garnaut report
8 Jul 2008
Next Up, Peak Earth
Growth is the problem, it can't be part of the solution, writes Geoff Davies
The draft Garnaut report is good as far as it goes, but it's based on old science and the thinking is still old paradigm. The challenge is both more urgent and less difficult economically than Professor Garnaut portrays it.It's good that Garnaut stresses the need to act, and the need for an emissions trading scheme to cover all emissions, including petrol. His blunt language will make some impression on the populace, even if it doesn't have much effect on a Government that has already backed away from his approach. We should remember though that the draft report made headlines as much because of high petrol prices as because of a widespread desire to get serious about global warming.
Unfortunately, global warming has progressed rapidly in the past few years, and the science upon which Garnaut relies is out of date. The symptom of most concern is the rapid decline of the summer Arctic sea ice, which could reduce to near zero within a few years, a century ahead of previous projections.
That news is worrying on its own, but the biggest concern now is that major climate dominos may begin to fall in unstoppable succession. The Arctic Ocean absorbs more solar heat when it's ice-free than when it's ice-covered, and that accelerates global warming. As polar warming accelerates, permafrost melting threatens to release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, which could render climate change unstoppable.
Thanks to Fiona Katauskas
Because of such concerns, prominent NASA climate scientist Dr James Hansen has called for the target carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to be lowered to 350 parts per million (ppm). Garnaut is still using the older targets of 450-550 ppm. Currently we are at about 380 ppm, already over the new target. If we can bring the level down within a decade or two we may get by without too much damage, but obviously the task is now much more urgent and more challenging.
If you've got a hammer you see nails everywhere, and if you're an economist you talk about growth. Garnaut and the Treasury will use elaborate computer models to compare projected growth rates under alternative policy options, looking for the emission-reduction policies that slow growth the least.
But growth has become the fundamental problem. We in the developed world have already achieved sufficient material productivity to keep everyone in a comfortable and dignified lifestyle. Our poverty problem is a social and political problem of fair distribution, not an economic problem of production.
Not only is our material production system more than sufficient, it is extremely wasteful, and by now we use four or five times our share of the Earth's carrying capacity. People are still seeing one problem at a time - global warming, peak oil, water shortages, declining forests, and all the rest - without seeing, or admitting, that these problems are all part of a bigger problem: we are at Peak Earth.
It is because of Peak Earth that the rush to produce biofuels is causing food shortages. It is because of Peak Earth that production of food and biofuels is causing water shortages and destroying forests.
Growth is the problem, and it cannot be part of the solution. We need to move our thinking into a new paradigm. The outline of this new paradigm is already well developed, it's just that most people can't see it through their old-paradigm blinkers.
In the new paradigm, we must move as rapidly as possible into an efficient and sufficient material economy. We will focus on quality of life instead of ever-more stuff. The economy will serve society, instead of the other way around. Markets will be managed so as to propel us into the new mode.
One of the quickest and cheapest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to make our buildings, factories, cities and vehicles more energy efficient. There are now many examples and studies showing not only that it's possible, but that many of the efficiencies would save us money.
We can also move to recycling materials, not just once but indefinitely. Already Germany requires 90 per cent of its car components to be returned to manufacturers for re-use or re-manufacture, and German cars have been redesigned to facilitate recycling.
If we follow this path, then nuclear power will be quite unnecessary. Coal, the export of which amounts to only 2 per cent of the Australian economy, can be phased out. As efficiency improves, renewable energies will become sufficient (claims that they must remain minor and unreliable are disinformation). Similarly, efficiency is the only path that will control household energy bills.
The hardest part of making these changes will be breaking away from old habits. We already do many the things that are required - just not comprehensively. There will be some winners and losers, but we've had three decades experience of that already, under the myopic and misguided "free" market regime.
