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a new, emerging global superpower, going eyeball to eyeball with the United States—and winning. In the new reality of shifting geo-politics, China would be the key arbiter between success and failure. Decisions made in Beijing would count for as much, if not more, than decisions made in Washington. But with the ruling Communist Party dependent on double-digit growth rates for stability and control, China was not prepared to make commitments at the international level that would threaten its ability to fuel its economic miracle with coal.

Copenhagen showed us all what failing to meet a planetary boundary looks and feels like. But this failure need not be terminal. As I will show later, at a subsequent UN climate-change meeting at the end of 2010 in Cancún, a very different global politics was in evidence. Following the gloom of Denmark, today I believe that a way can be mapped out toward a deal on climate that will not only lead us more quickly toward the planetary boundary but will do so in a way that brings prosperity and clean growth to billions of people around the world. And perhaps most exciting of all is the fact that the country that is showing the way most forcefully and determinedly toward this better future is the same emerging superpower that blocked progress in Copenhagen: the People’s Republic of China.

BACK TO THE BOUNDARIES

Based on the pioneering work of the 29 scientists making up the planetary boundaries expert group, this book has made the case that the Earth system has inherent ecological limits within it, and that seven out of nine of these limits can now be identified and quantified by science. The concept of a limited planet placing constraints on humanity is central to environmentalism, and we owe the Green movement a debt for making this philosophical case so strongly and ultimately persuasively—before science was able to confirm that ideas about ecological limits were well-founded. But as I have shown repeatedly, I differ from most Green thinkers in believing that in the short to medium term ecological limits need constrain neither our numbers as a species nor the growth of our economic activity. As the expert group wrote in its original 2009 Nature paper, “as long as the thresholds are not crossed, humanity has the freedom to pursue long-term social and economic development.”3 Our global civilization can continue to flourish indefinitely within the “safe operating space” provided by the planetary boundaries.

For easy reference, here are the planetary boundaries in summary, presented in the same order as chapters in this book and with those boundaries already crossed shaded in gray.

Several responses to the planetary boundaries are common enough to bear a quick rehearsal here. The first is: What about population? Why not set a boundary for a permissible number of humans? Firstly, this objection is moot because human population is a driver of environmental impact, not a qualifying physical Earth-system process in and of itself. But the objectors are quite correct in that a burgeoning population is likely to cause more environmental impact than a declining one. A 2010 scientific paper indeed makes clear that lower population scenarios by mid-century lead to significantly reduced carbon emissions as compared with alternative, higher-population outcomes.5 But it does not necessarily imply, as the authors of that study are careful to point out, that promoting birth control should be a policy choice. That would be bad science as well as bad politics. For a start, it only follows that population reductions lead to emissions reductions if the factors affecting birth and death rates are themselves independent of economics. In the real world, the best way to reduce the growth in human populations is to encourage faster economic development, accelerated urbanization, and therefore an earlier demographic transition to the lower birth rates already experienced in the most affluent societies. But faster economic growth will mean higher use of energy and more emissions, everything else remaining equal.