Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations

Preface to the Second Edition

I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman, US Federal Reserve, October 2008

Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger … The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.

Winston Churchill, 12 November 1936¹

Oil is the trouble, of course. Detestable stuff!

Gertrude Bell, Baghdad, 1921

RETURNING …

The elephant is still standing. And still dead. Around its feet glisten hundreds of coins thrown by visitors. They might be wishes asked of the soul of the departed animal. Or, small gestures of recompense in lieu of its fate and the fate of the land that was once its home. Three years since I last visited the Museum of Central Africa in the Belgian city of Brussels, little else has changed. Room after room is full of animals stuffed and perched rigidly against crudely realised backdrops of African forest and grassland.

Had they been painted by your three-year-old daughter, you would brim with pride. As the work of a major museum, they look comic and sad. The joke, too, is a bad one. Passing through to another long room that surveys Africa’s global economic contribution, maps on the wall dissect and label each country, tagging them like the worn, stuffed big cats and apes, and fish pickled in jars.

This is Africa as the memory and promise of wild, exhilarating and dangerous nature. Life waiting to be hunted, captured, tamed or killed. Two crocodiles in a glass case encircle each other in freeze-frame, flexing long tails and grins that seem to keep widening. This is Africa seen as a cornucopia of natural wealth to be mined, harvested, picked, squeezed and taken. The wall maps speckled with graphs reduce the continent in general, and the Congo in particular, to a series of carefully plotted locations for the extraction of oil, cotton, coffee, sugar, rice, maize, jute, palm oil, diamonds, cobalt, tin, copper and gold. One term for it is the ‘resource curse’.

A partial defence by the museum could be that this is real history – it represents precisely how Europe has viewed and treated Africa for more than a century. But the defence fails because there is too little to rescue it from the charge that seen like this, it merely lays the psychological foundations for the future to repeat the mistakes of the past. Somehow, the reality of civilisations wrecked and of peoples brutalised and killed to support Europe’s rising economies becomes dissipated.

When a continent is reduced to economic botany, agronomy and geology, it comes to be seen through a lens of cold accounting, by eyes disinterested in rich history and cultural diversity. But, more recently, a new interest in the murderous story of King Leopold II’s activities in Central Africa (told briefly in Chapter 5) forced the museum, and the nation more widely, to reassess its colonial past. Two rooms introducing the history have been carved out from among the cases full of still air, masks, spears and bewildered-looking big cats.

Yet in the museum, when it does address the troubled human past, the tone is often reluctant, equivocal and begrudging. With glorious understatement it tells the visitor that this history was experienced ‘differently’ by Belgians and Congolese. There is a quiet but repeated emphasis on the involvement of the Congolese in their own exploitation, as if to create a moral equivalence between the corruptor and the corrupted. We are warned that ‘passions and emotions’ concerning the past continue to the present. The display is less forthcoming about another unbroken link with the past, about how there is a continuing pattern of destructive appropriation of Africa’s natural resources, one that involves a similar, if slightly longer, list of more powerful nations.

But even with this nod to excavating the buried history of colonialism, an almost morbid fascination drags you around the museum’s unchanging stone corridors. A fabulous crassness clings to the walls. Here is a flagship national museum in a capital city that is home to the political machinery and administration of the modern European Union. Yet sitting proudly still in its central courtyard, with an imperially upturned chin, is a statue of the man who embodies international relations built on murder, theft and deception, carried out on a massive scale. These are displays not of historical revelation, but of masked continuity. In late 2008, the Democratic Republic of Congo again stood on the edge of full-scale conflict and calamity. Even before then, in just a decade from 1998, 5.4 million people were estimated to have died from war-related causes in the Congo.²

Tram number 44 takes you from the centre of Brussels to the park at Tervuren where the museum stands. As it trundles back again, through extensive woods and parklands and passed the city’s famous, grand art nouveau houses, there is time to dwell on its significance. Although I remain unsure how to interpret the fact, imparted almost with pride, that the uranium ore to fuel the first atomic bombs used on Japan in the Second World War came from Belgian-controlled Congo. After the bombs were dropped, Edgar Sengier, head of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga in Belgian Congo, wrote a letter of congratulation (a copy of which is displayed) to Major General L.R. Groves, head of the US atomic programme. It occurs to me that now the nuclear industry is again resurgent, exploiting climate change to argue for its own interests, pressure to mine uranium in Africa will increase. But in the middle of pondering the impossibly complex over-layering of history, my thoughts get interrupted by a ticket inspector who crept onto the tram unseen as we passed through the woods.

I finally produce a ticket after searching every pocket in my ridiculously over-pocketed khaki shorts. Then I look at him in a way that, to him, must seem very odd, when he gives three Japanese students, who speak no French, no Flemish and only a little English, a really hard time. They appear to have bought the wrong ticket and he forces them to get off the tram while we are still in the middle of empty parkland, a long way from the city centre. From African elephants to atomic bombs, a loosely connected flow of thoughts can easily stumble to an illogical conclusion. But behind the questioning look I gave the ticket inspector, I can’t help the unspoken accusation that more than half a century of colonialism and two atomic bombs on Japan is surely enough, without having to intimidate confused student survivors of the next generation?

