FORUM TPSIPOL : RED DEMOCRATICA (RED)
ESPECIAL
PARA LA RED DEMOCRATICA
Can economic growth be reconciled with sustanaible development ?
On a knife-edge between climate change and Millenium Development goals
30/06/2008
Http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eleccion **************************************************************
(RED)/ Ginebra
Oswaldo de Rivero
http://oswaldoderivero.blogspot.com/
Arts. rels.
(1) En ingles : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eleccion/message/25152
(2) Conferencia Desarrollo Sustentable en el Instituto de Altos Estudios Internacionales de Ginebra http://eadi.org/gc2008/
(3) http://community.eldis.org/.5995c74a
(4) http://www.gc2008.net/blog/
CAN ECONOMIC GROWTH BE RECONCILED WITH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? ON A KNIFE-EDGE BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND MILLENIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
26/6/2008
I don’t think that economic growth can be reconciled with sustainable development in the near future and possibly not for many decades. I wish it could but it cannot. In fact, we use the term sustainable development very easily. In reality, we are using an oxymoron, because sustainable development is not yet possible since all the production of goods and services in the global economy, utilizes fossil fuels, and these polluting energies will not easily be replaced.
Today, more than 75 per cent of energy used globally is made up of oil, coal and gas and our civilization is far from being able to do without these energies which are highly polluting and emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. Renewable energies, which would make sustainable development possible, are certainly not just around the corner.
To date, there is not one single form of renewable energy that could be used to replace the almost 90 million barrels a day of oil needed, to generate the 320 billion kilowatts/hour required, to produce the 58 trillion dollars of goods and services by the global economy.
However, the problem with achieving sustainable development is not only to replace fossil energy in order to stop global warming but is, above all, to change our patterns of consumption, which are polluting our cities, oceans, lakes, rivers and destroying forests and bio diversity.
Today the global model of consumption is what I call the “California Model.” It consists of an unsustainable urban expansion over agricultural land, which consumes more and more water, food and oil, whose principal economic activity is “shopping” and where the private automobile is the king. This is a model that produces enormous amounts of emissions of carbon dioxide and garbage.
Following the California Model, our urban civilization has gone beyond the footprint of the human species on the planet. This footprint should be, as a maximum, the use of 1.8 hectares of the earth’s resources per person but now it is 2.2 hectares. Therefore we are 25 per cent overdrawn on the sustainable use of the planet’s resources.
What would happen if all the 5.5 billion inhabitants of the poor countries were provided with 5.5 billion credit cards, so that they could consume like the people of the rich countries? According to Professor Jared Diamond, the one billion inhabitants of the rich countries consume 32 times more than the 5 billion of the poor countries. Therefore if these 5.5 billion were to consume as much as the populations of the rich countries, it will be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billon people. A number, which the planet simply cannot sustain. We would have to buy one o two more planets.
So, if we want sustainable development we have to change our patterns of consumption and this change must be focused, first of all, in the rich consumer societies that are today transmitting, through publicity and global trade, the California Model to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The Report of the organization, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, carried out by some 1,300 experts from 95 countries, concludes that over the last 50 years in order to satisfies our consumption patterns the growth of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in particular in the industrial countries, has degraded ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other period in history. The GDP grows but the planet doesn’t grow.
To change our consumption patterns we cannot continue with the fiction of interpreting an annual rise in GDP, that destroys non-renewable natural resources, as an increase in nations’ wealth. However, the World Bank, the IMF, even the United Nations itself, and the majority of economists and politicians venerate the annual growth of GDP as the indicator of development and happiness. This worship of the destruction of our own habitat is as illogical as venerating the growth of a cancerous cell, which also grows destroying its own organism. Perhaps, the future generations in the next millennium, when they study the way of consumption of our civilization, will classify GDP as the indicator of our barbarism.
For example, the rate of growth of the GDP of China is glorified as a paradigm of development. The majority of the international media only describe the China of the economic miracle, but the reality behind this miracle is that the urban population in China grows at an incredible rate of some 29 million every year, in a context where a third of the land suffers from erosion and is unfit for agriculture, where 75 per cent of the rivers and lakes are contaminated, and where 90 per cent of underground water sources are also polluted. Today 400 Chinese cities suffer from water shortages and almost all of them suffer, in addition, from some of the most polluted air in the world, which, according to the World Bank, causes almost 400 thousand premature deaths every year.
