Global Warming: The Great Equaliser

As the latest summit to discuss a post-Kyoto treaty continues in New York this week, the single most revealing statement has already been spoken: “We need to climate-proof economic growth”. These few words, told to reporters by the UN’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, during the recent Vienna round of talks, define the blinded establishment approach to tackling climate change.[1] Only if continued trade liberalisation and corporate profits are kept sacrosanct, remains the assumption, is it possible to consider even a broad agreement on future cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

With dire weather events and studies being reported on an
almost daily basis, fewer sceptics are able to dismiss the
reality of dangerous climate change. In the same week as
around 1,000 diplomats, scientists, business leaders and
environmental activists from 158 countries attended the
U.N.’s Vienna Climate Change Talks, a href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2186/36/"
target="_blank">top security think-tank stated that
climate change could have global security implications “on
a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken”,[2]
whilst leading scientists warned of a looming “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2174/36/"
target="_blank">global food crisis” that will require
more food to be produced over the next 50 years than has
been produced during the past 10,000 years
combined.[3]

The rapidity of these dystopian predictions
has grown to Faustian proportions; the year 2007 already has
the dubious accolade of witnessing the most extreme weather
events on record,[4] as characterised by the millions of
Africans just hit by some of the worst floods in a
generation in which villagers were “wiped off the
map”.[5] This summer, the collapse of the Arctic ice cap
(losing a third of its ice since measurements began 30 years
ago and “stunning” experts)[6] was topped off by the
latest UN study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) who now believe that the tipping point for
widespread catastrophe – involving a two degrees rise in
global temperatures - is “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2218/36/"
target="_blank">very unlikely” to be avoided.[7]

Common sense

Common sense would presume that the
resulting questions for policymakers, long since removed
from a debate on mans culpability, must inevitably focus on
how to achieve a wholesale reorganisation of society to
drastically decrease fossil fuel use, curb excessive
consumption, and reform the global economic framework to
ensure that all countries can live sustainably within
ecological limits. The collective government response to
date, however, makes it seem like the countless thousands of
lives being destroyed by flash floods, famines and
desertification are living in a parallel world to the
business-as-usual dealings of multinational
corporations.

The stalemate reached during the Vienna
talks reiterates the ongoing blindness to climate change
reality demonstrated by government leaders. China, which
continues to open up two coal-fired power plants a week,
refuses to cut emissions if it means sacrificing economic
growth, compared with the US senior climate negotiator who
said that the E.U.’s goal of slashing emissions to half of
1990 levels by 2050 would “be a very tough target to
meet”[8] – even though the IPCC determine that an 80
percent reduction in ‘global’ greenhouse-gas emissions
is needed before 2050.

At the same time as Japan,
Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada and Russia all argued that
the level of emissions cuts required should “be kept
open”,[9] a href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2199/36/"
target="_blank">Worldwatch Institute report was released
that showed more wood was removed from forests in 2005 than
ever before, more steel and aluminium was produced in 2006
than in previous world records, and inconceivable billions
of tonnes of fossil fuels and oil are increasingly being
consumed.[10] The more urgent and fundamental question,
therefore, is what factors continue to drive this one way
ticket towards ecological disaster, and what social measures
really need to be taken if cataclysmic global warming is to
be forestalled?

Limits to Growth

The framing
of this basic enquiry into environmental sustainability can
be traced back to a report published in 1972 that forecast
the imminent collapse of life on earth and resulted in an
outrage amongst economic thinkers. Limits to Growth,
written by leading scientists from the then unknown Club of
Rome, used crude mathematical models to project future
resource depletion that have long since been discredited,
even if it’s essential repudiation of the modern belief in
economic growth as “a kind of law of nature” is more
relevant today than when it was first published.[11] The
observational problem, outlined the report, is that the
planet has limited resources and a finite carrying capacity,
while the demands placed on it by a growth-dependent economy
and the grossly materialistic lifestyles it engenders are
insatiable. For this reason, the belief that free trade
will lead “to a natural order of things” is
catastrophically mistaken, it argued, as there are in fact

“no laws of economic ordination” because economics “is
not really a science but a set of theories,” and because
the ‘Invisible Hand’ of the market does not actually
exist.[12]

This challenge to orthodox thinking on
development was further underlined by the respected
economist E. F. Schumacher who penned the classic discourse,
Small is Beautiful, a year later in 1973. As the
world economy began to reel from oil price shocks,
Schumacher’s eloquent and prophetic writings scorned the
materialist assumption that ‘growth is good’ and
‘bigger is better’, and instead argued that natural
resources like fossil fuels should not be treated as
expendable ‘income’ but rather as capital owing to their
non-renewability and eventual depletion.

