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As negotiations on a global climate change treaty continue, a key issue of contention is the difference in consumption levels between rich and poor countries. The resulting proposals could be crucial in defining not only the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, but the future sustainability of the environment.

4th June 09 ~ STWR 

In the first two weeks of June, delegates from 182 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, to discuss the texts that will underpin the international climate change deal to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December.

A focal point of this year’s climate negotiations will be the per capita carbon emissions of each country, and the mandatory emission reductions any new agreement will impose. For many countries significant emission cuts would require a dramatic reduction in consumption habits – an issue provoking disagreement between the industrialised countries and the developing world.

India and China in particular are resisting the calls to reduce emissions, since the carbon footprint of developed countries far exceeds that of developing countries. This position was condoned in a pre-released report by the consultancy firm McKinsey shortly before the Bonn negotiations, which describes India as one of the least carbon intensive countries in the world despite its high rate of economic growth.

A recent World Bank report also provided evidence that it will not be possible for India to stabilise its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 without continuing to keep its citizens in poverty – an argument that the Indian government has long maintained in its pursuit of ‘economic progress as usual’. India asserts that western countries are responsible for the climate change crisis, and thus should take the lead in tackling the problem without forcing India to sacrifice its right to achieve western levels of consumption.

The illogical contradiction still ignored in the climate change talks is highlighted in an article for Yale Global by Chandran Nair. Since the world plunged into a financial crisis, orthodox economists have repeatedly fed developing Asia the mantra of boosting consumption to restart the world’s economic engine. But to follow their advice would set the stage for a far greater environmental crisis; if Asia comes even half-way to approaching western consumption rates, says Nair, all efforts to counteract climate change and the resulting environmental and social challenges will be in vain.

Put simply, the world’s limited resources cannot provide western levels of wealth and consumption for the global population. Rather than aspiring to the model of economic growth promoted by North American and European countries, Nair urges Asian leaders to deliver the message that a new economic order is needed. Such an alternative would secure basic needs whilst promoting cooperation in the use of the world’s limited resources - redefining growth in terms of quality, not quantity.

As Maryann Bird has explained in an article for China Dialogue, it is over-consumption in the developed world that is responsible for the vast majority of climate damage. The developed world’s habit of living far beyond its ecological means severely damages the environment and puts the citizens of poor countries at greater risk of changing weather patterns and climate disaster - even though they have done the least to contribute to the crisis.

Bird describes the insatiable consumerism of the West as ‘affluenza’, a hybrid of ‘affluence’ and ‘influenza’, referring to the well-documented failure of excessive consumption to improve quality of life. If India and China choose an alternative future to the model of unsustainable consumption and growth, their society’s well-being is likely to benefit along with their health and the environment.

Some scientists maintain that we have already surpassed the limits of ecological debt and that climate change cannot be reversed. Yet still the developed world seems unable to rethink its relationship with the natural world and acknowledge the need for a sharp departure from an economic model based on commercialisation and endless consumerism.

Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, argues that before a serious shift in Western consumption habits is possible, a deceptively simple lesson must be learnt: to respect environmental limits. The next lesson, he says, begins with resilient local economies – based not on beggar-thy-neighbour competition, but on the values of reciprocity, sharing and cooperation.

And for an example of how such a society could work, we need look no further than the social and economic organisation on small islands, often defined by sharing-based economies that reduce inequality across a community and maintain supportive social relationships. The only difference, says Simms, is that the challenge on a global scale requires us to arrive in a few short years at the conclusions that small communities took millennia to reach.

Can We Reverse Global Climate Change? - Chandran Nair, Yale Global

Sustainable Consumption: A Challenge for All - Maryann Bird, China Dialogue

Back to Basics - Andrew Simms, The Ecologist

Further Resources

Can We Reverse Global Climate Change?

19th May 09 - Chandran Nair, Yale Global

Ever since the world has been plunged into financial crisis, developing Asia has only heard one mantra from developed country economists: Boost consumption to restart the world’s economic engine. To follow their advice would set the stage for a far greater crisis that no amount of stimulus would be able to contain. On the contrary this is an opportunity for Asian leaders to call a halt to consumption-driven economic model and show the path of escape from environmental catastrophe that the model would ensure.

If the calls of some of the Western economists are taken to heart, and Asia comes even half-way to approaching Western consumption rates, all efforts to counter climate change and tackle other of the world’s pressing environmental and social challenges are doomed.

Quite simply, in our resource constrained world, there isn’t enough to go round for everyone to aspire to such levels of wealth and the associated levels of consumption. 

