Jul 10
7
The Practical Realities of Growth and Sustainability
Podcasts – or more importantly time shifted audio content – are, I believe, one of the great information accelerators of our age.
I subscribe to a number of feeds mainly from NPR in the US, the BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia. I listen to them in the car on my commute to and from the University of Wollongong or Sydney…
The ABC possibly does the best Science radio show anywhere in the world with the Robin Williams program. NPR does some brilliant political debate and humour, as does the BBC. And they all do great shows in the field of Humanities.
Yesterday I was listening to an ABC program called Big Ideas – which is a bit patchy in terms of delivering on the promise of its title, but the most recent show is absolutely sensational. It is a lecture given by Professor Tim Jackson from the University of Surrey. He discusses the dilemma of growth and sustainability. Absolutely riveting stuff.
This is broadly the thrust of his hypothesis:
Economies aspire to deliver greater labour productivity each year. That means delivering more products, more margin, etc with the same number of workers, machines, raw materials etc. each year.
So next year you would do the same amount as this year but with fewer people.
So if your economy is not growing, labour productivity is putting people out of work.
Politicians understand that productivity equals jobs. And jobs equals votes. So more jobs means more terms in office.
At the same time we understand more and more that the capacity of the planet is finite, so you can't keep growing infinitely in a system that has finite boundaries. That means that there is an inherent problem in the system. At the same time de-growth has been found to be unstable. So we have the prospect of unsustainability on the one hand, and instability on the other.
That is the set up.
He then goes on to talk about the fact that carbon activity has fallen by about a third over the last two decades as a result of innovation and efficiency. That is the good news. The bad news is that scale has had more impact than efficiency and the net result is that since 1990 carbon emissions have increased by 40%.
He then goes on to look at what the real requirements would be in order to create a stable carbon output, in a world in the year 2050 of 9 Billion people – which is what has been predicted based on normal population growth – and all aspiring to Western levels of income, and all expecting their incomes to grow at 2% per annum.
How far and fast would technology innovation have to go to achieve the goal of carbon dioxide stability?
The task is to reduce the output of carbon from 760 grams per dollar of economic activity down to less than 6 grams of carbon. And if you want to move the needle back in terms of quantity of carbon in the atmosphere you have to actually go backwards from that number.
The problem is that no one has conceived of an economy that has as its primary goal to scrub carbon out of the atmosphere. We don't know what the products or services are that would achieve this and we have no legislative or regulatory framework for getting there either. And yet this is absolutely what is required if we are to follow the concept that politicians are spruiking all over the world, that we can achieve equity for all people and have continued consumption of products and have jobs and that we can hit our global carbon target.
I could tell you more, but frankly, you should listen to the lecture and get it straight from the horse's mouth.
What I would say, though, is that this – what I would call - an evidence-based approach to the practical realities of life is very useful. We need to take this on board because there is no doubt that at some point in time we are going to hit against the boundaries placed on us by the physical limitations of the planet…
… unless of course, we are able to transition out of our carbon life form into another… which is where Ray Kurzweil is headed in his thinking. While that may well be the next stage of evolution, at this point in time, I think it is more useful to think about what will happen to both society, and to consumerism, and to technology as the meme that Tim Jackson is driving takes hold in society.
It challenges the traditions of religion, of politics, finance and even of enlightenment thinking. And each of those has a lot of momentum within nations and societies. But hopefully there will be a way of bringing those disparate forces together to understand that we need to be thinking about and discussing these matters now…