Have We Lost the Ability to Govern Ourselves?

It was October, 1980, and US elections were just a few days away. Ronald Reagan took to the airwaves and asked Americans "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Reagan was talking about how voters were doing materially. Were they able to get a job? Could they afford the rent? A new car or a family vacation? That sort of thing.

It was a one-two punch followed up by Reagan's "It's morning in America" and he rode it to sweep the high-minded Jimmy Carter straight out of the White House.  Over the following eight years, Ronald Reagan transformed the United States from the world's largest creditor nation in 1980 into the world's largest debtor nation by the time George H.W. Bush took over and America became a fiscal hot mess ever since.

The ghost of Ronnie is with us still. The neoliberal order ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, still has us by the throat. Politicians strive to swell their nation's GDP as one of the most powerful demonstrations of their fitness to serve. "It's the economy, stupid."

That metric, however, is failing us. Much has changed since Ronald Reagan came to power. The world has changed. The world's climate has changed. The size of the global economy has swelled as has the global population.

In 1980, global GDP was $11.17 trillion USD. In 2016 it hit $75.87. By 2018 it had swelled to $87.51 trillion USD. So there's been about an eightfold increase in economic activity from 1980 to 2018. That means a roughly commensurate, eightfold increase in resource extraction, and in production, and in consumption and about the same in waste. That's pretty impressive and it should also be just a bit worrisome.

Population. 1980 -  4.45 billion. 2018 - 7.63 billion.

If you're a statistics freak and interested in other indicia, there's plenty more here in a post exploring The Great Acceleration.

Looking only at GDP and population growth from 1980 to 2018, we've grown GDP about eightfold and while we've almost doubled in population. All of that since Reagan proclaimed "morning in America."

Is the growth metric even relevant any longer? When growth reaches levels seen in nature only in malignancy and pest infestations, shouldn't we revisit the question?

I'm asking this question because of what I keep hearing from some very well-intentioned, thoughtful Liberals when the subject turns to rapidly decarbonizing our economy and shutting down the petro-state. The response invariably turns to how that would "hurt the economy" and see their party punished at the polls.

They're right on the first part. It would cause some economic contraction. How much we don't know. How much it would stimulate growth in other areas such as renewable energy we don't know.  We do know how that would benefit our future over the next twenty years and our grandkids future over the balance of the century. The point is, it's not a net loss proposition.

As for a price to be paid at the polls, how much of that is because governments fail to have a realistic conversation with us about what's at stake, the trade-offs, and our collective responsibility to the future?

Then there's the standard argument about why should Canada act unless every other nation agrees. Isn't that a vague corollary to when your kids say, "but, mom, all the other kids are..." to which mom replies, "if all the other kids were jumping off a bridge does that mean you should also?"

The fact is we've just under 12 years remaining for the nations of the world to slash greenhouse gas emissions by half if we're to have a reasonable chance of averting runaway global warming - truly catastrophic climate change.

Canada is a major emitter of greenhouse gas. Our GHG footprint puts us in the first tier along with Russia and China. Second tier emitters such as the US and Australia aren't far behind.  If the major emitters, the real carbon hogs, won't lead what do we expect of the other countries?  We're the cork in the bottle. Given what inaction portends and we know that so well, what legitimate excuse do we have for dicking around with gestural responses, i.e. carbon taxes?

China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries. 

The US and Australia are only slightly behind with both pushing the global temperature rise dangerously over 4C above pre-industrial levels says the paper, while even the EU, which is usually seen as a climate leader, is on course to more than double the 1.5C that scientists say is a moderately safe level of heating.

What we're doing isn't just wrong, it's not survivable. That's the true measure of this emergency and, as our government's climate commissioner recently made clear, it is an emergency. Tell me, do you see any sign of our major political parties acting as though we're in an imminent emergency?

What are we to make of this self-serving inaction, ducking the question, kicking the threat down the road? We have had thoroughly-researched scientific studies up the yin-yang, clarion call warnings, about where the path we're on leads. It leads to our possible, some say probable, extinction.

Is that how we are being governed? Astounding as it is, the answer is a resounding "yes." Only from the darkest recesses of our mind where the bedrock of denialism is found can we possibly argue "no."

Now I'm not picking on Justin although he is pretty bloody awful. He's not worth having but he's a damn sight better than this crowd:

If Trudeau is the best we can do and we make our plight considerably worse by electing climate clowns like the Rogue's Gallery depicted above, we're in trouble - deep, deep trouble - and it'll be even worse for our children and theirs.

None of them has a vision of governance we so desperately need at this very moment to begin preparing for what is coming. None of them, and that includes the prime minister.

Footnote:

I apologize for the rambling, 'stream of consciousness' nature of this post. Some of the links are from earlier posts, others are from web sites that I search while I'm writing this. I'm lousy at editing and even proof-reading. It's hard enough for me to fashion some sort of ending and hit "post."  That said, for what you're paying for it, you're getting your money's worth.

I don't write this with any expectation that it will change anything. I don't have any pipe dreams. Several years ago I joined the Dark Mountain collective, a refuge for writers, poets and artists, veteran environmental activists, who "are walking away from the stories that our societies like to tell themselves, the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway."

Dark Mountain isn't about giving up as some, such as Naomi Klein, have claimed. It's very much about continuing to fight the good fight, as I'm trying to do with these posts, but doing that without the burden of false hope that anything is going to change.  It's that false hope that so many cling to ("oh, they'll think of something") that prevents us from "seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway."

Is It Fear?

After digesting yesterday's essay by UBC prof William Rees about how humanity is suffocating other forms of life on our planet, I was left wondering what they're afraid of, why aren't they talking to us about what is happening, right now, beneath our own feet?

As Rees pointed out, "We are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament." 

For a decade, perhaps a bit more, I've been covering one major report after another on research documenting the alarming collapse of non-human life - insect, mammals, birds, sea mammals, fish, the lot. Some species have fallen extinct but the worrisome problem is that virtually all species are in severe decline, often upwards of 66% of their numbers over the past 40 years which, of course, coincides with the advent of neoliberalism.

Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile, domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall. Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?

...

Scientists estimate that at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, H. sapienscomprised less than one per cent of the total weight of mammals on the planet. (There were probably only two to four million people on Earth at the time.) Since then, humans have grown to represent 35 per cent of a much larger total biomass; toss in domestic pets and livestock, and human domination of the world’s mammalian biomass rises to 98.5 per cent!

...

It took all of human history — let’s say 200,000 years — for our population to reach one billion in the early 1800s, but only 200 years, 1/1000th as much time, to hit today’s 7.6 billion! Meanwhile, material demand on the planet has ballooned even more — global GDP has increased by over 100-fold since 1800; average per capita incomes by a factor of 13. (rising to 25-fold in the richest countries). Consumption has exploded accordingly — half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past 40 years.

As the Bonn climate summit wraps up it reveals how ineffectual our nations have become and why they'll never succeed in bringing climate change under control. They're still treating climate change as a standalone crisis. They imagine they're dealing with a disease but it's really just one of several symptoms of the greater threat that confronts us - ourselves.

You cannot take climate change in isolation of its companion threats that are also existential. Climate change cannot be separated from over-population and over-consumption of our planet's finite resources.  Rees pointed it out beautifully. It took our species 200,000 years to reach one billion and just another 200 years to increase that more than seven fold and, in the course of those same 200 years, GDP has swelled about a hundred fold. That's hundreds of times more production, more consumption, more waste, more pollution and contamination of every form imaginable. And what are our politicians doing? With their corporate partners they're obsessively pursuing perpetual, exponential growth. Every foot is on the gas pedal but nobody's hands are on the wheel.

That's not democratic leadership. That's nihilism.

They can't even respond to climate change beyond purely gestural proposals - carbon taxes. What exactly is that going to do? Nothing, it's a sop.

Rees didn't write an op-ed. He penned an essay. He wasn't expressing an opinion. He was writing from fact, scientific knowledge documented in "exquisite detail." His was not some dodgy belief-based construct. That's the crap peddled to us by our political caste, the nihilists.

Surely we have reached a point where you have to ask yourself why you're supporting and empowering nihilists. Why? The science has been pouring in for more than a decade. There's a mountain of research and analysis and it's compelling. 

