Clean
energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can
It’s
time to pour our creative energies into imagining a new global
economy. Infinite growth is a dangerous illusion
Jason Hickel /
Friday 15 July 2016 12.00 BST
Earlier this year
media outlets around the world announced that February had broken
global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the
records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of
flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the
streets. In London, floods sent water pouring into the tube system
right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London
became rivers two metres deep.
With such extreme
events becoming more commonplace, few deny climate change any longer.
Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-important fact:
fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and
fast.
This growing
awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial
shift in our consciousness. But I can’t help but fear we’ve
missed the point. As important as clean energy might be, the science
is clear: it won’t save us from climate change.
What would we do
with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we’re doing with fossil fuels
Let’s imagine,
just for argument’s sake, that we are able to get off fossil fuels
and switch to 100% clean energy. There is no question this would be a
vital step in the right direction, but even this best-case scenario
wouldn’t be enough to avert climate catastrophe.
Why? Because the
burning of fossil fuels only accounts for about 70% of all
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The remaining 30% comes from
a number of causes. Deforestation is a big one. So is industrial
agriculture, which degrades the soils to the point where they leach
CO2. Then there’s industrial livestock farming which produces 90m
tonnes of methane per year and most of the world’s anthropogenic
nitrous oxide. Both of these gases are vastly more potent than CO2
when it comes to global warming. Livestock farming alone contributes
more to global warming than all the cars, trains, planes and ships in
the world. Industrial production of cement, steel, and plastic forms
another major source of greenhouse gases, and then there are our
landfills, which pump out huge amounts of methane – 16% of the
world’s total.
When it comes to
climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are
using, it’s what we’re doing with it. What would we do with 100%
clean energy? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more
forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture,
produce more cement, and fill more landfill sites, all of which will
pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these
things because our economic system demands endless compound growth,
and for some reason we have not thought to question this.
Think of it this
way. That 30% chunk of greenhouse gases that comes from non-fossil
fuel sources isn’t static. It is adding more to the atmosphere each
year. Scientists project that our tropical forests will be completely
destroyed by 2050, releasing a 200bn tonne carbon bomb into the air.
The world’s topsoils could be depleted within just 60 years,
releasing more still. Emissions from the cement industry are growing
at more than 9% per year. And our landfills are multiplying at an
eye-watering pace: by 2100 we will be producing 11m tonnes of solid
waste per day, three times more than we do now. Switching to clean
energy will do nothing to slow this down.
If we keep
growing at 3% a year, that means that every 20 years we need to
double the size of the global economy
The climate movement
made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil
fuels, when we should have been pointing to something much deeper:
the basic logic of our economic operating system. After all, we’re
only using fossil fuels in the first place to fuel the broader
imperative of GDP growth.
The root problem is
the fact that our economic system demands ever-increasing levels of
extraction, production and consumption. Our politicians tell us that
we need to keep the global economy growing at more than 3% each year
– the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits.
That means every 20 years we need to double the size of the global
economy – double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining,
double the McFlurries and double the
Current projections
show that by 2040 we will more than double the world’s shipping
miles, air miles, and trucking miles. Photograph: Feature
China/Barcroft Images
Our more optimistic
pundits claim that technological innovations will help us to
de-couple economic growth from material throughput. But sadly there
is no evidence that this is happening. Global material extraction and
consumption has grown by 94% since 1980, and is still going up.
Current projections show that by 2040 we will more than double the
world’s shipping miles, air miles, and trucking miles – along
with all the material stuff that those vehicles transport – almost
exactly in keeping with the rate of GDP growth.
Clean energy,
important as it is, won’t save us from this nightmare. But
rethinking our economic system might. GDP growth has been sold to us
as the only way to create a better world. But we now have robust
evidence that it doesn’t make us any happier, it doesn’t reduce
poverty, and its “externalities” produce all sorts of social
ills: debt, overwork, inequality, and climate change. We need to
abandon GDP growth as our primary measure of progress, and we need to
do this immediately – as part and parcel of the climate agreement
that will be ratified in Morocco later this year.
It’s time to pour
our creative power into imagining a new global economy – one that
maximises human wellbeing while actively shrinking our ecological
footprint. This is not an impossible task. A number of countries have
already managed to achieve high levels of human development with very
low levels of consumption. In fact Daniel O’Neill, an economist at
the University of Leeds, has demonstrated that even material
de-growth is not incompatible with high levels of human well-being.
Our focus on fossil
fuels has lulled us into thinking we can continue with the status quo
so long as we switch to clean energy, but this is a dangerously
simplistic assumption. If we want to stave off the coming crisis, we
need to confront its underlying cause.
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