(Reuters) – Growing economies without emitting carbon is the biggest dilemma of our times, sustainable development guru Tim Jackson argues in “Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet,” published on Monday.

The economics commissioner for the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, Jackson advises that sustainability won’t be achieved through relentless material consumption growth. Instead, a rewriting of the economic rule book is needed to meet the linked challenges of climate change, ecological degradation and resource scarcity.

Following are some questions Jackson answered about his blueprint for low-carbon growth in an email interview.

CAN ECONOMIC GROWTH BE DECOUPLED FROM CARBON EMISSIONS?

A few countries have made more progress in reducing carbon emissions than others, not just through accidents of fuel history, like the UK’s dash for gas, but also through developing renewable energy, like Denmark’s wind industry.

However, in both cases, growth still increases carbon emissions. We won’t get a true decoupling until we’ve transformed our economies into real renewable energy economies. Achieving that requires a massive investment. If we fail to make that investment, sooner or later we’ll run our economies off an ecological cliff.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN RESOURCE DEPLETION THREATS WE’RE FACING?

Those associated with oil. Some analysts believe the peak in extractable oil reserves has already been passed… Even the International Energy Agency foresees real shortages by 2020.

The carbon crunch could come over the same sort of timescale if the worst predictions of climate science turn out to be true.

At the very least, we seem to be on track for a 6 degrees (Celsius) warming by the end of this century. Human life in such a world would be considerably harsher than it is today.

AND TRADE-RELATED CARBON EMISSIONS ARE A MAJOR “HIDDEN COST?”

(They are) the biggest emissions source left unaccounted for in national accounts. Aviation and maritime ‘bunker emissions’ are also considerable. Taken together they already wipe out the apparent gains in carbon reduction achieved in the UK since 1990.

A fifth to a quarter of China’s emissions may be associated with goods destined for consumption in developed nations.

The most likely policy intervention to offset the impact of traded carbon emissions is either a global financing mechanisms funded by the developed nations to reduce carbon emissions in the industrialising nations, or some sort of border tax or tariff on high carbon goods with the proceeds recycled back to the producing country to reduce carbon intensities.

SOLUTIONS INVOLVE SCRAPPING GDP AND GREENING INVESTMENT?

The most important thing is to establish an international consensus about a new national accounting framework — similar to the postwar consensus established around the GDP. (For example) three headline indicators measuring 1. GDP adjusted for some of its most obvious economic deficiencies, 2. carbon footprints, and 3. some measure of social wellbeing.

The new ecological macroeconomics would focus on ‘ecological’ investment: targeting capital at resource efficiency, low-carbon technologies, demand management and sustainable infrastructures (transport systems for instance).

It’s extremely unlikely that such investments will happen without significant changes to capital markets. There is a need for a radical rethink of both financial and commodity markets, to re-localise some elements of financial markets to encourage local investment in community infrastructure.

HOW OPTIMISTIC ARE YOU THAT ECOLOGICAL REALISM WILL PREVAIL?

I am optimistic. It’s an optimism based in two things. Firstly, pragmatism. Optimism is a more pragmatic position to take than defeatism or pessimism, which would have us accept the status quo and abandon the search for solutions.

Secondly, realism. My experience delving into the supposed ‘impossibility theorems’ around economic structure, consumer logic and governance suggests that most of the road-blocks are socially constructed. Alternatives abound.

Source: Reuters

(Download Prosperity Without Growth from the Sustainable Development Commission website here)

(Editing by David Fogarty)

A dozen China-centred auto deals have been proposed this
year, underlining the growing international clout of the
world’s largest and strongest car market. [ID:nSP357901]

Here are some questions and answers about how the shake-up
in the global car market is playing out, and where it may be
leading the auto industry.

LET ME GUESS: ALL ROADS LEAD TO CHINA?

The sole bright spot for automakers reeling from the
demand-withering global financial crisis, high fuel prices and
pressure to up fuel efficiency, China powered past the U.S. to
become the world’s largest car market earlier this year.

