Australia’s CO2 emissions are among the highest in the world, when expressed on a per capita basis. When our historical responsibilities are taken into account, we are 14^th—out of about 200 countries in the world. Nonetheless, political figures and the media like to point fingers at other countries whose per capita emissions are even higher than ours. For example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) spew out nearly 30 tonnes of CO2 per capita, compared to our 19 tonnes (but don’t rejoice—the Swiss get by with about 5 tonnes, or nearly 75% less than us!).

It turns out that the UAE deserve a more careful look, because their enormous emissions tell only part of the story. The other part of the story is a place called Masdar.

Actually, Masdar is more than a place—it’s a project, it’s a city, and it’s a vision for the future. A carbon-free vision. Masdar seeks to become the world’s first carbon free, sustainable city, powered entirely by renewables.

At the moment, there are few buildings that have been finished, and completion of the project is scheduled to occur between 2020 and 2025 at an estimated cost of around US$20 billion. At first glance, that is a very hefty price tag for a city expected to house between 45,000 and 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses. However, break it down per person and it comes to $400,000, which is significantly less than the current median house price in Perth.

So, for less than the price of a house in Perth, a city is being built that is entirely carbon free, that recycles most of its water, and that attempts to reduce waste to zero. That doesn’t sound too bad.

Have you heard of Masdar before? I rather doubt it, I only found out about it through a talk here at UWA. Indeed, it would be easy to miss out on Masdar if you read Australian newspapers: According to a Factiva search, they mentioned the keywords “Masdar” and “carbon” a grand total of 6 times during the last year. By contrast, the words “China” and “carbon” were mentioned in 2,091 articles during that time.

A few months ago I attended the formal launch and information session, at UWA, for this blog site that you are reading. One of the speakers introduced a perspective on the whole conversation around energy use and climate change which I found challenging and helpful. The essential argument, if I understood correctly, is that introducing more renewable energy into the system is not, of itself, going to resolve climate and other sustainability challenges, unless there is, at the very least, a corresponding reduction in energy production from all sources.

What’s the reason for this? Firstly, simply adding renewables without a dramatic reduction in carbon based energy production does nothing for the climate problem. Secondly, adding renewable energy without reducing overall energy production simply speeds up the production/consumption cycle leading to a predicted loss of critically important scarce resources, some of which are due, on existing evidence, to run out this century. What’s the bottom line? By all means, shift to renewables instead of dirty energy but we also need to simultaneously consume less energy as a whole. This would mean, on the face of it, simpler life styles – less energy consumption.

How is it possible to move large populations who have become used to high energy consumption lifestyles to simpler less energy consuming lifestyles? This is an area that Carmen Lawrence addresses as a social psychologist. I heard Professor Lawrence give a talk last year in which she spoke about human beings as being imitative of each other and somewhat competitive. So a simple intervention that has worked in California, and I now notice is happening in my own suburb, is to give people information about their energy consumption in comparison to their neighbours. It turns out that if our energy consumption is higher than our neighbours then we tend to try to drop down to at least the level of our neighbours. A deeper challenge, of course, is how we reduce the energy consumption of a whole population to a lower median level. This is a compelling question for our times.

As an Anglican priest I’m interested in how the stories which underlie our lives may have a role to play in our use of energy. The stories (traditions) that we grow up with tend to shape our behaviour in very powerful ways. When clergy prepare couples for marriage we often find how different, and quite deep seated, family stories about the ‘way we do things around here’ intersect in the creation of a new social unit. These stories could include anything from how a couple makes financial decisions to the way in which they intend to celebrate their next Christmas Day.

If such stories are operating at the family level what about at the macro level of society and economy? Whether or not we live within a set of religious stories there are other implicit, largely unconscious, stories at work. Because we grow up within these stories we might not recognise their power and influence. My children have grown up in a story of privilege and an expectancy of a reasonably high standard of living. This story line has chapters about having a good education, probably going to university, probably ending up getting a good job, living in a reasonably comfortable house and, therefore, consuming the world’s resources at a particularly unsustainable level.

How do counter-narratives get introduced that act as circuit breakers on the story of economic privilege and environmental unsustainability?  I sometimes reflect on this from the perspective of my own Anglican traditions. The Church of England story continues to have close and complex interrelationships with the story of empire. Theology and politics get intertwined in interesting ways. If rulers can co-opt theology in the interests of the state then they tend to do so. For Christianity that has been the case  since the early fourth century when Constantine declared Christianity the state religion, at least in part, to try to bind together a vast empire. In this way the radical, even subversive, stories of the Bible get domesticated.

Within the Bible we find similar tensions lying alongside each other. There are stories of divinely appointed Kings (one Bible story points out that God thought this idea was a bad one at the outset) right next to stories of prophets declaring judgement on those same Kings for the unjust exploitation of land and people.

So what narratives in the Bible could provide counter narratives to the auto-pilot story of endless economic growth?  From a Christian perspective there are two potentially very useful anchor points in the Bible. The first, from the Hebrew Scriptures, is the practice of Sabbath. The second, from the New Testament, is the self-empyting (Kenosis) of Christ. I address each of these below.

The practice of the Sabbath is one that Christians share with their Jewish brothers and sisters. I am not equipped to do justice to the full riches of the Sabbath in the Jewish tradition and will therefore not try to do so. However, from a Christian perspective, since the first century, Sunday (the Day of the Resurrection) has become the ‘Christian Sabbath’. The Sabbath itself points to two other stories which have important environmental implications.

One meaning of the Sabbath comes from Exodus 20. The Sabbath is consecrated as a day of rest to mark the end of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. On the Sabbath we rest because the creator God rests. Rather than 24/7 creation and consumption, we take the time to breathe – to rest – to observe the beauty of both creator and created. Falling in love with the ‘beauty of the earth’ (as an English Hymn puts it) is a good first step for ensuring we don’t destroy it. The Earth is not just a disposable commodity for the use of humans. In the Genesis story, God declares creation ‘very good’. The creation has inherent value even before humans come along.

