Rav Casley Gera

I recently enjoyed the Environment Agency report 50 Ways To Save The Planet, given away with the Guardian a few months back. It’s a refreshingly positive approach to climate-change pamphleteering, with the emphasis firmly on answers. It’s also a bafflingly varied smörgåsbord of solutions, ranging from the mundane - put a jumper on before you turn up the heating - to slightly mad hi-tech schemes like using giant space mirrors to reflect the Sun’s rays away from the Earth. Amidst the sci-fi technology, though, one suggestion caught my eye: No 23, for the Government to legally require one-third of all park land to be converted to “public fruit and nut orchards and community held allotments” for the production of food.

While the high-tech schemes for reducing climate change might grab many of the media headlines, ideas like this show the environmental movement at its most radical. As I’ve noted before, there are various ways in which we can hope to intervene to reduce the climate dangers inherent in our current level of economic activity. One way is to reduce the carbon emissions required for energy production, through renewable energy; another is to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions, through carbon sinks, harvesters, or, yes, giant space mirrors. These areas are where the science-fiction stuff generally comes in.

But there’s a whole other area of intervention - reducing the actual amount of economic activity involved in modern life. This is the school of thought from which ideas like the one above - from TV pundit Penney Poyzer - stem. Modern life, the argument goes, is just too modern. We have too much stuff, travel too much, do too much. We need to return to simpler times - growing our own food, sourcing goods locally, re-using instead of replacing.

Why is this apparently backward-gazing viewpoint so radical? Because it disputes the central idea of economic and political thought in the last 200 years - the beneficence of material progress and economic growth. Having ever-more, the argument goes - more choice, more gadgets, more convenience - is costing the earth.

Ideas such as these reject principles that form the very foundations of modern economic growth. First, there’s specialisation. This is the idea that, if everyone produces the products they are best suited to provide, and exchanges with others, the result will be more efficient and allow a greater quantity and variety of goods than if everyone caters to their own needs. It began the first time farmers whose land was suited to crops first traded with farmers whose land was suited to tending cattle. Now, it’s the logic that sees goods, from electronics to fruit, shipped from across the world and sold more cheaply than those made locally.

The problem, of course, is that specialisation only increases economic efficiency. A company will build its factories in China, even for goods to be sold in the West, because it’s cheaper to do so. The savings gradually get passed onto consumers, and the standard of living increases. But such arrangements aren’t generally energy efficient, or carbon efficient. Indeed, because of the high CO2 emissions associated with shipping and aviation, they’re often environmentally disastrous. Instead, the argument goes, we must rediscover the merits of doing things ourselves, and doing things locally. “Eating apples from New Zealand, wrapped in clingfilm on a polystyrene tray, when it is apples season in England is crazy,” notes an activist in the report.

The same, the argument applies, goes for the other core principle of modern economics - ever-expanding consumption. For the more than 200 years since the industrial revolution began, if not before, economic growth has been driven primarily by the pursuit, by individuals and families, of ever more complex, useful, attractive or effective devices, tools and accoutrements. Our rising living standards have been driven by this process, but the ecological cost has been vast. As a result, it has become a credo amongst many environmentalists that the paradigm of non-stop material progress is inherently flawed. Writer Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff neatly makes the point, arguing the constant pursuit of newer, cooler stuff is leading us up an ecological dead-end. Endless material progress, argues this view, is an impossible fantasy - and its pursuit has become slow-motion suicide. We must relearn to repair broken goods, consume less food, get through fewer clothes, share cars, make do with fewer shiny gadgets.

Together, these views add up to a wholesale rejection of the foundations of modern economic thinking as a response to climate change. This viewpoint is clear - implicitly or, often, explicitly - in much modern writing on the environment and climate change. “The old economics is dead,” declared the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott - a liberal, but hardly radical economist - in 2006, identifying “the impending clash between economic orthodoxy and environmental sustainability.”

Stores now sell jeans at below $10 a pair… According to the present model of economics, this is progress, just as it is to be welcomed that flights costing as little as $4 make possible stag and hen weekends in Tallinn or Prague.

But are these developments really positive? Orthodox economics says they are, because they raise the real incomes of consumers. But, according to [environmental] analysis, they are potentially very bad indeed.