While industry-wide U.S. auto sales slipped 27 percent this
year to levels last seen in the early 1980s, China’s car sales
are on track for a record year. September sales surged 84
percent from a year earlier. [ID:nN2873326] [ID:nSHA335461]

The recession-led sales slump that drove U.S auto factory
closures and job losses in the traditional car making heartland
of Detroit saw General Motors (GM) [GM.UL] and Chrysler — two
of its ‘Big Three’ automakers along with Ford Motor Co <F.N> –
file for bankruptcy.

HAVEN’T STATE SUBSIDIES HELPED?

Results have been mixed.

Less than six months after the U.S. government extended an
emergency $17.4 billion lifeline to the industry in December
2008, as part of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program
(TARP), Chrysler went bust in April, and GM in June.

The summertime ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program, which offered
credits of up to $4,500 on new cars purchased by consumers
trading in older, less fuel-efficient cars, totted up nearly
700,000 sales, and around $2.87 billion in rebates.

Japanese and Korean carmakers emerged as main
beneficiaries: Toyota Corolla was the top-selling model, with
South Korea’s Hyundai and Nissan the next most popular brands.
Ford was the only U.S. manufacturer with top-selling models in
the program. [ID:nN26266317]

In Japan, the world’s third largest car market, demand fell
so flat that government stimulus could not prevent shrinking
sales that only broke a 13-month decline in September with a
modest 0.2 percent rise.

While state incentives helped European carmakers stage a
fragile recovery since June after a 14-month slump, the end to
state subsidies now hangs over the market.

In Germany — Europe’s biggest car market, where August
registrations leapt 28 percent — a scheme that paid drivers
2,500 euros ($3,659) to scrap their old cars and buy new,
greener models has now run out, whereas France has promised to
keep its scheme going into 2011.

HOW DID CHINA’S AUTO FIRMS OUTPACE THE DOWNTURN?

With low per-capita car ownership fuelling optimism that
the market is at the bottom of its growth curve, and GDP growth
chugging along at around 8 percent all year, China’s carmakers
bucked the global gloom to reap strong growth forecasts.

The fast-developing local industry, and a multi-billion
dollar government stimulus plan that includes tax incentives on
some car models and subsidies for buyers in rural areas, have
helped pave the way for an expected 10 million vehicle sales
this year — a massive 500 percent increase from 2000.
[ID:nSHA165501]

The country’s car market may grow 10 percent next year even
without government incentives, and industry-wide car sales in
2010 may top 13 million, a senior General Motors [GM.UL]
executive said earlier this month. [ID:nSEO350079]

CAN CHINESE FIRMS CUT IT ON A GLOBAL STAGE?

Geely’s bid for Ford’s Volvo may be among the first to go
through of a rash of rescue-style China deals proposed this
year.

GM and Ford have looked at offloading household names like
Hummer and Opel to virtual unknowns in China to offset
structural overcapacity that sees U.S companies attempting to
shift millions of new cars every year. Tengzhong, the Chinese
buyer of GM’s Hummer aims to close the deal by early 2010.

Observers surprised by these first signs of success for
such deals have more questions than answers about what China’s
rise to the global autos driving seat may mean as the industry
remodels.

Analysts question not only whether China’s automakers have
the expertise to run global auto brands, but how far
politicians who have fixed fuel efficiency as a core policy
goal will attempt to shape and control China’s 100 carmakers as
the industry remodels.

Source: Reuters
(Editing by Lincoln Feast)

In their book “Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living,” New Zealand-based architects Robert and Brenda Vale say keeping a medium-sized dog has the same ecological impact as driving 10,000 km (6,213 miles) a year in a 4.6 liter Land Cruiser.

Calculating that the modern Fido chows through about 164 kg of meat and 95 kg of cereals a year, the Vales estimated the ecological footprint of cats and dogs, based on the amount of land needed to grow common brands of pet food.

“There are no recipes in the book,” Robert Vale told Reuters, laughingly, in a telephone interview.

“We’re not actually saying it is time to eat the dog. We’re just saying that we need to think about and know the (ecological) impact of some of the things we do and that we take for granted.”

Constructing and driving the jeep for a year requires 0.41 hectares of land, while growing and manufacturing a dog’s food takes about 0.84 ha — or 1.1 ha in the case of a large dog such as a German shepherd.

Meat-eating swells the eco-footprint of canines, and felines are not that much better, the Vales found.