In Genesis 2:15 the Hebrew word translated as ‘till” (‘the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it’) is most often translated in other places in the Old Testament as ‘serve’. Hence we could say that humanity’s responsibility to the earth is to ‘serve it and keep it’. If humanity has any ‘dominion’ (a word used, in the other creation tradition, in Genesis 1:28) then it is a dominion of service. We might imagine a gardener watching over the land they are planting, recognising that if we don’t serve the land, then the land will not serve us. There is an inbuilt reciprocity. This reciprocity is recognised in Exodus 23 where it specifies that the land, the vineyard and the olive orchid also must rest – in the 7^th (Sabbath) year the land must lie fallow.

So a first question we might ask is – what would be the effect on the environment of a widespread adoption (even just by a couple of billion Christians) of entirely stopping consumption for one day a week? More importantly, this would not mean transferring one day of consumption across the other six. The idea of Sabbath is that it represents a pattern for the whole of life. The Sabbath invites us to a daily recollection of creator and creation so that we will preserve creation rather than destroy it. A Sabbath living would mean a simplified living. This brings us to a second meaning of the Sabbath.

In Deuteronomy Chapter 5 the underlying meaning of Sabbath is a reminder to the people that they were once slaves in Egypt and that God has liberated them. The story of the Hebrews is a story of a people ruthlessly pressed into service by Pharoah. Sound familiar? Try replacing the word “Pharaoh” with “the dominating system”. We only have to watch the evening news to know that almost the only game in town is the mythical “economy”. The economy is the whole rich fabric of exchange through which we receive food, housing, education and health care on one hand and an increasing servitude and environmental destruction on the other. No one is in control and yet we are all part of this collective system – we are complicit in a story of consumption because it’s convenient and familiar.

When God liberates a community of slaves from Egypt and calls them out into the relative austerity of the desert, many are not happy. The grumbling starts – people harken back to slavery in Egypt where at least they could get some food (Exodus 16:1-3). The Sabbath becomes a constant reminder (probably (re)forged in a new  temptation to slavery during the Jewish exile in Babylon) and a reminder that life is more than what we eat, drink and wear (Matthew 6:25). The Sabbath is a weekly invitation to a much bigger picture.

This question of true freedom is an important one. Is the freedom I have settled for, mortgaged to the hilt, and plugged in 24/7 to the internet really freedom? What if I were to stop consuming for one day in seven, not just to fall in love again with creator and creation, but also to break the addictive pattern of consumption? Addiction is, after all, a kind of slavery. How addicted am I to shopping, the internet and everything else? We may find out when we stop, unplug and disconnect one day a week. (Susan Maushard has written an entertaining exploration of her own family’s efforts to do this in ‘The Winter of our Disconnect’).

If a couple of billion Christians were to then carry that less addicted form of life into the other six days a week, what might be the effect on the environment?

The other major theological anchor point which I have suggested for an environmental theological ethics is the self-emptying (kenosis) of Christ. For Christians, Christ is the definitive reference point. Christ perfectly embodies (incarnates) the kind of ‘letting go’ to which the Sabbath invites people. For Christians, the death and resurrection of Christ represents a new Exodus for the whole world. Followers of Christ are invited by St. Paul in his Letter to the Philippians (2:6-8) to have the same ‘mind’ as Christ which involved a complete self-emptying (Kenosis). Self emptying is, for me, strongly suggestive of a general pattern of consuming less – to ‘live simply that all may simply live’ or, as suggested in a more recent articulation of an environmental theology (Sally McFauge), to reduce one’s environmental footprint.

Such changes in behaviour are really hard, particularly when we are addicted to consumption. However, for those who are willing to accept it, Paul reassures people ‘God who is at work in you, enables you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ (Philippians 2:13). In other words, we are given the grace to do what might be quite difficult by our own will power (as any member of Alcoholics Anonymous will attest).

What would be the energy reduction implications of a couple of billion Christians deciding to live the Sabbath? What would we do on Sundays? Walk instead of drive? Turn off the computers? Take a break from shopping? That would get us started one day of the week. What if we then lived the Sabbath every day of the week as a way of life? Because at it’s heart that is what Sabbath is trying to do – the one day in seven is a symbolic reminder that God is at the heart of everything (Exodus 20) and God wants to free us from being slaves to anything (Deuteronomy 5), including the economic system.

We give ourselves, and the earth, a break one day in seven in order to allow space for God to set us free 24/7.

I’ve suggested, in this article, that the stories in which we live and move and have our being can have enormous implications for the way we consume and therefore our impact on the environment. If you believe that God is bunkum and that Christians, like other religious folks, are mentally deranged, then you may not have read this far. So I think my appeal here is firstly to people of my own Christian community as well as anyone who is sympathetic to our strange ways. We Christians like to think that we live within a biblical narrative but I often wonder if it’s really the Bible that shapes our consumption patterns or another story entirely. I regret that I am often as addicted to consumption as the next person. Hence the Sabbath is, for me, such an enormous gift and never a burden. As Jesus himself said, “the Sabbath was made for humans”. God knows we need it and perhaps, more importantly, the earth needs it.

Andrew Craig hit the start-button on a balmy Albany April day. His Landcruiser unhooked from the household power, then the twin electric motors cut in and moved it quietly down the drive. The silence disturbed some people when HydroElectrics first took over the V8 market, so they’d bought the audio option that simulated the sound of a historical V8 engine. Now the only time you’d hear anything like that was when the amplified “chugga, chugga, chugga” of a Harley Electro Hog drifted through the open window.

