The Legacy of David Suzuki (audio)
Steve Curwood, Living on Earth
Acclaimed scientist and environmentalist, David Suzuki. (Photo: David Suzuki)
Over the span of a lifetime, the world’s population has tripled and consumption has become a way of life. David Suzuki reflects on these changes in his new book “The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future.” He tells host Steve Curwood that the path to a sustainable future is to stop elevating economy over ecology and to start imagining a brighter future.
From the transcript:
…CURWOOD: Let’s talk about the economy. In your book, you quote a couple of economists and retail analysts. One of them is Victor Lebow. You quote him as saying, “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige is now to be found in our consumptive patterns.” And he goes on to say that, “The greater the pressure upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more he does tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats, his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.”
SUZUKI: Isn’t that incredible? This is Victor Lebow who is an industrialist. What happened was we all came through the terrible depression after the stock market crashed in 1929. What got us out of the depression was WWII, and by the middle of the war, the American economy was blazing, white hot, pumping out guns and tanks and planes and weapons. And, of course, it was clear by the mid-1940s that the Allies were going to win the war, and people began to say, ‘well, what the heck do we do in peace time?’…
(17 December 2011)
Find out more about the book here.
China’s Grey Swan is changing colors
Jack Barnes, Confessions of a Macro Contrarian blog
The Chinese economy is heading toward an economic hard landing; it will overshoot to the downside and become the economic Black Swan event of 2011-2012. Inflation, yes both types, will be the story in China in the coming months.
The steps necessary for an economic black swan landing have all happened, what is next is just the crash landing. The rains in Australia have cemented China’s economic slowdown. The rains will have longer lasting implications for both economies.
The Chinese are going to be shopping the worlds markets for any available coal with BTU content higher than their own average domestic coal. They have no choices. They are going to be buying coal from the US east coast terminals in size before this is over.
The need to import high-grade coal ore & iron ore are the two Achilles heel of their export based economy. China is going to be pushing up coal prices around the world, making locally sourced steel profitable again in the US…
(3 January 2011)
Capitalism and Degrowth—An Impossibility Theorem
John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review
In the opening paragraph to his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen, the world’s foremost scientific authority on global warming, declared: “Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril….The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.”1
In making this declaration, however, Hansen was only speaking of a part of the global environmental crisis currently threatening the planet, namely, climate change. Recently, leading scientists (including Hansen) have proposed nine planetary boundaries, which mark the safe operating space for the planet. Three of these boundaries (climate change, biodiversity, and the nitrogen cycle) have already been crossed, while others, such as fresh water use and ocean accidification, are emerging planetary rifts. In ecological terms, the economy has now grown to a scale and intrusiveness that is both overshooting planetary boundaries and tearing apart the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.2
Hence, almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of “the limits to growth,” the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge.3 What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on “Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity,” and has since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 “Degrowth Declaration” in Barcelona.
Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (décroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society—and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society?…
(January 2011 issue)
More on this theme: Beyond growth or beyond capitalism? (Climate and Capitalism). -BA
The Oil – Employment Link, Part 1
Gail Tverberg, Our Finite World
From what I can see, oil consumption and employment are very closely linked. It is this link that seems to be contributing to the unemployment problems we have now in the US.
Going forward, we know that the US is heavily dependent on oil imports. If these drop, either because world oil production is dropping, or because world oil production is close to flat, and the US is being outbid for the oil, then it seems likely that employment in the United States will drop even more.
These are a selection of slides from my presentation:…
(3 January 2011)
Part 2 is online: Looking at more detail underlying History Chanel’s “Prophets of Doom” story. -BA
The Japan Myth
Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate
… the key argument was the need to avoid a repeat of Japan’s “lost decade.”
Policymaking is often dominated by simple “lessons learned” from economic history. But the lesson learned from the case of Japan is largely a myth. The basis for the scare story about Japan is that its GDP has grown over the last decade at an average annual rate of only 0.6% compared to 1.7 % for the US. The difference is actually much smaller than often assumed, but at first sight a growth rate of 0.6 % qualifies as a lost decade.
… But this picture of stagnation in many countries is misleading, because it leaves out an important factor, namely demography.
How should one compare growth records among a group of similar, developed countries? The best measure is not overall GDP growth, but the growth of income per head of the working-age population (not per capita). This last element is important because only the working-age population represents an economy’s productive potential. If two countries achieve the same growth in average WAP income, one should conclude that both have been equally efficient in using their potential, even if their overall GDP growth rates differ.
When one looks at GDP/WAP (defined as population aged 20-60), one gets a surprising result: Japan has actually done better than the US or most European countries over the last decade. The reason is simple: Japan’s overall growth rates have been quite low, but growth was achieved despite a rapidly shrinking working-age population.
Daniel Gros is Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies.
(6 January 2011)
Cited by Kevin Drums at Mother Jones, with additional comments: Demographics and Destiny. -BA
