World goes in to ecological debt
According to the New Economics Foundation October 9 was the day that the world went in to ecological debt for the year. You can think of it as if the world has a budget for the year, and basically this week it blew it. And of course there aren’t particularly friendly credit agencies to borrow from. The only way the world can live beyond its means is by taking from the future.
From October 9 until the end of the year, humanity will be in ecological overshoot, building up ever greater ecological debt by consuming resources beyond the level that the planet’s ecosystems can replace.
And the problem is getting worse.
The day that we begin living beyond our environmental means is creeping ever earlier in the year as human consumption grows:
humanity first went into global ecological debt in 1987, with the first ecological debt day on 19 December that year;
by 1995 it had jumped a month forward to 21 November;
now, new estimates based on the latest available data indicate that in 2006, we run out of ecological resources today, Monday 9 October.
October 11th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Wow!
talk about eating your children’s future..
This is only going to get worse as more third-world countries industrialise and take on board unsustainable consumption models from first world economies.
Makes christmas shopping look a bit redundant, tho’, doesn’t it? Not to mention planning my son’s birthday party…. event-managing task-of-the-week, *sigh*
cheers, katie
October 11th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Its very apt that this and the previous post (on climate change policy discussions in the house) are side by side. I posted a comment there but it got submitted into the wide blue (grey?) yonder. Damn.
Ecological debt highlights a consumption problem (as you say Katie). The NEF are quite a clever bunch. Their Happy Planet Index shows Vanuatu (the shopping mecca that it is!) as the hapiest and the US (the life giving economy of the world!) among the most unhappy. Funny that!
It’s processes that facilitate our consumtion that feed climate change, and cause the kind of debate that the first commentator on that post insist on pushing.
The climate change “debate” sees a whole lot of “interests” waving their arms drawing attention from the core problem of “consumption out of whack” with the planet. All the while nothing substantial happens on climate change and “interrested” pockets are lined with the status quo consumption (and production) setup.
We are able to claw back the days of the year - claw our way out of ecological debt. As the “mainstream” realise that this is possible a sea-change is bought closer. Far from doom and gloom, these are exciting times…
October 11th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
I agree. Bringing consumption back into balance can help to address a whole lot of environmental problems.
Underlying that consumption … (1) people’s belief that products will make them happy; (2) the growth ethic underlying corporate behaviour and the economy; their advertising feeds into (1). A lot of advertising seems irresponsible, e.g. peddling overpackaged unhealthy food full of meat that takes a lot of resources to produce. Government seems reluctant to touch any of this. But when the mainstream demands change, change will happen.
I recommend the book “Affluenza”.
It will be interesting to see how Nandor’s Waste Minimisation (Solids) Bill progresses, promoting reuse and recycling. I don’t recall right now whether there was much in it to reduce consumption of new goods, beyond promoting reuse.
October 11th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
A reduction in consumption (per.se) will never be a policy aim.
But there is still room for economic growth within ecological limits. Services are the breadwinner for most “modern” economies - services including technologies/techniques that can promote efficiencies.
The way I see it, very simply, if we extract less of the earths resources (capital) we can use increased eficiencies, re-use, and re-processing to take the slack that would (under the current way of thinking) contribute to growth - negating the need to dip into more and more finite resources/capital.
The more efficiencies we find, the less resource plundering we need to provide the same level of growth. In theory it probably wouldn’t be until we stopped extracting that all of our growth would have to come from efficiencies. Is it then possible to make an efficiency more efficient in perpetuity (in order to continue perpetual growth)? I dont know.
We still need to find a way to de-couple the extractive industries (oil, timber, chemical, other mining, etc) from the current political-economy. Incentives incentives incentives! The classically extractive industries are slowly changing (the EU carbon market, before it got shafted by the Spanish, was a good start)…. A question for an economist not a lay person….
October 11th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
mikeymike wrote:
“Is it then possible to make an efficiency more efficient in perpetuity (in order to continue perpetual growth)? I dont know.”
I do. Perpetual growth, by definition–on a finite planet–is impossible.
We have water, gases, biomass, minerals, fossil fuels (millions of years worth of stored sunlight) and current sunlight. That’s it. More efficiency under a growth scenario just means the stuff gets used up more slowly.
Mr. Efficinecy Gains, I’d like to introduce you to Ms. Diminishing Returns. I’m sure you’ll get along nicely.
Endless growth will end. Nothing is more certain.
