Would you want to live in the sustainable world? (Image: Adam Simpson)
91ɫƬy, happy and peaceful – that’s what life will be like if we choose to tackle climate change and overconsumption. But will a green economy be any fun?
THE system isn’t working. Or, depending on your point of view, it’s working too well.
Advertisement
Our current economic system has lifted billions of people and entire nations out of poverty, and provides most people in the developed world with a standard of living that royalty couldn’t dream of a century or two ago. The problem is that its very success – the intensity with which it motivates and finances the exploitation of nature, the multitudes who consume the cornucopia of goods and services it pours out, and the system’s built-in drive for continual growth – is sending us headlong past critical natural boundaries.
The list is long and familiar: too much carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere and acidifying the ocean; too much land being cleared, leading to deforestation and desertification; overfishing causing crashes in one stock after another; and habitat destruction reducing biodiversity so drastically that some consider a sixth mass extinction to be under way. If we don’t change course quickly, we will soon face extraordinary risks.
What’s the alternative? The answer is simple on the face of it. Live within the limits of what nature can provide and process. Leave the land, ocean, atmosphere and biosphere to the next generation as healthy as we found them.
If we accept such a sustainable future as an important, even urgent, goal, some big questions loom for us in the developed world. What would sustainable living be like? Would it be a drab, subsistence-level existence, or could we still have vibrant lives? Is a sustainable world economically viable, or even possible? And if is it, how can we get there from here?
Not surprisingly, there’s a wide range of possible answers to these questions. Some look at the ever-rising greenhouse gases, climate change and species loss and see a stark choice looming between catastrophe and drastic economic cutbacks. The 2 billion of us who are accustomed to a high-consumption lifestyle, together with governments and industries intent on “business as usual”, won’t voluntarily steer a path towards sustainability, says , a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, California. The upshot will be a series of crises that will cumulatively “knock civilisation back on its heels”, he says. At best, life for most of us in the world’s richest countries might resemble that in some of today’s poorer countries.
Others, however, argue that with renewable energy, sustainable use, reuse and “upcycling” of resources, and the smart design of everything from candy wrappers to cities, we can have both sustainability and abundance. Although nobody knows for sure what life in such a world would be like, a number of people have tried to envisage it.
, a conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, depicts how life in the US might play out in his book . He believes that innovations in four key areas – economics, renewable energy, transportation and urban environments – can work together to bring about rapid change. The book culminates with Sanderson and his wife travelling from New York to San Francisco in 2028 across a transformed country.
Green vision
They live in a densely populated urban community in which residents travel mostly on foot or by bicycle, supplemented by public transport and shared electric vehicles. They cross the continent not by aeroplane but on energy-efficient, high-speed trains. In place of today’s sprawling, gas-guzzling suburbs, they see lots of open country, much of it returning to woodlands and streams. Millions of people have decided to leave the suburbs and instead live in compact, self-sufficient and sustainably designed new towns. Some of these are standalone while others are communities within cities.
As Sanderson crosses the Midwest, instead of today’s endless monocultures of corn, wheat and soy, he sees smaller farms using smart, diversified systems to grow crops and animals for local consumption, employing more people while using far fewer fertilisers and pesticides that take a lot of energy to produce.
A radically different energy system is visible everywhere – wind farms, solar fields and geothermal plants feed energy into a continent-spanning smart grid. The problem of storing energy for use when the sky is cloudy or the wind isn’t blowing has largely been solved by pumping water from lower to higher reservoirs, then releasing it through turbines to generate power as needed.
Open for business
Although Sanderson’s timescale looks optimistic, his vision is not a utopian one. Use of renewable energy – wind, solar, geothermal and hydro – is surging worldwide. Electric vehicles are increasingly competitive. Homes, public buildings and many industrial processes are becoming far more energy efficient and we are charging ahead in terms of storing energy, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, and generating fuels biologically or from sunlight and CO2. “The technology that’s in the pipeline is astonishing,” says British environmentalist and author . “I think we can now speak confidently about delivering the future we need. It’s there. It’s absolutely there.”
Although challenging, the technological part of a transition to sustainability promises to be the easiest. The hard part – and it will be hard – is convincing economists, politicians and ordinary people worldwide to change how they live. To say that such changes are highly charged would be a huge understatement.
“The technological part of a transition to sustainability will be the easiest”
To most economists, continual growth is a necessity and a slowly growing economy, or a “steady state” economy that puts the health of the planet first, means catastrophe. Like worried doctors scrutinising an electrocardiogram, they track gross domestic product (GDP) – the market value of goods and services – diagnosing recessions and depressions by its downturns. Many see endless growth as the only way to create jobs and reduce poverty.
Not everyone agrees. , an ecological economist at York University in Toronto, modelled the Canadian economy from 2005 to 2035 under three conditions: business as usual, zeroing out all sources of economic growth, and a managed transition to a steady state – the sustainable option.
Business as usual produced no major surprises. The economy grew, but so did greenhouse gas emissions (see graphs). Slamming on the economic brakes produced the catastrophe mainstream economists dread – GDP fell while unemployment and poverty soared.
The third scenario, which phased in a carbon tax, boosted anti-poverty programmes and reduced working hours, yielded results that mainstream economists would never have dreamed of: GDP per person rose and stabilised at about 150 per cent of current levels, while unemployment, poverty and greenhouse gas emissions all fell. “It is possible for people to live well in a society in which economic stability rather than economic growth is the norm, where all its members flourish and social justice is served,” Victor concludes.