The catastrophic situation of the environment in China has triggered hundreds of thousands of unexpected protests. Concerned by this new social protest, the Communist Party of China adopted a “Green” GDP, which would discount from growth the costs of the destruction of non-renewable resources. This new GDP was never applied because it would imply admitting that the average growth of China over the last twenty years (1985 – 2005) was not 8 per cent but only 5.8 per cent.
Fortunately, there are researchers who seek a different calculation from that of GDP. In 1989, Professors Herman Daly and John Cobb of the University of Maryland, created the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which discounts from the GDP air pollution, destruction of agricultural land and the deterioration of the ozone layer. This index, applied to the economic growth of the United States, demonstrated that the per capita income of the American people had dropped by ten per cent since 1976.
Another new indicator known as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was created in 1995 by the NGO Redefining Progress. This indicator also discounts the external costs caused by the destruction of non-renewable resources, such as air pollution, the depletion of energy due to traffic congestion and also the costs of crime. In the light of this new indicator, the GDP of the United States that, according to the statistics grew by 56 per cent for the period of 1982 – 2002, in reality only grew by 2 per cent.
Recently, President Nicholas Sarkozy ser up a Committee of Experts, with the cooperation of Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, to change the way French GDP is calculated. The purpose is to include quality-of-life factors,
The idea of replacing the unsustainable GDP is advancing. More groups of experts are working on this issue and I think that the academic centres, which study development, also need to adopt a critical attitude towards the unsustainable GDP and investigate alternatives.
With regard to Millennium Development, I consider that its principal Goals are not in fact Development Goals, because the reduction by half of the number of those who live on our planet with one dollar a day, as well as the number of those who suffer hunger, does not constitute development, but rather damage control of human misery. Raising the miserable income from 1 dollar to 2 dollars a day is not development, because those who earn 2 dollars are still living in poverty, even those who earn 3, 4, and 5 dollars a day are still poor, particularly now that the prices of food and fuel have increased.
When these Millennium Development Goals were reviewed, I was Ambassador to the United Nations in New York. During this review, I maintained that the principal Millennium Development Goals were not laying the foundations for a process of sustainable development, because they do not include a coherent strategy to correct the dangerous imbalance that exists today between the growing urban population in the developing countries and their decreasing access to water, food and energy.
Since the dawn of humanity, the fundamental balance for a civilization to survive is that the size of the population does not exceed the decisive resources available to sustain life, such as water, foodstuffs and energy. This balance is what I called, in my book the Myth of Development: the “Physical and Social Balance”. All civilizations have been dependent on having sufficient water, food and energy for their population, and when they do not, they collapse. However, the Millennium Development overlooked this and left the invisible hand of the market to look after the physical and social balance. Today we can see the consequence of that, reflected in the global food and energy crisis.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the growing physical and social imbalance between food, energy, water and the growing urban population of the poor countries is like a socio-political seismic fault line, which can cause a series of tremors followed by the cataclysm of the national disintegration of many poor countries.
However, this physical and social imbalance has been ignored not only in the Millennium of Development but also in the national agendas of the developing countries. The majority of the Governments of these countries, overwhelmed by their external debt, have dedicated their policies more towards complying with the adjustments forced on them by the IMF and the World Bank, than addressing a physical and social imbalance which could convert their countries into non-viable nation states.
Most of national, as well as international technocrats never address the possibility of the non-viability of nation states. The discussion of this issue is taboo, because they still live under the influence of more than half a century of the myth of development, which predicates that all underdeveloped nation states will one day become developed nations, prosperous consumer societies with instant gratification, like a mirror image of the industrialized consumer societies.
In the actual ecological situation of the world, we need to free ourselves from the myth of development, to abandon the search for El Dorado. We need to replace the elusive agenda of the richest of the nations with an urgent agenda for the survival of nations. Today, the priority must be to stabilize the growth of the urban population and increase access to water, food and renewable energy to ensure that urban life in the poor countries is not converted into an ecological hell.
The achievement of this physical and social balance is not related to any ideology. Therefore, it should be possible to agree on a “National Pact for Survival” among all the political actors in any developing country where the urban population is exploding and there are alarming symptoms of water, food and energy insecurity.