What's your problem? Is it simply too much to take in? Can you not get your mind around the enormity of the change that has set in over just the past forty years? Do you, like our leaders, need to pretend this isn't happening or that it's not immediate or a mortal threat to our civilization?

Another Sign? I Sure Hope Not.

Something has changed over the past two years.  My home is bordered along the back by a row of large cedar trees.  When I moved here some 15 years ago one of the delights I discovered was being awakened in the mornings by the chirps and songs of a seemingly massive variety of small birds that nested in those cedars.

Last year that stopped. This year it's been the same.  My neighbour has several feeders in her yard and she says the usual birds haven't been coming to her place either, not even to eat.

Something seems to be happening, but what?

Then I came across an article in The Guardian about a severe and massive decline in flying insect populations in Germany.  A 75 per cent decline. That's pretty drastic.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

Could something akin to that be underway out here on the island? It's hard to imagine. We don't have any industrial agriculture in the vicinity, just rocks and Christmas trees.

That said, the World Wildlife Fund in conjunction with the London Zoological Society and other agencies has been warning us over the last several years how severely human activity is pummeling other forms of life on Earth. The Living Planet Report of 2014 took an inventory of terrestrial animal life on the planet and found we had collapsed the total numbers by 50 per cent since the 1970s, the neoliberal era.  The Living Planet Report of 2015 inventoried marine species over the same time frame and, again, found a loss of 50 per cent.  The Living Planet Report of 2016 updated the loss figures for terrestrial and marine life at 58 per cent since 1970.

There is a confluence of events that occurred in the early 70s. That was when mankind drove the world into "overshoot." That's when our population passed the 3 billion mark and our consumption of the Earth's renewable resources - water, air, biomass - exceeded the planet's carrying capacity. We exceeded the world's capacity to cleanse our pollution and waste output. We began drawing more surface and groundwater than the Earth could replenish. We began exploiting more of the planet than was needed for the survival of other species and their numbers began to plummet.

This research connected the dots, linking climate change to two other existential threats, overpopulation and over-consumption/depletion of natural resources.  From 3 billion in the early 70s, we've grown to 7.5 billion today en route to at least 9 billion, possibly by 2030-2040.  And, while we've done that, our per capita consumption and our per capita environmental footprint has continued to expand rapidly with the emergence of new, massively populated emerging economies in India and China.

And yet, even as these events of the past forty years - just forty years - have unfolded; even as the research has come in revealing how severely we're overtaxing the planet, Spaceship Earth, our one and only biosphere; even as the early onset impacts of our excesses begin to send us reeling; our politicians, including Canada's, still pursue perpetual, exponential growth. They believe their policies are constructive, positive when they're actually nihilistic. And you and me, we're just along for the ride.

A New Type of Economics for a World in Trouble

Whether we like it or not, traditional economic theory is bound to go the way of the Great Auk. It can't last because of the insurmountable hurdles that now confront it. We're running out of stuff - raw materials, energy, water, air, you name it. We're running out of time.

Now French president Nicolas Sarkozy is mulling over a report from leading economists claiming that gross domestic product {GDP} is an insufficient standard for determining economic health and should be expanded to include measures of sustainability and human well-being.

And just what nutbars came up with this radical notion? Well, how about Nobel prize economists Joe Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard, along with Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. According to The New York Times, these guys assert, "that economic growth had come to be seen as an end in itself, rather than as the means for increasing human happiness. "

What is of “particular concern is when narrow measures of market performance are confused with broader measures of welfare,” the authors said in the report. “What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted. Policies should be aimed at increasing societal welfare, not G.D.P.”

The report also notes that “an excessive focus on G.D.P. metrics” contributed to the onset of the financial crisis, as policy makers cheered rising economic growth while other data, like those that showed the increasing and unsustainable indebtedness of households and businesses, were overlooked.

Mr. Sarkozy, professing his dissatisfaction with standard economic measures, created the commission in February 2008, charging the economists with identifying the limits of gross domestic product “as an indicator of economic performance and social progress,” and asked them to consider alternatives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/business/global/15gdp.html?_r=1&ref=global-home