The Politics of Climate Change (11 page)

Using GDP as a measure of growth has distinct advantages, not least those of simplicity and ease of calculation. However, its inadequacies as an index of economic welfare are well known. It is essentially an indicator of the size of an economy and a measure of market transactions. Activities that are environmentally damaging can appear to be wealth-generating in GDP measures, as can many other harmful ones. GDP makes no distinction between industrial growth that acts to increase emissions and that which does not. Nor does it factor in economic inequality – GDP can continue to rise even though only a small minority of the population is making any gains.

The critique of GDP as a measure of welfare now dates back many years. Broader measures of welfare have to be introduced to get a true measure of how societies are faring as a result of economic growth. One such measure is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which was initiated in 1995. It starts with similar personal consumption measures to GDP, but adjusts for factors such as income distribution, the value of household and volunteer work, crime and pollution. As John Talberth and Clifford Cobb, who were responsible for producing the GPI, observe, in the developed societies ‘GPI started declining around 1975, while GDP keeps increasing'. They comment scathingly on the reactions of economic analysts to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the US. Whereas most analysts wrote about how well the economy reacted to the disasters, with growth rates unaffected, Talberth and Cobb wrote:

In one fell swoop, these headlines dismissed the inequitable and catastrophic toll associated with 1,836 preventable deaths, over 850,000 housing units damaged, destroyed, or left uninhabitable, disruption of 600,000 jobs, permanent inundation of 118 square miles of marshland, destruction of 1.3 million acres of forest, and contamination caused by millions of gallons of floodwaters tainted by sewage, oil, heavy metals, pesticides, and other toxins as irrelevant to the US economy.
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Figure 3.1  Real GDP and GPI per capita in the United States

Source:
The Genuine Progress Indicator, 2006, p. 19, fig. 3

Another measure is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). It uses both national and local data to identify trends. A study looking at the period between 1975 and 1990 showed that, although GDP continued to rise, the ISEW went down by a quarter in the US. Over the same period, the ISEW in the UK declined by a full 50 per cent.
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In common with other industrial countries, both societies showed record ISEW growth over the post-war period until the 1970s – the threshold point, it appears, for over-development.

A third index, the Sustainable Society Index (SSI), was set up in 2006.
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This makes use of a wider range of environmental measures than the others, including resource depletion affecting wetlands, forests, farmland and non-renewable raw materials, together with the level of carbon emissions and other potential causes of environmental damage, such as the ozone-depleting materials. Also incorporated are indices such as income distribution, level of volunteering and dependence on foreign assets. The results show similar conclusions to those of the ISEW: as measured by the SSI, growth in most industrial countries has been stagnant since the 1970s.

Why are political leaders in most countries so reluctant to use such measures in a prominent way? There is an obvious answer – they show economic development in a far harsher light than GDP does. A government that seems to have a good record of economic success is suddenly shown to have
presided over a decline in welfare. Yet we have to bite the bullet. Every country, but especially the developed ones, should introduce alternative measures of, and frameworks for, welfare alongside narrow economic measures, and they should be made public.

As a concept, ‘the polluter pays' is more easily dealt with than the others. It means that those who cause pollution – with carbon emissions at the top of the list – should be charged in ratio to the harm they cause. This is the logic behind climate change taxes and carbon markets; and it is also the origin of the principle that countries which have contributed most to greenhouse gases in the past should make the largest cuts today.

In practice, the notion can be difficult to pin down. Where does responsibility for pollution start and stop? The idea of ‘extended polluter responsibility' has been coined in order to try to clarify this question. Those who cause emissions through manufacturing, for example, should bear the responsibility for the goods they produce throughout their life cycle, including their eventual disposal. Making such calculations is rarely easy in practice, however, simply because of the complexities involved. We cannot know, for example, which polluters are most culpable in the case of floods that have been influenced by global warming. Hence the costs of such damage have to be covered either by insurance companies or by the public authorities, or by a combination of the two.

Moreover, harmful consequences may take some time to unfold, or, in the case of new technologies, be difficult to assess. As in most areas of climate change policy, inventive solutions will be required. One way of dealing with these situations, for example, is through assurance bonds, which are a way of getting the polluter to bear insurance costs that might arise later. Funds are put up by the company or industry to insure against possible adverse environmental
impact. The bond is recoverable, with interest, after it is demonstrated with reasonable confidence that the process in question is benign. If damage occurs the bond is used for environmental ends. The idea is that an incentive is provided for the potential polluter to reduce CO
₂
emissions as far as possible.

Although ‘the polluter pays' principle has its practical limits, it is nevertheless a guiding thread in bringing climate change into the sphere of orthodox politics. It is a principle of justice which not only stands behind that of the differential responsibility of developed and developing countries for responding to climate change, but offers the means of building such responsibility into law. The fact that it provides incentives to modify behaviour is also highly important.