It’s presented as a given that our current level of consumption is simply incompatible with the long-term health of the environment. It’s taken as read that the predicament we’re in makes a nonsense of the idea of ever-greater consumption, enabled by specialisation and trade, as the driver of progress. It’s a compelling argument. But it may be completely wrong.

Think back to a hundred and fifty years ago. City-dwellers were enjoying an unprecedented level of communication and mobility, thanks to the widespread availability of a hugely effective means of personal urban transport - the horse. There was just one problem - shit. Horse shit was piling up everywhere, making already overcrowded and unsanitary cities even more dangerous. Illness spread. Wise men stroked their chins, dwelling on how to solve the problem. Some sort of restrictions were surely necessary. The convenience of easy travel had a terrible cost to the environment. Surely, this was a convenience we couldn’t afford. No doubt, in a Victorian precursor to modern-day SUV-bashing, drivers of two-horse carts were singled out for blame.

But ultimately, of course, horses weren’t banned - they were superseded. By the tram, the tube, the bus and, ultimately, the car. Far from having to sacrifice convenience because of its nasty side-effects, city-dwellers simply found even more convenient systems that didn’t have the same problems. Technology won out.¹

The same may be possible now. As my previous article notes, in order to avoid dangerous climate change, our task is to lower our global carbon emissions to half their current rate. This may sound quite achievable; but bear in mind that, thanks to rapid improvements in standards of living in developing countries, the average level of economic activity per person is likely to quadruple over the next fifty years. Add to that a likely swelling of the planet’s population, from the current six billion to nine billion, and you’re looking at a six-fold increase in economic activity.

The anti-growth position states that this is simply too much. As the world’s poor countries improve their living standards, it argues, we must meet them halfway, lowering ours to a level more commensurate with the planet’s fragile state.

But remember the horse shit. Few would have imagined, as it piled up in the gutters, a mode of transport that could move people around in comfort without depositing faeces onto the street. Are we really so sure that technology doesn’t have the potential, now, to let us keep our current lifestyle while slashing our carbon emissions?

It may sound cavalier. But think about the maths. A six-fold increase in economic activity, and a halving of overall emissions, means we need to slash the carbon cost of a unit of economic activity by one-twelve. Doesn’t that sound plausible?

There are so many different stages at which technology can intervene. Energy efficiency - insulating buildings, energy-saving bulbs; clean energy; carbon capture. Some estimates suggest renewable energy could ultimately provide 100% of our energy needs, and that’s before you even consider nuclear. The transition to low-carbon energy production, and to greater energy efficiency, will be painful and expensive. But it’s by no means certain that the essentials of our current standard of living can’t be maintained, and improved, and extended to more of the world, without busting the carbon budget. To assume otherwise - to declare, without having properly invested in technological solutions, that we must crawl back down the developmental ladder - smacks of hair-shirt wearing martyrdom.

Take for example aviation. It’s become a standard villain of the environmental movement,as demonstrated by the ongoing protests over the expansion of Heathrow. And, in the short term, reducing the number of flights we take would be a quick way to make some impressive carbon emission reductions. But it’s going too far to conclude, as some have, that flying is simply a luxury we will have to learn to live without. Aeronautic technology advanced, in less than 70 years, from putting the Wright brothers in the air to putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Do we really believe, with a similar level of commitment, that low-carbon flight is beyond our power?

Indeed, in general, the end-of-growth environmental school is based on a fallacy - that because technological innovation got us into this mess, further innovation can only make things worse. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Every year, technology brings us new ways to generate clean energy and reduce our need for energy, all without significantly impairing our lifestyles; from energy saving light bulbs to the IT revolution, from hybrid cars to videoconferencing, which is slashing the need for business travel.

Of course, there are excesses in our modern lifestyle - in packaging, for example, and lazy waste disposal - that we should curb, and help developing countries avoid from the start. But the view that climate change requires the end of material progress, and a return to some imagined “natural” past, is one based less on a detailed understanding of the science and more on a general disdain for all things modern. Indeed, its proponents tend to resort to other arguments as well as the environmental - that modern life is making us miserable, stressed, sick and lonely. Fair enough: its proponents may have a point, although I doubt it. But climate change is too important to be used as an argument for the latest lifestyle fad.