The G20 - don't know, don't care, don't understand

The late Donella
 Meadows.
 

Joe Hockey and his G20 counterparts don’t know about, don’t understand or don’t care about the indisputable facts spelt out in the 1970s by the Club of Rome.

Arising from their recent Sydney meeting was a pledge to develop “ambitious but realistic” policies to add more than $US2 trillion to global gross domestic product over five years.

That pledge, if you take note of the realities described by the Club of Rome in its 1974 book “Limits to Growth”, is not only unsustainable, but wholly irresponsible.

The late systems analyst, author, environmental scientist and teacher, Donella Meadows, examined and explained the finitude of earth’s resources, considered present and likely usage, population growth, wrote about her findings and warned the world of difficult times ahead.

Meadows’ work was acclaimed by those aware of the world’s unfolding social and resource difficulties, but subjected to a barrage of criticism from many.

Ms Meadows penned the book in the 70s and although there was then an understanding of the damage caused to our atmosphere by fossil fuels it was not until the eighties the American scientist James Hansen spelt the complications of human activities linking it irrefutably to market-driven growth.

Mr Hockey, his fellow finance ministers and central bankers have, in signing up to boost world growth have simply worsened difficulties the world already faces.

The G20 pledge is populist in that it fits neatly with what has become human nature to have more, but today we know that “more” in its modern sense equates with a damaged climate, manifested as weather foreign to what most are familiar with and upon which humanity depends.

Rather than align themselves with the brutality of unfeeling growth, those who attend such events as the recent G20, need to be considering how nations understand and deal with the certainty of contraction and a world in which resources will become rarer and subsequently more expensive.

Rather than exhorting people to seek solutions to what ails them through growth, they need to work at understanding the “Limits to Growth” and lead a discussion about how people of the world can find contentment through living a more restrained life.

Such a conversation is contrary to the urgings of the market-driven system, but it is a necessary one for if we continue with business as usual and such things as the G20 Pledge, humanity’s grip on this rather slippery slope will be weakened even more.

The courage to address such ideas is in short supply for it demands a break with what exists and a willingness to take society in a fresh and safer direction; a challenge that is beyond most world leaders who do nought but muddy facts through the proselytizing of fallacies.

Human construct stands between us and mitigating climate change

A human construct is what stands between us and moving toward mitigating human-induced climate change.

Humanity is surrounded
by an economy that was
once our servant, but
 now is now our master.

Humans, bit by bit, piece by piece have built an economy that now straddles the globe and while it was at first our servant, it has now, through the apparent fault of no-one, become our master.

The economy has been elevated to God-like status and to suggest anything likely to unseat it, borders on blasphemy and brings accusations of ignorance, naivety and even stupidity, arguing that such foolishness is a misunderstanding of what it is that gives humanity sustenance.

Such allegations arise from an addiction to the paradigm in which the world economy is embedded and with most governments, whether they be liberal democracies, communistic, despotic regimes, religion-based democratic facades or something of any other flavour, bowing before the might of money, to suggest something different is not only decried, but considered grossly irresponsible.

Humanity, or at least some of it, has been fortunate to escape from the daily trepidations of the hunter and gatherer life; something that has been achieved through the construction of an economy which has, in many ways served us well, but at the same time has ignored the subtle beauties of life; beauties that are sadly irrelevant to the simplistic brutalities of the economy.

Growth, a code word for exploitation, has seen man excavate the world’s ancient sunlight, and in the past two or three centuries use the fossil fuels we discovered with a rude rush of exuberance to see all the available environmental sinks on the earth filled to over-capacity, disrupting the earth’s atmosphere to create disarray in the world’s climate to manifest weather patterns with which humans are unfamiliar.

That unfamiliarity is of such a dimension that the future of humanity, along with most other species with which it shares the planet, is problematic.

The time for action is already a few decades past and certain weather related difficulties cannot be avoided, but it is time to bury our concerns about the world economy and change our rhetoric to align it with ideals that are about equality, philanthropy, altruism, sharing, kindness and an understanding of the other to ensure that life on earth can endure.

The world’s economy has evolved in such a way that the distribution of wealth is disturbingly wrong in that about 15 per cent of the population controls 80 per cent of the wealth and nearly half the population less than two per cent.

The economy has served a few on earth well, disadvantaged more and if we are unable to rein it in and return it to again being the servant, as opposed to a master, then climate change will continue its march to a rather gloomy conclusion.