Ecology for capitalists
Let’s say you’re a busy person, with a good career going on. You don’t have time to worry too much about the environment, but there is one thing you’re good at: managing money. Let me try to use your language to show you how worried you should be.
We sometimes hear that we use more than one planet. I used to not really understand what that means: how can we use more than what the planet gives us? Is it not limiting? What I eventually understood is that the planet doesn’t give us a salary. You can’t spend more than your salary. It should be seen as a capital. The ability of the planet to carry life, and more specifically human life, is a capital that built up for eons to finally reach a value high enough to sustain human societies.
Let’s say you have one million euros. You’re rich. As any sane person, you’d like to stay rich. So you put your money somewhere where you know you’ll get 5% a year, and you live off the interests. That’s €50,000 a year, definitely enough to live without working if you’re not too big a spender. If you don’t have a child, you might start spending more at the end of your life, say from 60 on, to arrive at 0 at the expected time of your death. But if you do have a child, and you want him to live the same easy life as you, you’ll never spend more that your interests. You want him to benefit from the same capital as you. If you reduce your capital by spending more than your interests, those will decrease, so you’re implicily asking your child to live with less than you did.
This is directly applicable to ecology. Life and the ability of Earth to support us follows the same kind of exponential variations as money. A truly sustainable society shoud live off the interests of our ecosystem, i.e. consume the renewable resources no faster than they are produced. But that’s not what we’re doing: we’re using 1.7 planets. We would need a capital 1.7 times as big for the interests to cover our expenses. Since we don’t have a capital 1.7 times as big, we’re eating away our capital. We’re destroying the ability of Earth to support us, which sounds a lot like shooting ourselves in the foot.
Let’s get back to our story, with a slight revision. You were very poor and you win the lottery: suddenly, you have a million euros. But you don’t spend it like crazy. Instead, you slowly change your sober habits to adapt to your new status. Your expenses grow by 10% every year. But you don’t stop at the expenses of a normal rich person, no, you consistently spend 10% more every year for as long as you can. We consider that you manage to get 5% interests, as before, and you spend €10,000 in the first year. What happens? This:
For a long time, your sober lifestyle doesn’t consume all of your interests. Instead, they accumulate and build up, and both your capital and your expenses grow together. But here’s the catch: your expenses grow faster than your capital. At some point, even if the latter has been growing, you spend all of your interests. That’s the peak you can see in the capital curve. The year after, you spend 10% more, but this time your capital has not increased. So it decreases. From there on, you continue spending more and more and your capital produces less and less. One day, you’ve spent it all and you’re homeless. Note how brutal the fall of the spending is, it’s very similar to what we can see in Limits to Growth. Unfortunately, the spending represents our way of life. I’ve drawn the line corresponding to the point where expenses are around 1.8 times the interests. That’s where we are now. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like that steep downward slope we’re about to meet.
Now let’s imagine you have a “Oh shit!” moment as soon as you realize that your capital has started to decrease, and you reduce the rate of growth of your expenses to 5%.
Well, crap! It barely changes anything! What about 2%?
Not much better, maybe 1%?
I had to change the scale because it takes longer, but same story. “Ok ok, you say, I stop spending more, I’m happy with what I have!” 0%? Nice move.
It definitely buys you more time. In fact, you’ll be dead before your capital decreases back to the original million euros you won. But that’s not how nature works. Humanity doesn’t just die like a single individual. The truth is, once you’ve crossed the line and started spending more than what you earn, you have to decrease spending to be sustainable. And the longer it’s been since you crossed the line, the larger the decrease. We’ve crossed the line in the 70s, almost 50 years ago. Going from 1.7 planet to 1 means a decrease of 40% of our expenses. Of course, this can be over several years, but not too many, because if the decrease is too slow, we’ll still consume all our capital before our spendings become lower than the interests. In my simulations—with ficticious initial capital and growth rates, mind you—the yearly decrease needs to be no less than 4% to avoid collapse. What’s fun is that 4% a year corresponds to the decrease in CO2 emissions per capita we want if we’re to meet the 2°C global warming target at 9 billion people, until 2050. Of course, spendings can be stabilized once they go below interests.
I’m not a big believer in the decoupling between environmental impact and economic growth. What’s certain is that the first absolutely needs to decrease. If it can be done with economic growth, for instance by making better quality clothes and furniture, organic food, smartgrids, I-have-no-idea-what for transports, then great, we just have to finally implement the right international regulations. But if that’s not the case, we really have to think about, you know, not growing. I believe everyone will agree than unemployment and poverty for some are preferrable to death for everyone.
I’ll leave you on this happy note. This was kind of a short post with little research, unlike the previous one on NLP. Most of my free time is taken by my research and writing on nuclear energy. I’ll probably make a book out of it, but some parts will definitely land on this blog.