The average cat’s eco-footprint, 0.15 ha, weighs in at slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf, but still 10 times a hamster’s 0.014 ha — which is itself half the eco cost of running a plasma television.

By comparison, the ecological footprint of an average human in the developing world is 1.8 ha, while people in the developed world take 6 ha.

With pets’ diets under the control of owners, how can their unsustainable appetites be trimmed?

Convincing carnivorous cats and dogs to go vegetarian for the sake of the planet is a non-starter, the Vales say.

Instead they recommend keeping “greener,” smaller, and more sustainable pets, such as goldfish, hamsters, chickens or rabbits.

The book’s playful title, and serious suggestion that pet animals may be usefully “recycled,” by being eaten by their owners or turned into petfood when they die, may not appeal to animal fans.

Offputting as the idea may be, the question is valid given the planet’s growing population and finite resources, Robert Vale said.

“Issues about sustainability are increasingly becoming things that are going to require us to make choices which are as difficult as eating your dog. It’s not just about changing your lightbulbs or taking a cloth bag to the supermarket,” he said.

“It’s about much more challenging and difficult issues,” he added. “Once you see where (cats and dogs) fit in your overall balance of things — you might decide to have the cat but not also to have the two cars and the three bathrooms and be a meat eater yourself.”

(Writing by Gillian Murdoch; Editing by Sugita Katyal)

Ever been told by a ruthless boss that, “as Charles Darwin said, it’s survival of the fittest”?

Rather than answering that it was actually a one-time sub editor for The Economist magazine, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, or fighting back with an equally wrong comment about someone being descended from monkeys, Darwin academics are calling for a moratorium on the everyday use and abuse of the great naturalist.

Two-hundred years after he was born, and 150 years after he published “On the Origin of Species”, it’s time to check the facts, as “most of what most people think they know about him is not true,” according to Darwin scholar John van Wyhe, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge.

Visiting Singapore for a Willi Hennig Society-organised talk about Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, who is also the subject of several myths, van Whye ran through a series of widely-believed Darwin misconceptions that make humankind look pretty slow on the uptake.First off, he the pointed out that Darwin and Wallace, were not, really, such iconoclasts.

By the late 1830s, two decades before Darwin’s Origin, the scientific community had already accepted that the world was far older than could be allowed by a literal reading of Genesis, he said.

The “Bridgewater Treatise” by the Reverend William Buckland, the first person to scientifically describe a dinosaur, detailed geology and mineralogy’s relevance to theology by drawing cross-sections of the earth full of the fossils of extinct creatures, decades before the two came on the scene.

Second, Darwin did not hold off publishing his theory for decades out of a paralysing fear of outraging his wife or conservative Victorian society, as the popular “Darwin’s delay” theory has it.

The more than 20 year gap between his return from the Voyage of the Beagle and publishing his theory of natural selection is better explained by the fact that he was simply “really busy”, according to Wyhe.

After completing several volumes of Beagle findings, he spent so many — eight — years writing about barnacles that, by the end, he wrote that “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before”.

The next myth concerns the 1858 letter and paper, from his now comparatively little-known contemporary Wallace, that jolted both into publishing action, and has been cited as evidence that Darwin stole Wallace’s ideas.

Wallace’s years of specimen collecting in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and New Guinea led him to independently articulate a theory of evolution that, Darwin acknowledged in a June 1858 letter, was the most “striking coincidence” he had ever seen.

But rather than Darwin performing a nefarious, unattributed, Victorian equivalent of a cut and paste job from Wallace’s work, and racing to scoop the glory for himself, the two published a joint paper in 1858.

Anyone still not convinced doesn’t have to take my word for it.

Facts can be checked at Darwin Online, a complete archive of his works created by van Wyhe.

(Pictures – top Charles Darwin. Right: Darwin’s house, Down House in Kent, southern England, where he wrote “On the Origin of the Species” REUTERS/Tal Cohen)

* This article was modified on 29 June 2009. The original referred to Wallace as having travelled to Papua New Guinea. This has been corrected.

]]> http://blogs.reuters.com/gill-murdoch/2009/06/24/on-the-origin-of-the-darwin-myths/feed/ 0