Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (45 page)

Tim Jackson and the Myth of Decoupling

Ecological economists worldwide have continued to warn that indefinite economic growth is neither feasible in geophysical terms nor automatically beneficial to human beings. (For a brief account of some of the ecological economists and allied critics of economic growth working today, see the appendix). Tim Jackson’s work for the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission is one of many such challenges to the endemic valorization of growth and is particularly noteworthy for its critique of “decoupling,” in which technical efficiencies are thought to solve resource and ecological constraints by enabling growth to continue while decreasing the level of resource inputs and pollution outputs. Ambiguities in the role of technical improvement are already involved in the Jevons paradox, however, where efficiency breeds expansion rather than reduced impacts.

Jackson asks whether a strategy of “growth with decoupling” could, in reality, deliver ever-increasing incomes for a world of nine billion people.
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He notes that the amount of primary energy used to produce every unit of economic output (its energy intensity) has indeed declined quite steeply—by around a third—in the past thirty years or so, and even more sharply in the United States and the UK. Material intensities more generally have also been reduced in the advanced economies, and emissions intensities have followed suit in most cases. Global carbon intensity, for example, fell almost a quarter, from about one kilogram per dollar to just under 770 grams. This “relative decoupling” has been a long-term feature of advancing industrial economies and perhaps underlies the technological optimism so prevalent in mainstream economics. For about thirty years we have, in fact, been doing more with the same amount of inputs. Gross material throughputs, however, continued to increase, even in advanced economies, neatly demonstrating the Jevons paradox. More troubling, global downward trends in energy intensity have reversed since 2009 and begun to rise again. For some materials (iron ore, bauxite, copper, nickel), extraction is now rising faster than GDP, and cement production is growing some 70 percent faster than GDP.
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Jackson uses Ehrlich and Holdren’s equation, I = PAT (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology; see box 3.1), to explore the elements that constitute the human impact on nature. Jackson points out that it is the overall impact (I) that must ultimately be stabilized or reduced. He goes on to ask what amount of technological innovation (T) will be necessary to counter the continuing growth of populations (P) combined with the accelerating growth of per capita income, or affluence (A). While the standard argument in neoclassical economics holds that technology will create the space needed, Jackson, focusing on carbon emissions, observes that increasing population and affluence will, under business as usual, increase CO
₂
emissions by 80 percent by 2050, leading to atmospheric concentrations far beyond those considered tolerable, let alone safe. To neutralize this trend, T would have to improve by approximately 7 percent per year—ten times faster than at present. Even that unlikely level of innovation does not address global equity problems, so performance would need to be better than this, and a further caveat is involved in the recalcitrant population curve—the UN’s latest projected peak has risen by nearly two billion, to 10.9 billion.
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For Jackson, this is the crux of the problem:

The scale of improvement required is daunting. In a world of nine billion people, all aspiring to a level of income commensurate with 2% growth on the average EU income today, carbon intensit[y] … would have to fall … 16 times faster than it has done since 1990. By 2050, the global carbon intensity would need to be only six grams per dollar of output, almost 130 times lower than it is today.
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While we cannot rule out an unexpected and truly massive technological breakthrough, our current progress is hardly encouraging. In the light of the global inequities that make some degree of growth essential for large areas of the world, Jackson concludes that there can be “no credible, socially just, ecologically sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for a world of nine billion people.”

Michael Huesemann addresses these same issues and argues that it is the root causes of unsustainable behavior that must be addressed, namely, “our society’s obsession with economic growth … driven by an excessive desire for affluence (A) and a lack of limits on population (P).” These, he points out, are not technological but social and ethical issues and will not be affected by ecoefficiency, which, he believes, will only postpone a “socially and economically disruptive day of reckoning.” Pursuing technological solutions is, in his view, a confusion of means and ends and, while the goal remains economic growth, improvements in ecoefficiency merely promote this end and cannot generate its opposite.
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As far as its ability to indicate likely outcomes goes, the
Limits to Growth
standard run—where the business as usual scenario was modeled—closely matches the situation in the real world today. But though the performance of the World3 model far exceeds that of any known economic modeling over such periods of time, the message remains marginal to real-world policymaking.

15

Conclusion: The Planet and the Pie

As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, what is new about the pursuit of the study of history in the twenty-first century is the need to address the intersection between natural history and human history, something we have never really faced on a global scale before.
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The key to this need for alignment and mutual enlightenment between natural and human history is the concept of scale, an insight brought to prominence by the ecological economists. Herman Daly and his colleagues perceived that the scale of the human project in relation to the scale of the planet had reached a new ratio where humans are no longer inconsequential.

Especially since World War II, the human project has altered—and continues to alter—the actual physical condition of the earth. Phosphorus and nitrogen cycles are being transformed, nitrogen very radically.
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Emissions of CO
₂
are not just warming the planet but acidifying the oceans, which jeopardizes corals and animals with carbonate-based shells, including much of the plankton at the base of the marine food chain. By 1986, human beings were already appropriating around 40 percent of the planet’s photosynthetic product, leaving relatively little for all other species combined.
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Rates of species extinction are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times preindustrial levels. Extraction of the earth’s water for human use is close to the maximum in many places, with one quarter of rivers worldwide no longer reaching the sea; groundwater has been exhausted or grossly depleted in many others.
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While deniers of ecological crisis like to argue that notions of human impacts on the geophysical scale are laughable, this attitude reveals an ignorance of natural history. It is scientifically uncontested that humble cyanobacteria microscopically producing oxygen over two or three eons created an oxygen-rich atmosphere suitable for complex life, including ours. If algae can have planetary impacts—expressed very slowly, but unquestionably a geophysical force—big animals such as humans are obviously in a position to change the planet rather faster.