On the global scale, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary in April of the best climate modelling to date. It found that early implementation of policies to reduce climate change, including a global carbon tax and deploying all relevant technologies, could keep CO2 below 450 parts per million, which would hold global warming below the critical 2 °C threshold. Remarkably, . That’s not a misprint – a fraction of 1 per cent per year.
The implication is that a sustainable world is economically feasible. It would certainly seem much better than heading full steam ahead into climate disaster. “You can’t do business on a dead planet,” points out US-based sustainability consultant .
Still, that doesn’t tell us how to get there from here. Again there’s no shortage of ideas. Ecologists, economists and politicians have proposed many initiatives to foster sustainability. Most repurpose tools we are familiar with – international agreements, laws and regulations, taxes and subsidies, plus new technologies. Others are more radical, advocating structural changes to key institutions such as banking and finance, corporations, land and resource ownership, and government. Many individuals, grass-roots groups such as the , businesses such as , universities, cities such as Vancouver, and a few nations, including Iceland and Bhutan, are putting these ideas into practice.
Of course, most of us are not green crusaders. Yet we are already changing our lives, our work patterns and what we consume in ways that suggest the drive for sustainability may be pushing at an open door. For a start, we are . The annual distance travelled by UK car and van drivers fell by 7 per cent between 1995 and 2012. Germany, Australia, Japan and even the US all report the same trend. Why is that? Cost is a factor: young people are learning to drive later, put off by the price. We are also driving less to see friends and making fewer trips to the shops and to work by car – the rise in urban living, social media, online shopping and digital homeworking are seeing to that.
Driving less, and walking and cycling more are seen as positive lifestyle choices these days and are increasingly a feature of city living. Dense urban populations make recycling and other resource use more efficient, too. That doesn’t mean a return to slums. If building materials can be produced sustainably and houses can be designed to be carbon-neutral, people can still live in ample and comfortable homes, says Mary Ritter, head of the European Union’s climate innovation centre .
“Dense urban populations don’t mean a return to the slums”
Porritt believes that the biggest changes will come in response to large popular movements galvanised by droughts, floods, famines and other crises. “Suddenly there’s a shock to the system, and re-evaluation kicks in big time,” he says. Yet some changes just happen and we hardly notice, such as putting out the recycling or insulating our lofts.
One of the most important is that we are having fewer children. Today the , fewer than half as many as 40 years ago. There is big population growth still to come in some places, especially sub-Saharan Africa where there is less access to contraception. But after quadrupling in the 20th century, the world’s population, currently at 7 billion, is unlikely to rise by more than 50 per cent before settling down. So we can think about how we do sustainability with a stable population, rather than one that is continually growing.
Population is only one part of the equation, of course. , author of The Population Bomb, points out that the amount of stuff people use and the resources needed to produce that stuff are the other issues we need to worry about. In the developed world, at least, there is growing evidence that we have reached “peak stuff”. Individuals and society have got richer, and the rate at which we use resources has levelled off. Homes and factories are becoming more energy and water efficient and much of our new technology is smaller and lighter, reducing the amount of materials required to make them. So in many ways, the developed world is already dematerialising. The challenge is breaking the historic link between prosperity and energy and resource use fast enough.
91ɫƬier and happier
Some argue that feeding extra mouths will still trash the planet – but it needn’t. We already produce enough food to feed at least 10 billion people. But an estimated : in the developing world it rots in warehouses or gets eaten by pests. In the developed world we mostly throw it away uneaten. Our food problems are mainly about distribution and affordability – not overall production. Add in a shift away from industrial agriculture to more local and sustainable alternatives and that’s good news for a world that needs lots of food. “We’re learning that you can produce more calories per acre with smaller farms,” says environmentalist .
The solutions certainly won’t be one-size-fits-all. It’s possible to have a sustainable London and a sustainable Amazonia, but they will function very differently. “A renewable world depends on what you have close to hand,” says McKibben.
So living sustainably need not be a step backwards. Some things will change, though. Meat will become a luxury, as its cost is pushed up thanks to the huge amounts of energy and water needed to farm livestock. And while we’ll still be able to take holidays, those weekend jaunts on budget airlines are likely to be a thing of the past because there is currently no tax on aircraft fuel.
Porritt believes that doing away with such counterproductive subsidies and tax havens is essential. A global carbon tax and a tax on financial transactions would help to fund ecosystem restoration, public health, education and other crucial steps towards sustainability. “Tax is such a powerful instrument to promote sustainability,” he says. “It’s absolutely fundamental to the transformation we’re talking about.”
Porritt and Sanderson are buoyant about the quality of life in a more equitable and sustainable world, without denying the difficulties ahead. “One of the reasons why I think we have failed is that we haven’t given a sense of just how good a world it would be,” admits Porritt.
All of which adds up to a vision of a sustainable world that is significantly different from the one that critics envisage. It might mean a leaner and slower way of life for some, but also a healthier, happier and more peaceful world for us and future generations to enjoy. We have the tools. What we do with them remains to be seen.
See how writers and other visionaries have imagined sustainability in the future: “Visions of our future in a broken world“
Leader: “Drop the eco-pessimism – you can make a greener world“
This article appeared in print under the headline “Happy planet”