It was a long drive to Perth for Andrew and his daughter Jenny and, though the sun was shining and the cleaned solar panels on the roof of Andrews’  big Landcruiser Suburban would add charge to the high-test Beijing batteries, but they’d also have to burn some hydrogen before reaching the luxurious Abrolhos Marriott.

This could be the last International Wind Farmers Conference, and as one of the dwindling number of founding members who was still on the ball, Andrew was up for the opening keynote. He had plenty of time to consider his speech. Australian Clean Tech – now a major multinational corporation – had taken over the business and he no longer needed to worry about the 300 big turbines on the property. He’d installed and cared for those whirling power plants all his adult life and he’d done such a good job even the 60 year old antique Danish monsters were still pushing good amperage.

For a wind farmer descended form generation of dairy farmers, Andrew was an eloquent and compelling speaker. A devout Christian, he’d played a big part in influencing his congregation, to embrace the view that stewardship of this green world is of primary responsibility for people of faith. Even so the advocacy of those who shared his conviction would not have carried the day without the cumulating awareness that there was less water to drink, temperatures were inexorably rising and millions of hectares’ of Australia’s best agricultural areas were no longer agriculturally viable.

Andrew was reflecting on the massive events that had accrued overseas that impacted his life. Ironically in America it was the ‘new’ Republicans (now unrecognisable from the neo cons of the first decade of the century) and their chief strategist Arnie Schwarzenegger who in 2020 had pushed the final legislation that mandated a 90 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2070. While at the same time China, had failed to reign in its semi-autonomous provinces, the result being the clean policy legislation instituted in Beijing carried little “stick” for those who did not comply.

Now in 2061, we see desertification across the entire Western Beijing Plains, dust storms from the Inner Mongolian land long denuded of fauna for open pit coal extraction now roll in giant waves from the desert, reducing within minutes visibility to a maximum of 5 metres. Upon retreat millions of tonnes of red sand clog the streets, stores and homes. Economic refugees — mainly famers — have flowed into Beijing and live on the margins of society, the drifting sands themselves having encroached many Beijing suburbs and a social municipal department has been established to try and clear the sand drift in the suburbs. The Chinese Public are not happy campers.

Back to global actions, even more remarkable than the global GHG reductions commitments was the 2023 signing of the international convention that stated: “The deliberate suppression of science relating to climate change and technology that will alleviate the severity of global warming is a crime against humanity.”

Andrew’s thoughts returned to the task ahead. He’d thought very carefully about his speech. He wanted to convey the immense pride in the contributions that the thousands of fellow wind farmers had made to cleaning and greening the country they loved so much. Of course, the efforts by the “windies” had been just a part of the extraordinary Australian and global energy and determination that stabilised CO2 in the air at just below 450ppm; a momentous achievement that many had thought could never be achieved. The announcement prompted waves of celebration, street parties and gatherings across the world. These united efforts by the many across all cultures resembled the UN’s original charter of over one hundred years ago. Here the combined will and determination of the people and politicians and their rapid concrete actions had come together to find solutions to the greatest threat our planet had ever faced.

With the EU leading the way with the institution of tariffs against goods manufactured in countries that would not comply with internationally agreed carbon targets, the rest of the world had quickly followed suit. As the decades passed, they’d watched new industries emerge, along with a healthier and in every way happier society as people had gathered into closer communities and rediscover the delights of a sustainable lifestyle.

With the EU leading and China reluctantly playing ball (no doubt reminded of the economic impact of degradation back home), remitting carbon taxes back to supply the necessary resources to the poor nations of the planet had also led to a new sense of an international accord, and to a view that humanity had somehow returned to a sense of sanity. Weapon sales had been displaced by green technology and products that were designed to be recycled as the biggest revenue earners for all members of the UN Security Council. A remarkable transition that would have been dismissed out of hand by Friedman, Hayek, Von Mises even Keynes. These possibilities were simply not on their radars screen of the future.

Andrew felt good about his life, what he had stood for and what he had done, as Jenny slept the car glided silently along and the kilometres rolled gently by. He knew that the future was assured for his Grandchildren and their Grandchildren.

This post is the first one in a new category of “Free Thinking” pieces that will explore important issues by unconventional but creative means.

Before we can consider whether there are limits to economic growth, we first need to understand what is meant by the term ‘economic growth’. In conventional terms, economic growth means either the growth in a nation’s real GDP (an increase in a nation’s output of goods and services) or the physical expansion of the nation’s economy (note: the two are not the same) (see Lawn, 2007a). So, when people refer to economic growth, what they really mean is either ‘growth of real output’ or ‘growth of the economy’.

Let’s consider the term ‘economic growth’ more closely. The word ‘growth’ constitutes a noun; the word ‘economic’ constitutes an adjective. Hence, the term ‘economic growth’ implies the growth of something that happens to be ‘economic’ as opposed to something that is ‘uneconomic’. In microeconomics – the study of individual markets and firms – the term ‘economic’ implies that doing more of something has the effect of increasing benefits (marginal benefits) faster than it increases costs (marginal costs). Thus, in microeconomics, a firm is encouraged to increase its output if the ensuing marginal benefits – which exist in the form of sales revenue – are greater than its marginal costs. This is because an increase in its output would, under these circumstances, boost profits and thus be ‘economic’.

At the same, one is taught in microeconomics that the increase in benefits gradually diminishes as you do more of the very thing that generates the benefits. This is referred to as the principle of ‘diminishing marginal benefits’. One is also taught that the rise in costs gradually increases as you do more of the same thing. This is referred to as the principle of ‘increasing marginal costs’. Thus, while it is possible for a firm’s profit to rise as it increases its output, the increase in profit is gradually squeezed as the difference between falling marginal benefits and rising marginal costs narrows. Eventually, as output grows, the difference between marginal benefits and marginal costs is completely exhausted, at which point marginal benefits equal marginal costs. At this output level, profit is maximised. The firm effectively reaches its ‘optimal’ scale of production. Any further increase in output lowers profit and is therefore deemed ‘uneconomic’ and ‘sub-optimal’.

