The Impossibility of Growth Demands a New Economic System

Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham(1).

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems(2). It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained(3). But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and the pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible reserves have been exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable(4), the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park(5). It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills(6), will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America(7).

The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo(8); one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east(9), the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people(10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years(12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.”(13) If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced(14).

As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention. More

 

© 2014

Corporate stranglehold of farmland a risk to world food security, study says

The world's food supplies are at risk because farmland is becoming rapidly concentrated in the hands of wealthy elites and corporations, a study has found.

Small farmers, the UN says, grow 70% of the world's food but a new analysis of government data suggests the land which they control is shrinking every year as mega-farms and plantations squeeze them onto less than 25% of the world's available farmland, says international land-use group Grain. These mega-farms are less productive in terms of amount of food they produce per area of land, the report argues.

"Small farms have less than a quarter of the world's agricultural land – or less than 20% excluding China and India. Such farms are getting smaller all the time, and if this trend persists they might not be able to continue to feed the world," says the report which draws on government statistics and calls for a stop on land grabbing by corporations.

The report suggests that the single most important factor in the drive to push small farmers onto ever smaller parcels of land is the worldwide expansion of industrial commodity crop farms. "The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing," it says. The land area occupied by just four crops – soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane – has quadrupled over the past 50 years. Over 140 million hectares of fields and forests have been taken over by these plantations since the 1960s – roughly the same area as all the farmland in the EU.

"What we found was shocking," said Henk Hobbelink of Grain. "If small farmers continue to lose the very basis of their existence, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems."

Big farms have been getting bigger nearly everywhere with rising numbers of small and medium-sized farmers going out of business in the past 20 years, say the authors. Belgium, Finland, France, Germany and Norway in western Europe have each lost about 70% of their farms since the 1970s while Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia each lost over 40% of their farms from 2003 to 2010. Poland alone lost almost 1m farmers between 2005 and 2010.

"Within the EU as a whole, over 6m farms disappeared between 2003 and 2010, bringing the total number of farms down to almost the same level as in 2000, before the inclusion of 12 new member states with their 8.7m new farmers," says the report , released with international peasant organisation Via Campesina.

But the concentration of land ownership is seen on every continent. Argentina lost more than one-third of its farms in the two decades from 1988 to 2008. Between 1997 to 2007, Chile lost 15% of its farms with the biggest farms doubling their average size, from 7,000 to 14,000 ha per farm. The United States has lost 30% of its farms in the last 50 years. Here, the number of very small farms has almost tripled, while the number of very large farms has more than quintupled.

In addition most farms have been getting smaller over time due to factors such as population pressure and lack of access to land. In India, the average farm size roughly halved from 1971 to 2006. In China, the average area of land cultivated per household fell by 25% between 1985 and 2000. In Africa, average farm size is also falling.

The authors say land reform is urgently needed if enough food is to be grown to feed everyone. "What we see happening in many countries ... is a kind of reverse agrarian reform, whether it's through corporate land grabbing in Africa, the recent agribusiness-driven coup d'état in Paraguay, the massive expansion of soybean plantations in Latin America, the opening up of Burma to foreign investors, or the extension of the European Union and its agricultural model eastward," says Hobbelink.

"In all of these processes, control over land is being usurped from small producers and their families, with elites and corporate powers pushing people onto smaller and smaller land holdings, or off the land entirely into camps or cities," he said.

The takeover of small farmers' land is now accelerating, says the report with nearly 60% of this land use change occurring in the past 20 years. The report estimates that 90% of all farms worldwide are "small", holding on average 2.2 hectares.

The report also found that small farmers often twice as productive as large farms and are more environmentally sustainable. "Although big farms generally consume more resources, control the best lands, receive most of the irrigation water and infrastructure ... they have lower technical efficiency and therefore lower overall productivity. Much of this has to do with low levels of employment used on big farms in order to maximise return on investment.

