Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
strate how to use renewables such as wind and solar. They also speak of 'biomimicry',
whereby nature's design secrets are put to use in creating products with greatly reduced
ecological impacts. These are laudable goals and are to be encouraged and applauded,
but to think that the problems of growth will go away because of them is misguided.
In the Western world, significant improvements in the efficiency of resource use have
not prevented a significant increase in waste and pollution. Even if the supposed hyper-
efficiencies do eventually eliminate the problem of material throughput, which I doubt
will be possible, we would still be left with the social problems created by the greed and
selfishness that we must cultivate in ourselves if the economy is to grow.
The famous phrase 'sustainable development', introduced in 1987 in the Brundtland
Report,
Our Common Future
, is meant to address these problems by proposing that
more growth is required to generate the wealth to make sustainability a reality, espe-
cially in the global South, where it was perceived, quite rightly, that standards of liv-
ing had to increase. But 'sustainable development' is an oxymoron, as long as 'devel-
opment' implies increasing the extraction rates of raw materials from wild nature. If
so, sustainability and development are contradictory concepts and 'sustainable devel-
opment' is just economic growth dressed up in the language of deliberate obfuscation,
used knowingly or not by those who care nothing for the Earth in order to fool us into
thinking that they are taking her concerns seriously.
Steady-State Economics
For it to be truly sustainable, development would be aimed at ensuring that the amount
of matter flowing through the global economy would either shrink or be at a
steady
state
. The founders of economics, people like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, had no
problem with steady-state economics. John Stuart Mill wrote, “The best state for human
nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any
reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.” In
modern times a key steady-state economist is Herman Daly, who suggests that a steady-
state economy would have four principal characteristics. First, there would be caps set
by the best available science for the throughput of every single element and molecule
that we wish to incorporate into our production processes, or which we manufacture.
These limits will be set at well below the levels that scientists agree can be dealt with
by Gaia. This principle has been put to work by American power stations, which began
a 'cap and trade' system for trading sulphur emissions up to an agreed total emissions
limit. The scheme has reduced sulphur emissions by 30% below the legal ceiling, and
cost far less than expected. The same approach could well work for controlling global
