The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [129]
This leads on to my second point: that there can and should be no argument against rapid and sustained growth throughout the developing world. By definition, reducing poverty means raising levels of consumption—and not just of basic necessities like food and clean water, but of “luxury” goods like mobile phones and travel too. In speaking to British audiences I have often come across the rather quaint notion that people in poorer countries only want to get more prosperous so they can “be like us,” having been exposed even in their shacks, presumably, to the insidious consumerist propaganda of satellite television. The implication is that if “we” could consume less, then “they” would again emulate us by limiting their aspirations for development and prosperity, thereby helping the environment. This is a particular favorite of well-meaning, environmentally aware middle-class audiences in prosperous areas.
Of course, in reality the idea is as fanciful as it is patronizing. The truth is that people in poorer countries—to the extent that one can generalize—are desperate to increase their security by having access to modern medicine, fair employment, capital, and a whole host of other things that those of us living in rich countries have taken for granted since birth. Since abandoning the failed experiment of Maoism, China’s double-digit rates of economic growth have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in what is surely the greatest development success story of modern times. Over the last decade, having abandoned its own version of state socialism, India has begun to follow suit—and both countries are increasingly acknowledged as emerging economic and geopolitical superpowers. In contrast, sub-Saharan Africa has been somewhat left behind, though there, too, countries with freer economies like Rwanda and Ghana are beginning to experience welcome growth spurts.
China is already an environmental superpower, of course. As Oxford University’s Dieter Helm puts it: “Whether China builds 1,000 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation and whether it adds half a billion cars with conventional engines is of an order of magnitude more important to climate change than virtually any other trend.”8 China’s heavy use of coal makes it a prodigious emitter: Even on a per capita basis, China is rapidly catching up with France and Sweden (which have some of the lowest per capita emissions in Western Europe thanks to nuclear and hydroelectric power) and may already have overtaken them by the time you read this. Middle-class audiences are quite right to worry about China’s rise, for their own well-intentioned efforts to reduce their household emissions by turning down thermostats and walking their kids to school shrink quickly into irrelevance by comparison. Just consider that in 2009, while emissions fell in the U.S. and Europe thanks to the recession, China added more to its CO2 output in a single year than the entire emissions of the U.K., Spain, and Ireland combined (about 900 million tonnes).9 Opposing growth in developing countries is a nonstarter, however. All we can do is try to assist them in ensuring that their rising consumption of energy can come as much as possible from low-carbon sources and that other planetary boundaries are considered in sustainable development plans.
My third concern about attacks on the concept of economic growth is that there really does seem to be no conceivable alternative at present. Environmental economists like Herman Daly have struggled for decades to design a viable macroeconomic system that does not require growth as a central