This optimality rule in microeconomics is applied to many other areas of microeconomics, such as the utility maximisation of consumers, determining the optimal labour supply decisions of individuals, and even determining the optimal choice between consumption and environmental quality. Above all, in microeconomics, the optimality condition of operating where marginal benefits equal marginal costs constitutes a ‘when to stop’ rule. Grow while growth is ‘economic’ (marginal benefits greater than marginal costs); cease to grow once growth becomes ‘uneconomic’ (marginal benefits less than marginal costs).

Incredibly, when mainstream economists shift from microeconomics to macroeconomics – the latter involving the study of the national economy as a whole – the notion of ‘optimal scale’ and the distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘uneconomic’ growth are abandoned. Consult any first-year undergraduate textbook, where the first half typically contains microeconomics and the second half macroeconomics, and you’d be excused for thinking that the book is authored by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In the macroeconomics section, you are simply told that more national output – that is, the growth in the nation’s real GDP – is desirable. End of story. Totally absent is any notion of separating and comparing the benefits and costs of real GDP growth and ascertaining whether the additional benefits of growth are exceeding the additional costs. Totally absent, therefore, is any consideration of whether the growth in real GDP is ‘economic’ and, if not, whether it would make sense to maintain a constant rate of economic output and focus attention on: (1) producing better quality goods (which would increase the consumption benefits enjoyed from a given real GDP); and (2) producing goods more efficiently (which would reduce the environmental and social costs associated with a given real GDP).

A nation’s real GDP is revealed in the national accounts that are regularly published by national statistical agencies. These are not ‘economic’ statements. They are nothing more than ‘real output’ statements, which is all that real GDP was originally designed to measure (note: national accounts were first compiled during World War II to measure the total output of the nation and its composition – a key concern when fighting a war). Until such time as the national accounts are revised to include indicators that measure and compare the benefits and costs of economic activity, they will never reveal whether a nation is experiencing ‘economic’ growth in the true sense of the term.

Ecological economists have long recognised this shortcoming and have devised an alternative to real GDP as a measure of national progress and of ‘economic/uneconomic’ growth. Originally called the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (Daly and Cobb, 1989), but now referred to as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) (Lawn, 2007b), this new index consists of around 25 benefit and cost items of the economic, social, and environmental kind. What do GPI studies reveal? They show that, for almost all wealthy nations, the GPI rose in line with increases in real GDP until about the 1970s/80s (Lawn and Clarke, 2008). That is, until this time, the growth in real GDP was ‘economic’. However, the GPI of these countries has either plateaued or fallen – mainly the latter – which indicates that the growth in real GDP is now ‘uneconomic’. GDP growth is still generating greater consumption benefits. It’s just that the social and environmental costs of GDP growth are rising much faster, as are our defensive and rehabilitative responses to the negative impacts of growth.

Let us now return to the original question: ‘Are there limits to economic growth?’ The economy is a subsystem of a finite, non-growing ecosphere (Earth). The relationship between the economy and ecosphere is akin to one between a parasite and its non-growing host. Since the former cannot outgrow the latter, continued growth of the economy or continued growth of real GDP is biophysically limited irrespective of whether the growth is ‘economic’ or ‘uneconomic’. So there are clearly biophysical limits to economic growth. More importantly, we need to recognise that there is an economic limit to growth. I say ‘more importantly’ because the economic limit to growth (i.e., the point where the marginal costs of growth exceed the marginal benefits) is arrived at well before the biophysical limits to growth are reached and because growth beyond the economy’s optimal scale reduces a nation’s well-being. The aim of a nation should not be to increase the scale of economic activity until it reaches its biophysical limit, but to maximise the well-being of its citizens. This requires a nation to operate a steady-state (non-growing) economy at or around the optimal scale, which is much smaller than its maximum sustainable scale. It goes without saying that a nation should do everything to avoid operating its economy beyond its maximum sustainable scale. Sadly, ecological footprint studies reveal that more than half the world’s nations are in this latter position, as is the global economy as a whole (Global Footprint Network, 2008).

Given what I believe is a more accurate interpretation of ‘economic growth’, it would seem odd that I will summarise by saying that I support economic growth. But I say this recognising that the time period over which economic growth is enjoyed is very brief. I support economic growth because: (1) as long as the net benefits of growth are equitably distributed, everyone is rendered better off; and (2) to be experiencing economic growth, the economy must be physically smaller than its maximum sustainable scale (i.e., be at a physical scale that is biophysically sustainable). I do not support uneconomic growth, which is what nations eventually confront if growth continues unabated, and is precisely what most nations are currently experiencing. The failure of nations to quell growth once the optimal sale is reached and to focus instead on qualitative improvement is not only resulting in welfare-decreasing growth but, tragically, growth beyond what the ecosphere can sustain in the long-run. Given what this ultimately implies, it is humankind’s predilection with continued growth, not the lack of growth (except for the world’s most impoverished nations), that poses the greatest threat to democracy, freedom in the liberal-democratic tradition, capitalism, and international peace (Lawn, 2011).

References

Daly, H. and Cobb, J. (1989), For the Common Good, Beacon Press, Boston.

Global Footprint Network (2008), The Ecological Footprint Atlas 2008: Version 1.0, Global Footprint Network, Oakland, CA.

Lawn, P. (2007a), ‘What value is Gross Domestic Product as a macroeconomic indicator of national income, well-being, and environmental stress?’, International Journal of Ecological Economics and Statistics, 8, pp. 22-43.

Lawn, P. (2007b), Frontier Issues in Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

Lawn, P. (2011), ‘Is steady-state capitalism viable?: A review of the issues and an answer in the affirmative’, Ecological Economics Reviews, Annuals of the New York Academy of Science, 1219, pp. 1-25.