Often called
the ‘philosophy of enoughness’, Schumacher was one of
the first economists to question if Gross National Product
could sufficiently measure human well-being, concluding with
the damning verdict that “modern man has built a system of
production that ravishes nature and a type of society that
mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth,
everything else, it is thought, would fall into
place.”[13] Upon his advice that governments must respect
natures “tolerance margins” and first prioritise
sustainable development, the only answer to solving “the
problem of production”, he said, is to first “thoroughly
understand the problem and begin to see the possibility of
evolving a new life-style, with new methods of production
and new patterns of consumption: a life-style designed for
permanence.”[14]

These questions of ‘green’ or

‘ecological economics’ may not be anything new, as
furthered by other important studies contradicting the blind
reliance on economic growth such as For the Common
Good (1989) by Daly and Cobb, but the sheer simplicity
and common sense of the sustainability conundrum demands
constant repetition. The established economic system
steadfastly refuses to acknowledge planetary limits, flatly
ignores the inevitability of an eventual end to the growth
cycle, and fails to recognise that a system based on the
amoral concerns of resource allocation has created a world
of such unimaginable inequalities that millions of people
over-consume to the point of obesity, whilst millions of
others are left to die without access to adequate
food.

Market Contradictions

Government leaders,
far from contemplating the prognostic warnings of Limits to
Growth, have charged in the opposite direction by unleashing
a “veritable crusade of economic expansionism” with the
prevailing neo-liberal policies followed since the
1980s.[15] The result is a contradiction at the heart of
the market economy that literally threatens human life; by
maximising trade for its own sake, without questioning the
greenhouse-gas emissions brought about by the phenomenal
rise in transport that free trade demands, we are placed on
a collision course with the limits of social and
environmental tolerance.

As set out in a href="http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=43"
target="_blank">report by the New Economics Foundation
during the early years of the Kyoto Protocol, the simple
logic of growth and trade liberalisation conflicts with
attempts to control climate change.[16] At a time when
leading scientists estimated that a 90 percent cut in
greenhouse-gas emissions is required from the rich nations
by 203, international trade was forecasted to grow
exponentially by 70 percent during the period of the Kyoto
Protocol until 2012, yet the agreement failed to include any
emissions from freight in its ‘right to pollute’

measures of cap-and-trade.[17] According to href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1650/37/"
target="_blank">recent studies, CO2 emissions from
shipping – which are twice as much as airlines and not
even covered by the Kyoto accord – are not only far higher
than previously thought, but could rise by as much as 75
percent in the next 15 to 20 years if world trade continues
to grow and no action is taken.[18]

This ‘blind spot’
about freight, argued the NEF report, has led to a double
failure; firstly in appreciating the real environmental
impacts of rising freight movements, and secondly in the
failure to remotely introduce the necessary policies to
shift freight onto a sustainable path.[19] When the World
Bank published a report in 2000 called href="http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/qualityofgrowth/"
target="_blank">The Quality of Growth, nowhere did they
explain how ‘clean growth’ could be achieved globally
while simultaneously reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by
the drastic amount recommended by the IPCC. It constitutes
an underlying conflict of interest that has yet to be
debated at the highest levels of government, let alone
resolved; do we prioritise the relentless opening of a
country’s borders to international competition and the
unrestrained movement of goods and services, or do we
cooperatively manage the global economy to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions?

‘Ships Passing in the
Night'

According to the logic of neo-liberal
economics, it is perfectly acceptable for thousands of
lorries and ships to be ‘passing in the night’, carrying
almost identical goods or with produce that could be
produced locally, without consideration of the environmental
impact of needlessly burning fuel. The UK, to give a small
example, exports one-and-a-half thousand tonnes of fresh
potatoes to Germany each year, and imports practically the
same amount from the same country,[20] a practice of
ecologically wasteful trade that is not only repeated with
every material product made, but is endlessly encouraged by
the values of a purely capitalistic financial
system.

