We often speak about getting the lion’s share of a certain resource. Well, there are only 23,000 lions left in the world, and their number is fast decreasing. This is a shame, also because lions are in fact models of sustainability we should do well to imitate. After it seizes and devours a gazelle, the lion feels sated and goes on to enjoy the pleasure of rest. It does not even dream about getting another one, so it can sell it on the savannah market. The uptake is that lions consume just what they need, thereby maintaining the ecosystem in which they live in balance.
Our world is instead based on the accumulation of worldly goods. This has been the rule over the last two centuries. Such a system of limitless growth is not only endangering the ecological balance of the planet, but requires ever larger amounts of energy. Energy use simply mirrors our present mode of development, and it is useless to speak about peak oil and renewable energy sources, if we fail to consider the most important point, namely the huge waste of energy that is required to produce a plethora of goods and services catering to needs artificially that are induced by an economic system that must keep running in order to stay alive. How long this can go on? And, even more importantly, at what cost?
A simple piece of evidence should make us understand how the current globalization of such a growth model — no longer coincident with actual development — is leading us headlong into planetary collapse. A US citizen consumes 3.25 tons of oil each year, a European citizen 1.48, and a citizen of developing country only 0.25. Even if we thought about extending European, and not American, standards of consumption to the rest of the world, annual oil production would have to triple, with a consequent explosion in CO2 emissions and a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, with unsustainable consequences not only for the environment, but for human economies and societies, as reports drafted by entities traditionally impermeable to environmentalism, such governments and investment banks, confirm.
But all the approaches to economic policy still posit growth as the central objective and the energy question as the main problem. The specter of peak oil has been with us for years, but reserves keep augmenting, the high growth of world demand notwithstanding, because higher prices encourage costlier prospecting. Furthermore, the increase in the price of the oil barrel does not translate itself in higher inflation, contrary to what had happened during the two previous oil shocks.
This is clearly an anomalous situation, with rapidly growing oil demand and prices and stable inflation. We are still living under the illusion of sustainability, without realizing that the world is consuming each 400,000 liters of gasoline each second, an utter folly. Whereas ecologists are pessimistic, economists are optimistic, persuaded as they are that the market and technology will find a way out of this parlous situation, and so they keep on proposing models and policies based on the growth of production and consumption. Externalities are simply to be quantified and monetized in markets for the trading of emissions. But how can we ask from developing countries to reduce the impact of their consumption? On what principles of social responsibility, currently a fashionable concept among OECD governments and businesses, could we ever invoke that?
If carbon emissions were proportionate to populations, i.e. if each inhabitant of the earth were given her or his own quota of maximum emissions, would the West be comfortable with that? After all, we are the champions of democracy: one person, one vote; in this case, one person, same quota. But Westerners seem only to preach democracy when energy sources are imperiled, while refraining from democratizing energy use.
by Francesco Bertolini
Professor Università Bocconi - Master in Environmental Economics and Management