We need to change our thinking on the climate

WHILE Antony Pick (Newbury Weekly News, July 15) might share the climate change agenda, I don’t think that he really gets it at all.

The problem of climate change has been bought about by a culture of waste to fuel economic growth in western nations, with the UK leading the charge, although we are by no means the worst offenders currently.

We drive oversize, underused cars on journeys that should be undertaken by walking or bicycles, or not taken at all, wasting fossil fuels which pollute the air we breath; we make stuff which can’t be repaired and so is thrown away before the end of life of the materials that they are made from thus wasting valuable minerals which we delve thousands of metres into the earth to collect using huge amounts of fossil fuel energy in the process; we make single use plastic stuff which is thrown away wasting oil which we now scavenge from the ends of the earth to collect and polluting the oceans to the extent that there is a layer of plastic sediment building up which denotes the start of a new geological era, the Anthropocene; we drive long distances to talk to another person or persons, again wasting our own time and precious fossil fuel and polluting our air; we hold conferences in obscure but very nice parts of the world which the top brass, I won’t call them the elite because they rarely are, can fly to on a jolly on expenses, again putting pollution into the air, but this time in a position where it causes maximum damage to the environment.

This just a quick list of the waste which we accept as the norm.

The climate crisis is just one aspect of the challenge the human race faces.

In a report called Limits to Growth commissioned by the environment group Club of Rome and based on a simple computer model of the world economy, three eminent economists of the time, the early 1970s, laid out three paths the world economy could take into the future.

A path of reduced growth, one of business as usual (BAU) and one of increased growth.

Even the path of reduced growth showed a very dystopian future and the BAU path, which it was found that we were following when the report was revisited and republished in 2000, told of environmental and economic disaster in the early part of the 21st century.

The increased growth path doesn’t bear talking about.

The BAU path told of increased pollution leading to environmental breakdown; shortages of minerals leading to technological breakdown; population increase leading to pandemics leading to economic and societal breakdown; and to mass migrations caused by war and famine caused by all the things above.

That is the path that those economist plotted in the 1970s, which was confirmed in 2000 and which we are still following to this day despite their predictions.

Sound familiar? Their report was given the same treatment that the cancer from cigarettes report was given and later the claims of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels; it and the authors were ridiculed, contradicted by the industries with the most to lose and finally ignored by mainstream economists and the politicians that they advise; the readdressed report of 2000 was just ignored but it still stands out as a brilliant piece of academic work carried out at a time when computer modelling was in its infancy; and we are still ignoring its content today despite it having shown itself to be right on the button for accuracy.

Still, virtually no one in government or the economics profession that advise them believes in Limits To Growth, the report or the fact.

They still believe in infinite growth in a finite environment. Are they deluded or just idiots?

In either case this is evidence to question their suitability to govern us.

And this is not just a Tory problem as all three main parties and the Greens work on the same basis. We live on one planet but it has been calculated that we in Europe live a lifestyle that would require three planets of resources should the whole world wish to emulate our prosperity.

The US and Australia are worse and live a five planet lifestyle.

The problem is that the rest of the world does want what we have and they are coming in increasing numbers to get it.

Witness the stream of ‘refugees’ crossing the Med, the Channel and the Torres Straight to Australia and the queues of people waiting to cross the southern border of the US.

As the crisis of western overconsumption worsens, the queues of people will become a torrent unless we take measures to share what we have with those other people where they live now.

Our lifestyle will become increasing difficult to maintain because the up-coming economies of the world are growing apace: China recently recorded growth of nearly eight per cent in a quarter; extended to a year that is 32 per cent which means that if that growth rate is continued they will have doubled their consumption of everything that they have ever consumed in only two years and two months

If they carry on at that rate of growth China will again double everything that they have ever consumed in another two years and two months. What will that do to world supply chains?

China, which is not constrained by a colonial legacy which demands of us fair treatment of other nations, is building control of the food and mineral resources that it needs through out the world.

Witness its ‘aid’ programmes in Africa designed to give it control of huge mineral resources and its annexation of the South China

Sea to control fishing grounds and minerals.

Then there is the New Silk Road project and economic belt spreading through Asia towards Europe. Getting back to Antony Pick’s letter and his advocation of continued

BAU in travel and transport modes, a continuation of present car use into an electric car future, this completely ignores the inconvenient fact that China controls many of the minerals required to build electric motors and China will puts its needs above ours to control its own population.

We are just getting through a pandemic which changed our modes of communication completely, with Zoom meeting taking the place of face-to-face meetings and many people working from home.

If we carried on this change for even half our meetings and work, requirements for travel would drop drastically.

We reduced our fossil fuel use by seven per cent over the Covid period, a reduction that the UN says we will have to emulate every year for the next 10 years to combat climate change.

But what is our Government doing? They are encouraging us to get back to our old ways and consume, consume and consume again and the gains hard won have now been lost. Reduction be damned! It is bad for growth and the economy!

No matter that this constant growth is what has got us into our current predicament we must carry on growing so that the rich can get richer and the rest of us can ‘feast’ on the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table.

Unfortunately, the rich are very frugal with their crumbs and the rest of us are just about staying where we have been since the 1970s, according to most reports.

The imperative for growth is the addiction of our banking system to growth in the economy to pay off the interest that they charge and of course the need of the rich to get richer.

There are people who can see a way forward.

Even Antony Pick’s fellow party member, Lord Zac Goldsmith, knows that continued economic growth isn’t possible or even desirable and he put that in writing in his book, The Constant Economy, in 2009.

David Cameron suggested before the 2010 election that we might have been happier with much less in the 1950s, although he was obviously told to shut up and and the subject was never bought up again. Economists from the authors of Limits To Growth through Lord Nicholas Stern to Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics are telling us that we can’t go on as we were. We also have our environment telling us that we have to change with unprecedented heatwaves in the US and Canada and unprecedented floods in Western Europe. And that’s just so far this year.

But according to Antony Pick and his advisors we need to carry on with the same recipe which has got us into the problem in order to pay our way out of it.

Perhaps a change of thinking might be in order for once?

KEN NEAL

Basingstoke Road

Newbury