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Culture Change e-Letter
#4
Where lies failure of
the World Summit
on Sustainable Development
by Jan Lundberg
"Sustainable development" is almost as much of a
contradiction in terms as "sustainable growth." Yet, more growth
is exactly what the powerful interests are gunning for at the current United
Nations meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. The World Summit on
Sustainable Development is the ten-year follow-up of the Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro, which was about solving the environmental crisis. You might
ask, how can growth be a sacred cow at this point in our overpopulated and
polluted state?
In 1992, my colleagues attended in Rio and we dubbed it Earth
Plummet. As with George Bush the First, no one
expects much global responsibility from his son. The global crisis is not so much one of leadership but of
industrial development and growth as a way of running the world. The
preordained
failure of the U.N. meeting in Johannesburg is due in part to an
environmental movement that is split and compromised. Many nonprofit
groups (NGOs, or non-governmental organizations) in attendance in Johannesburg
are weak on some key issues of sustainability and development.
The rationale of sustainable development/growth is that
"poverty" must be eliminated before there can be environmental
protection. The best example is a person being unable to buy cooking fuel,
so roots are dug up for burning, causing erosion or desertification. What
is not stated is that the poor person digging up roots for fuel had lost his or
her land due to interference in traditional rights, and was forced into a cash crop arrangement amidst a
gangster-controlled, overpopulated country buying arms from the U.S., most
likely.
Moreover, in the assumptions of the industrial elite running the
world and giving out "development" loans, fighting "poverty"
means many more polluting consumer products manufactured and shipped (via
petroleum) for the Third World. That would also mean creating more roads,
motor vehicles, and electric power, to bridge the "north-south gap."
Besides adding more greenhouse gases, the problem would remain that there
isn't nearly enough petroleum to begin to fuel the southern countries'
"development" anything like the north's industrialization and
consumption.
On top of that confusion, the world has been receiving an
intensifying amount of false information from the funded environmentalist
sector that claims a massive consumer economy can be maintained simply by
switching to renewable energy.
What about population growth? Surely, that must be stopped
and reversed if we are to achieve sustainability on a global scale. But
not according to delegates and most NGOs at a similar U.N.
conference in Cairo on Population and Development in 1994: the only politically
correct mantra is that there must be more economic development and
education so that people will have fewer children. However,
author Virginia Abernethy had already proven the fallacy of the conventional
view of the "demographic transition," in her 1993 book Population
Politics. Rather, it is the sense of economic austerity and
uncertainty that guides couples to have fewer children, Dr. Abernethy
demonstrated.
Development must become redevelopment or undevelopment,
so that urban sprawl is reversed. Fortunately, on hand at the U.N.
conference in Johannesburg is Richard Register of Ecocity Builders, who has
devised and brought about sane urban development in Berkeley, California.
In place of building anew and gobbling up more farmland and wildlife habitat,
restoration and repair must prevail which provides much employment.
However, government number-crunchers and their corporate and
academic friends deem poverty to be the absence of consumption. Such as,
no dishwashing machines and other major appliances for each household means
poverty relative to Wonder Bread America. For families to share an oven is
culturally foreign to well-heeled bureaucrats and corporate executives.
Also, there is no consideration for the idea of spending more time with one's
family as a measure of good economics. After all, how can a few
capitalists profit by tolerating that? Ecological development
that restores traditional, community interaction is hardly making a dent in the
U.S., but it is part of the foundation of healthy, long-term economic planning.
Dominating the Johannesburg conference are forces led by the
World Bank. Its vice president for sustainable development, Ian Johnson,
recently said there could be no question of an acceptable future "unless we
can make major inroads into crippling poverty. We believe poverty is at
the heart of unsustainable development." The World Bank has always
served major financial and corporate interests in extracting nonrenewable
resources for major markets, as part of "free trade." Third
Worlders are urged to generate more cash and debt instead of bartering and
subsistence food growing and gathering. The World Bank does not address
the north's greed or contribution to unsustainable development. The last
thing the Bank is going to advocate is fewer north Americans and their consuming
habits, although our population growth threatens the planet as much as any
threat facing humanity and countless species.
Compromised green vision
Serving to obscure basic issues of development, energy and sustainability is the
consensus of funded environmentalist and think-tank policy analysts trumpeting
renewable energy as the answer to the planet's ecological crisis.
Renewable energy does tend to be decentralized, and pollutes much less
than fossil fuels and nuclear power. However, this is not 1960 or 1970; a technofix today is too little and too late.
