcomes:

1. Massive industrial growth depletes resources.
2. Resource prices then rise and stocks are depleted.
3. So more capital used for obtaining resources, leaving less for growth.
4. Eventually investment cannot keep up with depreciation.
5. With that, the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, the tax base for government, and so on.
6. However, population keeps rising, so the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.

Radical collapse comes ‘well before the year 2100’.

As I say, the authors presented other scenarios in which:

• Nuclear power is cheap and safe.
• We manage to discover vastly increased resources.
• Innovation and technology allow much reduced pollution.
• Agricultural yields are greatly improved.

And so on. By and large, these optimistic assumptions mean that the eventual collapse is delayed by a decade or two – never more.

Here’s another typical example: the Green Revolution. This has indisputably increased food production, but at a price. The specialised seeds require a great deal of fertiliser and water. The former accelerates fossil fuel use and depletion, while the latter extracts more water than natural systems can sustain. In addition, the need for extensive capital also leads to peasant farmers being evicted from the land by their landlords, and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants end up in Mumbai, Kolkata, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, where they have no resources and no relevant skills from what they might earn a living. This increases pressure on urban systems and causes fertile land to be built over by slums.

The increase in capital requirements – tractors, petrol, fertiliser, shipping etc. – needed to operate the Green Revolution hugely depletes resources, including oil and natural gas. What is worse, the intensive treatment of the soil under a monoculture régime means that it becomes less able to support any other sort of agriculture, so the system becomes even more locked into an inherently unsustainable ‘solution’, and by this remarkable ‘advance’ we have managed to convert what one would have thought was an inherently renewable resource – fertile soil – into a non-renewable resource. Aren’t we clever? Meanwhile, the planet’s carbon footprint is made that little bit bigger, global warming is given that small extra shove upwards, and the glaciers that feed the irrigation systems that feed the crops melt that little bit faster. More jam today, but not only less jam tomorrow but also a lot less ability to manage having less jam tomorrow.

More generally, the consistent result reported by The Limits to Growth was overshoot and collapse. If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue, the limits to growth will be reached by 2070. The alternative scenarios only delay collapse: all end by 2100. The most probable direct outcome will be sudden, uncontrollable falls in population and industry – in other words, the ‘hundreds of millions’ of deaths predicted by the Stern Report. Only The Limits to Growth predicted it all three and a half decades earlier.

The authors conclusions about the ‘business as usual’ scenario are stark:

The unspoken assumption behind all of the model runs we have presented in this chapter is that population and capital growth should be allowed to continue until they reach some ‘natural’ limit. This assumption also appears to be a basic part of the human value system currently operational in the real world. Given that first assumption, that population and capital growth should not be deliberately limited but should be left to ‘seek their own levels’, we have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior.

As so often, the reactions to the original publication illuminating not only for the welcome offered to this absolutely vital book but also by the disdain expressed by those who could see no further than the status quo. It was described as ‘the most fascinating and the most disturbing book’, and it was said that ‘if this doesn't blow everybody's mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput’. But it was also described as ‘a piece of irresponsible nonsense’ and ‘an empty and misleading work’.

The authors reviewed their findings in updates published in 1992 and 2004. These books are worth reading in their own right, as they both go far beyond updating the original methods and finding. Their original conclusions, they find, were sound. They needed some qualifications, but by comparison with the critics who greeted the original publication with such scorn and the deniers by whom they are still surrounded, they seem to have been pretty much spot-on.

Nor is this merely their own opinion. In 2008 Graham Turner published a comprehensive re-evaluation of the data, and concluded that:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario…, which results in the collapse of the global system midway through the 21^st century.

In other words, we have done nothing significant to deflect our fate.

So are there no scenarios that lead to a happy ending? Maybe - it depends on what makes you happy. If you want interminable consumerism, then no, there aren’t. If you ever wanted a ringside seat at the end of the world, consumerism represents the front row. But if you are willing to settle for mere sufficiency, to imagine that there might actually be an ‘enough’, then yes, a somewhat reduced standard of living – something like the 1940s or 1950s, it is said – is available for all. Not bad, given the alternative, and hardly desperate poverty by any standard. It’s not as though we are any happier than we were then, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Nor need it look quite like that slightly dismal era – we start from here, not there, and a great deal can be done with a 1950s carbon footprint, give the science and technology of the 21^st century.

But there is a lot to be done – population control, the end of ‘the American Way of Life’ (which surely represents the biggest threat to the planet since the last ice age), serious support for developing countries, and so on. But it’s hardly worth thinking about – we never have done anything about these things, we show no signs of doing anything about it, and we are led by politicians, media and business people with as much grasp of our situation and as much interest in dealing with it as a bucketful of molluscs.

But not to worry – it will soon be too late to deflect the worst effects of our own actions, so we won’t have to worry about it any more. Just die in our millions. If you have ever wondered what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like, stay tuned.

Read this book.

References

Ehrlich, P. (1971). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Hubbert, M.K. (1974). Testimony to Hearing on the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1974, hearings before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives. June 6, 1974. Published as The Nature Of Growth by Technocracy.org.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, and J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Earthscan.

Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., and Meadows, D.L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. Earthscan.

Turner, G. (2008). A comparison of the Limits of Growth with thirty years of reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series 2008-2009.

Ward, B., and Dubos, R. (1972). Only One Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Negotiating - a numbers game the poor must lose

John Vidal had a very good piece on the pre-Copenhagen talks in the Guardian last Friday. Reading this article reminded me of something I have often read elsewhere - that one of the real reasons why developing countries will always lose out at the climate change talks is that they haven't enough negotiators or expertise - a stupidly simple, practical reason that western governments take ruthless advantage of.

Vidal reports that the whole of Africa - 55 countries - has only 145 negotiators - to cover every area, to be present at all the meetings. 'At least 50 countries have only one or two, but the WWF… has a team of 50'. What is more, 'the G77 has no offices, no permanent staff and no budget to meet in advance of conferences'. Even the language - invariably English - is against many of them. Meanwhile, the UK, USA and Denmark have 142 participants between them, plus innumerable lawyers, interpreters and consultants on tap, all armed with huge budgets, etc. The conferences are organised and run and the agenda and processes are comprehensively dominated by white diplomats from industrial countries. It's quite impossible for developing countries, and the real decisions are made when they are not present, in closed meetings.

But this is exactly the model on which the WTO operates - effective exclusion by lack of representation and expertise, the manipulation of meetings and a constant and quite deliberate war of attrition and divide and conquer against the poor and weak.

And why are they poor and weak in the first place? Because of the last couple of centuries of colonial and post-colonial exploitation.

So well done all you clever western negotiators! Who knows how many people will die because you exercised your talent for bullying and deceit so expertly in the name of the glorious western way of life! And how soon do you plan to start blaming the poor for their plight, or congratulating yourselves on your wonderful humanity? But I forgot -you started on that one the moment you set foot in their countries and heroically took up the White Man's Burden.

Words fail me. (Well, obviously not, Richard...)