Global warming and the future of New Zealand
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Wellington schoolgirl Brittany Trilford won TckTckTck’s Date with History competition with this powerful message. She has earned a trip to the Rio+20 Conference in a month’s time, and — with luck — will get the chance to express her feelings to the assembled world leaders. Speak truth to power, Brittany. Speak it loudly. Our leaders, such as they are, need all the truth they can get, and urgently.
The Club of Rome has launched a new report, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, written by Jorgen Randers, one of the co-authors 40 years ago of their famous publication Limits to Growth. I’ve been listening to Randers speaking at the launch this week at Rotterdam. It’s a striking address, delivered with a charm that softens its grim content. It can be viewed on the first 25 minutes of the YouTube video below. I’ll offer an outline here, along with some loose transcription of parts of the address.
He reflects that he has worked a lifetime pushing sustainability without success.
Will the world overshoot and collapse? This was the warning that my friends and I made in 1972 in Limits to Growth… We are now forty years down the line and it is perfectly obvious that world has already overshot. In 1972 our critics said that the world is not going to be so stupid as to let the world move into non-sustainable territory. Well, we now are in unsustainable territory.
The simplest example is greenhouse gases.
Continue reading “2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years”
Business pages don’t often carry articles about the need to forsake the growth model. I was somewhat startled to come across one prominent in the NZ Herald business supplement last week. Journalist Chris Barton wrote about the ideas of Chandran Nair, author of Consumptionomics and a speaker at this year’s Auckland Writers & Readers Festival There’s a Kindle edition of Consumptionomics so I was able to read it over the next couple of days, which I did with considerable interest.
Nair, a Malaysian of Indian descent, is founder and chief executive of the Asian think tank Global Institute for Tomorrow and writes for Asian audiences. His basic intent in Consumptionomics is to urge Asian countries not to follow the pattern of Western models of economic growth, consumption-driven and built on the exclusion of environmental and social costs. While the West may have got thus far by leaving those costs out of account there is no way in which the much larger populations of Asia can aspire to the same kind of economic development. The economic model only more or less worked when a relatively small proportion of the world’s population was using it, and then only by excluding the long-term damage to the world’s environment which now confronts us. It is folly to think that consumption-driven capitalism can be realised across the vast populations of Asia. Instead he calls for sustainable ways of living which will pass on to future generations an environment with rainforests, with biodiversity, with adequate resources, with fish in the oceans, with cities that are a pleasure to live in and with a climate that is not running out of control.
There’s a new kid on the climate block: a sustainability news blog/portal called Planet 3.0. Prime mover behind the initiative is long-time Only In It For The Gold blogger Michael Tobis, and he sets out the stall for the site in an introductory post titled (quoting Sartre) The Future Is Not Yet Written:
It is time for us to start writing it [the future]. We cannot do so if we limit the discussion by imposing the interests of any particular culture or interest or institution. We need to take the discussions that the cleverest of us occasionally manage to have over beer at midnight, and put them front and center, into the public sphere. A cold, hard look at the present and the future can be frightening, but it also can be exhilarating. It is time for us to be willing to say what mustn’t be said, and consider doing what mustn’t be done. This is no time for an excess of propriety. But the time for blame and recriminations is over. We can’t afford them anymore. Let’s move on.
Let’s look reality in the face and decide what needs to be done.
The tag line for Planet 3.0 is Beyond Sustainability. That can be taken two ways: as a statement of the fact that we are living well beyond the planet’s means, eating natural capital; and as a pointer to where we need to go – -beyond traditional ideas of sustainability to design ourselves a system that will enable the survival of our civilisation.
The conversation Tobis wants to spark is vital. Go and have a poke around Planet 3.0, and contribute to the discussion. We’ve only got the one planet to play with. Time to start treating it right. The current paradigm is getting us into trouble. What might a new paradigm for benign development look like?
Hot Topic is very pleased to support Planet 3.0. You can find a full list of the supporting blogs here. It’s an honour to be in such distinguished company. Good luck to all who sail in her…
Environmentalist Lester Brown is a competitive long-distance runner even into his late seventies. There’s something of the dogged persistence of that sport in the way he keeps delivering the message that humanity must change course, and backing up what he has to say with masses of data. The latest email I received a few days ago from his Earth Policy Institute underlined that message yet again, along with stark figures. It’s a short article headed Learning From China. I was taken with its directness and simplicity and thought it worth sharing here. He reflects that for as long as he can remember his own country, the US, with 5 percent of the world’s population has consumed a third or more of the earth’s resources. But today China consumes more basic resources than the US does. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.
That’s national consumption. What if per capita consumption in China were to catch up with the US? That will happen by 2035 on the conservative assumption that China’s economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent.
If the Chinese spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then things get pretty well impossible. Continue reading “The Lesson from China”
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