Similar pernicious examples could be repeated ad
infinitum, as in recent studies that show how deforestation

– which added 5,000 million metric tonnes of carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere between 1989 and 1995 without even
mentioning the profoundly deleterious effect on essential
oxygen production from trees – is perversely encouraged by
the values of economic globalisation and now threatens to
annihilate some href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2224/36/"
target="_blank">60 percent of all species.[21] As
succinctly concluded by the NEF; “To build the global
economy on the foundations of fuel-intensive international
trade and consumption is to build a castle on shifting and
treacherous sand.”[22]

The predominant market-based
approaches to tackling climate change, not least the carbon
cap-and-trade schemes endorsed by the Kyoto Protocol, are
equally a part of the central problem owing to their
implicit approval of unlimited economic expansion. As
argued extensively by alternative and green economists, it
is markets that “got us into this crisis in the first
place”[23] and now it is markets, somewhat sardonically,
that are touted as the only solution, as reflected in the
conclusion of the Stern Review that climate change is the
“greatest market failure the world has seen”.

Free-market proposals like carbon-trading, advocated by a
growing list of prominent economists, high-profile
politicians and ‘green NGOs’ (including Sir Nicholas
Stern, World Bank chief economist Larry Summers, Governors
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Richardson, Eliot Spitzer, and
not least Bill Clinton and Al Gore who both quipped that

“the invisible hand has a green thumb”)[24] are not only
deficient measures that give the illusion that suitable
action is being taken, but are also prolonging the
environmental crisis by creating new market opportunities
for corporate profits and by delaying investment into
renewable energies.

Commodification and
overconsumption

“The act of commodification at the
heart of offset schemes assigns a financial value to the
impetus that someone may feel to take climate action,”
reports the Carbon Trade Watch, “and neatly transforms
this potential to bring about change into another market
transaction. There is then no urgent need for people to
question the underlying assumptions about the nature of the
social and economic structures that brought about climate
change in the first place.”[25] By turning nature into a
‘market’, in other words, attention is temporarily
diverted from the reality that “today’s ecological
problems are related to a system of global inequality that
demands ecological destruction as a necessary condition of
its existence.”[26]

The clearly sane response to the
emergency of global warming is for all developed nations to
considerably reduce their levels of consumption, but this
platitude will remain a fantasy until the inherent
inequities of the world economy are first addressed. Only
then, coupled with an international acceptance of the need
to drastically limit the quantity of fossil fuels being
extracted and burnt from the earth, can a workable framework
for climate change mitigation be meaningfully
discussed.

The evidence so far, judged in the context of a
continuing “great global coal rush”, is that such an
admittance is still critically ignored; China, who remains
reluctant to cut any CO2 emissions if it means sacrificing
economic growth, has doubled its annual coal production in
six years; India will construct more than 100 coal-fired
plants over the next decade; US power corporations are
frantically pushing ahead with plans to construct around 150
new coal-fired stations; and the UK Labour government is
quietly resurrecting two deep coal mines in Wales with
furtive plans to reopen several more.[27] “Unaware of the
causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their
likely termination,” says the eco-activist George Monbiot,

“we drift into catastrophe.”[28]

It is possible to
feel an acute sense of foreboding when comparing the basic
threats of global warming with government inertia and
denial, but climate change as the “moral question of the
21st century” also holds the potential to initiate global
justice on a scale never seen throughout history.[29] This
is best illustrated through a key concept promoted by many
environmental campaigners as a guide for agreeing a solution
to CO2 emissions: carbon debt. If the wealthiest countries
first acknowledge that their unequal use of the global
commons has run up an enormous and unpaid ecological
‘debt’ to the world, runs the argument, then the stage
is set for a new kind of dialogue between rich and poor
countries. Any future negotiations on emissions reductions
or the sharing of reductions, therefore, must also focus on
just recompense for the damage already done to the
atmosphere.

