Imagine all the people sharing all the world

YOU WOULDN’T know it from his State of the Nation address, but our president moonlights as co-chair of the UN High Panel on Sustainable Development.

In fact, 10 days before his big speech, President Jacob Zuma attended the launch in Addis Ababa of the panel’s long-awaited report on the state of the planet. It makes for sobering reading. The panel, including, one assumes, our president, are of the opinion that we are using up the Earth’s resources too fast and unless we take drastic action, the consequences will be disastrous.

They blame “unsustainable lifestyles, production and consumption patterns and the impact of population growth”.

They warn that we “can no longer assume that our collective actions will not trigger tipping points as environmental thresholds are breached, risking irreversible damage to both ecosystems and human communities”.

At the launch, Zuma himself told reporters that “sustainable development is more important than ever given the multiple crises now enveloping the world”.

Policymakers, he claimed, were “hungry for ideas that can help them to navigate these difficult times”.

Odd that he didn’t raise the subject last Thursday. On the contrary.

Instead of the panel’s vision of a 21st century “ever-green revolution” he gave us last century’s hydrocarbon-fuelled, industrialised economy dependent on debt and ever-increasing global trade for survival.

He did, it’s true, make passing reference to solar power. He even told us we must save electricity, but just until the next couple of huge carbon dioxide-belching power stations come on line.

When he mentioned water, it was only to promise to provide more of it. He tossed a paltry R248 million at acid mine drainage – perhaps the most critical, but by no means the only, threat to our already stressed water supplies.

The one time he uttered the words “sustainable development” was when he said SA would be flying a team to Brazil for the next world summit of that name. His only mention of climate change was when he pronounced 17th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change a “huge success”. There was not a single reference to peak oil or even the environment.

One isn’t surprised. The politician-heavy UN panel he heads admits that one of the two biggest obstacles to putting sustainability into practice is a failure of political will. Its excuse is that our entire system rewards short-term gains while the dividends of sustainable development are “long term, often intergenerational”.

The second obstacle is that “the concept of sustainable development has not yet been incorporated into the mainstream national and international economic policy debate”.

Actually, the overarching reason sustainable development is not a reality is that it’s incompatible with economic growth. The term “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron. We are already living beyond the planet’s means.

But since the stability of the entire global economic system is predicated on the idea of constant expansion, no one in power can bring themselves to speak the unmentionable truth. Zuma’s panel, in spite of making a lot of excellent recommendations, is no exception.

Its “ever-green revolution” aims “to at least double productivity while drastically reducing resource use and avoiding further loss of biodiversity, topsoil loss and water depletion and contamination”.

All past experience, current evidence and future modelling indicate that this is impossible. Growth in economic activity invariably results in an increase in resource use and further environmental degradation. Any efficiencies created are quickly swallowed up by further growth.

There is no technological fix for this.

In spite of its fatal flaws, the UN report contains one recommendation that could change everything.

Science, the panel says, must play a far bigger role in assessing the planet’s physical limits and making policy recommendations.

Hurray! Until now, economists and ideologues have run riot, untrammelled by the laws of nature. Perhaps, at last, reason and evidence will play some role in deciding our futures.

But the panel, and all the other believers in infinite expansion, may be sorry they asked. Scientists were the first to warn that the laws of the universe did not permit endless growth in a finite system.

They were also the first to predict what would happen if we continued to follow the expansionist path: sudden and uncontrollable collapse.

All the signs indicate that we are approaching that point.

President Zuma will argue, as he clearly did during the UN panel’s discussions, that sustainability measures should not impose ‘an arbitrary growth ceiling” on poorer countries.

It’s an important point. By far the biggest culprits for the mess we’re in are the big industrialised countries. Poor nations consume far less than their fair share of the world’s resources.

But SA is not one of them, in spite of the fact that most of our people live in poverty.

Our emissions of carbon dioxide per capita are similar to those of rich industrialised nations. We are already living beyond the capacity of the natural systems within our national boundaries.

It’s glaringly obvious that resources need to be shared more equally, not just globally, but within our own country. And since there is only so much to go round, the rich are going to have to make all the material sacrifices.

But a simple transfer of land and capital will not solve the underlying problem. We need to assess the true value, and fragility, of our natural capital and develop a new economic model that will protect and enhance it so it can provide for our needs, and those of future generations. That, after all, is the official UN definition of sustainable development. Although, strangely enough, it’s not included in this new report.

What would a truly sustainable, post-growth economy look like? Scientists and enlightened economists who have been wrestling with this problem are convinced it would be a more stable, fairer and healthier world, with meaningful work, deeper democracy and plenty of leisure time for all.

But we’ll only get there if we start dismantling the current system now, instead of waiting for it to fall on our heads.