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.

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But switch we must. Ask anybody about the steps needed to combat climate change, you’ll hear guilt over obvious infractions like cheap flights, but no real sense of roadmap to change. Or, you’ll hear politocultural prejudices mapped onto climate change: the crisis as evidence that globalisation / meat consumption / global inequality is unsustainable. In short, most people either don’t grasp the magnitude of the task in hand, or want to use it as a platform for radical changes in lifestyle which, however attractive they may be, can hardly form the core of an international governmental consensus on what to do next.

Part of the problem is that, for such a scientific issue, the climate change discussion has been discussed in the media in an almost entirely unquantified way. Do you know how many centigrades the climate is expected to increase by? How much our carbon emissions need to decrease? Without these numbers in the public debate, it’s impossible to fully grasp the scale and shape of the challenge, and therefore to be able to visualise a solution.

So let’s see if we can crunch the numbers a little, just to get a sense of the task ahead of us. Jeffrey Sachs, in his recent speech at St. Paul’s and again in his recent Reith Lectures on the BBC, offers some useful UN statistics.

Right now, the world population is just over 6 billion. By 2050, UN estimates predict an increase of 50% to 9 billion. If the level of energy consumption per person remains static, therefore, that’s a 50% increase in our energy needs by 2050.

But energy consumption is unlikely to stay static. Economies all over the world are growing fast. The average income of people on Earth is expected to increase by four times by 2050, fuelled largely by massive increases in China and India. This is wonderful news for those enjoying increased quality of life, but obviously compounds the climate problem. 1.5x the population times 4x the income equals 6 times more economic activity on Earth in 2050 than now. Assuming the amount of energy required increases with income - that each dollar of income costs the same in energy consumption in 2050 - we’re looking at a six-fold increase in our energy needs. Assuming energy production produces the same amount of carbon as it does now, we’re looking at - you guessed it - a sixfold increase in our carbon emissions.

Scared yet? Let’s really put ourselves on the ghost train. How much over safe limits is our current carbon use? It depends partly on how much hotter we’re prepared for things to get. The European Union has accepted as its climate change goal limiting change to a 2-degree (centigrade) increase. 2 degrees is still pretty scary, but it’s liveable without mass death in developing countries. Crucially, it should avoid triggering ‘vicious circle’ effects where climate change becomes self-reinforcing.

The IPCC estimates that, to keep the increase down to 2 degrees, atmospheric carbon must stabilise at around 450 parts per million. Right now, it’s about 425 parts per million. So the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, right now, is within the zone of acceptability. But, of course, it’s increasing. It’s increasing because emissions are too high. The fact that the atmospheric level is currently acceptable doesn’t mean that current levels of emissions are.

Let’s say the atmosphere is like a sink, and it’s filing with water - carbon. There’s a safe level of water - the capacity of the sink. And there’s a plughole, where the water drains away, and there’s a tap, pouring water in. But the tap is putting water in faster than it can drain away. And the sink has been filling up, slowly, and you know in a few minutes it’s going to be full and water is going to start spilling over the sides and flooding the room. But here’s the thing: somebody keeps turning the tap on, opening it more and more.

So first of all, we need to stop the guy who’s opening the tap more. But that’s not enough: the tap’s current flow is still too much. We need to start moving the tap towards “closed”. So what’s the acceptable level to aim for? Here’s realclimate.org:

Humankind is releasing CO2 at a rate of about 7 Gton C per year from fossil fuel combustion, with a further 2 Gton C per year from deforestation. Because the atmospheric CO2 concentration is higher than normal, the natural world is absorbing CO2 at a rate of about 2 or 2.5 Gton C per year into the land biosphere and into the oceans, for a total of about 5 Gton C per year. The CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is rising because of the 4 Gton C imbalance. If we were to cut emissions by about half, from a total of 9 down to about 4 Gton C per year, the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere would stop rising for awhile.

OK. So that’s the target: half of current emissions. Half of current emissions times six times the energy consumption (see above) means we’ve got to get the level of emissions associated with each unit of human economic activity down to one-twelth its current level.

Yeesh.

And yet, while the task sounds massive, it also sounds at least theoretically achievable. The problem can be tackled in several ways.

1. Reduce population growth. 9 billion is prediction, not a prophecy. Mass provision of contraception in poor countries could speed the demographic transition from a high-birth, high-mortality society to a low-birth, low-mortality society. This happens naturally with economic growth, but factors like disease have stalled the trend in parts of the developing world, like Africa.

2. Reduce economic growth. This is essentially the response of those who say we need to turn our back on many aspects of ‘progress’ and return to some kind of more agricultural lifestyle. However, it’s not limited to hippies: even the economics editor of the Guardian believes climate change may mean the end of economic growth as the world’s governing paradigm. The problem is that while we in developed countries have a standard of living where we could probably stop growing quite happily, developing countries do not. Growth-stoppers suggest promoting alternative ideas of development without the focus on industrialisation, based on local trade and subsistence. However, there is no evidence that life expectancy, nutrition and democracy can develop to Western levels without economic growth; in practice, it’s widely believed this vague ideal of rural living amounts to telling developing countries not to develop.