These National Pacts for Survival should emerge from a wide-ranging national dialogue and democratic exchange between the government, political parties, business managers, workers, the academic community and civil society. Only an ongoing democratic exercise of this nature can help to overcome the challenges posed by the physical and social imbalance and in this way prevent many developing countries from becoming non-viable nation states.
Thank you very much.
Oswaldo de Rivero
I don’t think that economic growth can be reconciled with sustainable development in the near future and possibly not for many decades. I wish it could but it cannot. In fact, we use the term sustainable development very easily. In reality, we are using an oxymoron, because sustainable development is not yet possible since all the production of goods and services in the global economy, utilizes fossil fuels, and these polluting energies will not easily be replaced.
Today, more than 75 per cent of energy used globally is made up of oil, coal and gas and our civilization is far from being able to do without these energies which are highly polluting and emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. Renewable energies, which would make sustainable development possible, are certainly not just around the corner.
To date, there is not one single form of renewable energy that could be used to replace the almost 90 million barrels a day of oil needed, to generate the 320 billion kilowatts/hour required, to produce the 58 trillion dollars of goods and services by the global economy.
However, the problem with achieving sustainable development is not only to replace fossil energy in order to stop global warming but is, above all, to change our patterns of consumption, which are polluting our cities, oceans, lakes, rivers and destroying forests and bio diversity.
Today the global model of consumption is what I call the “California Model.” It consists of an unsustainable urban expansion over agricultural land, which consumes more and more water, food and oil, whose principal economic activity is “shopping” and where the private automobile is the king. This is a model that produces enormous amounts of emissions of carbon dioxide and garbage.
Following the California Model, our urban civilization has gone beyond the footprint of the human species on the planet. This footprint should be, as a maximum, the use of 1.8 hectares of the earth’s resources per person but now it is 2.2 hectares. Therefore we are 25 per cent overdrawn on the sustainable use of the planet’s resources.
What would happen if all the 5.5 billion inhabitants of the poor countries were provided with 5.5 billion credit cards, so that they could consume like the people of the rich countries? According to Professor Jared Diamond, the one billion inhabitants of the rich countries consume 32 times more than the 5 billion of the poor countries. Therefore if these 5.5 billion were to consume as much as the populations of the rich countries, it will be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billon people. A number, which the planet simply cannot sustain. We would have to buy one o two more planets.
So, if we want sustainable development we have to change our patterns of consumption and this change must be focused, first of all, in the rich consumer societies that are today transmitting, through publicity and global trade, the California Model to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The Report of the organization, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, carried out by some 1,300 experts from 95 countries, concludes that over the last 50 years in order to satisfies our consumption patterns the growth of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in particular in the industrial countries, has degraded ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other period in history. The GDP grows but the planet doesn’t grow.
To change our consumption patterns we cannot continue with the fiction of interpreting an annual rise in GDP, that destroys non-renewable natural resources, as an increase in nations’ wealth. However, the World Bank, the IMF, even the United Nations itself, and the majority of economists and politicians venerate the annual growth of GDP as the indicator of development and happiness. This worship of the destruction of our own habitat is as illogical as venerating the growth of a cancerous cell, which also grows destroying its own organism. Perhaps, the future generations in the next millennium, when they study the way of consumption of our civilization, will classify GDP as the indicator of our barbarism.
For example, the rate of growth of the GDP of China is glorified as a paradigm of development. The majority of the international media only describe the China of the economic miracle, but the reality behind this miracle is that the urban population in China grows at an incredible rate of some 29 million every year, in a context where a third of the land suffers from erosion and is unfit for agriculture, where 75 per cent of the rivers and lakes are contaminated, and where 90 per cent of underground water sources are also polluted. Today 400 Chinese cities suffer from water shortages and almost all of them suffer, in addition, from some of the most polluted air in the world, which, according to the World Bank, causes almost 400 thousand premature deaths every year.
The catastrophic situation of the environment in China has triggered hundreds of thousands of unexpected protests. Concerned by this new social protest, the Communist Party of China adopted a “Green” GDP, which would discount from growth the costs of the destruction of non-renewable resources. This new GDP was never applied because it would imply admitting that the average growth of China over the last twenty years (1985 – 2005) was not 8 per cent but only 5.8 per cent.
