Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20: A View from Civil Society
A summary of the proceedings from the APCSE conference on Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20 is now available on Medium.com
A summary of the proceedings from the APCSE conference on Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20 is now available on Medium.com
By Jeremy Williams, Griffith University
News emerging from Washington last week suggests climate change may amount to more than an FAQ in the appendices of this November’s G20 leaders’ summit agenda. President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economics, Caroline Atkinson, has made the point that, as the G20 economies generate 80% of the world’s carbon emissions, the group should give a political push to “specific steps” to address climate change.
There has been some speculation in recent weeks as why 16,000 dead pigs floated down the Huangpu River. The rotting carcasses threatened the water supplies of those depending on this river system including the 23 million inhabitants of Shanghai. (Now, to add insult to injury, there are dead ducks to contend with as well).
Characteristically, there has been plenty of sooth-saying from Chinese government officials, but the scepticism aired on Chinese social media platform Weibo suggests that this is doing little to reassure residents.
The problem, according to a report in The Guardian yesterday, is the sheer scale of pig production. Last year, China produced and consumed half the world’s pork (about 50m tonnes), and with a mortality rate of 2-4%, up to 300,000 carcasses need to be disposed of each year. Things become difficult when the capacity to process dead pigs does not keep up with the growing number of pig farms. Until now, it seems, this issue has been managed by some ‘entrepreneurs’ who have been buying up dead and diseased pigs and butchering them for sale as pork to unsuspecting consumers. A crackdown on black market traders has put a stop to all this and so farmers have resorted to dumping the carcasses in the river.
Mainstream economics refers to this as a ‘negative externality’ arising from a market transaction. I call it wanton destruction of natural capital, fuelled by rampant consumption and unsustainable production. GDP will go as a result of the expenditure required to rid the waterways of dead animals, but this is not economic development.
This is the slide deck I presented at the Asia Pacific Centre for Social Enterprise (APCSE), Griffith University, Open Lecture Series this week.
The world did not end in 2012 as the Mayans predicted, but as George Monbiot documents in a superbly authored piece in The Guardian the other day, humankind is certainly doing its best to engineer such an outcome. The article is a superb summary of my feelings about 2012, and why it is likely to be remembered as the year we did least at the time we needed to do most.
It is probably a little harsh to lay the entire blame with humankind in the broad sense. It is our political representatives that are most at fault, as inaction has come to characterise discourse at both national and international levels.
To talk of keeping the average temperature increase to 2 degrees or less by the end of the century now appears to be sheer folly. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is intensifying at an alarming rate with some quite profound consequences for human survival on the planet.
Where will the leadership come from in 2013?
Paul Gilding tells us it is the end of economic growth. Not only is the earth full, but we have gone beyond its carrying capacity. In other words, we are over the credit limit on the ecological ‘credit card’ and now we are starting to experience the consequences. The question is, do we restructure to get back within our ‘ecological budget constraint’, or are we intent on becoming extras in a Mad Max type world?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Ou1A9F9y4&feature=plcp]
This clip is a mashup of Paul Gilding’s TED talk The Earth is Full. I stumbled across it when searching for an engaging summary of the key messages in Gilding’s The Great Disruption for my MBA class at the Reims Management School in France.
Gilding’s TED talk is fine, but a little wordy, and TheSustainableMan does a great job of editing the speech, picking out key sound bytes and matching them with appropriate imagery from The 11th Hour and a host of other clips advocating sustainability.
The latest statistics from the Singapore National Environment Agency (NEA) show that the recycling rate in Singapore continues to grow, to the extent that the net generation of waste is about the same as it was in 2000. This is not a bad result but, in a country the size of Singapore, with a growing population, it is critical that people are aware of the importance of managing their ecological footprint.
The high proportion of construction debris that is recycled in Singapore is perhaps the most stunning statistic; a sign, perhaps, that raw materials are becoming more expensive. The recycling of construction materials is certainly becoming a very lucrative business. National performance in the recycling of plastics is less impressive, and in the consumer society of Singapore where plastic packaging is so rife, this is definitely an area for improvement.
Image source: zerowastesg.com
This TED talk is a useful summary of Paul Gilding’s book, The Great DIsruption. Listening to the first half of his presentation, one could be forgiven for thinking that Gilding has thrown in the towel, based on his projected level of doom and gloom. This is not entirely the case. Yes, things do look grim, but Gilding is not nearly as pessimistic as James Lovelock or Clive Hamilton. The book goes into great detail as why he (and his collaborator Jorgen Randers) believe there is a future for humanity with their One Degree War Plan.
Image source: thinkingouttabox.wordpress.com
A report in the NYT the other day, Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern, provides an update on the ambitious attempt by the Chinese government to redirect water from the south of the country to the increasingly dry north.
The Chinese, it seems, have a very sanguine view of their ability to control the forces of nature. As Chairman Mao once famously declared:
Natural science is one of man’s weapons in his fight for freedom. For the purpose of attaining freedom in society, man must use social science to understand and change society and carry out social revolution. For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.
As no-one has yet successfully managed to replicate biodiversity, I confidently predict that this plan will add to China’s water problems rather than ameliorate them. What worries me most is that there does not seem to be a ‘Plan B’, or at least it is not publicly stated. Where will China go for its water when the well runs completely dry?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN9j0y9bivo]
Millions of tonnes of plastic floating around in the Pacific constitute one of the largest — if not the largest — rubbish dumps in the world, and covers an area bigger than the US according to one account. Out of sight, out of mind? Maybe, but if you eat seafood, probably not out of your digestive system. Still, what harm is a bit of plastic going to do? The Crápola Islands is on the look out for new ‘citizens’. This rapidly accumulating land mass in the heart of the Pacific Ocean is a product of ‘modern living’ and comprises a veritable cornucopia of plastics. Not enough toxicity in your life? This could be the place for you.