It's amazing how much of and how well Ted Trainer
can state the bottom line in 14 minutes: that
dealing adequately with the climate crisis and
overshoot means an abandonment of consumer
capitalism and the end of acquisitiveness. If you
memorize one essay, this might be it.
<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1515951.htm>http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1515951.htm
You can listen to this on mp3 or as a podcast by
going here for a few more weeks:
<http://abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/>http://abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/
And you can find transcripts of several of his
other interviews (and those with contrary views)
here:
<http://search.abc.net.au/search/search.cgi?form=simple&num_ranks=20&collection=abcall&meta_v=rn&query=ted+trainer&submit=+go+>http://search.abc.net.au/search/search.cgi?form=simple&num_ranks=20&collection=abcall&meta_v=rn&query=ted+trainer&submit=+go+
Such as
Natural Capitalism Challenged:
<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s156837.htm>http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s156837.htm
Let's Scrap the Economy:
<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s50.htm>http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s50.htm
His web site is "The Simpler Way: Working for
Transition From Consumer Society to a Simpler,
More Cooperative, Just and Ecologically
Sustainable Society":
<http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/>http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
~~~~~
I am subscribed to the weekly podcast of this
program, "Ockham's Razor". You can subscribe to
it here at their web site, but I did it at the
iTunes Music store with iTunes.
<http://abc.net.au/rn/podcast/default.htm>http://abc.net.au/rn/podcast/default.htm
Oh, and today's news? Greenhouse Gas levels
highest in 650,000 years (380 ppm). "Today's
still rising level of carbon dioxide already is
27 percent higher than its peak during all those
millennia," according to Thomas Stocker of the
University of Bern, Switzerland. Moreover the
rise is occurring at a speed that "is over a
factor of a hundred faster than anything we are
seeing in the natural cycles." This is reported
in next week's issue of Science.
Climate Action NOW!
Andy Caffrey
<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/rwilliam.htm>
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<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/>Health Report
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Sunday at 8.45am, repeated Wednesdays at 9.45pm
Presented by
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Robyn Williams
<http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1515951.htm>print
What is our biggest problem?
Sunday 27 November 2005
Summary
Ted Trainer from the School of Social Work at the
University of New South wales tells us that the
fundamental cause of the big global problems
facing us is over-consumption.
Program Transcript
Robyn Williams: Well last week on this program we
had Jennifer Marohasy taking on what she called
the celebrity scientists, and their gloomy
forecasts. She said that most indicators of
natural wellbeing show improvement, not decline.
By the way, she also accused Jared Diamond of
asking Australia to give up agriculture,
something Professor Diamond tells me he did not
say, although his book ‘Collapse’ certainly gives
that impression.
So this week, a contrasting point of view. Ted
Trainer from the University of New South Wales,
with his assessment of our prospects, as we come
to the end of the year 2005.
Ted Trainer.
Ted Trainer: The fundamental cause of the big
global problems threatening us now is simply
over-consumption. The rate at which we in rich
countries are using up resources is grossly
unsustainable. It’s far beyond levels that can be
kept up for long or that could be spread to all
people. What is not clearly understood is the
magnitude of the over-shoot. The reductions
required are so big that they cannot be achieved
within a consumer-capitalist society. Huge and
extremely radical change in systems and culture
are necessary.
Several lines of argument lead to this conclusion, but I’ll note only three.
Some resources are already alarmingly scarce,
including water, land, fish and especially
petroleum. Some geologists think oil supply will
peak within a decade. If all the world’s people
today were to consume resources at the per capita
rate we in rich countries do, annual supply would
have to be more than six times as great as at
present, and if the 9 billion we will have on
earth soon were to do so, it would have to be
about ten times as great.
Secondly, the per capita area of productive land
needed to supply one Australian with food, water,
settlements and energy is about seven to eight
hectares. The US figure is close to 12 hectares.
But the average per capita area of productive
land available on the planet is only about 1.3
hectares. When the world’s population reaches 9
billion the per capita area of productive land
available will be only .9 hectares. In other
words, in a world where resources were shared
equally we would have to get by on about 13% of
the average Australian footprint.