Conspicuous environmental problems accompanied the immense economic growth of the postwar world, a growth that depended on an unprecedented escalation in the scale of industrial production. For industry to remain profitable and to continue its accumulation of capital, this increase in scale was unavoidable and remains so. It is not surprising that large sectors of business embrace the denial or minimization of the problems it generates, arguing that growth is the solution to its own problems.

Underlying the debate about the limits to this relentless economic expansion lie the assumptions of the participants. Economists view the human economy as the primary system and the natural world as a sector of it. Economists who are well respected in their own profession have argued hyperbolic versions of the “no limits” case—that economic growth can easily continue for another 2,500 years, that a population of 3.5 trillion can be supported, or that “copper and oil come out of our minds.”
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Faith in the magic of prices and technology underpins these claims. For physical scientists and ecological economists, the planet is the primary system and self-evidently finite. Whatever pie we might be baking, they say, physical parameters are essential to understanding longer-term economic processes.

The emergence of environmental degradation on a hitherto unknown scale after World War II led not only to the public concern and legislative changes described in chapter 3 but also to renewed attacks from business on regulatory regimes that interfered with profit and accumulation. Any policy that enforces the internalization of environmental costs constitutes a threat to profit, the core corporate interest, and is depicted as undermining civilization. In the absence of a comprehensive strategy for reform, the collision of economic expansion with the finite planet, though moderated to varying degrees in particular instances, has continued to intensify.

Such a wide-ranging strategy is unlikely to be adopted by a corporate network for which growth is a basic precondition, intrinsic to its functioning. When operating smoothly, growth will inevitably stimulate more growth, and to be viable, corporate capitalism must keep expanding.
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In Australia today, business organizations routinely insist that we need more people to make the economy grow and generate ever-increasing personal wealth, and that growth is imperative if we wish to repair environmental damage—and employ the increasing population they call for.
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They do not engage with the proposition that this approach is a kind of pyramid scheme and cannot go on indefinitely; they merely assert that human ingenuity will prevail. This ignores the underlying contradiction—that an increasing population will inevitably demand further infrastructure and more growth, and that faster growth will compound the water scarcities and greenhouse gas emissions it is expected to ameliorate. In the absence of an infinite planet, growth cannot solve its own problems.

Quest for a Bigger Pie

Growth was not promoted by governments as a policy objective during the first half of the twentieth century,
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though it was always prized and pursued by business. Yet business had grown nervous about overproduction by the early 1920s and had taken steps to ratchet up the level of consumption in response. The newly consolidated national US corporations were building a massive productive apparatus, and their products needed outlets. If basic needs were successfully met, it was urged that “old needs” must be replaced with new. As the radio extended the reach of advertisers into the daily life of people, new needs could be created more or less at will. The tactic of increasing consumption—to soak up production and drive further economic growth—rested on the harnessing of desire with its complex individual peculiarities rather than on the meeting of basic material needs, though first world working people did reap real benefits. The incitement to consume resurfaced after World War II, when it became an intrinsic element of the
bigger pie
approach to social ills.

After World War II, growth began to be advanced as the preferred solution to the many problems of poverty and human suffering recognized throughout the postwar world, and gradually became an avowed objective of governments. In first world countries, labor organizations were increasingly convinced that economic growth would provide what workers wanted most—secure and comfortable material conditions rather than fundamental reform of the capitalist system. With the “prosperity and welfare” agenda, the working class rapidly improved its material situation and the welfare state provided support for those who could not compete successfully in the market system; much of the first world’s population has become the global rich. Conditions were especially propitious in the developed world before the crisis of the mid-1970s precipitated the neoliberal “revolution.” Yet, though beneficial for its workers, the postwar welfare state was a growth state, the most spectacular ever seen up to that point.

Growth was also preferred to redistribution of land and resources in the third world. The
bigger pie
was advanced as the answer to everything and remains the dominant view for business, governments, and the international bodies allied to business.
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Although Arndt found the limits critique to be ubiquitous in the 1970s and suggested it would probably put an end to the headlong pursuit of economic growth, this did not turn out to be the case; rather, its influence waned as neoliberalism transformed the economic discourse.

During the explosive growth of the first thirty years after World War II, there was little evidence that the swelling pie, though undoubtedly beneficial for first world populations, was enhancing the lives of people in the third world. This awareness troubled the men who founded the Club of Rome and was one of the five crucial problems the Meadows team set out to address. Contrary to some critical characterizations, neither the Club of Rome’s founders nor the Meadows team were “middle-class greenies” who were happy to abandon the poor. Rather, the welfare of the poor was a major focus of their thinking.

“Development” was conducted in the belief that there was only one path to prosperity, and it required adoption of the Western template and the fostering of a “saving” class. No contradiction was perceived between extending the wealth of the first world and accommodating the needs of the third. The “development discourse” imposed Western norms of progress on third world countries, aiming to industrialize economies, “modernize” peasantries, abolish feudal relations under a marketplace template, and sweep “backward” cultures aside, supposedly in their own interest. The reality, though, was that even where GDP increased, income polarization often widened, poverty was not ameliorated, and low-income people sometimes ended up worse off.
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