October 11th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Gang… Finding efficiencies will never be enough by itself. Stifling economic “growth” can’t get us out of this by itself. There are too many of us by half, and that is going to destroy the planet or cause our numbers to be reduced, one way or another. Worse, we resist any reduction in our excess with a passion that leads to bloodshed… which of course can eventually and painfully, accomplish the reduction in any case.
It is what it is. It hurts to think about it. The world is running out of everything except people.
My understanding has evolved. The great encouragement of consumption is a result of our banking system and may well be a conscious and considered choice of some individual bankers. The economic model is extremely broken when it faces physical realities, and the bankers are running the planet… AND this country.
This will not be corrected, not even addressed, by either Labour or National…
The question of the moment is how the end game will play out in the USA. It is embarking on a great adventure now. The economy is tanking… its real inflation is higher than that of all its trading partners, but the housing bubble is imploding and the jobs numbers are embarrassingly bad. Better, 83% of Americans believe that the President lied, and since the illiteracy there runs to 12 percent it is pretty clear why he doesn’t favour making the schools better….
(Sorry… started rambling)
The point about the USA is that its consumption model is breaking down now. In the next 6 months even the blindly faithful will see some light.
It may allow us to bring questions to the table that have never been permitted before. The question of economic growth vs a sustainable economy may get an airing. It is not an opportunity that comes often.
respectfully
BJ
October 11th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
During my hibernation this long winter past, I broadened my already eclectic reading to include J Diamond’s book on the rivers drying up. Until convinced otherwise I will assume that the author had his facts fairly accurate. If so, then the book was a horror story. Joy.
P.S. Appropo Diamond’s chapter on Australia, especial South Australia, I checked with my Adelaide brother-in-law and he concurred. He said that they are in deep s**t re: the rivers.
October 11th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Not read the book on rivers. But on a recent trip down south, in spring, through North Canty and Otago I was simply blown away by the amount of irrigation that seems to have exploded in those areas. New irrigation canals about as to massive sprinkler systems and intesive looking feed crops for stock.
This is surely going to have a major impact on those regions and I now understand where the pressure on so called “water rights” is coming from. Agriculture is very important to our economy and our farmers have done wonders over recent times but I do question whether the current directions are what we need for the next 20 years.
October 11th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Jeeves I think there was a national radio interview of a canterbury lad who’d written a book about water rights down there. Quite damning I recall… It was a few weekends back…
_____
Above, I asked if you could build efficiencies into eficiencies in perpetuity to ensure growth. tochigi, I certainly see your resounding “no” as bang on. That/my scenario would simply grind itself to a halt. Unless you changed the basis of what you’re building efficiencies into. Eg. Making the internal combusution engine use less “oil” is futile - it uses “oil”.
Given that we’re 30% over our ecological budget, what’s our carrying capacity? Its clearly not the corresponding drop in population and a similar reduction in extractive industry. That’s just the “reset” button that gets us back to neutral - before we (under “business as usual”) go back into ecological debt the very next moment.
If we could reach the nirvana of optimal population and a clean production system tomorrow, assuming population remained stable, how much “growth” could we get out of constantly improving a clean production system? What is the potential economic contribution of human “interest”?
This assumes that humankind will always apply the mind to “improvement”. To date this has tended to concentrate on providing a surplus, which tends to facilitate population growth. If this application (in our nirvana) could be put toward improving clean production systems and population remained was held static, this improvement would surely be seen in comparable political-economic terms as our current “growth” paradigm.
Ah, hello! I’ve just nulled my own question. There is no point to “growth”. Growth for who, for what? Unless it is simply some kind of insurance policy in case of a disaster (for one or many). Our nirvana entity, if it chose to persue “growth”, would need to be the epitome of altruism. Hmmm….
All very hypothetical, but maybe it explains a little of what I was trying to get to with my earlier comment…
As you were…
October 12th, 2006 at 8:52 am
Just to add to the farming thing, we also drove through several dust storms where the topsoil from these dug over paddocks was being blown away and creating a cloud as thick as any fog I have driven through. This is just not sustainable, especially given the doughts being experienced down there.
Farmers need far better support, marketing, leadership and advice than they seem to be getting right now, instead of blaming “townies” and evil greenies for all their woes.
FYI…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
October 12th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
What happens in the USA when the Oglalla dries up?
October 12th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
They invade Minnesota..?
