We Cannot Fight Climate Change With Capitalism, Says Report
As access to cheap,
plentiful energy dries up and the effects of climate change
take hold, we are entering a new era of profound challenge ― and free market
capitalism cannot dig us out. This is the conclusion of a report produced for the United Nations by Bios, an
independent research institute based in Finland. Signs of a world in
turmoil are not hard to find.
People are increasingly feeling the effects of
rapid climate change. Cities boil in more than 120-degree heat, California
burns and the Arctic thaws. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is reaching
terrifying levels, with animals going extinct at about 1,000 times the natural rate. In addition, as societies,
we’re facing increased inequality, unemployment and soaring personal debt levels.
Faced with these
interconnected crises, says the report, our economies are woefully
underprepared: “It can be safely said that no widely applicable economic models
have been developed specifically for the upcoming era.” The paper,
commissioned by the U.N. to feed into its 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, looks specifically
at the next 20 to 30 years as a key transition period during which the world
must radically cut emissions and consumption to have a hope of
stopping climate change. Traditional ways of
economic thinking have been based on the assumption we will continue to have
access to cheap and plentiful sources of energy and materials, says the report,
but the “era of cheap energy is coming to an end.”
The thrust of the
authors’ argument is that, for the first time, economies are moving to sources
of energy that are much less efficient ― meaning more and more effort is needed
to get smaller amounts of energy. There are plenty of fossil fuels that
can still be pulled from the ground but doing so would shoot through climate
commitments and accelerate global warming. In addition, we have used up the
planet’s capacity to handle the waste generated through all our material and
energy use.
In other words, we are
at an ecological crunch point and we don’t have the economic tools to deal with
it. “Trusting that the
free market capitalist dynamics will get us there, that of course is not going
to happen,” report co-author Paavo
Järvensivu, an academic who specializes in economics and culture at Bios,
says in a phone call with HuffPost… read more:
