What if greenies are right? Growth: we can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Another great TED talk

Sometimes I get scared that the hardcore greenies might be right.

There’s a challenging talk up on my old fav, TED.com, by Tim Jackson who studies links between lifestyle, society and the environment. Basically he’s an economic growth sceptic.

In the talk he has a great line: “This is a story about us being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, to create impressions on people we don’t care about.”

And that’s a modern economy in a nutshell. Debt, free markets, consumerism, advertising etc simply help keep the show on the road.

The TED talk also touches on a number of BigCake themes:
• The growing gap between rich and power
• The coping mechanisms of more debt and more work to maintain living standards and
• The allure of the ‘zombie’ economy’.

But it also confronts another belief – that the human race is smart enough to recognise that modern economies have created a hole and that we are clever enough to dig our way out.

BigCake’s always believed we can do this within the current system.

But Jackson reckons the human race has a choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.

What follows is an edited version of the first 10 minutes of his 20-minute TED talk. Part 2 to come.

Imagine, he says a world in 2050 of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western incomes.

How fast do we have to move – how clever do we need to be – to deliver our carbon targets?

Our current carbon intensity of economic growth [that is emissions per dollar of real gross domestic product] is about 770 grams of carbon.

In 2050 it has to be 6 grams of carbon – a 130-fold improvement.

That is 10 times faster and further than anything we have ever achieved in industrial history.

May be we can do – who knows.

Believing these numbers is crucial if you want to buy into Jackson’s argument. I haven’t been able to find any arguments to the contrary and anyway, he’d have to by way out to be wrong, so I’ll go with them for now.

Also as he writes elsewhere “efficiency improvements are continually offset by increases in scale”.

Back to TED Jackson says the only thing that has remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last decade is recession.

We are caught in a trap – a dilemma – of growth. We can’t live with it; we can’t live without it.

Our best avenue to escape from this is a kind of blind faith in technology, in our cleverness and in efficiency.

But shouldn’t we just check first that the economic system we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement.

The system works thus: Firms produce goods and provide us with incomes and then we can spend those incomes on goods and services.

This look harmless enough. The key feature is investment which equals a 5th of national income in most economies. It stimulates further consumption growth.

It also seeks out novelty – a process of creative destruction, continually chasing expanding consumer markets.

Human beings apparently love new stuff (and ideas and experiences). In every language, stuff is a symbolic language we use to tell each other stories, for example how important we are.

This ties in with the posts I’ve been writing about growing inequality based on the book ‘The Spirit Level’ which roughly says problems in rich countries are not caused by people not being rich enough, but by the scale of material differences.

So, says Jackson here’s a system that is locking economic structure with social logic. It’s an engine of economic growth driven by a sense of anxiety, what Adam Smith called “a life with shame”.

Now you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the net book, the ipad…[The zombie economy]

And even if we don’t want them, we need to buy them because if we don’t buy them the system crashes.

To stop it crashing over the last decades we have expanded the money supply – expanded credit and debt so we can keep buying stuff.

But is this really how people are?

We run up against a couple of anomalies.

In the crisis what do people want to do – they want to look to the future, they want to hunker down. Spend less and save more.

But saving is exactly the wrong thing do from the system point of view.

The system is at odds with who we are as people.

[More to come]

Hat Tip – NZ Institute