The Economic Meltdown We Had To Have
Just as consumption is a disease of the lungs, so an economic reliance on consumption over durability and functionality is withering the lungs of the planet.
It's the nature of my job to be optimistic. Some find it surprising that anyone can be optimistic nowadays. In the next four years, depending on what you read, the world is threatened with economic meltdown, long-term lock-in of catastrophic runaway climate change, a kind of technological singularity whereby artificial intelligence, molecular engineering, nanotechnology, TCP/IP+WiFi and genetic engineering all conspire with the face recognition systems in your cameras and laptops and, well, who knows. Rapture ready Christians are packing their bags right now and of course the Kyoto Protocol is due to end and Mayan calendar, signifying the end of the world, is approaching its termination. Come 2012, by almost any account you care to read, the world we know will be swept away. Perhaps.
I agree that our technology is consolidating at an astounding rate, and I took to heart many of the warnings outlined in Theodore Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future" and, later, Bill Joy's famous essay "Why the future doesn't need us." Both authors make a fundamental error if they think life as we know it is the be-all and end-all of the evolutionary process. If the technological singularity comes with a bang rather than a whimper there's very little any of us can do to stop that, and who's to say it's a bad thing anyway. It's just different. What it means to be human will, in essence, remain well past 2012, I am certain of that.
The Four Horsemen have been traipsing around this world for as long as history has been written as far as I can see, but If the Christians' Rapture does come along in 2012, or the expiring of the Mayan Calendar really does mean the world ends, then, similarly, there's not much I can do to stop that, and by all accounts, for believers this is an event to be welcomed too.
Let's look at things we can affect. We know that the climate changes we have started to observe over the last 10 years or so, the melting ice, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, rising ocean acidity, and so forth, with their consequent effects on plant and animal populations can be attributed to industrial consumer society. We've been warned for decades, centuries in some cases, that increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gasses leads to a warming of the planet. This theory neatly explains all the observable data to date and is simple enough that primary school science experiments can verify the basic principles.
One fact long understood is that a fast way to take the pressure off the planet is immediate consumer demand destruction. The recent wave of economic gloom to hit the world could therefore not have come at a better time. A few commentators have made this point out loud, but only a few. It's economic heresy to want less consumerism, but reduced consumerism is inevitable. Firstly the explosion of cheap easy credit, mixed with a poor economic model of the many layers of risk associated with that credit meant the whole global economy took a massive hit and a huge wave of forced nationalisation happened to save the whole system from going under. Millions of jobs vanished, everyone stopped spending, property prices worldwide slumped triggering margin calls, write-downs and fire-sales that set in place further ripples of economic retraction. It will be fascinating therefore to see if the overall emission of CO2 declined at all due to this contraction. If our economic activity is to blame, then we should see this link emerge. Most of the stuff people buy is disposable rubbish, yet our economy seems to rely on it. This sudden chop to the heart of the economy is like Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" but being used for good instead of evil.
Globally right now there is a race to improve economic, and environmental efficiency. This is largely driven by the imposition of a cost for pollution. This reigning in of externalities sets the stage of a mass-movement of all externalities onto the chart of accounts. The drive to efficiencies must result in less packaging, fewer disposable products, more recyclability and "cradle-to-cradle" design. This is a road we've never bothered to explore before, as a species, and the economic hit the world has taken might be just in time to give the planet the breathing time for us to get our act together.
Just as consumption is a disease of the lungs, so an economic reliance on consumption over durability and functionality is withering the lungs of the planet. Cutting out all illegal logging worldwide would cut global carbon emissions by around 5%. Cutting out all logging means around 20% of the problem gone. Naturally the world needs timber but this can be farmed sustainably rather than harvested from the planet's lungs.
I look forward to a world with less junk, very few cars, fewer things, of much higher quality. The idea of sharing, of communal property, common gardens, is hardly utopian. We people, if we are to endure, simply have to start living within our means.
In the long run we have to get off this planet, that too is well understood. Sometime in the distant future the sun will explode, taking the whole planet with it. So we need to make sure we don't somehow consume ourselves back to the stone-age, like so many civilisations have done in the past, as we simply don't have the natural resources left to re-evolve to a state where interstellar expansion is possible. We get one shot at panspermia and if we fail there may be nothing around in the universe to ever regret it.
Dave Sag is a pioneer of the Australian carbon management industry, with expertise in carbon accounting, engineering, trading and offsetting. A serial entrepreneur, Dave's career began in information technology and later led him to complement his experience with careers in online retail, satellite-launch re-insurance trading and work at the European Patent Office. In 1998, Dave received an Australia Day Council award for services to Australian business. Having founded and grown a number of companies in Australia and Europe, Dave's diverse experience provides him the insight to guide clients through the rapidly evolving carbon market. Dave is a Founder and Executive Director of Carbon Planet Limited (www.carbonplanet.com).
MikeM
February 11, 2009 at 11:25 am
In the long run…
Absolutely right, Dave. Stephen Battersby wrote in New Scientist last week:
In the meantime there is a rather closer deadline: 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 10 January, 2038. That is when the Unix operating system event will occur equivalent to what was feared with mainframe computers as the clock ticked over from 31 December 1999 to 1 January 2000. The Unix event has received less publicity than the so-called Y2K event but may be more interesting. There are Unix-derived operating systems tucked away inside things you didn't even know contained a computer.
My advice is: lay in a year's supply of food and head for the hills. There is no point at all in laying in two billion years supply.
MikeM does not expect to live for 2 billion years but is disappointed that he can't.
Dave Sag
February 12, 2009 at 12:25 am
Speaking of Unix and time
Before I start worrying about things that will happen in 2038, here's something to celebrate. at 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890. Where will you be at this momentous second?
For those of us in Aus that's at 10:31am on Saturday 14th Feb 2009, Australian Eastern Standard Time (ie In Canberra).
Naturally there is a facebook group devoted to this auspicious event. See http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10378926406
Cheers
Dave
sally.rose
February 19, 2009 at 12:44 am
Here’s to less stuff!
Just simply using LESS STUFF has the potential to radically improve our environmental predicament but is often overlooked as an option.
We have embraced recycling, which is good, but it would be far better if we embraced less packaging. Whether it's recycled, recyclable or not, it is still most excess.
Over the last 15yrs going grocery shopping in Australia I've witnessed a paradox. We have becoming increasingly environmentally conscious, with many brands success dependent on appealing to this, whilst at the same time embracing practices that are increasingly environmentally irresponsible.
Do tea-bags really need to be individually wrapped? Or, in light of our new environmental consciousness should we regard this type of trend as wasteful?