3. Reduce the energy requirements of economic growth. This is where insulating your roof comes in. Increasing economic activity can be mitigated if the energy use for each dollar made is reduced. This covers most energy efficiency drives, like buying local produce, taxing cheap flights, or encouraging public transport. It also covers some technological improvements, like TVs that don’t have a standby mode or decreases in petrol consumption.

4. Reduce the carbon emissions involved in energy production. This is the other key role of technology. Renewable energy, coal sequestering, nuclear, and even the humble Toyota Prius all fit into this category.

Idea one, while attractive, is difficult technically and politically (the chances of the Bush administration sponsoring a mass drop of condom kits on Africa is, go figure, not high). Idea two is radical and attractive on paper, but, in practice, very problematic. There’s a blurry line between points two and three, too - if I work from home instead of travelling to the office, I’m reducing the energy cost of my earnings, but am I also reducing my total economic activity by eschewing the transport industry? Maybe I am, but it’s still a far cry from us all running off to live in mud huts. We don’t need to grow less, I think, just better.

Either way, most mainstream suggestions for tackling climate change, from public transport to nuclear power, come under points three or four. It’s worth thinking about which category ideas fit into when you consider them. There’s a tendency to see them as mutually exclusive, which is just crazy. “We need cleaner energy!” “No, we need to use less energy!” Shut up, idiots. Patently, we need both.

These ideas are all about reducing emissions, that is to say, the flow of the tap. But there are other options.

What about climate change mitigation? The likes of Bjorn Lomberg think we need to focus less on reducing carbon emmissions, and more on reducing its effects. In the sink scenario, this is the equivalent of thinking about how much water spillage we can manage to mop up. The point, though, is of course that we need to do both. The 2 degree target still brings with it some pretty nasty effects, including sea level rises deadly heatwaves across Europe every summer - some water on the kitchen floor, as it were. We’re still looking at big changes - and this is pretty much the best case scenario, emissions-wise. So it’s hard to take seriously the idea that improving the emissions situation isn’t a big part of the solution.

And, what about planting trees? “Offsetting” has become a key part of the climate-change response of well-off liberals, as it’s one of the few ways you can simply buy off climate guilt. In our climate change kitchen, this is the equivalent of unblocking the sink - undoing some of the damage we’ve done to nature’s ability to absorb the carbon we produce.

The central challenge - to reduce the carbon emissions associated with each dollar of economic activity on Earth by one-twelfth - is indeed scary. But it doesn’t sound infeasible. Neither energy efficiency nor cleaner energy alone can do it; neither can mitigation or offsetting alone make it unnecessary. But if we do it all - the electric car and more public transport, more renewable energy and more energy efficient homes and workplaces, we might, i reckon, have a chance. Let’s run a quick thought experiment, as economists say (”wild speculation” to you and me”):

Let’s say we do manage to shower Africa with condoms, and instead of 9 billion, we get the Earth’s population stabilised at 7.5 billion. I have no idea if this is considered possible, but hey, impossible is nothing, as those annoying mountaineering boys point out in the Adidas advert. That takes us from a 1.5x population increase to a 1.25x increase. That means instead of a 12x decrease in carbon emissions per dollar economic activity, we now just need a 10x decrease.

Next let’s assume that by a combination of energy efficiency technology and lifestyle changes, we can reduce the energy required to produce a dollar’s economic activity by two-thirds. Sounds ambitious? I know. But think about it: cut all those extra flights, work from home, more multiple accomodations, more locally produced food where it’s clearly more energy efficient. It’s imaginable, at least. One-third the energy needs takes us from needing a 10x decrease in emissions per dollar of activity to needing a 3.33x decrease.

Then, imagine we reduce the carbon emissions involved in producing a block of energy - a kilowatt hour, say - by two-thirds as well. This is not too hard to imagine - a bit of nuclear there, a bit of renewable there, a bit of carbon sequestration there - it’s doable. That gets us to 1.11x - within a sliver of the target.

I’m not saying these numbers are achievable now. And they’re all subject to disagreement. But they demonstrate that’s it’s at least possible to imagine a solution. And the great thing is, these numbers take into account all the common objections. What about China and India? These numbers have accounted for that. What about the melting of the ice caps reducing light reflection? The 2-degree target bears that in mind.

Climate change has become a chorus of misery, with new problems popping up all the time. And the result has been an equally messy chorus of solutions. Nuclear is the answer! Energy-saving lightbulbs are the answer! Banning cheap flights is the answer! We badly need to start thinking about the problem as a whole, and putting together plans for solutions that encompass the categories we’ve outlined here. Despite the scariness of the challenge, knowing these figures makes me feel more, not less, confident that we can, actually, get through this. Sachs keeps quoting Kennedy, and it does seem appropriate in the current climate of fear:

Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

UPDATE 28/05/07: George Monbiot crunches the numbers slightly differently and comes to a more pessimistic conclusion.

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