 If the majority of Chinese, say just half the population, get rich enough to start eating seafood – hardly an outlandish aspiration – then the oceans will soon be emptied. Neither technology nor money can address this problem though there are those who will try to convince us that even the mighty blue fin tuna can be farmed to sate our appetite for sashimi. But who is to say to the Chinese that they should be denied their swordfish and tuna.

At the same time if Indians aspire to own cars like westerners (currently less than 10/1000 people compared to about 700/1000 in the West) then the consequences for oil supply and prices, as well as the environment could be very serious. If Chinese and Indians reach western car ownership levels over the next 20-30 years, there could be anything from 1.5 to 2 billion cars just in these two countries. Some estimates suggest it would take the entire OPEC oil supply to fuel them. As for the price of oil, ask the scenario planners at the oil majors? But who is to deprive middle class Indians of their Tata Nano?

And if Asians eat meat like Americans ( Chinese today consume about 50kg/capita, Americans 220kg/capita), and own houses like Australians (largest ecological footprint in the world) then the consequences will be catastrophic not just within their borders but for the biosphere too.

Thus it should be clear that Asia, as a latecomer to the model of development which puts a premium on wealth creation at any price, will never be able to attain the standards of living taken for granted by most in the West. Nor should they aspire to it even if they are able to ape the slightly more abstemious Japanese.

Conventional wisdom – of the kind still adhered to by mainstream Western economic thinking – maintains that technology, trade and smart financial tools, combined with a better pricing of externalities, will somehow both end poverty and save the world.

But anyone who thinks that technology will solve such problems is utterly deluded. It’s just plausible – as James Lovelock advocates – that the mass construction of nuclear power stations could generate the energy needed, though some major public concerns over safety and proliferation have to be overcome first.

What this means is that the decisions that determine the world’s fate will take place in Beijing, New Delhi and Jakarta – not Washington, New York or the capitals of Europe.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, Asia’s leaders have an opportunity and obligation to send out a different message – that measures to halt global warming and other pressing ecological concerns, far from being “noble objectives” that can be postponed until the global economy is fixed, as Stephen Roach has said, have to be the priority.

The good news is that few of these leaders really believe that pursuing the Western model of consumption-driven capitalism is the answer to their countries’ development needs. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao articulated this sentiment at Davos this year when he said that the current crisis had its roots in ‘inappropriate macroeconomic policies”; “unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption”; and “blind pursuit of profits”.

But unfortunately most of the Asian leaders remain either unwilling or unsure how to articulate the dilemma they face, leading to a conspiracy of silence, or at best a hope that that solutions can be found later. Even in state run China it will be a challenge to shape polices that reverse the globally interlocked economic development path of the last thirty years. This could well be one of the big internal struggles of the next decade in China as expectations are modified out of sheer necessity.

Of course, for Asians, it will be harsh to be told that as latecomers to the capitalist party they will never be able to attain the standards of living taken for granted by most in the developed countries. The roots of the new consumerism are to be found everywhere in Asia even where people are clinging on to other aspects of their culture. The role of information technology coupled with advertising and its relentless march in making this happen is a reality that governments have to acknowledge.

But it’s a message their leaders have to deliver: that a new economic order is needed – one that stresses providing the basics of life, appreciating that there are limits to resource exploitation and growth which in turn have security implications, allowing more to share in the wealth that nations generate. They have to accept that the world is living in times where growth is redefined by quality and not quantity. To do this, strong and even draconian regulations may be needed.

However not all consumption is destructive and in shaping polices Asian governments should be stimulating their economies and linking it to moving away from export led growth by investing in education, clean water, sanitation and healthcare. In China this is already part of policy especially the recent polices to build a national health care system even if some of the rationale is to get people to save less and spend more.

Can Asian leaders tell their populations that their aspirations rooted in more material consumption can’t be reached? Yes – if they can stand up to economists like Hank Paulson, Roach and others by saying Asians can’t be expected to help the developed world regain its economic footing if they can never realize the lifestyles of those they are aiding.

And yes – if they can they refuse Western entreaties demanding far greater support with environmental technology for energy and other of their needs.

If they don’t, and the arguments for greater consumption win out, the world will only be storing up bigger trouble for the decades ahead – of a magnitude that no stimulus package will be able to overcome.

Notions that the world’s destiny rests with the West must be put aside. The decisions, smart or otherwise, that will decide the future of capitalism and the fate of the earth’s climate will be taking place in Asia. Welcome to the 21st century. 

Link to original source

Back to Basics

22nd April 09 - Andrew Simms, The Ecologist

Uncontrolled growth of financial debt is currently laying waste to large parts of the global economy. An explosion of ecological debt looks set to do the same, but worse, to a biosphere friendly to human civilisation.

