Professor John Beddington is the chief scientific advisor to the U.K. government. He is big on evidence. On the facts. He doesn't really do hyperbole. On Thursday, he delivered a powerful presentation warning of a "perfect storm" of social and environmental crises all converging around 2030.
That's exactly what I've referred to as "the ultimate recession": a recession caused not by failed regulation and bankers' greed, but by very high oil prices, food and water shortages, disappearing forests, accelerating climate change, forced migration and mass civil disruption. The only point where John and I part company is on the date: He says 2030, I think it will be nearer to 2020.
There is now very wide consensus around this kind of analysis. A combination of very rapid population growth over the last 50 years and reckless economic growth during the same time has stored up massive problems for societies the world over. No nation is immune. The scientific evidence tells us all we need to know: Carry on with business-as-usual growth-at-all-costs, and we're stuffed.
Avoiding that ultimate recession (and, in particular, the potentially horrific impact of accelerating climate change) has therefore to be our top priority. But right now, perhaps understandably, politicians' top priority, all over the world, is sorting out the recession. And some people are even using this as an excuse to keep the environment stuff on the back burner.
They couldn't be more stupid! As I've argued in Forum for the Future's latest pamphlet, "Living Within Our Means," the surest route out of this recession would be a vast surge in new investments in precisely those things that will help us avoid the ultimate recession: energy efficiency, renewables, smart electricity grids, new transportation technologies and so on. We enforce that with collective international action to protect the "natural assets" on which our future absolutely depends (all the remaining rainforests, for instance, or endangered fisheries), and we will have a solid, job-generating foundation on which to build tomorrow's economy.
Genuinely sustainable wealth creation on a massive scale.
So are our politicians up for it? Sort of. Obama's certainly got the message. China has started out on its own transition to a lower-carbon future. Several EU countries are making the right noises.
But it's all much too patchy. Too half-hearted. The back to business-as-usual brigade is still very powerful. And preparations for the meeting of the G20 on April 2nd show little sign of demonstrating just how big an opportunity this could be to set the world on a very different path.
The long and the short of it, unfortunately, is this: More politicians still believe that economic recovery depends on continuing to live beyond our means (financially and ecologically) than on learning to live within our means. And that's why the ultimate "perfect storm" recession still looms on the horizon.
Jonathon Porritt is founder director of the sustainable development nonprofit organization Forum for the Future.
Storm Photo — CC licensed by El Garza.
But WHY have you avoided population?
Mr. Porritt states that he "studiously avoided banging [the population drum]" in this report. Why?
Population is the root of our problems. We'd have many more livable options if humans would act like other species and limit their offspring in line with available land, water, food, etc. Why should all other species suffer and go extinct so that one in particular can overpopulate? Why is "continued population growth" always cited as a given around which all other problems must be negotiated? Bear in mind, I'm talking about people in "developed" nations as well, since consumption per kid is many multiples of any southern hemisphere kid.
Population must move to the front of the collective brainpan. It must be addressed in any environmental report. Family size can no longer be considered a personal matter--because it isn't. Tax codes need to change, and give credits to people who don't breed (or who adopt) rather than to all of those who crank out kids, whenever they do. And when people reproduce more than themselves (like the freakazoid Christians we have in the U.S.) others should open their mouths and apply peer pressure.
And just for the record, I chose not to have kids, for environmental reasons.
Living within our means
I'm not sure what Mr. Porritt thinks the politicians should be "up for".
I don't think Obama gets it. If "living within our means" is the government taking on an additional trillion dollars of deficit spending per year, this is certainly not living within our means. It's the government setting a bad example by spending way beyond their means and flirting with bankruptcy.
Obama's bailout plans are not aimed towards sustainability. The "fix" that his government is offering is to get us back to unsustainable borrowing and spending patterns of 2005. Bailing out AIG? Who needs them? Bank of America? I moved my accounts to my small local credit union years ago.
What Obama doesn't "get" is that society is trying to "tone down" it's freaky consumption patterns. People are no longer interested in cheap credit and all the trinkets it can buy.
What Obama should be doing is "fixing" our financial system. We should no longer be reliant on large financial institutions that are "too big to fail" who's financial models are based on leveraging everybody and everything up to the hilt in debt.
We need to "phase out" our fractional reserve lending system and abolish the Federal reserve, which is essentially a banking cartel. The federal reserve serves elite eastern banking interests - the federal reserve is not interested in the public's best interest.
We need to return our currency to "sound money" so that politicians can't borrow and print away our future in order to be re-elected today.
These are the real changes we are not seeing. What we are seeing is "bailing out" of the old ways of doing business - even though people don't want to do business that way any more.