Carbon debt

A plethora of reports
and articles constantly reveal how developing countries, who
have done comparatively little to contribute to global
warming, have become the world’s ‘climate change
canaries’ and will pay the highest price in years to come
through increasing droughts, storms and vector diseases,
therefore requiring a moral ‘pay back’ of the carbon
debt accrued by industrialised nations. The impoverished
living standards of the billions of people living on less
than two-dollars-a-day, in this respect, is the immoral
safeguard preventing the planet from even worse disaster.
It would not be alarmist to conjecture that if everyone
shared the same lifestyle as the average American, the

“holocaust predicted for the distant future would have
already visited us.”[30]

A consensus of
environmentalists now propose that the only acceptable
solution to redressing CO2 emissions must be equity-based,
thereby conceding “each individual’s logical claim to
the atmosphere”.[31] The proposed mechanism of
‘contraction and convergence’, as formulated by the
Global Commons Institute, incorporates these principles by
first establishing how much carbon dioxide can be produced
each year within a safe limit, then basically dividing that
sum between each individual in the world. On a set date,
all nations would ‘converge’ to an agreed level of
emissions.

This straightforward concept, which is already
approved by the European Parliament and key government
spokesman in Africa, India and China, embodies more than
just equal rights to the atmosphere for every citizen. The
implementation of contraction and convergence, based upon an
international acceptance of ecological limits, would
necessitate a sustainable world economy, an enforced
reduction in consumption levels by the wealthiest nations,
and hence a vast redistribution of resource usage between
nations.

If contraction and convergence can be imagined as
a potential model for future world development as a whole,
it could also lead to a greater emphasis on sharing through
a reformed economic system that prioritises sustainability
and basic human needs. The large-scale implications for
global justice would be immense and all-encompassing,
reflected in a necessary reorientation of the values and
driving forces behind the economy. Rather than the blind
pursuit of maximum instant gratification and profit, the
underlying priorities governing social development would
need to focus on the collective desire for human survival,
an end to poverty and gross inequality between countries,
and the beginning of an international culture defined by
cooperation and the shared purpose of averting mass
catastrophe.

Man's Ingenuity

In the present
political climate such a vision might seem like abstract
idealism, but if the alarming forecasts of the IPCC come
anywhere near to fruition with the exposure of hundreds of
millions to drought, hunger and flooding, then “the
biggest economic and geo-political realignment of recent
history” will soon be unavoidable.[32] Two optimistic
examples can be cited of how capable man is at change and
adaption, firstly in a study of the Second World War economy
in which England radically simplified its lifestyles and
reduced its consumption of resources,[33] and in which
America turned around its economy “on a dime” upon
entering the war in 1941.[34]

Another example of man's
ingenuity and responsiveness to potential calamity is seen
in the cyclical response by governments to financial
emergencies, as witnessed recently with the respective
bailouts enacted by the Fed and the Bank of England.[35]
What is clearly missing when these examples are applied to
the environmental emergency is the same sense of a shared
crisis, the necessary statesmanship and vision distinct from
the short-term concerns for economic hegemony and profit,
and the combined leadership of governments who recognise the
critical need to reverse the escalating “problem of
production.”

More than three decades after E. F.
Schumacher penned his famous treatise, the global obsession
with economic growth has stretched the limits of natural
resources to the point of imminent exhaustion, an empirical
conclusion that requires no further study or mathematical
modelling to confirm. The neglected policy debate on
ecological limits, increasingly obfuscated by the complex
arguments over CO2 emissions, is unable to call out the
elephant of unsustainable lifestyles without challenging the
very premise of an economic system built upon endless
consumption and competition over scarce resources. The only
enduring cause for hope, despite the continued antipathy of
the international community in questioning the systemic
causes of global warming, is for climate change to become
the world’s greatest equaliser by forcing an admission of
the failure of globalised market forces.

Notes:
1 William J. Kole. “Climate-proofing economic
growth” (Associated Press, 28th August 2007)
2 Jeremy
Lovell. target="_blank">“Global warming impact like ‘nuclear
war’” (Reuters, 12th September 2007)
3 Ian
Sample. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2174/36/"
target="_blank">Global food crisis looms as climate change
and population growth strip fertile land” (The
Guardian, 31st August 2007)
4 Agence France Presse.

