Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

They Say: “No Impact/Extinction (Environment)”

Environmental degradation causes extinction.

Roberts 17 — Paul Craig Roberts, Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, Former Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Former Professor of business administration and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Former Inaugural William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at Georgetown University, Ph.D. in Economics from The University of Virginia, 2017 ("The Globalization of Environmental Degradation," Global Research, February 14^th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-globalization-of-environmental-degradation/5574752, Accessed 6-13-2017)

Figuratively speaking, a ginormous asteroid is hurtling to a cataclysmic rendezvous with earth, but we are not supposed to notice. The asteroid is the rising threat from environmental degradation. Evidence is accumulating that environmental degradation is becoming global.

We can either act responsibly by accepting the challenge or take refuge in denial and risk the consequences.

There is nothing new about climate change. It has been ongoing for as long as earth has had an atmosphere. Through change nature produced an atmosphere supportive of life. We know for a fact that human activities can have adverse impacts on the air, water, and land resources. If these impacts become global, as independent scientists believe, life on earth might be at risk.

We’re in a state of perpetual crisis

Moreover, environmental degradation can contribute to, and be worsened by, other changes that are not under our control. Presently humanity is challenged by three revolutions which collectively constitute a perpetual crisis: the technological revolution that is displacing humans in the production of goods and services, the volatility and instability of the global financial system, and environmental degradation. Our focus is on environmental degradation.

It’s a matter of balance

The weight of the atmosphere, at 14.7 PSI, has remained relatively constant throughout much of earth’s existence. What has varied is the makeup of the atmospheric gaseous mix. The mixes that existed prior to the current era would prove toxic to the contemporary biosphere. As the biosphere evolved over the hundreds of millions of years prior to the current era, the gaseous mix of the atmosphere and the biosphere came into perfect, or indeed as some might say, heavenly balance.

Indeed, our very existence as well as the existence of the biosphere depends on this balance. There is no question that human activities can affect this balance. Perhaps not enough that nature wouldn’t eventually be able to reset the balance, but perhaps enough to end civilization before nature could correct the disturbance. While some are cavalierly dismissive, others have concluded that things are already so irreversibly out of balance that civilization as we know it will cease before the middle of this century.

Easter Island is an example of death by environmental degradation on a local level. When the island was first settled, it was covered by a forest. Soil analysis suggests that the natural environment was reasonably diverse and, absent human settlement, resilient enough to recover from natural disturbances that included volcanic eruptions. The humans that settled on Easter Island thrived until the population degraded the environment to the point that it could not support the population.

Tree removal was one of the activities that proved detrimental to the island’s natural balance. As trees were removed, so too was the island’s natural diversity and its ability to support human habitation. Many have wondered what Easter Islanders were thinking as they cut down the last tree.

Environmental degradation’s role in the collapse of civilizations is well told in Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse. At least two pre-Columbian empires fell to sudden environmental collapse. Environmental degradation even contributed to Rome’s fall. Throughout history, empires and civilizations have collapsed once they degrade the environment below its capacity to carry the human footprint imposed on the environment.

Global warming introduces a difference. In the past environmental destruction was local or regional. But what is now underway appears to be global. It can take a long time to unbalance the biosphere, but once the line is crossed, collapse can be rapid and irreversible.

Global Warming a hoax?

Humans and animals convert oxygen to carbon-dioxide, and trees and plants convert carbon-dioxide to oxygen. It’s a simple truth that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon-dioxide. Carbon-dioxide is one of several greenhouse gases so named because they contribute to atmospheric warming. The atmospheric carbon-dioxide molecular count has steadily increased since measurements were first made decades ago. Analysis of ice cores extracted from glaciers and polar ice indicate that carbon dioxide levels were never as high as they are now for millions of years prior to the Industrial Revolution. In addition, vast amounts of woodlands have been cleared thus reducing the biosphere’s capacity to absorb and process carbon-dioxide. For example, by 2030 it’s predicted that just 40% of the Amazon rain forest, itself a massive percentage of the biosphere, will remain.

But carbon-dioxide isn’t the only concern. In addition, vast amounts of methane, also known to be a potent greenhouse gas, are also being released into the atmosphere.

The oceans also contain gasses that if released into the atmosphere could prove toxic to the biosphere. The earth itself contains gasses, such as methane, which is routinely released into the atmosphere through coal and petroleum extraction operations. Animal farming adds more methane. Even larger amounts of methane are estimated to be locked up in polar ice. Based on recent measurements and observations, vast amounts of methane, estimated to be in excess of ten times as much as is presently contained in the atmosphere, are predicted to be released in a sudden volcanic-like eruption as the ice melts. A sudden release of methane could cause the atmosphere to rapidly heat to a temperature where most agricultural activities, except perhaps for hydroponic operations housed in controlled environments, would cease.

The Pace is Quickening

From one day to the next it is difficult to discern changes in the environment. Yet those of us old enough to have been around for decades know that the weather has changed. Predictions made by scientists are being met sooner than expected. Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster and glaciers and polar ice are melting faster. The release of methane locked in arctic ice could quicken environmental change so that it is noticeable in real time.

The simple truth is that the atmospheric gaseous mix is changing and altering the natural balance. This is in addition to the historical kinds of local and regional environmental degradation associated with human activity. When humans destroy watersheds with deforestation, turn fertile lands into deserts, and pollute local sources of water, they can move on. But when the global environment degrades, there is no where else to go.

As climate changes, so does the geographical location for the best crop yields. Climate change has produced a new occupation: climatologists who predict for Wall Street investment bankers the best geographical locations for the highest crop yields.

Environmental changes, even a temporary one such as a multi-year drought, can cause turmoil in societies that result in deadly conflict. During the three years that preceded the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean) suffered from an extended drought. In Syria as water became more scarce, the government favored the most loyal elements of the population. Crop failures in the unfavored regions prompted a migration to the cities and produced political unrest. The US used this unrest to intervene against the Assad government which had alienated the US by pursuing an independent foreign policy.

The global spread of corporate monoculture agriculture and the global timber corporations’ exploitation of the remaining virgin forests are spreading environmental fragilities. On Easter Island the population declined into disappearance. For a thousand years after the Roman Empire collapsed the Italian peninsula was an environmental disaster with soils so depleted, agriculture was reduced to marginal subsistence farming barely sufficient to support a population a fraction of what it had been. Unlike our time, the Romans achieved environmental degradation without burning fossil fuels or fertilizing their fields with toxic petrochemicals and herbicides known to deplete soils to the point where continued land use is predicated on artificial fertilizers and ever larger applications of herbicides, the runoffs from which produce algae blooms and destroy marine life.

Today in locations where multinational agribusiness has replaced traditional farming, it can take years for soils to regain their natural fertility and for the societies to regain their economic balance from the imbalance that agricultural monoculture produces.

Environmental degradation can be destructive irrespective of global warming. Throughout history, humans have degraded their environments to the point that their societies failed or were weakened to the point that they were conquered in whole or part by invaders. However, global environmental failure can terminate life in general.

Environmental failure can result from ignorance, careless practices, and the short time horizon associated with profit maximization which encourages disposing of waste products directly into the environment where they damage, air, water, and land resources. When emissions alter the atmospheric balance, what has historically been local and regional damage becomes global.

In other words, human activities can put life in general at risk. This risk is too total to justify dismissing accumulated evidence as a hoax or as “a plot against capitalism.” We must assess the risk without being shouted down by material interests. There is no prospect of finding a solution to an unacknowledged risk.

Just as Easter Islanders did not understand the consequences for them of deforestation, today many in government do not acknowledge the risks of global degradation. President Trump has appointed a climate change skeptic as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. This is not enough for US Rep. Matt Gaetz who wants the EPA abolished. Is humanity now globally on the same path and in the same denial as led to the extinction of human life on Easter Island?

Environment collapse coming – biodiversity collapse and climate change

Sutter 16 — John D. Sutter, Sutter is an award winning columnist for CNN and creater of the networks “2 degrees” project, which aims to invlolve readers in climate change, 2016(“We have 20 years -- at the very most -- to prevent mass extinction”, CNN, October 27, http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/opinions/sutter-wwf-sixth-extinction/index.html, Accessed 6/22/17)

(CNN)The Earth's next mass extinction -- the first caused by people -- is on the horizon. And the consequences are almost unthinkably dire: Three-quarters of species could disappear. This has happened only five times in the planet's history -- including the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. What's different now is that humans are causing these changes. How? Well, we're burning fossil fuels and consequently heating up the planet; turning massive chunks of land into farms; spreading invasive species and diseases around the world; boosting our own numbers and consuming more and more resources; and causing all sorts of trouble for the oceans, from overfishing to filling them up with plastic. (Did you know researchers expect the ocean to be equal parts fish and plastic, by weight, as soon as 2050?) This subject certainly is alarming, especially when you consider the global picture. Another frightening data point in this trend toward extinction emerged on Thursday in a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. The report claims 58% declines in certain vertebrate animal populations since 1970 and says that if trends continue, then two-thirds of all of these individual birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals will be gone by 2020. Some scientists see those numbers as potentially misleading. Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke chair of conservation ecology at Duke University, told me that 58% is "a fairly silly kind of number to report because it mixes what's going on in the ocean with what's going on in the land." He continued, "It mixes studies of bird populations in Europe with mammal populations in Africa. It has very few data points in South America. The idea that you in the media can only handle a single number to summarize the state of the planet -- you should be insulted by that." I agree with Pimm that these numbers can be misleading, but that's only if people misunderstand them. I also spoke with Anthony Barnosky, executive director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at Stanford University. He told me the most important thing to remember is that this report is limited in scope -- it has little data from some important tropical regions, for example, and only covers animals with backbones. But it highlights an important and little-considered fact: It's not just that species are going extinct at an alarming rate -- at least 100 times what could be considered "normal," and maybe much higher than that -- but that populations of still-common animals are declining very rapidly. "I don't think I would quibble with the trend they're pointing out -- we're losing individuals of species and geographic ranges at a really rapid rate," he told me. "If you keep that up, extinction of lots of species is inevitable." Importantly, the WWF report deals with individual animals disappearing, not with entire species. A mass extinction, by definition, means three-quarters of all species disappear. That could happen in 100 or 200 years, Barnosky said, but not by 2020. Don't look at that figure and think we have time to count our blessings. Barnosky told me we have maybe 10 to 20 years to stop the sixth extinction from becoming an inevitability. If we do nothing, expect three-quarters of species to disappear over the next century or two. In other words, what we do (or don't do) right now will shape generations on this planet. "Yes, species are going extinct very, very much faster than they should be," Pimm said, "which means we are depriving countless generations to come the extremely rich diversity we inherited from our parents." And others experts, including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University, say the sixth extinction is already here. "We've probably lost, say, 200 species -- kinds of big animals -- over the last couple of hundred years, but we may well have lost on the order of a billion different populations," he said. "We are basically annihilating the life on our planet and that is the only known life we know about in the entire universe. And it's life that shaped the planet, that made it possible for us to live here. And it's life that still makes it possible for us to live here. (If) we don't have the diversity of other organisms, we're done." Pimm told me we have "about a human generation" to do something before it's likely too late. "If we don't start doing a lot of things to stop extinction, we are going to see very significant losses of species," he said. "There are a lot of things we can do and I would rather concentrate on the positive (rather) than just wallow in this really appalling number" presented by the World Wildlife Fund. "In the last 50 years, roughly, we've lost 50% of the individuals in these species," Barnosky said. "If we lose another 50% in the next 50 years we're down to 25% of the original. Basically, in a couple hundred years you'd have almost all of these species we're talking about blinking out -- if we keep going at that rate." We know how to slow the rate of extinction. We need to ditch fossil fuels to blunt climate change. We need to protect more of the land and ocean on behalf of biodiversity. (The biologist E.O. Wilson has called for half of the world to be protected, a bold and exciting proposition.) We need to stop the spread of invasive species, and we've got to get a handle on illegal trades like that in ivory, which Barnosky said could wipe out Africa's elephants in 20 years if poaching rates continue. The first step, however, is waking up to the crisis and its monstrous scope. "The best way to envision the sixth mass extinction," he told me earlier this year, "is to look outside and then just imagine that three out of every four of the species that were common out there are gone." I'd rather imagine a world where we stop anything close to that from happening.

They Say: “Environment Resilient”

Environmental resilience theory gets co-opted by corporate elites and is wrong.

Nixon 11 — Rob Nixon, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2011 (“Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, ISBN: 0674049306, pgs. 21-22)

That said, we need to be cautious about romanticizing the noncom-pliance that may inhere in a targeted resource: relative to the accelerated plunder involved, say, in the "second scramble" for Africa—as American, Australian, Chinese, European, and South African corporations cash in on resource-rich, regulation-poor, war-fractured societies—the resistance posed by nature itself should not be overstated.42 The recent turn within environmental studies toward celebrating the creative resilience of ecosystems can be readily hijacked by politicians, lobbyists, and corporations who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollution liability. Co-opting the "nature-and-time-will-heal" argument has become integral to attempts to privatize profits while externalizing risk and cleanup, both of which can be delegated to "nature's business."

This was dramatically illustrated by the Deepwater Horizon disaster— in the laxity that contributed to the blowout and in the aftermath. Big Oil and government agencies both invoked natural resilience as an advance strategy for minimizing oversight. Before the blowout, the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Interior Department had concluded that "spills in deep water are not likely to affect listed birds. .. . Deepwater spills would either be transported away from coastal habitats or prevented, for the most part, from reaching coastal habitats by natural weathering processes."43 Even after the disaster, this line of reasoning persisted. Oil industry apologist Rep. Don Young (R-AK), testifying at congressional hearings on the blowout, knew exactly how to mine this "natural agency" logic: the Deep-water Horizon spill was "not an environmental disaster," he declared. "I will say that again and again because it is a natural phenomenon. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. ... We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sea-life, but overall it will recover."44 BP spokesman John Curry likewise explained how industrious microbes would cleanse the oil from the gulf: "Nature," he concluded sanguinely, "has a way of helping the situation."45 BP representatives repeatedly invoked the capacity of marine life to metabolize hydrocarbons and the dispersing powers of microbial degradation. But in conscripting nature as a volunteer clean up crew, BP and its Washington allies downplayed the way ravenous microbes, in consuming oxygen, thereby starved other organisms and exacerbated expanding oceanic dead zones.46 What will be the long-term cascade effect of the slow violence, the mass die-offs, of phyloplankton at the food chain base? It is far too early to tell.

In short, the very environment that high-risk, deep-water drilling endangered was conscripted by industry through a kind of natural out-sourcing. And so Big Oil's invocation of nature's healing powers needs to be recognized as part of a broader strategy of image management and liability limitation by greenwashing. Natural agency can indeed take unexpected, sometimes heartening forms, but we should be alert to the ways corporate colossi and governments can hijack that logic to grant themselves advance or retrospective absolution. Crucially, for my arguments about slow violence, the time frames of damage assessment and potential recovery are wildly out of sync. The deep-time thinking that celebrates natural healing is strategically disastrous if it provides political cover for reckless corporate short-termism.

They Say: “Tech Solves”

Tech can’t solve —

A) Perishability and thermodynamics.

Kerschner 10 — Christian Kerschner, Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Leeds, PhD in Ecological Economics from ICTA, M.A. in Economics from the University of Vienna, 2010 (“The Steady State Economy,” Critical Economics, Accessible Online at https://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/ec/jec10/ponencias/410kerschner.pdf, Accessed On 03-20-2016)

The so-called weak interpretation of sustainability is also based on factor substitutability. Human-made capital is assumed to be a perfect substitute for natural capital. Thus the loss or degradation of the stock of natural capital (resources and sinks) to future generations is being compensated by what is being created by humans (structures erected, technologies developed, knowledge gathered, etc.). The fact that virtually all human produced artefacts are ‘perishable’ (Ricardo 1817), i.e. they depreciate, is completely ignored. Most of them will probably have to be replaced entirely within 100 years time (Viktor 1991) (the same could be argued for technology and knowledge).

Natural capital and man-made capital are indeed supplements and not substitutes. This has often been illustrated on the example of the fishing industry. Historically, in an ‘empty-world-economy’ (see below), the scarce factor were the fishing boats (manmade capital). This role has been changed over the last decades. Now that we live in a ‘full-world-economy’ the scarce factor is fish (natural capital). New fishing boats equipped with high-tech instruments are in total not increasing the amount of fish caught, instead the opposite is true. Meanwhile overfishing has lead to a decrease in the world stock of fish, which has dramatically reduced their reproductive capacity. Hence the fishing industry has clearly exceeded the limits of the newly scarce factor (Costanza, Norgaard et al. 1997).

Secondly, the mechanical value concept has a strong impact on the treatment of time in neoclassical economic theory. It is argued hat often even its very existence is denied. In those cases, where time is taken into account, it is treated in a mechanical way. There is no such thing as uncertainty; everything is known either with absolute certainty or in the form of some probability distribution (Georgescu-Roegen 1971 ch. 5-8; Edmonds and Reilly 1985; Perrings 1987). Furthermore the interaction between the economy and the environment is assumed to proceed in infinitesimal, qualitatively identical and reversible steps without the consideration of possible thresholds or points of no return (Söllner 1997). Reversibility therefore leaves humanity free to cut down forests, because they could be replanted; contaminate its freshwater supply, because it could be de-polluted; exploit species to extinction, because they could be re-introduced from stocks in zoos and botanical gardens or be reproduced in genetic engineering laboratories, etc.; In reality, “of course, all real economic (and other) processes are irreversible.”(Söllner 1997 p. 181, own emphasis)

Finally technological optimism seems to act as a reinforcing and ‘gap-filling’ mechanism in neoclassical economic theory. It facilitates both, the assumption of factor substitutability (i.e. the rejection of absolute scarcity) as well as the assumption of reversibility. Human technological progress appears to be the panacea for mainstream economists. This optimism is by no means substantiated (Aage 1984) as the laws of thermodynamics will always impose limits. Of course physical laws have been found untrue in the past, but according to most physics, among those Albert Einstein, the laws of thermodynamics are the least likely ever to be overthrown (Daly 1992a).

B) Speed of innovation.

Speth 8 — James Gustave Speth, law professor, Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law, former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, 2008 (“The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability,” ISBN: 9780300145304, EBrary, pg. 114-5)

The needed rates of technological improvement are thus high, and they must be continuously sustained. And there are many, many areas where such technological changes must occur, beyond those affecting carbon dioxide emissions— in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and elsewhere. In the carbon dioxide example, almost half the required rate of change is needed simply to compensate for the effects of economic growth. It is like running up a down escalator— a very fast down escalator. Perhaps it can be done. I am doubtful,10 but here is a key point: it is not being done today, and no government that I know of is systematically, adequately promoting the universal, rapid, and sustained penetration of green technology, at home and abroad, on the scale required. Governments are, however, profoundly committed to promoting growth. Real speed is required for technological change to stay well ahead of growth, but the social and political institutions that can create the incentives for rapid technological change can be slow to respond, as can the needed science and technology. The development of international environmental law and regulation is painfully slow, for example. But the world economy and urbanization surge ahead, faster than societies can respond. Chlorofluorocarbons were produced for decades before scientists raised concerns. Then it took a decade to agree on a phaseout, which took another decade. Yet the problem was relatively simple compared to most, and the response was fast by international standards. Our capacity to anticipate and respond effectively today has not greatly improved. Yet by the time today’s university students reach leadership positions, the world economy will likely be twice its current size.

C) No adoption.

Speth 04 — James Gustave Speth, law professor, Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law, former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, 2004 (“Red Sky at Morning : America and the Crisis of the Global Environment,” New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, ISBN: 9780300128321, 2004, Ebrary, pg 131)

So the bottom line on technology is much like that for consumption. Public attitudes toward technology have generally been supportive, welcoming, and trustful. This receptivity continues today with information technology, robotics, nanotechnologies, and even genetic engineering despite the controversy about the health and ecological impacts of genetically modified organisms. The control of technologies has been largely in the hands of large corporations that benefit from their deployment and are clearly in no position to be impartial judges of the public’s best interests. The current market fails to guide technology toward good environmental choices, and governments have failed to correct poor market signals. And once a technology has reached a certain level of deployment, it gains an often unwelcome lifespan, something one could say with equal truth about both the inefficient QWERTY keyboard on which we type and the internal combustion engine that has powered our cars for a century.

D) Tech can’t solve the environment.

Godhaven 09 — Merrick Godhaven is an environmental writer and activist. He co-authored the Corporate Watch report Technofixes: A Critical Guide to Climate Change Technologies, 2009 ( “Swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate change,” The Guardian, July 15^th, Accessible Online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/jul/15/technofix-climate-change, Accessed On 03-20-2016)

Technology is part of the solution to climate change. But only part. Techno-fixes like some of those in the Guardian's Manchester Report simply cannot deliver the carbon cuts science demands of us without being accompanied by drastic reductions in our consumption. That means radical economic and social transformation. Merely swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate change. We need to choose the solutions that are the cheapest, the swiftest, the most effective and least likely to incur dire side effects. On all counts, there's a simple answer – stop burning the stuff in the first place. Consume less. There is a certain level of resources we need to survive, and beyond that there is a level we need in order to have lives that are comfortable and meaningful. It is far below what we presently consume. Americans consume twice as much oil as Europeans. Are they twice as happy? Are Europeans half as free? Economic growth itself is not a measure of human well-being, it only measures things with an assessed monetary value. It values wants at the same level as needs and, while it purports to bring prosperity to the masses, its tendency to concentrate profit in fewer and fewer hands leaves billions without the necessities of a decent life. Techno-fixation masks the incompatibility of solving climate change with unlimited economic growth. Even if energy consumption can be reduced for an activity, ongoing economic growth eats up the improvement and overall energy consumption still rises. We continue destructive consumption in the expectation that new miracle technologies will come and save us. The hope of a future techno-fix feeds into the pass-it-forward, do-nothing-now culture typified by targets for 2050. Tough targets for 2050 are not tough at all, they are a decoy. Where are the techno-fix plans for the peak in global emissions by 2015 that the IPCC says we need? Even within the limited sphere of technology, we have to separate the solutions from the primacy of profit. We need to choose what's the most effective, not the most lucrative. Investors will want the maximum return for their money, and so the benefits of any climate technologies will, in all likelihood, be sold as carbon credits to the polluter industries and nations. It would not be done in tandem with emissions cuts but instead of them, making it not a tool of mitigation but of exacerbation. Climate change is not the only crisis currently facing humanity. Peak oil is likely to become a major issue within the coming decade. Competition for land and water, soil fertility depletion and collapse of fisheries are already posing increasing problems for food supply and survival in many parts of the world. Technological solutions to climate change fail to address most of these issues. Yet even without climate change, this systemic environmental and social crisis threatens society, and requires deeper solutions than new technology alone can provide. Around a fifth of emissions come from deforestation, more than for all transport emissions combined. There is no technological fix for that. We simply need to consume less of the forest, that is to say, less meat, less agrofuel and less wood. Our level of consumption is inequitable. Making it universal is simply impossible. The scientist Jared Diamond calculates that if the whole world were to have our level of consumption, it would be the equivalent of having 72 billion people on earth. With ravenous economic growth still prized as the main objective of society by all political leaders the world over, that 72 billion would be just the beginning. At 3% annual growth, 25 years later it would be the equivalent of 150 billion people. A century later it would be over a trillion. Something's got to give. And indeed, it already is. It's time for us to call it a crisis and respond with the proportionate radical action that is needed. We need profound change – not only government measures and targets but financial systems, the operation of corporations, and people's own expectations of progress and success. Building a new economic democracy based on meeting human needs equitably and sustainably is at least as big a challenge as climate change itself, but if human society is to succeed the two are inseparable. Instead of asking how to continue to grow the economy while attempting to cut carbon, we should be asking why economic growth is seen as more important than surviva

They Cite: “Lomborg — Growth Sustainable”

Lomborg is wrong about limits to growth — he’s overly optimistic.

Watson 13 — Iain Watson, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ajou University, 2013 (“Nostalgia of a green skeptic,” The Korea Times, July 15^th, Accessible Online at http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2013/07/197_138696.html, Accessed On 08-22-2016)

Lomborg argues that limits to growth proponents ignore human ingenuity. This is rather disingenuous. The 1970s were coming off the back of the space race, whilst technology for the Internet was being born and the 1970s was all about new kids on the block such as Apple and Microsoft. There were oil discoveries in the North Sea and oil discoveries in states such as Nigeria. After all this was the beginning of the "resource curse'' and "Dutch disease' development debates. Limit to growth was a common sense warning, wrong in places of course, but this doesn't mean the need for a wholesale rejection characteristic of Lomborg's peculiar doublethink style. By shifting the goal posts from climate change, then to water and air pollution and then to natural resource depletion, a consistent anti-green argument is often difficult to fathom.

Consequently, there is also a potential logical flaw in his argument. Maybe limits to growth actually spurred on such innovations which don't just happen in a social and political vacuum.

On China for instance, Lomborg confusingly suggests that during the 1970s the Beijing government was so influenced by limits to growth inspired fears of an overpopulation crisis it embarked on what Lomborg terms a "self-destructive'' one-child policy. What is ignored here are the historical specifics of the aftermath of Mao's regime. Moreover, the one-child policy was sustained by Deng Xiaoping in order to create economic growth to which Lomborg applauds brought million out of poverty. Again the exaggerated (and selected) influence of limits to growth even on communist states is undoubtedly a key to Lomborg's strategic use of limits to growth. But could it be that limits to growth was used as a justification for already agreed upon policies rather than the cause of policy change itself?

Lomborg's debating strategies tend to also miss historical context by generating inferences from specific yet unconnected points and thus leading to inconsistent diagnoses and solutions. There is no mention either of how green growth initiatives from non-European and emerging countries such as South Korea are challenging the false choices. For these countries economic growth is good, but this does not necessarily eradicate poverty or even lead to green solutions as if by some magic wand. Mitigation issues are highly political and anyone living in Korea would know about the concerns over yellow dust and air quality brought about by economic growth. Yet one could hardly call South Korea part of the developing world.

Indeed, if limits to growth had been followed by the Western elite instead of economic globalization, then this would have allowed the developing world to "catch up'' even faster. Presumably Lomborg's point here is that as economic development reaches a certain GDP per capita through an emerging middle class, then green awareness and ingenuity automatically follows. However Lomborg's original point was that it is in fact poverty that often causes environmental damage to air and water so this in effect would cancel out any gains from green awareness resulting from industrialization. The nature of relationships and consequences between these variables is often rather opaque in Lomborg's work.

In today's post-economic crisis era, global consumption is the catalyst for businesses. Lomborg's argument is bereft therefore of identifying policy specifics, rejected in favor of what is at best abstractly termed "human ingenuity.'' It may well be, as Lomborg notes, that humans don't need or could ever consume all these resources. The point is that the current economic system certainly does. But then who defines and controls this ingenuity? Who owns it and who has access to it? Who has the opportunities to harness ingenuity? The perpetual round of needing scientific evidence to prove this or that pro or anti-climate change argument (depending on who finances the research), and even the climate change debate itself, indicates a constant desire for reassurance.

And even without such reassurance, this need not imply that we are all panicking. States such as South Korea are retooling and creating a smart grid green economy by becoming a "me first mover.'' Emerging countries are simply sidestepping the straw men created by Western climate change debate romantics.