Third, the greenhouse problem is the most
powerful and alarming illustration of the
overshoot. The atmospheric scientists are telling
us that if we are to stop the carbon dioxide
content of the atmosphere from reaching twice the
pre-industrial level, we have to cut global
carbon emissions and thus fossil fuel use by 60%
in the short term, and more later. If we did that
and shared the remaining energy among 9 billion
people, each Australian would have to get by on
about 5% of the fossil fuel now used. And that
target, a doubling of atmospheric CO2, is much
too high. We’re now 30% above pre-industrial
levels and already seeing disturbing climatic
effects.
These lines of argument show we must face up to
enormous reductions in rich world resource use if
we’re to solve the big global problems. This is
not possible in a society that’s committed to the
affluent lifestyles that require high energy and
resource use. We in countries like Australia
should reduce per capita resource use and
environmental impact, to something like one-tenth
of their present levels.
Now all that only makes clear that the present
situation is grossly unsustainable. But that’s
not the most important problem. This society is
fundamentally and fiercely obsessed with raising
levels of production and consumption all the
time, as fast as possible, and without any limit.
In other words, our supreme, sacred,
never-questioned goal is economic growth. We’re
already at impossible levels of production and
consumption but our top priority is to go on
increasing them all the time.
If we in Australia average 3% growth to 2070 and
by then the 9 billion people expected on earth
have all risen to the living standards we would
have then, total world economic output each year
would be 60 times as great as it is now. Yet the
present level is grossly unsustainable.
Many respond here by saying that Yes, the
problems are very serious but No, we don’t have
to think about moving from consumer-capitalist
society because more effort and better technology
could solve the problems. It only takes a few
seconds to show that this tech-fix position is
wrong. The overshoot is far too big.
Technical-fix optimists like Amory Lovins claim
we could cut the resource and ecological costs
per unit of economic output to half or one
quarter. But if global output rose to 60 times
what it is now, even a Factor Four reduction by
2070 would leave global resource and
environmental costs 15 times as great as they are
now, and they are unsustainable now.
The foregoing comment has only been about
sustainability and our society is built on a
second deeply flawed foundation. We have an
extremely unjust global economy. It’s a market
economy and that means scarce things go to those
who can pay most for them, that is, to the rich
and not to the poor. So the rich countries gobble
up most of the world’s resource production.
Even more important, in a market economy what’s
developed is what’s most profitable not what’s
most needed. So the development that takes place
in the Third World is development of what will
maximise the profits of corporations. Look at any
Third World country and you see a lot of
development but most of it puts their resources
into producing to stock our rich world
supermarkets and very little goes into the
industries that produce the basic necessities the
majority of poor people need. Conventional
development is therefore well described as a
process of plunder.
Our living standards in countries like Australia
could not be anywhere near as high as they are if
these unjust processes did not occur and we had
to get by on our fair share of the world’s
resources.
If one is to understand the nature of the
problems facing us, one must focus on these
concepts of gross unsustainability and injustice.
For instance, they show that the conventional
concept of ‘development’ for the Third World is
totally impossible; there are nowhere near enough
resources for all of them to rise to anything
like our rich world ways and standards. Yet
that’s the taken-for-granted goal of development.
Similarly few green people seem to recognise that
the environment problem cannot be solved without
dramatic reduction in the level of producing and
consuming going on, and therefore without radical
social change to frugal living standards and a
zero-growth economy. Yet our peak environmental
agencies do not focus on the absurdity of the
quest for economic growth.
And how many within the Peace movement realise
that if we refuse to dramatically cut rich world
demand for resources, and everyone strives to
rise to our living standards, then there will
inevitably be increasingly fierce competition for
the dwindling resources. If we insist on
remaining affluent, then we had better remain
heavily armed. We can’t expect to go on getting
far more than our fair share of the world’s
resources unless we’re prepared to use force to
invade oil fields and prop up compliant dictators.
What then is the answer? If the question is how
can we run a sustainable and just
consumer-capitalist society, the point is that
there isn’t any answer. We cannot achieve a
sustainable and just society unless we face up to
huge and radical transition to what some identify
as The Simpler Way, that is to a society based on
non-affluent but adequate living standards, high
levels of self-sufficiency, in small scale
localised economies with little trade and no
growth, to basically co-operative and
participatory communities, to an economy that’s
not driven by market forces and profit, and most
difficult of all, a society that’s not motivated
by competition, individualism, and
acquisitiveness. Many have argued that this
general vision is the only way out of the mess
we’re in.