If, several decades ago, industrial nations had substituted the internal-
combustion motor-vehicle fleet for vehicles powered by renewable energy, this could have brought us all to a different global juncture by
now—provided all countries had stopped population growth. But, with today's sad health of the world's life-support system,
major reductions in energy use are imperative—to the tune of perhaps 80%
reduction in fossil fuel use immediately, says the world scientific community
working in climate studies. Conservation therefore must be so massive as to render
unrecognizable today's unsustainable, highly vulnerable consumer society.
This is because global warming is well underway, with decades of future harm
already unleashed that will take effect even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped
right now.
Yet, the dominating message from the funded environmentalist
sector is not that we slash energy use. Only Dick
Cheney has been more dismissive of serious conservation. The progressive
wing of the status quo pushes adoption of maximum renewable energy as fast as
possible, while ignoring (1) the entropy of uncounted billions of gizmos
manufactured, and (2) that non-petroleum energy cannot feed billions of
people. Any transition from today's agricultural and distributive
infrastructure to a sustainable system requires renewable energy, but how much
is necessary per capita, and for what population size?
Renewable energy sounds good, but how feasible is it in the aggregate?
(Some forms are a net gain in pollution, as in biodiesel.) The information
is scanty and looks doubtful. For example, the proponents of renewable
energy usually disclose nothing on their technologies' "imbedded
energy"—how much energy (fossil, usually) went into making the solar
panels, copper wire, windmill poles, etc. The lack of
flexibility of those energy technologies means that we cannot derive multiple
fuels and materials out of them, as we get from petroleum (e.g., tires, asphalt,
plastics). Again, what could be the population size of the "green
consumer economy?"
Perhaps half the world's six billion people are fed via petroleum-oriented
agriculture. This is highly unsustainable partly because, aside from the ecological
damage, the world is now reaching its peak of oil extraction. This means
that the imminent downturn in supplies will only intensify, triggering shortage,
as the old growth-economy will never come back.
Other forms of energy cannot
substitute for petroleum, partly because the net energy of non-petroleum energy
sources is so low, compared to the cheap oil that once came out of new oil wells
in the U.S. and is still pumped in much of the Middle East. Despite the
petroleum reality facing our overpopulation, many environmentalists and others
anticipate massive population growth as inevitable.
Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC group with a presence in Johannesburg
this week, points out that "Reducing world dependence on fossil fuels
before a major crisis forces an unplanned transition should be considered a
security priority." However, Worldwatch's basic solution, cleaner energy,
has its limitations. Organizations such as Worldwatch over hype renewable
energy in an overpopulated world that is not prepared for the end of
plentiful petroleum.
The funded environmental movement and the status quo of the current, failing
socioeconomic system assumes only the economy's continuity;
therefore, they engage in denial of both the petroleum-reality of overpopulation
and today's completely unsustainable infrastructure. They should publicly
ask, "how big an economy can be supported by what mix of energy
technologies, for how long?"
Several august nonprofit/non-industry
organizations are capable of quantifying the
possible role of renewables. Worldwatch, for one, is responsible enough
not to blindly tout more "clean cars" as the main approach to air
pollution. Although Worldwatch is unsurpassed in providing crucial, timely
detail on the destruction of the planet and positive news such as the number of
additional windmills constructed, the group is careful never to publish or
analyze the twin realities of (1) overpopulation as having been achieved in the
U.S. and elsewhere, and (2) petroleum dependence being so out of control that we
are all well over the brink, assuring an historic population crash.
Finally, unless today's life-and-death global issues are heeded as part
of a rejection of mainstream, modern materialist culture that relies
on exploitation and oppression, a sustainable future is not in the offing.
Fortunately, some of the grassroots NGOs understand concepts such as carrying
capacity (the number of a given species that a given environment can
sustain indefinitely). Such knowledge guides their work and their members'
lifestyles. This is a big part of the network of culture changers who take pride
in living well on less money, in harmony with nature (almost), while enjoying
the conviviality of a closer community within the faltering global ecos which
they bravely defend.
*****
See Culture Change's dispatches from
international editor Pincas Jawetz online at www.culturechange.org/worldsummit.htm
For Palestine-Israel negative "development"
(effects of war), see http://www.culturechange.org/palestine's_de-development.htm
Visit Ecocity Builders' website at
http://www.citizen-planners.org/ecocitybuilders/
For sustainable living strategies, visit the Culture
Change website's page on climate protection, at:
http://culturechange.org/global_warming_pledge.html
©2002 Sustainable Energy
Institute
To e-mail Culture Change:
info@culturechange.org
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