"Our data [suggests] that if all farms in Kenya had the current productivity of the country's small farms, Kenya's agricultural production would double. In Central America and Ukraine, it would almost triple. In Hungary and Tajikistan it would increase by 30%. In Russia, it would be increased by a factor of six," the report says.

"Beyond strict productivity measurements, small farms also are much better at producing and utilising biodiversity, maintaining landscapes, contributing to local economies, providing work opportunities and promoting social cohesion, not to mention their real and potential contribution to reversing the climate crisis."

The most productive farmers in the world are possibly found in Botswana, the report argues, where 93% of the farmers have small patches of land but together they grow all the country's groundnuts, 99% of its maize, 90% of the millet, 73% of beans and 25% of the sorghum on just 8% of the farmland. More

 

© 2014

Mega dry spell Spain's worst in 150 years

Parts of Spain are currently suffering through their most intense dry spell in a century and a half with Valencia and Alicante among the worst affected regions. Future predictions are not too rosy either, meteorologists warn.

The last eight months have been brutally dry for large swathes of southern and eastern Spain.

While huge storms buffeted Spain's Atlantic coasts and the Canary Islands during the winter and spring, Valencia and Alicante, as well as areas including Murcia, parts of Albacete province, and the Andalusian provinces of Jaén, Almería, Cadíz and Málaga have all been starved of rain.

In the last 150 years, there has never been "such a long and intense drought", according to the country's meteorological agency Aemet.

Indeed there are parts of the country where during "the second worst period of drought on record there was twice as much rain as now", meteorologist José Antonio Maldonado told Spanish free daily 20 minutos.

Rainfall levels in many areas have been less than half of those seen from 1971 to 2000, while some places have seen less than 25 percent of those levels.

Most dams are still at somewhere between 74 percent and 90 percent of capacity thanks to rains from earlier years, but some farmers are already struggling to water their crops, or have gone out of business.

Spain is also facing an uncertain water future: a 2013 study by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) looking at the period from 1945 to 2005 found the country's droughts were becoming more intense and more regular. More

 

 

© 2014

Nepal Glaciers Shrink By Quarter In 30 Years

Climate crisis has caused Nepal 's Himalayan glaciers to shrink by nearly a quarter in just over 30 years, said a scientist.

The glacier loss raises the risk of natural disasters in the ecologically fragile region.

A new study by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) shows that the area covered by glaciers has decreased by 24 per cent between 1977 and 2010.

Samjwal Ratna Bajracharya, lead author of the report, said “the shrinking of glaciers in Nepal is definitely connected to climate change; glacial melt is a huge indicator of rising temperatures.”

Under the three-year study led by ICIMOD scientists mapped satellite imagery from several decades to find the extent of ice loss in the region.

The fastest decline occurred between 1980 and 1990, said Bajracharya. Prior to the late 1970s, satellite imagery reflected little change in Nepal 's glacial area.

He said the glacial melting is creating huge, expanding lakes that threaten to burst and devastate mountain communities living downstream.

The accelerated glacial loss raises concerns over future access to water resources, particularly in regions where groundwater is limited and monsoon rains are erratic.

“If the trend continues, the immediate impact will be felt by those living in high-altitude regions, which are dependent on freshwater reserves from glaciers,” said Bajracharya.

The findings also sound alarm bells for Nepal 's push to develop hydropower projects.

“ Nepal cannot use its water resources to develop the country without assessing the state of our glaciers and river basins,” he said.

A government report in India recently blamed hydropower projects for devastating floods last year that killed thousands in India and Nepal .

The government panel said the build up of sediment in rivers, due to the dumping of soil that was dug up during construction of hydropower projects, exacerbated flooding when record-high rainfall hit the region last June.

It should be mentioned that the Himalayan region abounds in glaciers. Most of the big glaciers lie in the eastern Himalayas .