Lawn, P. and Clarke, M. (eds) (2008), Sustainable Welfare in the Asia-Pacific, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

It’s beginning to add up. After some period of uncertainty, the picture that emerges is beginning to fit into the neo-McCarthyite pattern of attack on scientists that has become all too common in the United States.

It’s been nearly two months since a scientist working for the “U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Enforcement and Regulation” (BOEMRE), Dr Charles Monnett, was placed on administrative leave after an ongoing investigation.

An investigation of what? Well, no one quite knows, least of all Dr Monnett, who was kept in the dark about the nature and source of the allegations against him.

What we now know for sure is this:

Dr Monnett published a paper in 2006 that reported the discovery of several floating bodies of polar bears, presumed drowned while trying to swim across long ice-free distances in the Arctic Ocean. This article was only one of hundreds that have attested to the perilous decline of Arctic eco-systems resulting from global warming, but it attracted a lot of attention at the time and helped put the fate of polar bears onto the political agenda.

Earlier this year, the investigating officer, full of bravado but devoid of 5^th-grade arithmetic, repeatedly quizzed Dr Monnett about this particular paper, trying to find fault where peer review had found none. Following the earlier release of written transcripts, a video recording of this investigation has now also been made available.

When this affair became known to the public, BOEMRE issued a statement that Dr Monnett was being investigated for administrative matters, involving “collateral duties involving contracts.” The investigation, it was said, had “nothing to do with scientific integrity, [or] his 2006 journal article.”

Notwithstanding this public statement, a subsequent interview of Dr Monnett again focused on the 2006 journal article.

In the meantime, representatives of Dr Monnett lodged a complaint with the U.S. Department of the Interior about this Kafkaesque investigation. The Department’s Scientific Integrity Officer has therefore now in turn launched an inquiry of BOEMRE Director Michael Bromwich and others.

And now, Dr Monnett has returned to work after 6 weeks on administrative leave without any charges being leveled against him. Oh, and a stop-work order issued by BOEMRE against a Canadian university they had been funding to conduct research on … guess … polar bears has also been rescinded.

So the “case” against Dr Monnett is imploding and the folks who pushed this “case” are now being asked to explain themselves. Sadly, those explanations may be delayed or compromised by the purported fact that a hard drive of a key BOEMRE manager was found to have been wiped clean after the investigator sought his files.

Definitely time to settle in and get some more popcorn.

What are the important lessons to draw from this?

Irrespective of the final outcome of this affair, it is abundantly clear that a U.S. government scientist was interrogated repeatedly and thoroughly over a purely scientific matter, notwithstanding the agency’s public rhetoric invoking contract management. The transcripts of the interviews simply permit no other conclusion.

It is also abundantly clear that when Dr Monnett’s administrative leave was first announced, it was pounced upon with glee and delight by those who deny the fact that the Earth is warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions.

Neither of those facts is new.

It is all beginning to add up and it fits into a pattern that has now, sadly, become routine:

Somehow someone manages to launch an “investigation” of a scientist or group of scientists with great public fanfare about “scientific misconduct.” There are numerous ways in which this can be achieved, for example by stealing people’s emails or by just sending a sufficiently large number of abusive emails to a university, or by issuing legal threats, or by filing frivolous FOI requests.

The denialist echo chamber on the internet recycles and amplifies the story until it is reported by the “mainstream” media. Pliable politicians and vested interests keep the story alive with dark mutterings that are dutifully reported by the media. Eventually, however, public interest subsides and the next “investigation” must be manufactured. So the cycle resumes with step 1 above.

In the meantime, the investigation finds no impropriety among the scientists. So another investigation is requested and launched, until that also completely exonerates the scientists involved. Needless to say, those serial exonerations usually fail to be widely reported because for our gullible media it is so much more interesting to froth over the next manufactured “scandal” involving an inconvenient scientist, rather than to face up to the fact that there is a pattern here.

The pattern is a systematic McCarthyite assault on climate science and climate scientists.

Anyone who continues to ignore this pattern will have to explain themselves.

To their grandchildren.

Because for them the laws of physics will not be something that can be denied but will be the challenge dominating their lives.

As Carmen Lawrence has pointed out here in her series on economic growth and human well-being, the issue of climate change is directed related to that of economic growth.  Our endless quest for growth is leasing us up against planetary limits in resources (resource limits) and in the earth’s capacity to absorb the outputs of that growth (sink limits).  Climate change is essentially an atmospheric sink limit that demonstrates the planet’s growing inability to absorb further emissions of carbon dioxide without significant disruption to the climate system. Growth and climate change are running into each other and this impasse will not be solved without a transformation in the way we define, measure and regulate economic growth. 

One of the central issues with growth is that economies are both regulated (by governments) and self-regulated (by organisations and families and personal behaviours) according to certain economic indicators.  The dominating player among those indicators is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The problems associated with using GDP as a global indicator of national progress are well known.  In September last year the former Secretary to the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry, made a speech in which he pointed out that policy makers need to “appreciate [the] limitations … of GDP as a measure of economic well-being or progress” (Henry, 2010, p. 23).  Cautionary warnings like this have been made for many decades (see, for example, Kennedy 1968) and yet our infatuation with the GDP indicator continues to such a degree that growth is taken as the general measure for economic, social and cultural advancement at every level of decision-making from the corporate, to the national and global levels. 

What I want to point out here is that individuals, organisations, governments and virtually the whole international economies self-regulate their economic behaviour according to this single measure.  My point is not so much that GDP is a bad measure of real, sustainable and sustaining growth (which it is), but that we need such measures to set our economic direction at all levels of social existence from the micro to the macro and mundo. 