“World hit by record extreme weather events in 2007:
WMO” (August 7th 2007)
5 Matthew Green, Fiona Harvey
and Barney Jopson. “Global warming concerns after Africa
deluge” (Financial Times, London, 19th September
2007)
6 David Adam. “Loss of arctic ice leaves experts
stunned” (The Guardian, London, 4th September 2007)
7
Cahal Milmo. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2218/36/"
target="_blank">‘Too late to avoid global warming,’ say
scientists” (The Independent, London, 19th September
2007)
8 John Ward. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2155/36/"
target="_blank">U.N. climate talks end in cloud of
discord” (Washington Post, September 1st 2007)
9
Agence France-Presse. “Climate change: row mars Vienna
talks on future emissions cuts” (August 31st 2007)
10
Worldwatch Institute. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2199/36/"
target="_blank">Window to Prevent Catastrophic Climate
Change Closing; EU Should Press for Immediate U.S.
Action” (September 13th 2007)
11 Wouter Van
Dieren. Taking nature into account: A report to the Club of
Rome – Introduction (Springer-Verlag New York Inc., June
1995) p. 3.
12 Ibid.
13 E. F. Schumacher. Small is
beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered (Blond

& Briggs, Great Britain, 1973) p. 246.
14 Ibid. p.
16.
15 Quote from Wouter Van Dieren, ibid.
16 Andrew
Simms. “ href="http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=43"
target="_blank">Collision course: free trade’s free ride
on the global climate” (New Economics Foundation,
November 2000)
17 Ibid, p. 2.
18 John Vidal. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1650/37/"
target="_blank">CO2 output from shipping twice as much as
airlines” (The Guardian, March 3rd 2007)
19 Ibid,
p. 9.
20 Andrew Simms, Dan Moran and Peter Chowla.
“ href="http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/f2abwpumbr1wp055y2l10s5514042006174517.pdf"
target="_blank">The UK Interdependence Report: How the world
sustains the nation's lifestyles and the price it
pays” (New Economics Foundation, April 2006)
21
Julio Godoy. href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2224/36/"
target="_blank">‘Incentives Offered to Destroy
Forests’ (Inter Press Service, September 20th 2007)

22 Andrew Simms. “ href="http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=43"
target="_blank">Collision course: free trade’s free ride
on the global climate” (New Economics Foundation,
November 2000) p. 5.
23 See, for example, John Cavanagh,
John Feffer, Daphne Wysham. href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2005/37/"
target="_blank">Just Climate Policy (Foreign Policy in
Focus, June 28th 2007)
24 See Mitchel Cohen. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1572/37/"
target="_blank">Listen Gore: Some Inconvenient Truths About
the Politics of Environmental Crisis”
(Counterpunch.org, February 2nd 2007)
25 Kevin Smith.
“ target="_blank">The Carbon Neutral Myth: Offset Indulgences
for your Climate Sins” (Transnational Institute
report, February 20th 2007)
26 John Bellamy Foster.

“ target="_blank">A New War on the Planet?” (MRZine,
June 8th 2007)
27 John Harris. “The great global coal
rush puts us on the fast track to irreversible disaster”
(The Guardian, London, August 30th 2007)
28 George
Monbiot. “ href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2004/37/"
target="_blank">A sudden change of state” (The
Guardian, July 3rd 2007)
29 Quote from George Monbiot.
“ target="_blank">Drastic action on climate change is needed
now – and here’s the plan” (The Guardian, 31st
October 2006)
30 C.E. Karunakaran. href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1648/37/"
target="_blank">Dangerous Denial (Frontline Magazine,
February 2007, Vol:24 Iss:04)
31 Andrew Simms. An
environmental war economy: The lessons of ecological debt
and global warming (New Economics Foundation, July 2001) p.
2.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid, p. 26-33
34 See George
Monbiot interview by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. "If We
Don’t Deal with Climate Change We Condemn Hundreds of
Millions of People to Death" (Democracy Now! Interview, May
18th 2007)
35 See Andrew Dobson. href="http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2219/37/"
target="_blank">A climate of crisis: Towards the
eco-state (OpenDemocracy.org, September 19th
2007)

Adam W
Parsons is the editor of Share the World's Resources
(STWR), an NGO campaigning for global economic and social
justice based upon the principle of sharing. He can be
reached at editor@stwr.net

www.scoop.co.nz