As the western Himalayas receive only a small amount of rainfall, barring the formation of vast snowfields, the source of some of the big rivers of Nepal are in fact glaciers.

Nepal 's largest glacier lies in the Mahalangur and the Kumbhakarna ranges. Khumbu is the biggest glacier and Langtang the longest. Kanchenjunga , Yalung, Nupchu and Langtang are some other glaciers belonging to the eastern Himalayas . Tukche and Hidden valley glaciers belong to the central Himalayas but these are comparatively small.

The Khumbu glacier is situated between Mount Everest and the Lhotse-Nuptse Ridge. It is seen flowing down between the two mountains and swerving right through the Khumbu valley. The terrain is gray and rocky. More

 

© 2014

Climate treaties must recognise and protect eco defenders

River otters, lichen on trees and coral in oceans are not just beautiful to look at, they tell us something important about the environment around them.

Amazon rainforest activist Jose Claudio
Ribeiro da Silva poses in front of a tree at
Praia Alta Piranheira settlement in October, 2010.
Silva and his wife Maria, defenders of the Amazon
rainforest who constantly reported illegal loggers
and ranchers, were killed in an ambush in May,
2011, in Nova Ipixuna, Brazil.
Photograph: Felipe Milanez/Reuters

The return of otters to a river can point to water becoming cleaner, lichens typically appear when the air is clear and free of pollution, while if corals – part of the large animal group known gloriously as cnidarians – bleach and die it can be a sign of oceans warming. Famously, Cuban tree frogs are thought to be under threat due to climate change. Collectively such organisms are known as 'indicator species.'

You wouldn’t think that humanity could fall into that group. We have an extraordinary ability to inhabit everywhere from the most polluted inner cities, choking mines and factory sites, to the sweetest meadow and untouched island paradise. We can make camp in harsh sub-zero Arctic conditions and live as nomads in the sweltering desert.

But, look more closely at the fate of particular groups of people, and you can tell an awful lot about what is happening to certain key environments and the planet more generally. From endangered tropical forests in Brazil and Liberia, to contested tracts of fertile land under threat of being ‘grabbed’ across Asia, people defending the environment and land rights are increasingly under attack and being killed.

Thinking of such environmental defenders just as an ‘indicator species’ is too technical and reductive. But as people under ever more violent threat, who find themselves on the front line of humanity’s transgression of planetary boundaries, they have become bellwethers, those who reveal the existence of a trend.

Competition for access to natural resources is intensifying. Logging and mining concessions, land grabs for industrial scale palm oil plantations, all these deals pitch powerful vested interests against the livelihoods of communities and the long-term health of the environment.

This plays out against a backdrop of the still unquestioned pursuit of economic growth and rising consumption in rich countries, together with extreme global inequality. Humanity in the meantime is crossing the threshold of several vital ecological life-support functions.

As a result, more and more people find themselves like border guards at our planetary boundaries, defending their environment from corporate or state abuse and unsustainable exploitation.

In the decade between 2002 and 2013 there were 908 known killings of people across 35 countries resulting from their work on environment and land issues. The worst year on record was 2012, but numbers for 2013 are expected to rise due to a time lag in data.

These figures, though, are just the visible tip of a larger veiled mountain of harassment and intimidation. Because of the failure of the international system to properly recognise, record and report on the plight of environmental defenders, these known deaths – on a par with the number of journalists killed as a result of their work over the same period – are almost certainly a significant underestimate.

For example, unrecorded killings are highly likely in African countries such asNigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Zimbabwe that are enduring resource-fuelled unrest, but information is almost impossible to gain without detailed field investigations.

So, all around the world, an increasing number of individuals and communities operate like guardians, look-outs, watchers, pioneers, messengers on the edge of our planetary boundaries – feeling the brunt of resource competition and providing the human face of the consequences of global overreach. Their example challenges us to accept ecological limits and devise a new economic compact for how we can all survive and prosper by sharing a finite world.