While GDP figures are released only every quarter, the flood of more specific indicators of economic performance are announced daily and their primary role is to act as proxies for estimating annualised GDP figures and predictors of future growth rates. In between the quarterly GDP announcements we use company profits, interest rates, job advertisements, home loan approvals, house prices, unemployment rates, car registrations and many other economic indicators as indicators for economic growth and adjust our economic goals and future plans at the state, national and international levels accordingly.  Whether it was intended as such or not, GDP, as a measure of economic growth, has become the compass by which we set our course into the future, the main gauge by which nations and the global community judge their ongoing progress. 

The problem is that this GDP compass is setting us off in a completely wrong direction if we want to attack the true causes of climate change and secure a sustaining and sustainable environment for advancing national or international development. 

Economists have long noted the problems in how GDP growth is calculated and used (Duncan & Gross 1995; Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi 2009).  David Gruen (Director of Macroeconomics at the Department of the Treasury) recently argued that the way we currently use GDP actually risks “the wellbeing of future generations” (Tandon 2010).  In the absence of a more inclusive measure of development, the holy grail of achieving endless growth as measured by GDP is no longer something to celebrate or even aim for. The thing is, however, that we need some measure of national development and while there are several alternative measures in the wings (Hagerty et al. 2001), none of them is ever likely to compete with, or even complement, GDP as a global indicator of national growth. 

What is needed is a new kind of regulatory intervention to reshape and re-contextualise GDP itself.

Of course, GDP needs to include and integrate broader indicators of production including those that measure the input of cultural, biological and environmental systems.  As the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi (2009, p. 12) report states, “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s wellbeing” (emphasis in the original) and, I would add, people’s wellbeing cannot be separated from the health of cultures and natural environments.

The need to broaden GDP (or someother measure of national advancement) is clear but what is not so well acknowledge is the self-regulating power that such measures hold over personal, familial and communal behaviours and economic choices. Thus, we not only need a more inclusive and balanced measure of growth, as represented by a reformed GDP, but we also need new regulatory mechanisms for harnessing the self-regulatory power that such national measures unlock. 

Ken Henry points out, “the metrics we use to measure our goals affect the path we take to reach our goals” (Henry, 2010, p. 24).  This means that our indicators of macro-level national progress and growth regulate the micro- and meso-level behaviours we engage in (as individuals, organisations and communities) to pursue those national goals. 

This is where the notion of meta-regulation enters the picture: Regulating the indices we use to achieve national goals is a form of meta-regulation that can potentially guide our economic behaviour towards more sustaining and enriching national goals. Where traditional command-and-control forms of government regulation attempt to directly control organisational and corporate activities through legislated standards, meta-regulation guides the (self-)regulatory process itself. Morgan (2003, p. 490) defines meta-regulation this way: “[Meta-regulation] captures a desire to think reflexively about regulation, such that rather than regulating social and individual action directly, the process of regulation itself becomes regulated.”

Supporting the recommendations of Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi and others, the meta-regulation of GDP would involve the deliberate broadening of the indicator to include and integrate measures of social, cultural and environmental well-being. But even more importantly, the lens of meta-regulation provides a means for seeing how our inherent enthusiasm for achieving “growth” can be expressed via more sustainable activities and more enriching goals. 

A root-and-branch solution to climate change will not emerge without the meta-regulation of (inter)national measures of economic advancement. 

This, of course, also means that there will need to be some kind of international co-ordination of such measures.  Whatever the actual constituent elements of those measures will be, the central role of meta-regulation and its co-ordinated governance will need to be acknowledged.     

Meta-regulation provides a new lens for understanding the dynamics involved in our infatuation with GDP and how we might alter it to target more balanced goals.  For example, GDP and its ancillary indicators constitute a dynamic feedback system that we and our organisations use to inform our mindsets, behaviours, goals and intentions.  This is particularly true for international and global issues such as climate change, which cross all kinds of national and jurisdictional boundaries.  Focusing on the meta-regulatory potential offered via indicators such as GDP can unlock organisations’ inherent energies for attaining goals. 

Whereas direct command-and-control regulation enforces standards through imposing sanctions and restrictions, meta-regulatory interventions aimed at improving indices of success tap into our self-generated capacities for change and creativity (Parker 2002). Through regulating the goal of development rather than trying to control behaviour itself, the conditions for self-regulation, self-determination and innovation are supported rather than suppressed.  And so the meta-regulatory task of guiding private and public organisations to achieve certain goals “is premised upon a change in mentalities or culture, rather than on coercion” (Scott 2003, p. 214). 

If our measures of success, as exemplified in GDP growth, continue to tell us that unlimited production and consumption of goods and services is the great national goal and that we need not bother with the long-term, planetary implications of our economic actions, then the multiple crises that face us in the 21^st century will only deepen. In particular the climate change crisis will deepen and, as Naomi Oreskes has pointed out, lead to much greater and more direct regulatory actions of the command and control variety. Such old-style regulations will themselves have many unforeseen impacts on natural environments as well as social conditions. I don’t see that regulatory option ending in anything but unwanted consequences and massive social unrest. On the other hand, meta-regulatory interventions have the potential to capture innate social and psychological forces that use people’s inherent drives for healthy innovation and balanced growth of a more grounded and holistic nature. The meta-regulation of these growth indicators can help us turn a reflexive eye onto the compasses we use to set the direction of our domestic as well as national economies.  The alternative of staying the course with a broken compass is not a sensible option.  

References

Duncan, J & Gross, AC 1995, Statistics for the 21st century: Proposals for improving statistics for better decision making, Irwin Professional Pub. , Chicago.

Hagerty, MR, Cummins, RA, Ferriss, AL, Land, K, Michalos, AC, Peterson, M, Sharpe, A, Sirgy, J & Vogel, J 2001, ‘Quality of Life Indexes for National Policy: Review and Agenda for Research’, Social Indicators Research, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 1-96.

