After 60 years of wanton environmental destruction we are on the edge of a climate catastrophe—but Jonathon Porritt is optimistic that we'll put it right
The arbitrary nature of anniversaries is what makes them so intriguing. From the perspective of 2007, there's nothing that special about 1947, other than the opportunity to comment on 60 extraordinary years, during which time capitalism has triumphed, the lives of hundreds of millions of people have been massively improved, world food production has quadrupled, further world wars have been avoided, populations more than doubled, life expectancy in developing countries has risen from 46 to 64 years, while the majority of citizens of the rich world have learnt to party on as if there was no tomorrow.
But will it turn out to have been a "gold-plated" era rather than a genuinely Golden Age? A thin, bling-film, crudely but cleverly painted over startling levels of inhumanity, deprivation, and wanton environmental destruction?
For the progeny of this 60-year feel-good frenzy, such grumpy, neo-Malthusian negativity tends not to go down too well. But just look at two of the fundamental elements of success that have made the last 60 years such an extraordinary epoch.
The first has to be oil, that "black gold" on which our lives now almost entirely depend—tens of millions of years' worth of stored solar energy brought back up to the surface of the Earth and converted in the blink of an eye into chemical feedstocks and transportation and heating fuels. These days, we consume about 84 million barrels of oil a day, and in total have worked our way through the equivalent of around a trillion barrels. The oil companies would have us believe there's another two trillion still available to us; a growing body of dissenting geologists and academics, however, tell us it's no more than one trillion—in other words, that astonishing natural patrimony is already half-gone. Either way, there will be one big difference between past oil and future oil: it will never be cheap again. It may go back down from today's high level, but who thinks it will go back down below $40? And when will we first see the $100 barrel? The economics of the next 60 years will not be underpinned by access to cheap oil, and the knock-on implications of that will be massive. With one extremely painful exception (namely, the impact on some of the world's poorest countries), this is basically "a good thing". With high oil prices, massive efficiency improvements suddenly become economic. And all sorts of "uncompetitive" sources of renewable energy suddenly become competitive.
The second element is all-pervasive but still almost entirely invisible to most people. It arises out of the sumptuous subsidy we have benefited from through not paying a realistic price for the use of natural resources and systems, or for the pollution and environmental damage we have caused. As Sir Nicholas Stern said, climate change is best understood as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".
By not paying anything for the billions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that we've put into the atmosphere, we have so severely jeopardised the capacity of the atmosphere and the oceans to absorb those waste products that we now find ourselves on the very edge of a climate catastrophe. That kind of licence to pollute simply isn't available anymore. On climate change, for instance, we're going to have to reduce emissions of CO2 by at least 60 per cent (and probably nearer to 85 per cent) by 2050.
So, with "business as usual" simply no longer available, are the next 60 years going to be so utterly miserable that no self-respecting reader of Director could begin to get excited about them? Not on your carbon-constrained life! Weaning ourselves off our dependence on oil, and cutting carbon out of our lives, could/should usher in the most startlingly dynamic economic revolution in the short history of capitalism. All the answers we need are already out there. My optimistic half, even now, still trusts in the extraordinarily creative, regenerative capacity of the human species that got us to the moon, that (all but) eliminated polio, smallpox and leprosy, that invented the internet, the fold-up bicycle and the iPod, that delivered inconceivable (if unsustainable) levels of prosperity to the lucky billion or so people who happened to be born in the right places with the right life chances.
Human beings are not that dumb. Once people come to realise that it's a straight choice between a better quality of life (albeit with substantially reduced levels of earth-trashing consumption) on the one hand, and an accelerating descent into eco-apocalypse on the other, then we will get it sorted. And it won't take 60 years either!
Jonathon Porritt is founder-director of Forum for the Future www.forumforthefuture.org and chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission www.sd-commission.org.uk