Fortunately, there are researchers who seek a different calculation from that of GDP. In 1989, Professors Herman Daly and John Cobb of the University of Maryland, created the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which discounts from the GDP air pollution, destruction of agricultural land and the deterioration of the ozone layer. This index, applied to the economic growth of the United States, demonstrated that the per capita income of the American people had dropped by ten per cent since 1976.
Another new indicator known as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was created in 1995 by the NGO Redefining Progress. This indicator also discounts the external costs caused by the destruction of non-renewable resources, such as air pollution, the depletion of energy due to traffic congestion and also the costs of crime. In the light of this new indicator, the GDP of the United States that, according to the statistics grew by 56 per cent for the period of 1982 – 2002, in reality only grew by 2 per cent.
Recently, President Nicholas Sarkozy ser up a Committee of Experts, with the cooperation of Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, to change the way French GDP is calculated. The purpose is to include quality-of-life factors,
The idea of replacing the unsustainable GDP is advancing. More groups of experts are working on this issue and I think that the academic centres, which study development, also need to adopt a critical attitude towards the unsustainable GDP and investigate alternatives.
With regard to Millennium Development, I consider that its principal Goals are not in fact Development Goals, because the reduction by half of the number of those who live on our planet with one dollar a day, as well as the number of those who suffer hunger, does not constitute development, but rather damage control of human misery. Raising the miserable income from 1 dollar to 2 dollars a day is not development, because those who earn 2 dollars are still living in poverty, even those who earn 3, 4, and 5 dollars a day are still poor, particularly now that the prices of food and fuel have increased.
When these Millennium Development Goals were reviewed, I was Ambassador to the United Nations in New York. During this review, I maintained that the principal Millennium Development Goals were not laying the foundations for a process of sustainable development, because they do not include a coherent strategy to correct the dangerous imbalance that exists today between the growing urban population in the developing countries and their decreasing access to water, food and energy.
Since the dawn of humanity, the fundamental balance for a civilization to survive is that the size of the population does not exceed the decisive resources available to sustain life, such as water, foodstuffs and energy. This balance is what I called, in my book the Myth of Development: the “Physical and Social Balance”. All civilizations have been dependent on having sufficient water, food and energy for their population, and when they do not, they collapse. However, the Millennium Development overlooked this and left the invisible hand of the market to look after the physical and social balance. Today we can see the consequence of that, reflected in the global food and energy crisis.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the growing physical and social imbalance between food, energy, water and the growing urban population of the poor countries is like a socio-political seismic fault line, which can cause a series of tremors followed by the cataclysm of the national disintegration of many poor countries.
However, this physical and social imbalance has been ignored not only in the Millennium of Development but also in the national agendas of the developing countries. The majority of the Governments of these countries, overwhelmed by their external debt, have dedicated their policies more towards complying with the adjustments forced on them by the IMF and the World Bank, than addressing a physical and social imbalance which could convert their countries into non-viable nation states.
Most of national, as well as international technocrats never address the possibility of the non-viability of nation states. The discussion of this issue is taboo, because they still live under the influence of more than half a century of the myth of development, which predicates that all underdeveloped nation states will one day become developed nations, prosperous consumer societies with instant gratification, like a mirror image of the industrialized consumer societies.
In the actual ecological situation of the world, we need to free ourselves from the myth of development, to abandon the search for El Dorado. We need to replace the elusive agenda of the richest of the nations with an urgent agenda for the survival of nations. Today, the priority must be to stabilize the growth of the urban population and increase access to water, food and renewable energy to ensure that urban life in the poor countries is not converted into an ecological hell.
The achievement of this physical and social balance is not related to any ideology. Therefore, it should be possible to agree on a “National Pact for Survival” among all the political actors in any developing country where the urban population is exploding and there are alarming symptoms of water, food and energy insecurity.
These National Pacts for Survival should emerge from a wide-ranging national dialogue and democratic exchange between the government, political parties, business managers, workers, the academic community and civil society. Only an ongoing democratic exercise of this nature can help to overcome the challenges posed by the physical and social imbalance and in this way prevent many developing countries from becoming non-viable nation states.
Thank you very much.
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