 |
"Mankind is playing dice with the natural environment
through a multitude of interventions – injecting into the atmosphere trace gases
like the greenhouse gases or ozone-depleting chemicals, engineering massive
land-use changes such as deforestation, depleting multitudes of species in
their natural habitats even while creating transgenic ones in the laboratory,
and accumulating sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy human
civilizations." Under the climate change models he has developed, in
general those sectors of the economy that depend heavily on unmanaged
ecosystems – that is, are heavily dependent upon naturally occurring rainfall,
runoff, or temperatures – will be most sensitive to climate change.
Agriculture, forestry, outdoor recreation, and coastal activities fall in this
category." Nordhaus takes
seriously the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Nordhaus, W. D.
'"Reflections on the economics of climate change", Journal of
Economic Perspectives (1993)
OVOODOCORVO
|
Economics is a failing discipline doing great harm – so
let's rethink it
Andrew Simms
Our global economy should serve rather than dominate people
– and that includes factoring in the climate crisis, too
“Late last year, on the day that the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change released its starkest warning yet on the importance of
holding global heating below 1.5C, William Nordhaus was awarded economics
equivalent of the Nobel prize. Nordhaus
is famous for applying conventional economic models to environmental issues.
Using his toolkit on climate breakdown, infamously he came to the conclusion
that an optimal economic approach would allow warming of at least 3C – the
level that climate science shows would cause catastrophic, irreversible change.”
@andrewsimms_uk
Sat 3 Aug 2019 09.00 BST Last modified on Sat 3 Aug 2019
21.10 BST
Something is killing conventional economics and it’s
probably an inside job. Reliance on abstract mathematics and absurd assumptions
has brought the discipline into disrepute, even if politics and policy are
guided by the ghosts of its teaching.
Nobody was surprised recently to learn that the price of the
overdue and over-budget HS2 high-speed rail project could rise by another
£30bn. People were surprised to learn, however, that in the cost-benefit
analysis used to justify the original project, planners assumed that no
passengers work while on a train. That made the times savings on the new line
look more valuable than they really were.
But curiosities like that are nothing compared with the
epic, conceptual departures from the real world made by the economics
mainstream in recent years. Risk models used by the investment bank Goldman
Sachs suggested that the financial crisis of 2007 should have been in effect
impossible. And have you ever wondered why privatisation continues in the face
of repeated failures from care services to railways, and in spite of pledges to
rein them in?
It’s because neoclassical economics has so deeply entrenched
the notion that markets are better than all other ways of organising life, that
decisions escape rational scrutiny. Academic economists will tell you that
their discipline offers a far more complex picture of the world. But, at the
policy level, what tilts a spending decision one way or the other is the simple
power of the seeming “folk wisdom” that markets are best. It becomes the rule
of thumb.
They might look less good if the assumptions on which the
equilibrium models that got us here were more widely known. The idea of perfect
markets under perfect competition, for example, asks us to believe in a world
where everybody knows everything, there are an infinite number of companies, no
barriers to setting up a business, where any product can stand in for any other
(say, a banana for a tractor) and, crucially, there are no “externalities”
(economic speak for “consequences”) from production or consumption.
‘[The economist] William Nordhaus came to the conclusion
that an “optimal” economic approach would allow global heating of at least 3C –
a level that climate science shows would cause catastrophic, irreversible
change.’ Photograph: Michelle Mcloughlin/Reuters
All models use a few simplifying assumptions, but those
underpinning mainstream economics more often distort and detach from reality.
It’s one of the reasons why students have rebelled, forming groups to demand
that universities take a more pluralistic approach to teaching economics. Katie
Kedward left a banking job in the City for ethical reasons and sought a degree
that would make sense of economics. Despairing at the unreality of mainstream
courses, she found a rare exception: a master’s in ecological economics at the
University of Leeds. The course, though, isn’t even taught in the economics
department but the School of Earth and Environment. That’s why new groups are
emerging to promote heterodox economics, which draws on the insights of the
study of complexity, neuro and behavioural science, ecology, feminism and the
core economy of family, mutualism and community.
But there’s an awfully long way to go. Late last year, on
the day that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its
starkest warning yet on the importance of holding global heating below 1.5C,
William Nordhaus was awarded economics equivalent of the Nobel prize. Nordhaus is famous for applying
conventional economic models to environmental issues. Using his toolkit on
climate breakdown, infamously he came to the conclusion that an optimal
economic approach would allow warming of at least 3C – the level that climate
science shows would cause catastrophic, irreversible change.
For anyone outside economics that might seem bewildering,
but the blase disregard of the economy being a wholly owned, and utterly
dependent, subsidiary of the biosphere is perfectly symbolic.
Economics has a reputation for being dismal because it seems
to delight in making itself confusing and inaccessible. Real progress, and
better decision making, is hard to imagine without demystifying the discipline
and breaking the singular grip of old school, neoclassical teaching.
For that reason, my colleague David Boyle and I dared to
write a beginners’ guide for the complete non-expert. In it we ask some
heretical questions that that could get us expelled from most university
economics departments, such as: is the price mechanism so clever, or rising
productivity always a good thing? We talk about the trouble with growth, and
why working less might be better. Our common starting point is that the economy
should serve rather than dominate people, and that it must work within
planetary ecological boundaries.
