The Great Disruption (9 page)

1.   The problem is population. There are just too many people, so we should focus on that.

2.   When the impact hits we'll respond and fix it. It will be difficult, but it won't be a crisis. Markets and technology are remarkable.

3.   We can just grow the economy in a different way, with fewer materials, less energy, and more renewable resources.

The first question is very popular, especially in Western countries. It's usually something like “So the problem is population, isn't it? There're too many people, so we should just fix that!”

This is a consistent response to these issues and has been for decades. The answer lies in the numbers of the mathematics and the politics of reality.

First to the mathematics, remembering the critical equation I = P × A × T. What this shows is that while population is a lever we could pull, even if we did, the impact, while certainly helpful, would not solve the problem. The UN forecasts for world population increases reflect an average growth rate of around 0.7 percent over coming decades, to reach a peak population of just over nine billion by 2050 under the medium projection. So the nature of compound growth means that even a substantial reduction in the population growth rate would soon be overwhelmed by economic growth on a per capita basis, predicted to grow by about 2.5 percent each year, thus outrunning population growth rates considerably. I will give you an example of the comparative impact shortly.

The second challenge, of course, is the politics. While individual nations (most notably China) can and have acted on their own populations, there is no realistic chance that we could reach a global agreement to slow global population growth in the countries we need to in any meaningful way. We should remember here the comparison between growth rates in per capita wealth vs. growth rates in population. What they mean is that even a 50 percent reduction in the population growth rate, which would require a herculean effort, would actually have only a small impact on the trends we're discussing.

To really have a substantial impact on the forecast environmental impact, we would need to dramatically
reduce
the global population by a significant percentage from what it is now. Given that we struggle even to slow the rate of
growth
, a deliberate strategy to reduce the population is not going to happen. We will return to whether it might happen involuntarily, but it certainly won't be a strategy we deliberately pursue to avoid the crisis. It's also worth bearing in mind that with 2050 less than forty years away and average world life expectancy now almost seventy years, many of the people of 2050 are already around today or soon will be.

So back to our core equation; the population lever is clearly broken, and pulling it would have little impact.

The most common question I get to my arguments from those who disagree is something along the lines of “Surely when the impact becomes clear for all to see, we can then change quickly and fix this without a major crisis. After all, haven't we fixed many of our environmental and social problems in the past?”

Or it's put as “There's always been doom-and-gloom forecasts, but we always make it through. Markets and technology are remarkable and will deliver again.”

I have some sympathy for this view, and I have really challenged myself on this one. It's always seemed to be the most likely reason I was wrong. After all, history has seen humanity face many crises and respond effectively. There have also been a remarkable series of extraordinary technological breakthroughs, often surprising ones, that have reshaped society and/or have addressed what would otherwise have caused a monumental crisis. Take the examples of World War II, which we will consider later; the agricultural green revolution of the 1960s onward, which saw food production in developing countries more than double;
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and the rapid growth of information and communications technology.

It is also true there are some remarkable and exciting technologies and business models both under research and in the process of commercialization that could have massive impacts on the “T” in our equation.

But even if technology could fix the underlying problem, it cannot prevent a major crisis from happening first. I will explain why in a moment.

Nor do I approach this philosophically as a person opposed to technology or to markets. Indeed, I have now spent fifteen years advocating the power of markets to drive change in this area and running companies delivering that change. So my natural sympathies are in that direction because I recognize the enormous potential to drive change at speed and scale globally through well-directed markets.

However, a sensible and calm analysis of the idea, applying not belief or hope but mathematics and science, gives us the answer to the question of whether markets and technology can save us from the crisis. The answer is, in short: “No, not this time.”

There are two reasons, one of which (around the scale and speed of the change required) I'll come back to. The most important reason, however, is based in science. It is the lag between the action of emitting pollution or causing other ecosystem damage and the impact on the system of those emissions or damage. This of course also translates into a lag between reducing those emissions or impact and there being a benefit to, or restoration of, the global ecosystem.

While we work in an economic system of annual targets, quarterly profits, and twenty-four-hour news cycles, the planet works in longer and more complex cycles. And, as U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson reminded us, “the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.”

For example, the consequences we are seeing in the climate today are being caused largely by pollution emitted decades ago. As greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, much of that energy is absorbed in the upper layers of the ocean, meaning that temperatures are not immediately observed to increase. It's only after the ocean has warmed up that we start noticing the impact of that CO
2
on the climate and land-based ecosystems, a delay that is measured in decades. This observation caused the National Academy of Sciences to caution as early as 1979 that “we may not be given a warning until the CO
2
loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.”
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Once we start noticing this warming, a lot more of it is already locked in given how long CO
2
sticks around in the atmosphere, with some remaining there for over a thousand years after release.
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And it keeps warming the planet the whole time.

This principle applies to many environmental issues, making this lag an ecosystemwide problem, not just a climatic one. Examples include the acidification of the oceans (that at some point can prevent coral reefs from being formed and stop shellfish from having shells) and the ozone layer, which kept deteriorating long after we addressed the causes and may take until the next century to recover. Furthermore, many of these systems tend to act in nonlinear ways. They resist change while trying to absorb our impact, and then approach a tipping point, where they change rapidly or collapse. Likewise when we address the causes, recovery can take a very long time, if it occurs at all.

