Climate change and the growth paradigm

Stephen Purdey (University of Toronto) has composed a short text addressing "the link between science and society regarding climate change" (email distributed via the adaptation-list for participants at the March 2009 Copenhagen climate conference). More specifically, he writes about "The Growth Paradigm" (cf. his book Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations, to be published in November by Routledge).

Excerpts:

Mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change are important objectives, but the biggest obstacle to achieving those objectives, and to successfully maintaining a stable planetary climate, is the deep-seated commitment among policy-makers to continuous economic growth.

... Continuous growth depends irrevocably on the continuous transformation and consumption of energy. The socio-political commitment to unending economic growth will inevitably overwhelm any effort to conserve energy, or to shift energy supplies from carbon-based to renewable sources, and it is fundamentally incompatible with any absolute reduction in the amount of energy consumed. Greenhouse gas emissions can be significantly reduced per unit of economic production in the global economy, but if production itself continues to increase, then those relative reductions will ultimately be futile.

... at its root, climate change is a socio-political, indeed a cultural issue and as such requires from scientists a kind of social and moral awareness which often falls outside their normal range of professional interests. ... Now scientists have the ... obligation of pointing out that the core policy priority of governments around the world is at odds with immutable physical laws which preclude unending economic growth.

And here's my response (sent to Purdey only):

Dear Stephen,

I do believe this is a very important point (see my article "The Statistician's Guide to Utopia: The Future of Growth").

In this context I think it is further crucial to emphasize the shift in attention and political priority that is going on today as part of the rising global awareness about climate change, wherein climate issues tends to dominate and almost monopolize environmental policies. Just think about energy: Even if we did manage to use only renewable energy etc., that energy consumption (and the economic activity that goes along with it) would, within a paradigm if never-ending growth, be likely to have severe environmental consequences; even it the climate problem was hypothetically solved (which is in itself a totally unrealistic assumption, of course).

A further consequence of the prospect of continued growth is that policies increasingly depend on high-tech solutions, which further commits us to a technologically dominated society and in effect limits our range of policy options.

By the way, have you read "Surviving 1,000 centuries: Can we do it?" - A very informing book about the physical limits of our long-term global activities.

Best,

(morten tønnessen)
Academic homepage: http://utopianrealism.blogspot.com