Many in the green movement have been hostile, on the grounds of the precautionary principle, to innovations that would seem to undermine or transgress natural processes. On this basis they have opposed bioengineering and GM crops. Given the overriding importance of limiting climate change – as well as coping with wider areas of sustainability – here, just like in our assessment of global warming itself, trust in science should be the guiding thread. In a world where we face fundamental new risks, avoidance of risk perversely can be far more risky than an embrace of the new.

The growth in world population up to 2050 will place enormous strain on global resources. At the opening of the twentieth century, there were only just over 1 billion people in the world. Today there are almost 7 billion and that number will continue to rise. It may stabilize at fewer than 8 billion, or may rise to more than 9 billion. In terms of food production, this situation contributes ‘a major threat that requires a strategic reappraisal of how the world is fed'.
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Competition for land, water and energy will accelerate. The British government's
Foresight
report, from which this quotation comes, identifies five major challenges for the future:

In looking for ways to respond to these huge problems, the report drew upon contributions from some 400 leading experts from low-, middle-and high-income countries around the world.

Climate change is likely to interact with the world food system in two main ways. Increased demand for food must be met against a backdrop of the mixture of drought and greater rainfall, together with more extreme weather generally. Moreover, the demand of feeding a growing population must be achieved while simultaneously producing a steep decline in carbon emissions. The chance of coping with these exigencies through bringing new land into cultivation is minimal – unless there are dramatic advances of some kind that would allow cultivation on previously barren or inhospitable land. Under existing conditions, far from bringing new land under agricultural production, the main task is actually the reverse. Deforestation is one of the main sources of increased greenhouse gas emissions. The urgency of the need to protect the tropical rainforests is often stressed, but the same also applies to forests in more temperate parts of the world, including Europe. From a climate change point of view, reforestation should quite often take precedence over opening up more land to agriculture.

So far, so green, but when we confront the urgency of intensifying production from a finite landspace – while simultaneously reducing emissions – it is impossible to see how such an end could be achieved without encouraging advances
in biotechnology, including the use of GM crops. The issue is not simply one of radically improved productivity, but of keeping abreast of evolving threats, including the emergence of new pests and the spread of plant diseases to areas where they were not previously known. New varieties of crops will be needed that are resistant to flooding, drought and the increased salt content of water as climate change advances. Much the same goes for waste reduction. The amount of waste involved in the global food chain is gigantic. A good deal can be coped with – in principle – by orthodox recycling; but disposal of some kinds of waste could be facilitated by the introduction of novel forms of chemical or biological agent that could break down that waste.

No strategy of any kind is risk-free, as I have stressed earlier, but there are fewer risks at this point involved in GM crops than there are in seeking to rely only on pre-established agricultural processes. Moreover, those risks to a large degree can be monitored through scientific scrutiny under controlled conditions. It would be quite wrong to treat GM crops as a magic bullet – they form one part of a wider front of advance in biotechnology. Market regulation is clearly called for, and should converge with other forms of regulation of monopoly in the wake of the financial crisis. A relatively small number of corporations tend to dominate the world food chain. Governance of the food system should for many reasons seek to ensure diversity.
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Reconciling expansion of the world food supply with diminishing emissions is even more difficult than may appear at first sight. Agriculture and the rearing of livestock release a high proportion of methane – a greenhouse gas more lethal in climate change terms than CO
₂
. The overall impact of food production, even where it is largely concentrated within the developed countries, is high. It has been calculated that over 30 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the EU are directly the outcome of food production. Production and application of nitrogen fertilizers contribute most; in second place are the production of livestock and their digestive processes.

Using quite conventional agriculture, emissions can be reduced to some degree without loss of productivity – for example, through improvements in the use of water and
fertilizers. However, further advances in agricultural technology will be needed if increased efficiency is to be reconciled with a substantial and progressive decline in emissions. As with all areas of innovation, how far such advances can be achieved is an open question. Areas to concentrate on include genetic modification of plants that can reduce the need for fertilizers, improve nitrogen use and create improvements in fodder of farm animals.

One should never consider technology in isolation from wider social and economic processes. Government has a major role to play here, alongside private companies and other groups. Advances in technical capacity, for instance, are of little or no use if they do not percolate down to farmers, and if the farmers do not have the knowledge and skills to apply them. Farmers probably quite often tend to be conservative in their outlook, but they can also be agents of change. Communications technology can be deployed to help create activist groups which can in turn communicate their ideas to others.

These points apply to the spread of biofuels. Most of the biofuels being cultivated at the moment take food out of people's mouths – in other words, they occupy land that could otherwise be used for agricultural production. Bioengineering will be needed if this situation is to be transformed. A range of strategies are in play in laboratories around the world. The cultivation of algae forms one promising line of approach. Attempts are being made to alter the genetic makeup of algae in order to be able to produce them in a diversity of environments. Some forms of algae can produce up to 60 per cent of their dry weight in the form of oil, which can then be turned into biodiesel. Efforts are under way to drive this percentage higher.