Roasted by heatwaves, this year the world went into
ecological overshoot on 29 July, the earliest yet. Unless we begin again with
economics, understanding and letting go what has gone wrong, and letting more
of the real world in, one day soon everything will have fallen apart and nobody
will quite know why. But the answer will be: it was the economy, stupid.
• Andrew Simms is co-author with David Boyle of Economics: A
Crash Course, published this week
While economic
growth continues we’ll never kick our fossil fuels habit
George Monbiot
There may be more bicycles but there will also be more
planes. We’re still in denial about the scale of the threat to the planet
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 26 Sep 2018 06.00 BST Last modified on Wed 26 Sep 2018
14.03 BST
Illustration: Sébastien Thibault
We’re getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition
towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and
thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology
news.
So how come oil production, for the first time in history,
is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to
climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition
(Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being
beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest
from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have
investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a
year?
The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles
on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines.
There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how
many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad
things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to
meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is
hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.
When a low-carbon industry expands within a growing economy,
the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry. Anyone who works in
this field knows environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green
business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts
of the world and the flights required to get there. Electric vehicles have
driven a new resource rush, particularly for lithium, that is already polluting
rivers and trashing precious wild places. Clean growth is as much of an
oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is
treated as political suicide.
The Labour party’s new environment policy, published this
week, rightly argues that “our current economic model is threatening the
foundations on which human wellbeing depends”. It recognises that ecological
collapse cannot be prevented through consumer choice or corporate social
responsibility: the response to our greatest predicament must be determined by
scientific research, and planned, coordinated and led by government. It pledges
“to meet the Paris agreement goal of limiting global temperature rises to no
more than 1.5C”. But, like almost everyone else, it ignores the fundamental
problem. Beyond a certain point, economic growth – the force that lifted people
out of poverty, and cured deprivation, squalor and disease – tips us back into
those conditions. To judge by the devastation climate breakdown is wreaking, we
appear already to have reached this point.
The contradiction is most obvious when the policy document
discusses airports (an issue on which the party is divided). Labour guarantees
that any airport expansion must adhere to its tests on climate change. But
airport expansion is incompatible with its climate commitments. Even if
aircraft emissions are capped at 2005 levels, by 2050 they will account for
half the nation’s carbon budget if the UK is not to contribute to more than
1.5C of global warming. If airports grow, they will swallow even more of the
budget.
Airport expansion is highly regressive, offending the
principles of justice and equity that Labour exists to uphold. Regardless of
the availability and cost of flights, they are used disproportionately by the
rich, as these are the people with the business meetings in New York, the
second homes in Tuscany, and the money to pay for winter holidays in the sun.
Yet the impacts – noise, pollution and climate breakdown – are visited
disproportionately on the poor.
I recognise that challenging our least contested ideologies
– growth and consumerism – is a tough call. But in New Zealand, it is beginning
to happen. Jacinda Ardern, the Labour prime minister, says: “It will no longer
be good enough to say a policy is successful because it increases GDP if it
also degrades the physical environment.” How this translates into policy, and whether her party will resolve its own
contradictions, remains to be determined.
No politician can act without support. If we want political
parties to address these issues, we too must start addressing them. We cannot
rely on the media to do it for us. A report by the research group Media Matters
found that total coverage of climate change across five US news networks (ABC,
CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS) amounted to 260 minutes in 2017 – a little over four
hours. Almost all of it was a facet of the Trump psychodrama (Will he pull out
of the Paris accord? What’s he gone and done this time?) rather than the
treatment of climate chaos in its own right. There was scarcely a mention of
the link between climate breakdown and the multiple unnatural disasters the US
suffered that year; of new findings in climate science; or of the impacts of
new pipelines or coalmines. I cannot find a comparable recent study in the UK.
I suspect it is a little better, but not a lot.
The worst denial is not the claim that this existential
crisis isn’t happening. It is the failure to talk about it at all. Not talking
about our greatest predicament, even as it starts to bite, requires a constant
and determined effort. Taken as a whole (of course there are exceptions), the
media are a threat to humanity. They claim to speak on our behalf, but they
either speak against us or do not speak at all.
So what do we do? We talk. As the climate writer Joe Romm
argued in ThinkProgress this year, a crucial factor in the remarkable shift in
attitudes towards LGBT people was the determination of activists to break the
silence. They overcame social
embarrassment to broach issues that other people found uncomfortable. We need,
Romm argues, to do the same for climate breakdown. A recent survey
suggests that 65% of Americans rarely or never discuss it with friends or
family, while only one in five hear people they know mention the subject at
least once a month. Like the media, we subconsciously invest great
psychological effort into not discussing an issue that threatens almost every
aspect of our lives.
Let’s be embarrassing. Let’s break the silence, however uncomfortable
it makes us and others feel. Let’s talk about the great unmentionables: not
just climate breakdown, but also growth and consumerism. Let’s create the
political space in which well-intentioned parties can act. Let us talk a better
world into being.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário