Q&A: ‘Economic Growth Is Making us Poorer’

VITERBO, Italy, Dec 7 (IPS) – Dinner one evening when he was a kid put William Rees on track to becoming a
sustainability pioneer. It was after a day at work on the family farm when he was
nine or 10. He saw he had had a hand in growing everything on his plate. That
brought a fascination with a connection to earth that would never leave him.

Together with a team of post-graduates, above all former PhD student
Mathis Wackernagel, Rees, now a professor at the University of British
Colombia, went on to develop the concept of the ‘ecological footprint’. That is
now prime measure of the demands humanity puts on nature.

He spoke to IPS at the Greenaccord conference in Viterbo, near Rome.

You have helped change our way of thinking about how our
everyday
lives have an impact on the world and climate change with the ‘ecological
footprint’ concept. This must be very gratifying.

WILLIAM REES: Yes. As a metaphor and as a scientific method, I’m very proud
we’ve had such an impact on changing the debate. It has an enormous
contribution in the climate debate because in many industrial countries the
carbon footprint, a sub-set of the ecological footprint, amounts to half or
more of the human eco-footprint.

Nevertheless consumption and energy use levels continue at
unsustainable rates. According to the Global Footprint Network headed by
your former student Mathis Wackernagel, if everyone lived the lifestyle of the
average American, we would need five planets. So your message has not
succeeded yet.

WR: There are several ways of looking at this. It’s well known among cognitive
scientists that new information often does not make a difference. People
become habituated to a certain way of life. When there are great
uncertainties, we tend to gravitate to the things we know.

And if I change my life entirely so I had a perfectly adequate eco-footprint, I
would take a major hit. But if no one else did the same, I’d be overwhelmed
by other people’s effects. So for individuals to change is almost meaningless,
if they are not in a context of social change.

But what new knowledge does do is prepare people to be willing to accept the
changes we make collectively. So if people are well informed about the drivers
of climate change, about the role of consumption and population in creating
an oversized ecological footprint, then they are more likely to accept the kind
of government and international policy changes that are absolutely necessary
to make a real difference.

I’m from North America, a car-driven society, and very few people will
voluntarily change that. But if governments provide substitutes in cities, via
major investment in public transit, then people are more likely to be willing to
give up the car for much of the work week.

But I as an individual cannot provide the public transit. That’s a collective
solution to a collective problem.

Similarly as an individual I can’t apply a carbon tax, I can’t apply a carbon-
trading system. Education about climate change and the eco-footprint
prepares people to be willing to accept those kind of major changes.

With the Copenhagen climate change talks, a lot of people
seem to think
that by tweaking our lifestyles and making a few changes such as more use of
renewables, we can go on and live happily ever after. The impression is that
you do not think this is true and we need more radical changes.

WR: Absolutely. Technology has a major role. But the simple reality is that
whenever we look at major technological efficiency gains, they tend to
increase rather than decrease consumption. So think of a major change that
reduces the energy content of something, then energy prices are likely to fall;
if this operates through to the economy then people will simply consume
more energy across the board.

Do we have to change the widespread view that economic
growth is
always a good thing?

WR: There’s no question that economic growth is good if you are starting
from virtually zero. People need basic food, clothing and shelter. But we see
over and over again that as people become wealthier, there is a disconnect
between improvements in wellbeing and per capita income. (After income of)
something like 10,000 dollars per capita per annum in a country, there’s no
further general improvement in longevity. You’ve obtained about 95 percent
of the benefits of income growth at a relatively low income level.
Similarly, in most high income countries we see no further correlation
between felt wellbeing, a personal subjective feeling of how happy we are and
our future prospects, and income growth.
Most North Americans and many Europeans were happiest in the 1950s and
60s, when incomes were half what they are today. At low levels, extra income
enhances your ability to consume the basics of life. But you reach a point
where further income actually complicates life and quality of life begins to
decline.

If we were really living up to our self-proclaimed capacity as rational beings,
the evidence of intelligent life on earth, we would be reorganising the global
economy, so that needed growth was taking place in countries where there
are significant gains in wellbeing. Growth is simply an increase in the scale;
development means an improvement in the quality, and we have seen
increasing growth in rich countries but a decline in development. We are dis-
developing even as we are growing. It’s growth that makes us poorer, rather
than richer.

What you’re suggesting is a fundamental rethink of our values
and an
overhaul of our social and economic structures. Have you any idea how we
can bring this about?

WR: Education is important. But it’s very slow. There are obvious examples of
social learning – the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement,
women’s liberation – but they take decades to take full effect. With climate
change we simply don’t have 40 or 50 years.

One thing people do respond to is prices. The rhetoric suggests we are in a
global market place – I can assure you it is nothing of the kind. We’ve
organised this economy in ways that assure prices of goods and services do
not reflect their true costs of production, hence the economy is a lie. We are
willing to move all our dirty industries to Asia, so externalities such as
pollution, waste and public health problems are now happening half a planet
away.

Any economist will tell you this is a gross market failure. But we won’t do
anything about it, because it facilitates trade and we love getting those cheap
goods from China, so your laptop that costs 300 or 400 pounds is probably
worth twice that if you were to internalise those external costs.

There will be no change unless governments come together and begin to
introduce the legal and institutional framework that causes us to have a more
truly market-orientated economy and a more heavily regulated economy too.
For those who recoil at the idea of government regulation, I can say without
any fear of being proved wrong by history that the longer we wait, the more
freedoms will be lost and the more stringent the regulations will become.

I think we need some very strong leadership here from one of the major
countries – say look, it’s clear from the science that we’re committing a kind
of cultural suicide, therefore we will take the lead and this is what we are
trying to do. If that requires setting up trade barriers to make it possible, I’m
all for it. We clearly need much stronger leadership.

More here: 
Q&A: ‘Economic Growth Is Making us Poorer’

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