October 12th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Nope - they blame it on North Korea and then invade Iran
October 13th, 2006 at 9:52 am
I was listening to the wire on bfm yesterday and there was a segment about the greening of the national party and then a response from the greens. Now I won’t go into that but it kinda highlights how i think about societal movements. There are huge amounts of inertia within any society so change, when it occurs, takes ages to get going and once in it’s stride is almost impossible to stop. And because of this inertia any new ideas must always carry with them the weight of old ideas. Our problems, as humans reliant on the paradigm we’ve created for ourselves, exist and will continue to exist far after we make the choices to change and eventually make the physical changes required.
As individuals we know when to make changes because the effects of our actions affect us directly but as a society we are buffered from these effects by the shear size of the animal that is modern society and so changes are not made. As societies have grown and started to steal the futures of others yet to come how can we see the effects of this?
It may very well be that humanity will extinct itself simply because we are unable to develope a way of thinking and acting that goes beyond the individual and sees the whole picture. This though is impossible simply because we are all individual’s and can’t be expected to make decisions based on a wholly different animal’s nature.
The only human model of change that comes near to being able to solve the world’s problems was the communisn inflicted on the Russians and the Chinese. Now I’m not saying that communism is the answer but that it is the only time in human history when a new model of consciousness has been installed within a society. The Russians, and the Chinese later, stopped being one thing and became another. The other instance of this would have been when the British left India and Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan and Bangledesh were created.
With the inertia within society, and the paradigm it holds resolute too, we cannot change in time to address the issue we are all talking about. The only thing that can possibly work is a transformation of the paradigm and a re-orientation of the social inertia.
People need to relook at the writings of Marx and all those other guys and take from that model, transformed to suit modern purposes, because it really is the only thing out there that comes even close to the type of change and transformation we need to shift consciousness.
October 13th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
To be totally honest, most people are far to busy or far too preoccupied to hear warnings like this. It comes down to the old truth that unless it impacts people directly in the pocket, and they can actually do something about it, then they couldn’t care less. What exactly is the solution to global overpopulation? I really hope it is Martian terraforming rather than genocide or starvation.
For all you USA-bashers posting before, be aware that this is the most technologically advanced society on earth, and this is where solutions will probably come from. So go easy on the yanks, they’re not so bad really.
October 13th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
UK_Kiwi - Uh… I’m from New York by way of LA (NASA JPL) myself. I really REALLY want “Cheap Access To Space” (CATS) and was (when I could afford it) a member of the NSS. I know what’s happening at NASA though, and it ain’t pretty at all. I know what’s failing in the system, and it isn’t hopeful at all. The scientists I worked with are mostly scared for the future of the species.
I also knew, nine months before the invasion of Iraq, that there were no WMD there. I knew 3 months before the invasion that there would be an invasion. I knew that it would turn into a mess on the same basis as Vietnam went sour. The only thing I didn’t know ahead of time was that the shrub would resort to legalizing torture, and seize power to the extent that he has on the back of his declaration of perpetual war. When I understood the “war on terror” as the perpetual conflict first proposed by Orwell, that simply iced it.
So if I am bitter in my hatred of the current administration in the USA, it is still because of very real patriotism. We may miss the USA at times, and we gave up a lot to come here, but to protect the future of our children, we moved to NZ. Here at least, we have a chance, and I may make a small difference. I intend to make as much improvement as I possibly can, but in the USA I’d make no difference at all. They don’t have the wits to count an MMP ballot, and I doubt the honesty of the voting machines as well.
respectfully
BJ
October 13th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Like uk_kiwi, I think that a lot of working adults struggle to find time and energy just to do their jobs and bring up their kids, let alone anything else. I think that there’s a lot to be said “in praise of idleness” for a few hours a week. Maybe then people would have more time to reflect and make changes? I think government might have to reset some economic levers, for people to relax their lifestyles a little. I always think that Labour Day is a tad strange when (as I hear) many people work well over 40 hours a week. I wonder whether shopping has to some extent substituted more meaningful leisure.
Re US-bashing, as I understand it BJ Chip (above) hails from the US, and is a rocket engineer or in that line. US people do have a great “let’s try it” kind of attitude, which is a great attitude for developing new ideas. However, they do have huge consumption, and the solution to that might not necessarily be purely technological.
October 13th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
TOO MANY PEOPLE
FULL STOP
the 3rd world has far to many people
the 1st world has far to many poluting people
STOP the PEOPLE BREEDING
STOP the intack of people; it will just make more
greens should be supporting the limitation of population why haven’t i heard any policies about that??? because less people equals a greater world
October 14th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
eskstaek says: “greens should be supporting the limitation of population why haven’t i heard any policies about that???”
I suspect you haven’t been looking in the right place!
Just out of interest: Where have you been looking/listening etc to find out what the Greens are supporting/saying/writing?