Kennedy, RF, Remarks of Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968, University of Kansas. Available from: <http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/.aspx>. [April 14].

Morgan, B 2003, ‘The Economization of Politics: Meta-Regulation as a Form of Nonjudicial Legality’, Social & Legal Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 489-523.

Parker, C 2002, The Open Corporation, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.

Stiglitz, JE, Sen, A & Fitoussi, J 2009, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

Tandon, S, 17th Sept. 2010, Treasury admits GDP used inappropriately, ABC. Available from: <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/17/3015176.htm>.

This is an updated and extended version of an article that first appeared on The Conversation.

Discussion of the proposed carbon tax is practically inescapable for most Australians at the moment, but the proliferation of information doesn’t mean that things become more understandable.

This is particularly true for homeowners and those who are about to build a home.

Some housing and construction industry lobby groups claim that the carbon tax will increase the cost of an average new home by over $6,000. So that would be from around $313,000 to $319,000.

However, there are reasons to be skeptical of those claims, and the cost is likely to be much less than that. According to our analyses, the average 3 x 2 brick veneer home in Australia creates around 80 metric tons of carbon due to its materials, construction, and maintenance over its entire design life. If the proposed carbon price is to be $23.00 per ton of carbon, this equates to only around $1840.00 in additional cost for the average new home due to the carbon tax.

Because many trade-exposed industries, such as cement, steel, aluminium and glass-making qualify for up to 94.5 percent shielding from the tax, the resulting end cost will not be anywhere near as high as that. In fact, the end-cost to someone building a new home may only be around $100 for the average Australian home.

So your new home will cost $100 extra.

That’s $313,100 instead of $313,000.

In addition, if you are building a home you can request a number of easy, cost-effective ways to reduce the amount of embodied carbon and energy contained within a new home. This will also reduce the financial impact. 

For example, you could specify fly-ash as a substitute for cement in concrete, which would significantly reduce the embodied carbon of a new home, without affecting its structural integrity. There are also a number of cost-effective, low-carbon building materials available on the market. By making smart choices, the proposed carbon tax could have a negligible cost impact on the construction of new homes—in fact, the whole point of the tax is to empower consumers to make low-carbon choices.

It is only through the tax that carbon becomes “visible” during your purchasing decisions: By making wise choices, you can reduce not only your costs but also our emissions.

However, selecting low-carbon materials is just the first step in preparing for a low-carbon economy: We should also be designing our homes so they require less energy for heating and cooling, be selecting energy-efficient lighting and appliances, and considering renewable energy alternatives. All of these steps help to reduce our energy consumption and carbon emissions, without compromising our lifestyle.

Simple steps such as these are easy to integrate in the early design stages of a project, and will create homes that are more enjoyable to live in. As the focus on sustainability increases, these elements of design will grow in value as homebuyers increasingly recognize these as desirable design features.

The transition to a low-carbon economy is inevitable. Prospective homebuyers can do their part in the transition for $100.

In two recent posts (here and here), colleague David Hodgkinson eloquently presented the case for nuclear power as one strategy to deal with climate change. Rather than revisiting all arguments in favour of nuclear power or against it, he focused on three core issues: (a) expense, (b) nuclear waste, and (c) militarization. In addition, Hodgkinson suggests that unless we put in place an infrastructure now, an ostensibly “cheap” nuclear power option will be precluded when the world gets serious about emission cuts within the next 10 years or so.

In this counterpoint, I note several points of agreement with Hodgkinson while also raising several other issues that, in my view, speak against reliance on nuclear power as an alternative source of energy.

(a) Expenses

There is no question that coal-generated power today is comparatively cheap only because the full externalities—namely, the short-term environmental and long-term climatological costs of emissions from fossil fuels—are not included in the cost of power generation. But does this necessarily mean that nuclear power would be the preferred alternative if the externalities of fossil fuels were considered?

Two points speak against that: First, throughout the history of nuclear power realistic insurance coverage has proved impossible to obtain on the free market. This suggests that the costing of the nuclear option has been ignoring large externalities—namely the true risk of its operation—in much the same way as coal.

The true cost of nuclear power is hidden because around the world governments have been condoning the operation of reactors without insisting on insurance coverage that is commensurate to the actual risks. (The situation varies from country to country, but this statement is an accurate summary).

It is extremely doubtful that a privately-insured nuclear industry would be viable at all. The world’s taxpayers are thus ultimately underwriting an industry that private insurers won’t cover in full.

Does this sound like the energy of the future?

(b) Waste

The issue of nuclear waste is sufficiently complex to escape summary in a few blog posts. What is certain, however, is that nuclear power generation to date has created a large amount of “legacy waste” that is as nasty as it is long-lasting. Nastier, by far, than the original nuclear fuel which seems vegetarian by comparison to the waste product.

How long-lasting? Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

So, in a less-than-benign sense, nuclear power already is the power of the future—and it will remain a future consideration for thousands or more years even after the last reactor is switched off. (There may be a technological solution to this problem but at the moment it appears inadvisable to take it for granted.)

Philosopher John Nolt from the University of Tennessee has recently argued (e.g., Nolt, 2011) that our inaction with respect to climate change is tantamount to the “domination” of future generations—and hence deeply unethical because those future generations have had no say in the fate that we bequeath upon them. The same argument can be made about leaving behind nuclear waste for generations to come: None of those generations had a choice in the matter, and yet we are forcing them to deal with the potentially devastating consequences that arise from our (arguably) poor policy decisions.

In a nutshell, a strong argument can be made that passing on a large and inescapable risk to future generations is unethical.

And surely, our future energy should not be unethical.

(c) Militarization

Hodgkinson argues that militarization of nuclear power is without precedent and the risk overstated. I agree. But recent events surrounding Iran, which by the accounts of the IAEA only has a peaceful nuclear program (no military activities have been convincingly uncovered to date), shed another light on this matter.