Where climate change, one of many examples of ecological debt, is concerned, NASA scientist James Hansen says we’ve already gone too far. The atmospheric bank of biocapacity is too far in the red and vulnerable to collapse. ‘If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,’ he wrote in the Open Atmospheric Science Journal in 2008, ‘CO2 will need to be reduced… If the present overshoot… is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.’

Yet somehow we still view our relationship to the natural world through bankers’ glasses. We are triumphal, untouchable, indestructible. If there are problems, a fix will be found, no change of direction is necessary. Even though financial credit has virtually collapsed due to reckless over-extension, we seem incapable of extrapolating that this might mean other operating systems are similarly under threat. If only history could give us reassurance.

Two fascinations recently caught me: one for Roman history and the other for our evolution in Africa and subsequent diaspora. The latter is constantly being recalibrated. New research recently pushed back the history of humans in Britain by 200,000 years.

Each gives reason to adjust our priorities. The first concerns the nature of progress: what justifies the name? At what cost is it bought? Can something be ‘progress’ if it contains the seeds of its own downfall? The second is that progress does not march forward through history in a straight line, like some immortal Roman legion, and can’t be taken for granted.

The first hominids are now thought to have arrived in Britain 700,000 years ago, when the climate was warm enough for hippos to lumber around East Anglia, yet there has been continuous settlement only for the past 11,500 years. In response to severe changes in climate, time after time, Britain was emptied of people. Vast periods of time passed, lasting 100,000 years, when you wouldn’t have heard a pebble drop in a pond. There was no-one to drop the pebble, and no-one to hear it plop.

Living in one of the most stable climatic periods of the past half-a-million years has lulled us into a false sense of security. Now, climate change coupled with other shocks such as the peak and decline of oil production (itself no answer to global warming) means that our grip on ordered, reasonably benign societies will be heavily shaken. What should be our guide to help us through?

We live on an isolated island planet with no known neighbours, so perhaps we can learn from small island populations who survived harsh environments for millennia. To tackle the ecological debt crisis, we need to relearn resilience and adaptability, and to move towards a dynamic equilibrium between society and nature while ensuring equity and suffi ciency. There are failures to learn from (Easter Island, Nauru), but island communities have generally achieved well above average ecological effi ciency at meeting human needs, and score well in NEF’s Happy Planet Index. The index compares ecological footprint data with life-expectancy and satisfaction.

The first lesson is deceptively simple: to respect environmental limits. Next, resilient local economies – of necessity based on reciprocity, sharing and co-operation, not unlimited growth, fed by individualistic, beggar-thy-neighbour competition.

We are challenged at a global level to learn in a few years lessons that small communities took millennia to arrive at. In Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation, he presents social and economic organisation on islands as evidence against Adam Smith’s more sweeping assumptions on the central role of markets.

Complex forms of ‘gift exchange,’ in which people meet their needs not solely through markets mediated with cash, but through the giving and receiving of gifts, operated over vast areas. This also helped bond societies. In the face of our rising vulnerabilities, the degree to which different forms of economic organisation enhance or undermine social cohesion must become a basic test of their fi tness for purpose. Polanyi codifi ed certain common principles: reciprocity, redistribution and ‘householding’, a system that enables needs to be met in a largely self-reliant way. It’s from the latter that we derive the root of the word for economics – oikonomia.

Boiled down, the potted small-island survival guide for a troubled planet would include these essentials: contact with nature, an awareness of and adaptation to more obvious limits, sharing-based economies that reduce inequality across a community and maintain supportive social relationships, food crops bred for hardiness and grown in mixed, productive plots. Island diets, too, typically follow the balance in most ecosystems, which is the nine-word mantra for a more sustainable food system of food found in Colin Tudge’s book : ‘lots of plants, a little meat and maximum variety’. To which, of course, living on an island, you would add fish.

Similarly, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology recently concluded that a massive shift of support to small-scale farmers using a diverse range of agro-ecological methods would be an efficient way to build resilience, inoculate against food crises, and insure against increasingly hostile weather patterns.

‘Since the Earth itself is developing without growing, it follows that a subsystem of the Earth (the economy) must eventually conform to the same behavioural mode of development without growth,’ writes ecological economist Herman Daly in his book Beyond Growth. In its place, he says, we need ‘a subtle and complex economics of maintenance, qualitative improvements, sharing frugality, and adaptation to natural limits. It is an economics of better, not bigger’. Achieve that, and it’s just possible that our ecological debts might not bankrupt a civilisation-friendly biosphere.

Link to original source

Further Resources:

Link to STWR's key facts page on Climate Change and the Environment

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change website

An End to Infinite Growth and Blind Consumerism - Jonathon Porritt, Guardian (UK)

UK Interdependence Report: How the World Sustains the Nation’s Lifestyles and the Price it Pays - NEF

The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard and Louis Fox (video)