As we develop, we can teach China and India to pursue this more rewarding and durable approach. We can stop behaving like a locust plague on the face of the Earth, and transform our economies so that we are good denizens of the biosphere upon which our lives depend totally.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Newsvine
Facebook
Kwoff
Discuss this article
To participate in the discussion Sign in or Register
douglas jones
I agree. But:
But our current economic system depends on consumption waste and replenishment on which depend the employment of people, important when the number of unemployed increases world wide with the complication that the majority of people in the late teen early twenty age group are in regions already given to physical reaction to their deprivation (terrorism). The IMF/World Bank/ WTO have yet to change their endorsement of allowing the movement of capital, speculative, under the mantra of the free market. The people referred to have little money to implement changes and the people indulging in the latter are not likely to change their desire (market need) for profit at high level. This is a problem as great as climate change each of which has it’s own destructive future.
Carbon emission trading or even CO2-e trading simply as one writer says said permission to pollute doing little for emissions and nothing for the problems above.
So one must add do away with the idea of profit as the driver for business (and living) and substitute co operation predicated on a campaign designed not to mislead as so much is presently designed but to inform of the finiteness of the world. How I do not know and will co operation ensure within the time available and where do the groups above fit?
We have seen the equanimity greeting the latest boom/bust, correction being only in offering some help to those hurt, prosecuting a few (America), proposing world agreement to limit such scams, as though no government was involved, and as though agreements work (see recent debacle of Iraq war) and restoring some of the financial safeguards originally designed to prevent a repeat of the 1930’s but recently removed in favour of the market control.. Lovins and all his like minded folk have been researching demonstrating solutions for some 30 years and more with real effect, or at least all we are told, confined to a few countries and none with an overall dovetailing approach. Surely the squealing special pleading and general concealed dishonesty in the name of progress is more likely with the consequence of a vast reduction in population and ability to make changes in certainly the medium term. Even now the absence of a co-ordinated effort at solving the relatively simple problem, transport of people to shops and goods to shops let alone the larger with oil now recognised as finite is worrying in itself never minds the larger problems. Ignoring for the moment all the other problems including how to change the mindset of people.
Iran and oil shortage, we will invade says the imperialists not share and prioritise the use of finite resources, after all the economists have always said there are alternatives.
If you can offer a more hopeful future, incorporating all the problems, please write to say what it is.
So I guess the chinese middle class is unsustainable then. So too, is the Indian middle class. I apologize in advance to the people of Vietnam, Bangladesh, Burma and Angola, amongst many others. Please don’t try to improve your lot, there is not enough to go around. We are at peak earth.
Focus on quality guys and girls. We will teach you to pursue a more rewarding and durable approach to life. Focus on enjoying your 14 hour days at the ipod factory. Rejoice in the fact that you’ll be using recycled materials. And make sure you ask your kids and grandparents to focus on getting the most out of the toxic fumes that they inhale when preparing old computer parts for recycling.
Its hard to tell which element is more misleading about this article. Is it the implication that the ‘peak earth’ thesis is somehow new? Or is it the notion that "efficiency" can some how logically be an end in itself?
Bob Karmin talks about a global middle class like it is a good thing. There can be no doubt that we are in for many changes, and it is only recent history that makes people think endless growth and universal prosperity at that level is even a possibility. The West shouldn’t have sold the developing nations a ‘have it all’ package; we can’t deliver.
Genuine sustainability might mean no Ipods at all. While Peak Earth might be an old concept there has never been more evidence that the contained system that is our planet is at breaking point.
It is going to go down regardless, and it may not be all for the worse. As an example I can forsee in the very near future less travelling, both nationally and internationally due to fuel and polution issues. At the same time there are reasonable concerns about social cohesion. These two problems may cancel each other out as people are forced to return to more local activities for their leisure.
That’s why I don’t have a problem with rising fuel prices. They have to go up. If people can’t move around they will do something else. My concern is that our governmental, commercial and other systems are not flexible enough to allow for the significant changes in our lifestyle that are almost a certainty.
I am also worried that the very middle class that India and China aspire to won’t be capable of change here in the West. I see no real evidence that we are capable of the sort of wartime mentality that will get us through this. It seems much more likely that our capitalist empire will fail and that China or India or somewhere else will come up with a new paradigm. That would be great, because the way we are doing things now gives me no confidence about the evolution of our species. We are not, to borrow a phrase from the next generation, all that. I say bring it on, despite the pain and personal sacrifice it may entail.
Dr Dog talks about the middle class as though it can only exist in one homogenous form. The energy consumption patterns of the middle class vary from country to country. There is no reason to conclude, that because a level of energy consumption is unsustainable in one community, that same level of energy consumption is unsustainable in general. It simply doesn’t follow.
Dr Dog’s comments provide the astute reader with a good example of how fascism (the idea that evolution can and should be guided in the interests of the "volksgemeinschaft" or homogenous middle class) and sado-masochism (the idea that one can and should derive pleasure from the suffering of others) are complimentary doctrines.
To borrow my own phrase from the next generation, carbon efficiency is dog.
Seems like they are already crawling out of the woodwork Bob. How long before the Fuhrer arises in person to command the Dr dog masses. And Mr Dog, we need a war time mentality, why not just have a war to go along with it? I am p*ssing my pants at the naiveté of it all. A simpler world, denying others what you already have, trying to force those that have to give it up. Deny, deny, deny. Your’s is proto-fascist rhetoric, but you can’t see that because you think you are saving the world.
I hope I didn’t sound like I am coming out in favour of guiding evolution in the interests of the middle class. My position as I tried to put it is that the middle class is in and of itself unsustainable, certainly in the form we currently enjoy here in Australia. And to claim this group is not homogenous is drawing a pretty long bow, at least in regard to this country. It is after all called the middle class largely as a result of consumption patterns, so they are certainly homogenous in that regard.
The fact that other groups are doing better at energy consumption does little to alleviate my concerns about the future of the planet. My main argument with Bob’s position is that he is restricting our options to those that fall within the current political and commercial structures. It seems the height of arrogance to assume that climate change does not have the capacity to force some form of revolution in the way we live, govern ourselves and consume our resources.
Ideas aren’t fascism, Bob. If I came over your house with a bunch of guys in green uniforms and turned your power off, that would be fascism. My point is that we are going to have less to consume regardless of our political or philosophical stance and we need to decide how we are going to deal with that.
Why shouldn’t efficiency be an end unto itself? Bob may well have defined the new paradigm I was searching for. If we in the West were able to socialise ourselves into feeling rewarded by efficient consumption and smaller energy footprint that would go a long way to acheiving sustainability. Living light on the planet seems like a very logical goal to me, albeit a long term one.
For some, it seems, carbon fuel consumption is God.
By wartime mentality I am talking about sacrifice of self for a perceived greater good. I don’t see the capacity for it in this generation. Specifically I am suggesting that individuals in the West need to consume less if there is to be any possibility of raising the standard of living for all.
I hear nothing by way of ideas from opponents of carbon efficiency. It can’t be OK with you guys if the whole world brcomes middle class enough to have plasma screens but there is not enough food to go around, or there are multitudes of refugees because the middle class housing on every coast in the world has been innundated with rising oceans.
The weather is simple ryip, it cares nothing for your politics, the piss in your pants or my naievity. You claim that I am in denial, but you still seem to be among the ignorant few that is in denial about climate change. What do you suggest we do? Hope it will all go away?
We can no longer live in a disposable society. Items will have to be made to be repaired, not just recycled. Quality not quantity. Ipods are a music delivery system, there are other ways of delivering music including walking down the street and seeing a band.
Its funny how peoples’ jobs in forestry and mining only become vitally important when the bosses pay packets are threatened. Until then they are happy to lay them off in droves as quickly as they can mechanise the jobs out of existence.
The comments above playing free with accusations of fascism for expecting everyone to buckle under are the signs of selfish and immature minds.
The Iraq war is consuming more oil than all of Greece combined and for what end? If we are going to play around with notions of fascism forcing unwanted results and removing people freedoms while combining the power of government with desires of big business (God told him to invade) then sniping at Dr Dog is wasting your time and you should look elsewhere for your conspiracies (no theory at all).