So which of these problems is our biggest one?
None of them. The most disturbing problem of all
is our failure, our refusal to even recognise
that the pursuit of affluence and growth is a
terrible mistake.
Despite our vast educational systems, information
technologies and media networks, despite having
hordes of academics and experts, there is almost
no official or public recognition that the quest
for affluence and growth is the basic cause of
our alarming global predicament. There is no
recognition of any need to move to The Simpler
Way. These themes are almost never mentioned in
the media, educational curricula, or government
pronouncements.
We are dealing here with a fascinating and
powerful ideological phenomenon, a failure,
indeed a refusal, to even think about the
possibility that we are sitting on the railway
tracks and there is a train fast approaching. It
would be difficult to imagine a more profound
case of denial and delusion. Some of the forces
at work are understandable, such as the fact that
profit driven media are not going to raise such
issues but will work hard to seduce people into
preoccupation with trivia, sport, celebrities and
mindless consuming. But how do you explain why so
very few academics and intellectuals concern
themselves with these themes while many of them
work at providing the economy with the
technocrats, the managers, and the mentality that
it needs.
Obviously the corporate class is most culpable.
Their very existence depends on maintaining the
conviction that we need not even think about
reducing consumption. The economists are high on
the list too, teaching and practising an
ideology, which casts the consumer capitalist way
as the only conceivable way. But why do the
educators so diligently teach that worldview. Why
do the curriculum makers, and the ABC program
makers, and journalists and the intellectual
ranks so studiously avoid any reference to limits
or the possibility that affluence and growth are
suicidal goals or the possibility that survival
requires urgent transition to some kind of
Simpler Way? How can it be that almost all of our
most intelligent and educated people devote
themselves to pursuits which never challenge
over-consumption and have nothing to do with the
sustainability crisis now threatening the
survival of all of us.
Toynbee analysed the fate of civilisations in
terms of their capacity to respond to challenges.
What then are our prospects, given that we cannot
even recognise that we are committed to fatally
mistaken goals.
If the thing threatening our survival was a comet
headed for earth, or a global flu epidemic, or
another Hitler, there would instantly be focused
attention and energetic and massive effort to
deal with it. But what’s threatening us is the
very thing that is cherished in consumer society
above all else, greater material wealth. We
suffer from the blinding curse of affluence. The
situation was summed up elegantly by that
insightful analyst, George W. Bush, when he said
recently ‘The American way of life is not
negotiable’.
The greatest tragedy is that we could quickly and
easily move to sustainable and just ways, if we
wanted to. Essentially that would involve people
in suburbs and towns getting together to organise
local economies with small farms and firms using
local resources and labour, to produce to meet
local needs. There would be many voluntary
working bees and committees and town meetings.
Some things would be free, such as fruit from
trees planted on the commons. For the detail see
The Simpler Way website.
This could be a far more satisfying way of life.
Consider being able to live well on two days work
for money a week, without any threat of
unemployment, or insecurity in old age, in a
supportive community. These are the kinds of
conditions that thousands of people enjoy in
eco-villages around the world. Many of these
communities are trying to demonstrate the
alternative ways to which the mainstream can move.
I believe we are now entering a time of rapidly
intensifying problems which will impact heavily
on the complacency within the rich countries. The
coming peak of petroleum supply might concentrate
minds wonderfully, but I think the probability of
us achieving the transition is very low.
Your chances in the next few decades will depend
very much on whether your region manages to build
local economies, and whether the people living
there are willing to shift to frugal,
co-operative and self-sufficient ways.
Robyn Williams: And those self-sufficient ways
are on that Simpler Way website, which you can
look up by going to abc.net.au/rn and following
the prompts to Ockham’s Razor.
Ted Trainer is from the school of Social Work at
the University of New South Wales and by
contrast, Bob Carr, former Premier of New South
Wales, on his return from China a couple of weeks
ago, insisted that the only way that that great
nation can handle its environmental future is via
the creation of wealth through the market economy.
We shall see.
Next week on this program, Joanna Penglase talks
about Orphans of the Living – growing up in care
in 20th century Australia.
I’m Robyn Williams.
Guests on this program:
Ted Trainer
School of Social Work
University of New South Wales
Sydney <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/>
Further information:
The Simpler Way
<http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/>http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
Presenter: Robyn Williams
Producer: Brigitte Seega
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