Wisdom on the Topic of sustainability
Quotations
Climate Changers
We urgently need to stabilise and reduce human numbers. There is no way that a population of nine billion – the UN’s medium forecast for 2050 – can meet its energy needs without unacceptable damage to the planet and a great deal of human misery. We need to think about climate changers – human beings and their numbers – as well as climate change. It is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation.
Digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight
For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight, and while two hundred years seems like a long time to us, in geological terms it’s like a bat out of… well, out of hell. We’re currently injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ten times faster than during the End-Permiasn, which was, just to repeat, the worst event in the earth’s history.
Economic growth will not save the global ecosystem
Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.
Economies that make us thrive
Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.
Exponential growth in a finite world
Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Having Fewer Children and Grandchildren
On the subject of climate change, I think we need to not only think of what sort of planet we will be leaving to our children and grandchildren, but start to think about leaving fewer children and grandchildren for our planet to have to sustain. We cannot stop and reverse climate change if the human population of the planet continues to climb; in fact, it is exceedingly improbably that we can save our planet while maintaining the same number of people we have alive today.
The Human Experiment is Now in Question
Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question. The stakes feel very high, and the odds very long, and the trends very ominous.
Managing our planetary household
The word ‘economics’ was coined by the philosopher Xenophon in Ancient Greece. Combining oikos meaning household with nomos meaning rules or norms, he invented the art of household management, and it could not be more relevant today. This century we need some pretty insightful managers to guide our planetary household, and ones who are ready to pay attention to the needs of all of its inhabitants.
A Planet-Sized Problem
Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth’s climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
Quality of Children vs. Quantity
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
Unprecedented growth in human power
The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. (Take a second look at those figures – human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)