"Why shouldn’t efficiency be an end unto itself?"
Because people should never be conceived solely as a means to an end. People are ends in themselves.
"Ideas aren’t fascism"
Fascism is precisely the "idea" that one identity is somehow universally superior to other identities.
"The fact that other groups are doing better at energy consumption does little to alleviate my concerns about the future of the planet."
Narcissism can be described as a turning inward for gratification rather than depending on others and as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power and prestige. Narcissistic personality disorder can be caused by receiving excessive praise and criticism in childhood, particularly from parental figures.
Dr Dog I think we are looking at things from two different places. It’s the underling defining logic of society. Capitalism has always been fascist. Think about it this way. In the middle ages society was ruled by a king on a hill who took his law from god. All the people on the bottom of the hill believed in the existence of god and so took at face value the law of the king. Of course there were those who had different interpretations of god, but god was still the glue that bound the subservience of the masses. Gaia is the next god Dr Dog and just like the middle ages it will be man who interprets the her will. Now while I think living a sustainable existence is a good thing, I do not think the high priests of global economics have the formula right. When carbon becomes a resource to be traded, and remember it is infinite, we must put a price on it to create scarcity and give it value. The simple long and short of it is that certain logic follows toward inevitable conclusions. Problem with the Gaia logic is that it is ripe for fascism. People don’t become fascist overnight, the ground is tilled, the seeds are sown. All it takes is a major economic disaster, like the one on the horizon, and all those corporate interests (the ones you think that I am in so much support of) assimilate the nascent fascist logic and take control of the state (then they go to war, that is why I was p*ssing my pants). There are many ways to combat global warming, but none of them has DIVISION as their base logic.
"People don’t become fascist overnight, the ground is tilled, the seeds are sown."
What an image!
I guess that makes Ross Garnaut the constant gardner…
Whenever someone suggests some changes, someone else seems to cry "fascist". We’ve suffered substantial change over the past three decades of market fundamentalism. We can choose a more positive form of change instead. Change isn’t the issue, it’s what kind of change.
The Earth can still provide quite a lot. If we eliminate the really wasteful things we do there’s probably quite enough to go around. We can probably have iPods, but we need to stop driving large safari vehicles around on pavement - for example. And building houses that leak most of their warmth when we know better and it costs very little to do it properly.
It can all be done with sensibly managed markets, not a Mussolini nor a Hitler in sight. Now, how about a more constructive discussion?
Bob, people have an end in themselves, and I think that’s where you are talking from.
Again, fascism is not me writing on a post site. I have done nothing to compel you to give up, or do, anything. I just think we might willingly change the way we live. Its clearly beyond your conception but don’t abuse me for the hope of a better world. Fascism is a big accusation man, and unfounded.
"This is the way the world ends,this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper"
The only fascism around here i see is intellectual fascism, i.e political correct populist pop scientific crap.
We’re all p*ing and swimming in the swimming (p)ool. If I stop p*ing and the rest don’t, I still have to put up with urine up to my neck, and don’t get any relief.
Why should I be the first one to stop p*ing .
Does anyone really believe that by sqeezing my legs together as hard as I can and turning blue in the face, and being forced out of the pool I will be hailed as an example of prudent behaviour, and one to be emulated?
I think not.
More likely another bather will jump in with a nice full bladder and let it all out.
Guys just look what’s happening , in the arctic sea the 5 nations are jockeying for drilling rites under the shrinking polar ice cap.
Russia, USA, Norway, Denmark, UK all are salivating at the thought that in about twelve months they will be able to prospect for oil and natural gas in the arctic circle.
The green movement has to recruit more credible and high powered advocates with some clout. The greens are either too academic or totally lacking altogether in any where withall in this department.
As far as the middle class goes there won’t be one left if business and the real workers get squeezed much more.
There will simply be the minority haves and majority have nots classes, until the revolution or war of the classes occurs, or it all just stops.