This means when we look around now and see the arctic sea ice melting, the glaciers disappearing, food supplies diminishing, and wildfires causing death and destruction, Mother Nature would like you to know “You ain't seen nothing yet.” This is just the warm-up act.

What this means as a system tendency is that even if we had a dramatic societal response, which we will at some point, the momentum for change already built into the physical processes of the earth's ecosystem means the impacts would continue for decades to come. To slow this down, we would not only have to reduce our impact (for example, cut CO
2
emissions), but also actively restore the system (actually remove CO
2
from the atmosphere so our net impact was to
reduce
concentrations). Doing so in the case of CO
2
is imaginable, though very challenging. Doing so across the whole range of global ecosystem services at sufficient speed to overcome the various lags is stretching probability. I wouldn't rate it as impossible, but I certainly wouldn't be betting our future on it.

This doesn't mean we can't do anything. In fact, it means we must and will do even
more
extraordinary things. And when we do respond, it will be with breathtaking speed and scale, and it will drive the biggest economic and industrial transformation in history. This is the fun part we come to later in our story.

My point on technology as the solution is simple. It's not that technology is not crucial; it most certainly is. It's just highly unlikely that it will be physically possible to drive new technology and its adoption fast enough to overcome the inertia for ecological change already in the system—sufficiently to prevent an economic and social crisis.

This is particularly so given that the challenge is not primarily a technical “is it possible” one, but more a political/economic one. In this context, what the lag means is that we will be fixing the causes of future problems (such as reducing current emissions) while also dealing with the economic and social consequences of yesterday's behavior (for example, dealing with rapid climate change, famine, and the like). This need to respond to past behavior will undermine our economic and political capacity to reduce future impact. An example might be the collapse of the global insurance industry in the face of rapid changes in the physical climate.

The momentum driving ecological change in the system is just too powerful to overcome smoothly. When the scale of change required to keep the issue from becoming a crisis is translated into arithmetic, as we'll do shortly, it defies belief that it can be achieved. So, yes, I believe in markets, I just don't believe in miracles that ignore the laws of physics and mathematics.

The final straw clutched at by market-focused technology optimists is that we can avoid the crisis by decoupling material and energy growth from economic growth. This has long been the holy grail of corporate sustainability experts and has been advocated by many, including myself until five years ago, as the solution to the growth dilemma.

The idea is that we can shift the structure of the economy away from stuff and pollution. We would move to renewable energy and resources and drive dramatic resource efficiency improvements, thereby using less and cleaner material and energy per unit of economic output. It assumes we can do so at sufficient speed and scale that economic growth can occur while total absolute environmental impact is dramatically reduced.

It is a good idea, and it is the right direction for the economy. Indeed, the focus on the concept has led to some very good business ideas that are being implemented around the world, like a shift from selling physical products to selling services. A good real-world example is the idea that we should buy the service of air-conditioning rather than the equipment. The logic is that we don't want to own a machine, we want the air at a certain temperature and humidity, so we buy that service. The company we buy it from then owns the machine and pays the energy bill, so they would be encouraged to design it for longevity, recyclability, and efficiency because the company rather than the customer would bear the costs of repair, disposal, and energy consumed. The company would be incentivized to improve these, as they would get the resulting savings. This approach has long been applied in commercial photocopiers, where you can pay by the page.

Another example is the sustainability-focused carpet company Interface, led by the legendary sustainability-focused CEO Ray Anderson. They promote an “Evergreen Carpet” lease, where the customer pays for the service of having their floors covered. Interface is then incentivized to produce the carpet in a way that minimizes life cycle costs, including making the materials recyclable and hard wearing.

So why can't we pursue decoupling by putting in place structures like these that incentivize efficiency? We can and will. The challenge is that we again face the problem of the math. Returning to Ehrlich's formula, we are in this case dealing with the T in I = P × A × T.

An excellent study on this topic was published in 2009 by the U.K. government's Sustainable Development Commission. Initiated under the chairmanship of my friend Sir Jonathon Porritt, this study,
Prosperity Without Growth
, was led by Professor Tim Jackson and offers an outstanding summary of the issues.
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The report presents some fascinating scenarios to 2050, using just the challenge of decoupling economic growth from CO
2
emissions to achieve 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO
2
concentrations. Keep in mind when reading these numbers that most scientists regard 450 ppm as an inadequate target, so the actual challenge is much greater than that expressed here.

It should also be noted that CO
2
is one of the
easiest
decoupling challenges because energy can be produced with no CO
2
, whereas making cars without metals or plastics, for example, would be more difficult.

The study used the measure of grams of CO
2
emissions per dollar of economic output to compare across the scenarios. In 2007, this measure was 768 g of CO
2
per dollar globally. They give four potential scenarios going forward to show the scale of change required in this, the
easiest
decoupling challenge:

1.   Under the midrange forecast of nine billion people and assuming economic growth continues as it has since 1990 at 1.4 percent per annum, we would require CO
2
/$ to decrease from 768 g CO
2
/$ today to 36 g CO
2
/$ in 2050, representing a 95 percent reduction.