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By Root 1540 0

the damage that will be caused by climate change is irreversible and large, so it makes no sense to think about the choices as trade-offs, a bit more here for a bit less there, which is what the conventional economics approach does. The “price” of environmental goods in the future will rise so much that there is no sense in discounting them: the cost-benefit analysis will be overwhelmed by the prospect of catastrophic and irreversible environmental change. Economics assumes that there is a relationship between amount consumed and global temperature: a bit more consumption means a slightly larger increase in average temperatures, and conversely. From the environmental perspective, the idea that there could be incremental changes in temperature is wishful fantasy; the only choice is catastrophe or not, with extreme weather threatening the fundamentals of human life and society. Others support his view that conventional economic tools for assessing the costs and benefits of different choices are not applicable in the context of a potentially massive change in the environment.23

Unfortunately, this makes the policy choice about what scale of costly changes to impose on citizens’ lives more or less a matter of faith. Perhaps Al Gore and Nicholas Stern are right; but unless a majority of their fellow-citizens agree with their assessment of the urgency and scale of the reduction needed in consumption today, it is unlikely that the policy actions they’d see as necessary will be feasible. Passionate campaigners for urgent action against climate change are impatient with talk of political realities. They prefer to put their energies into trying to convince others to share their views. Which is fine. But it’s in the nature of faith that others will challenge it. There is a valid debate about the scale of the actions needed now to safeguard the world against damage from climate change, and it is foolish to be dismissive of the sincere argument that the sacrifice we make right now does not need to be as large as the very big estimates some campaigners are advocating. This, surely, is an area of policy where pragmatism is essential, no matter how much it antagonizes the true believers.

Figure 4. What threat does climate change pose?

HOW TO TAKE THE FUTURE SERIOUSLY

In chapter 1 I described the evidence undermining the fashionable argument that higher GDP—that is higher income and spending—doesn’t make people any happier. On the contrary, there is good evidence that more income and more consumption do make people happier. The idea that it will be easy to give up policies for economic growth is therefore a false trail.

The environmental issues set out in this chapter have put at center stage the dilemma of persuading voters that some growth must be sacrificed, in a context of increasingly bitter dispute about the scale of the necessary change. The idea of environmental sustainability leads us to think about the future. People my age in the West are likely to live another forty or fifty years. Parents care about the well-being of their children. Many people have religious beliefs or come from a cultural tradition in which the concept of good husbandry is a moral imperative. Whatever our individual rationale, many of us do care about the future and therefore about sustainability. A good society will deliver economic growth with due regard for the next generation. What measures will steer us toward that goal? Using annual increases in GDP has not done the trick and has been too short term as a focus for policy, whether in terms of the natural world or—as described in later chapters—the social world. Indeed the framework for shaping policies during the past half century or so has brought economies to the point of unsustainability in a number of ways.

Decisions to consume now rather than conserve for the future have long-lasting implications. “We” (meaning a majority of people in rich Western societies) have been consuming “too much,” according to the evidence from the scale of the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in