Oli
Its interesting what ryip has to say about the new earth god, we have had that god before, but I don’t agree that it is the same thing. When we worshipped the sun and earth before, or Jehovah, or Baal, or King Henry, it was because they represented the forces in our life that were the great unknowable. Facsism surely relies on this sort of ignorance to survive.
We have much more knowledge about these systems now, in fact we have so much knowledge that if we had trusted it instead of our beliefs we could have avoided the worst of global warming. Science has been pretty clear about the issue for some time now.
But I do agree that the problem is the way people manipulate others for their own political or financial gain. We have a lot of people who are keen to put the brakes on change, because they see the potential for some loss to themselves. What they can’t seem to acknowledge is that the losses are coming anyway.
But when the Gulf Stream expires within five years and the Northern Hemisphere becomes coated in a new Ice Age, no-one will admit belonging to the CULT of Global Warming.
Then you will worship coal. Both to warm your toes and provide oil for your indispensible vehicles.
Garnaut is not infallible although he personally may believe his vision marketable. Another Market to fix failed Markets. El Dorardo for speculators on top of commodities. Such a scenerio should see off the hated "Middle Class".
skipping the fascist banter and generic male sword waving….
Efficiency does not imply a lesser quality of life or the reduction of people of icons of efficiency. I’m reading efficiency as a reduction of waste. Take the disposable paper and plastic industry, particularly products like paper napkins, plastic spoons, to go food containers…
They call all be replaced with more permanent items that are more costly. I’d also wager that less energy is involved in creating 1 metal spoon that can be used 1000’s of times, than creating, packaging, distributing, and disposing of 1000 plastic spoons… Cloth napkins? Try sitting down for a meal on a plate and drinking out of a glass, enjoy your consumption. :)
This may be just my experience as one of those wasteful Americans, but in the last 20 years there has been a large increase in the quantity of disposable products… From IKEA to the paper napkin. Disposable products are great for business.. consumers come back more often… but in reality they just represent spinning wheels cutting a deeper rut and nothing of real value.
Well-said Geoff Davies!
As a former organically certified commercial Horticulturist turned ‘Mad Hatter’ and as a Responsible Citizen of the troubled Murray-Darling Basin I would like to add my two bobs worth:
We need a Carbon Credits/Emission Trading Scheme for Responsible/Ordinary Citizens
In my opinion the switch to Government accredited GreenPower (as stated on my electricity bill) is very appealing to ‘high-income’ earning celebrities, politicians, bureaucrats and so on. Just as trendy as showing off your new hybrid car or solar panel on your roof or going shopping with a green bag. Since raggedy style of dress has become fashionable we need alternative forms of ‘class distinctions’.
I would welcome a simple compulsory system that automatically includes every ‘ordinary’ Citizen.
I envisage some sort of allocation system put in place by the Government of the day
Whereby each citizen is allocated a certain amount of Carbon credits on ones electricity bill at a low price. This will give a person a choice how to budget their allocation. Whether to reduce usage of electrical appliances in the house, turn off those lights, fantasizing about participation in a Native American healing Sweat Lodge instead of turning on the air conditioner, choose to fly or not to fly, reduce usage of your diesel guzzling motor car, grow some green leafy vegetable in pots and turn off that screen, mend your clothes instead of buying new ones, avoid meat and all processed food.
You may receive an email: "We’re writing to let you know that you’ve just reached 75% of your usage allowance for your standard rate electricity allocation. This is a reminder that when you reach 100% you will be billed triple the standard rate!"
Alternatively an Alarm or flashing light system is installed in your kitchen indicating your power consumption by green light flashing up to 50%, orange light from 50% to 75%, red light from 75% to 100%.
With today’s technology and all the fuss about intelligent design? Chickenfeed!
I would like to see a system similar to ‘Flybuys in reverse’ implemented by all Power brokers?
Instead of gaining points for high spending you will gain points for low usage. Accumulated reward points will attract a bonus. Interplanetary voyage?
A similar reward system could be applied for low usage household water consumption!!!
The choice is ours?