The year of the worst recorded killings of environmental defenders – 2012 – also saw a conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. The day the conference closed, two campaigners – Almir Nogueira de Amorim and João Luiz Telles Penetra – fighting on behalf of Rio’s fishing communities against the expansion of oil operations were abducted nearby in Rio de Janeiro state and later found executed.

The killers of environmental defenders enjoy almost complete impunity. Only 10 perpetrators, about 1% of the overall incidence of known killings, are known to have been tried, convicted and punished between 2002 and 2013.

Later this year in December government officials from around the world will gather for the next climate change talks in Lima, Peru. Without urgent action, as they struggle towards a paper agreement on progress, the murder and intimidation of ordinary people actually defending the environment and land will continue outside the conference halls largely ignored.

With crushing irony, environmental defenders who find themselves in conflict with powerful vested interests get depicted as enemies of development. Yet a model of economic development that undermines planetary life-support systems and kills and intimidates those who would protect them, cannot really be called 'development' at all.

As long as human progress in lower income nations is based on the exploitation of their natural resources to feed relentless over-consumption elsewhere, this problem will remain and worsen. New approaches to development must begin with communities first and foremost being able to manage and benefit, securely and in environmentally resilient ways, from their own natural resources.

In the meantime we need action to recognise and protect environmental defenders. In finding the frontline of their struggles globally, we will be drawing a map of planetary boundaries. For the sake of our own collective survival, we must then work out how to stay the right side of the lines. More

 

© 2014

Third National Climate Assessment: Climate Change Impacts in the United States

Please see the message below announcing the release of the new U.S. National Climate Assessment and the associated websites where it is available.

We are so pleased to announce today’s release of the Third National Climate Assessment: Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The Third National Climate Assessment (NCA), which delivers on USGCRP’s legal mandate and the President’s Climate Action Plan, is the most comprehensive, authoritative, transparent scientific report ever generated on U.S. climate impacts, both as currently observed and as projected for the future. The Third NCA documents climate change-related impacts and responses across key sectors and all regions of the U.S. with the goal of better informing public and private decision-making at all levels.

WHERE CAN YOU FIND THE ASSESSMENT?

The Third NCA is available to download and also can be explored in a novel interactive format through USGCRP’s newly redeployed web presence at http://globalchange.gov. An important feature of this interactivity is the traceability of the data and other information in the report, giving users the means to refer back to these data for their analyses and decision support. The site is mobile-compatible and every piece of the report—from highlights to chapters to key messages to graphics—has its own unique URL for social network sharing. Please find below links that will help you navigate the Third NCA:

· Full Report: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/

· Highlights: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights

Beyond the Third NCA, the new globalchange.gov features accessible and dynamic information on a wide range of climate-related topics.

Any White House materials about the release of the Third NCA will be available from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/climate-change. At 2:00 pm EDT, the White House is hosting a stakeholder event that will feature speakers from the Administration, NCA authors, and users of the report. For those who won't be at the event in person, you can tune into the live webcast:http://www.whitehouse.gov/live.

WHAT CAN BE FOUND IN THIS LATEST ASSESSMENT?

The data and information in the Third NCA can be of great value to the adaptation planning and implementation efforts of U.S. Federal Agencies and their partners and stakeholders. Some examples include:

· The latest science on observed trends and projected future conditions of changes in the climate across the 8 NCA regions and contiguous U.S. as well as 13 sectors and cross-sectors.

· Examples throughout of on-the-ground impacts across the U.S., many of which are already directly affecting substantial numbers of Americans.

· For the first time in a U.S. national assessment, explicit chapters on Decision Support, Mitigation, and Adaptation, with specific information on those topics as they are practiced now in addition to identifying research needs associated with these topics for improving future implementation of climate resilience measures. Specifically related to adaptation, the following information is captured in the Adaptation chapter:

o Adaptation key terms defined

o An overview of adaptation activities at multiple levels including the Federal government, states, tribes, local and regional governments, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector

o Example barriers to adaptation

o Several illustrative case studies of adaptation in action

· A useful and informative section that answers some frequently asked questions about climate change. The questions addressed range from those purely related to the science of climate change to those that extend to some of the issues being faced in consideration of mitigation and adaptation measures.