And that is the risk to peace and democracy not by direct militarization but by possibly even more pernicious indirect routes that inevitably arise from civilian generation of nuclear power. Simply put, nuclear power, even if pursued entirely for peaceful purposes, poses a security risk. Unlike a wind turbine, which may at worst rob a bank, nuclear reactors are an acknowledged attractive target for terrorists.

And because they are a target for terrorism, and because the consequences of a terror attack on nuclear installations are particularly devastating, responsible governments are forced to ramp up the security apparatus surrounding nuclear power. The resulting likely erosion of democracy was analysed by Robert Jungk in the 1970s in his book the Nuclear State. (Google link here.)

A full analysis of Jungk’s thesis is beyond the present scope: Suffice it to say that at the very least, awareness of the implications of nuclear power for democracy must be firmly on the radar for anyone who is considering the future of energy generation in Australia.

(d) Future options

Hodgkinson argues that once the world gets serious about emission cuts, Australia needs to be ready by preparing a nuclear infrastructure now, lest we get caught out by having to rely entirely on renewable energy sources.

But would that be all that bad?  

In this context it is crucial to consider the actions of Germany, which has just decided to exit nuclear power at a rapid pace. At the same time, Germany is pursuing aggressive emission cuts—40% by 2020 compared to 1990 and 80-95% by 2050.

How?

By pursuing a three-pronged strategic plan.

Lest one think that Australia does not have the intellectual or material resources to pursue a similar energy future, a blueprint for our future can be found here.

At the moment, however, the future is taking place elsewhere. While some Australian cities are blessed with 3000 or more hours of sunshine per year (e.g., Perth, with 3200 hours), German cities must make do with just over half that (1700 hours is considered luxurious by German standards).

Yet, Germany has 17,000 MW of installed solar power-generating capacity, compared to Australia’s 300 MW.  Adjusted for hours of sunshine, that’s 100 times more than Australia. Which is one reason why we are one of the dirtiest power generators on this planet.

References

Nolt, J. (2011). Greenhouse gas emission and the domination of posterity. In Arnold, D. G. (Ed.),  The ethics of global climate change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 60-76

Some time ago we introduced the Earthworker Cooperative, a cooperative dedicated to providing finance, assistance with marketing strategy, R&D and networking of the various, loose strands of the social sector of the Australian economy. Their goal is to create a powerful force for the collective good, on behalf of its member cooperatives, unions, shire councils, faith-based communities and individuals.

Earthworker Cooperative is a social enterprise with a mission to create realistic solutions for transitioning Australia’s workforce into a low carbon economy. It aims to create jobs, build social capital and protect the environment in local communities by building workers cooperatives engaged in the manufacture of renewable energy infrastructure.

Their first project is to establish a workers’ cooperative in Morwell, Victoria. Eureka’s Future Workers Cooperative will manufacture and then sell solar hot water systems collectively through union-employer Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, or other bulk purchasing arrangements.

Earthworker is now entering a new phase because, in their words: “The only problem in achieving our goal has arisen from an over-reliance on governments to do the job for us. What government bureaucracies have been telling us, what everyone has been telling us, is that we should come see them when we have something to show them. “

Earthworker is therefore calling upon everyone across the Australian community, to do their part to ensure that manufacturing jobs in factories owned directly by communities produce the renewable products our country needs.

Getting involved is easy: visit www.earthworkercooperative.com, have a look at the single set of aims and objectives – and second, contribute a $20 membership fee. Earthworker Cooperative’s immediate objective is to enlist 100,000 Australians to contribute $20 per member to create clean-energy jobs in Australia.

Something does not add up.

About two weeks ago, a scientist working for the “US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Enforcement and Regulation” (BOEMRE), Dr Charles Monnett, was placed on administrative leave.

In effect, he was banned from his place of work and was formally placed under investigation.

For what?

This is where things get murky, especially because Dr Monnett apparently has not been informed of the charges against him.

What is known, however, is that Dr Monnett published a paper in 2006 that reported the discovery of several floating bodies of polar bears, presumed drowned while trying to swim across long ice-free distances in the Arctic ocean. This article attracted a lot of attention at the time and helped put the fate of Arctic animals, and the effects of climate change onto the Arctic, onto the political agenda.

It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that Dr Monnett’s suspension was greeted with glee and delight by those who deny the fact that the Earth is warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions. Their conclusion, as obvious to them as it was unwarranted by the available information, was that Dr Monnett’s scientific work was under investigation and hence should not be trusted. The polar bear, the Arctic, and the planet are just fine now, and CO2 emissions nothing to worry about, because one biologist has been placed on administrative leave.

BOEMRE later issued a statement that Dr Monnett’s suspension had nothing to do with his scientific work in general or the polar-bear study in particular. BOEMRE said that Dr Monnett was being investigated for administrative matters, involving “collateral duties involving contracts.” The investigation, it was said, had “nothing to do with scientific integrity, [or] his 2006 journal article.”

But why, then, did the same internal investigator who is about to interview Dr Monnett again on 9 August about those contractual matters, quiz Dr Monnett about his polar bear work at great length in February 2011?

And why did this same investigator, a certain Eric May who very evidently has no scientific training or knowledge, interview another scientist on the same issue of polar bear research in January of 2011?

(The two transcripts linked in the preceding paragraphs are worthy of study, especially if you are a fan of Franz Kafka.)

By the way, BOEMRE’s website clarifies that it “is the federal agency responsible for overseeing the safe and environmentally responsible development of energy and mineral resources on the outer continental shelf.” Accordingly, “BOEMRE is leading the most aggressive and comprehensive reforms to offshore oil and gas regulation and oversight in U.S. history.”

Last month, President Obama issued an order to speed up Arctic drilling permits.

Something does not add up.

Or does it?