On one level this is simply very good news. Rising living standards are of real value when a country is moving – as China has – from mass starvation to massive opportunity. But when billions of people acquired increased purchase power it comes with problems.
For decades the average citizen of the United States has consumed massively more energy than the typical person elsewhere on the planet. Over 12,000 kilowhat hours per head was a fairly normal level every year. The UK being less well off but having a similar lifestyle ambitions usually consumed less than half of that figure per head. In poorer countries it was massively lower. The average Nigerian person was, for example, consuming less than one hundredth as much electricity as an American ten years ago.
Over the last ten years the average Nigerian has got a lot richer very quickly and good luck to them. Yet it is not hard to see what will happen if country after country follows the path of China and moves from a civilisation of bicycles to one where many more people have a car, a refrigerator, a washing machine and work in air-conditioned offices. How is it going to be possible to sustain an increased standard of living across the globe if these are the kinds of lifestyles we are all going to want to enjoy?
It simply isn’t possible to copy the current US or even UK lifestyle across 8 billion people or more without environmental and therefore economic collapse. There isn’t enough oil and gas available to burn and even if there was the consequences of doing so for the climate and for the air quality would become horrendous very quickly.
That is only one of a whole series of environmental pressures that improving standards of living could bring. The ocean is already struggling to cope with the mountain of plastics that have been dumped into it. Without changes to technology it is expected that humanity will produce more plastics in the next 20 years than it has done in its entire existence and most of them will be dumped somewhere not recycled. Then there is the issue of water consumption which rises exponentially with living standards. Or the destruction of forests. Or any number of other environmental challenges which come with a lot of people and a lot of companies producing and consuming.
It is logically impossible to spread the current production and consumption patterns of advanced ‘western’ economies across the entire globe. Yet if we try to continue current worldwide growth rates for another 20 years then we are going to test out those logical impossibilities.
There are only a few possible alternative outcomes. One is that population and consumption will be controlled by war, famine and natural disaster. That is a pretty horrible solution but the most probable one if nothing is done. Another is that economic improvements will radically slow down or cease altogether and this will prevent significant numbers of extra people from getting richer. Globalisation could simply result in changing which locations are rich and poor without much change to the total number of people who enjoy a prosperous lifestyle. That is also a pretty cruel solution. The final answer is to find a way of letting people increase their standard of living whilst reducing their impact on the planet.
In other words, we need to find ways of enabling more people to be comfortably well off whilst seriously limiting the consumption of resources. That kind of green growth is in my view not just the only ethical solution it is the only practical way forward. We therefore need a lot more thought about what it might mean to live, produce and consume in ways that allow many more people to enjoy affluent lifestyles.
It would be nice to think that this might be achieved by persuading people to make more ethical personal choices and to become more spiritual and purchase less physical products. Depending on that kind of mass cultural change is a very high-risk strategy. I simply don’t think it will happen. Or at least it won’t quickly enough. Try telling a Bangladeshi peasant that she can’t have a washing machine because it would be ethically better for her to continue to slap clothes clean on a rock in a river and I don’t think she’ll be impressed by your spiritual empathy. I therefore think we need to look to changes in technology and the lifestyle changes that will naturally come with those changes if we are going to stand any chance of resolving the challenge of too much production and consumption.
There are plenty of grounds for a degree of optimism that we may be about to embark on such a change. A major move away from fossil fuels to renewables is now entirely plausible and hugely helpful. It would produce a significant direct reduction in the production of CO2, an increase in the ability to produce locally on a small scale and remove some of the negative impacts of many of the extra products people might wish to consume.
Yet the current pace of change is not remotely fast enough even in the most promising areas and there are other aspects of technology such as the use of plastics where many of the necessary changes have scarcely even reached the research stages.
Project global economic growth rates of 3.7% forward for 20 years and the consequences for increased consumption dwarf any reductions in consumption that we might realistically expect to achieve by current trends in replacing petrol with electric cars. Total world demand for cars is going up a lot faster than electric car production and consumption. The same is true across most other forms of consumer technology. On current trends we are on course to consume more fossil fuels and more plastic and to produce more waste in the next decade than we do now and if nothing more is done then it will be at least twenty years before the numbers start to go down.
That is scary. We are in a race against time. Will increased global living standards become unsustainable before the technological revolution that is just beginning to take off rescues us and our planet from the consequences?
No one can possibly know the answer to that question. What I do believe I know is that this issue is the biggest and most significant political and economic challenge of our time bar none. We are currently facing an existential threat to the wellbeing of billions of people and to the entire ecology of the planet. Instead of facing up to that threat we have a President of the United States who is quite happy to deny that it even exists in case it interferes with the short-term profits of the businesses he runs.
This kind of reaction against necessary social change is not rare. But we no longer have much time to waste on irresponsibly wishing away problems. Unless we beat off the reactionaries and get governments worldwide to step up the scale and the pace of incentives to change production and consumption technology then we risk an almighty system failure.
Put simply I am all in favour of a strong and stable economy. Unfortunately the current one is deeply unstable and desperately weak. The only realistic and practical way forward is to invest to make that economy properly sustainable.