· Data and metadata behind content and images used in the assessment are accessible and traceable.

 

 

© 2014

Climate change is clear and present danger, says landmark US report

Climate change has moved from distant threat to present-day danger and no American will be left unscathed, according to a landmark report due to be unveiled on Tuesday.

The National Climate Assessment, a 1,300-page report compiled by 300 leading scientists and experts, is meant to be the definitive account of the effects of climate change on the US. It will be formally released at a White House event and is expected to drive the remaining two years of Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

The findings are expected to guide Obama as he rolls out the next and most ambitious phase of his climate change plan in June – a proposal to cut emissions from the current generation of power plants, America's largest single source of carbon pollution.

The White House is believed to be organising a number of events over the coming week to give the report greater exposure.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," a draft version of the report says. The evidence is visible everywhere from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, it goes on.

"Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between."

The final wording was under review by the White House but the basic gist remained unchanged, scientists who worked on the report said.

On Sunday the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed to try harder to combat climate change. At a meeting of UN member states in Abu Dhabi before a climate change summit in New York on 23 September, Ban said: "I am asking them to announce bold commitments and actions that will catalyse the transformative change we need. If we do not take urgent action, all our plans for increased global prosperity and security will be undone."

Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University and vice-chair of the NCA advisory committee, said the US report would be unequivocal that the effects of climate change were occurring in real-time and were evident in every region of the country.

"One major take-home message is that just about every place in the country has observed that the climate has changed," he told the Guardian. "It is here and happening, and we are not cherrypicking or fearmongering."

The draft report notes that average temperature in the US has increased by about 1.5F (0.8C) since 1895, with more than 80% of that rise since 1980. The last decade was the hottest on record in the US.

Temperatures are projected to rise another 2F over the next few decades, the report says. In northern latitudes such as Alaska, temperatures are rising even faster.

"There is no question our climate is changing," said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois and a lead author of the assessment. "It is changing at a factor of 10 times more than naturally."

Record-breaking heat – even at night – is expected to produce more drought and fuel larger and more frequent wildfires in the south-west, the report says. The north-east, midwest and Great Plains states will see an increase in heavy downpours and a greater risk of flooding.

"Parts of the country are getting wetter, parts are getting drier. All areas are getting hotter," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change at the US Geological Survey. "The changes are not the same everywhere."

Those living on the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska who have weathered the effects of sea level rise and storm surges can expect to see more. Residents of coastal cities, especially in Florida where there is already frequent flooding during rainstorms, can expect to see more. So can people living in inland cities sited on rivers.

Some changes are already having a measurable effect on food production and public health, the report will say.

John Balbus, senior adviser at the National Institute of Environmenal Health Science and a lead author of the NCA report, said rising temperatures increased the risk of heat stroke and heat-related deaths.

Eugene Takle, convening lead author of the agriculture chapter of the NCA report, and director of the Climate Science programme at Iowa State University, said heatwaves and changes in rainfall had resulted in a levelling off in wheat and corn production and would eventually cause declines.

In California, warmer winters have made it difficult to grow cherries. In the midwest, wetter springs have delayed planting. Invasive vines such as kudzu have spread northward, from the south to the Canadian border.

Some of the effects on agriculture, such as a longer growing season, are positive. But Takle said: "By mid-century and beyond the overall impacts will be increasingly negative on most crops and livestock."

The assessments are the American equivalent of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. This year's report for the first time looks at what America has done to fight climate change or protect people from its consequences in the future.

Under an act of Congress the reports were supposed to be produced every four years, but no report was produced during George W Bush's presidency. More

 

© 2014