A BELL TOLLS … EXPANSION AND DIVERGENCE

I went to the museum for the first time three years previously. My intention was to understand better the ‘official’ version of events about the central idea of this book.

The global economy has expanded vastly, alongside a massive divergence between rich and poor, and has done so paid for by the creation of a huge ecological debt. As a result, we have a world divided, volatile and living beyond its environmental means.

The preface to the first edition began with this quote from Wilfred Owen, that is worth repeating:

There was a whispering in my hearth,

A sigh of the coal,

Grown wistful of a former earth It might recall.

Wilfred Owen, ‘Miners’

(published posthumously, 1921)

It then proceeded:

This is a book about the health of the planet and the wealth of nations, and how the two are linked. It also talks a lot about ecological debt. What’s that? If you take more than your fair share of a finite natural resource you run up an ecological debt. If you have a lifestyle that pushes an ecosystem beyond its ability to renew itself, you run up an ecological debt.

    Global warming is probably the clearest example … Parts of the world like Britain and the United States became very rich by burning a disproportionate amount of our finite inheritance of fossil fuels, an act which has triggered climate change. Other parts of the world like Bangladesh, the South Pacific islands and sub Saharan Africa are set to suffer excessively … [as a result].

    [Well over] 80 per cent of the global economy still depends on coal, oil and gas, and demand keeps rising. But, because we must burn less of these to stop climate change, it means that there is no more fundamental issue than the distribution of wealth in a carbon constrained world economy. This book was a long time brewing. It draws heavily on several, separate pieces of work that looked at obstacles to both poverty reduction and environmental protection. Specifically it grew out of my sense of amazement during the international campaign for debt relief at the end of the last millennium that many poor countries in the majority world had to beg for relief from rich countries that were themselves carrying much bigger and more life threatening, but generally ignored, ecological debts.

There is no reason to change these words. However, producing a second edition enables me to test how well some of the observations and predictions contained in the first have fared. The bulk of the book remains the same, with only minor amendments and the occasional, unintentionally amusing typographical error corrected. This preface to the second edition and four additional chapters at the end of the book are, though, entirely new. They address how awareness of the problems highlighted by the first edition has skyrocketed, and discuss possible solutions in more detail.

In revisiting the original themes, the general conclusion that must be drawn is that they have fared unfortunately well. Going through them one by one, each still resonates as clearly as a bell tolling, mostly for the worst, but sometimes for the better.

Let’s begin by asking a big question. What is the economy for? And how do we know if it is succeeding? There is a confusion of signs.

Before the great economic crash of 2008, waiting lists for the ultra-rich queueing to buy petrol-hungry supercars were getting longer. Pity, for a moment, the frustrated plutocrat who might have had to wait five years to become the proud owner of a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe. To many, it was a great success of wealth creation. The car cost $412,000 and, driven in the city, will creep through the congested streets for just twelve miles on a gallon of petrol. Instead of triggering a cultural shift, the crash appeared to lay the foundations for unprecedented audacity and shameless greed. In October 2008, even when the cost of the crash was estimated to have reached a bewildering $2.8 trillion (that’s $2,800,000,000,000) with hundreds of billions allocated from the public purse to support reckless financial institutions, management from banks implicated in causing the crisis were still intent on paying senior executives multimillion-dollar annual bonuses.

All the time, the real world grew more perilous as the prospect of potentially imminent and irreversible global warming grew closer. Casting an eye at the world economy, the share of the poorest in the benefits of global economic growth, already pitifully small, has dwindled in the last few decades.

A little less than half of the world’s population, a staggeringly large number of 2.7 billion people live on the equivalent of $2 per day or less.³ At that level of income, you’d need a little more than a Christmas bonus to afford the Rolls-Royce. In fact, saving every cent and spending on nothing else, you’d need to live to be around 600 years old.

We have been living at a time of unparalleled financial wealth, even as the mighty Anglo-Saxon British and American economies are wracked by credit (or rather, debt) crises, brought on by banks conjuring too much money into existence. Astonishingly, over 97 per cent of humanity’s financial wealth is estimated to have been created in just 0.01 per cent of recent human history.⁴ Yet the distribution of that wealth is tragically unequal. In the last decade, for every $100 of growth, only $3–4 worth found its way to those 2.7 billion. And in its wake lies a depressingly familiar trail of environmental wreckage, set disproportionately to undermine further the livelihoods of the poorest.

Money should never be the measure of all things, but we cannot dismiss the hardship that results from a level of income that, if endured in the UK, would be the equivalent of surviving on the minimum wage while having sole responsibility to support an extended family of at least 18 other people.

A growing literature explains how the world got to this point,⁵ and at the end of the book I discuss some of the options available to enable us to move forward in a more progressive manner.

In the meantime, let’s make a wild assumption that the purpose of the economy is to meet everyone’s basic needs and lay the foundations for us all to have relatively long and happy lives, and to do so while not causing irreparable harm to the planet’s biosphere upon which we all depend. This means that the economy needs to be trebly efficient. It must be efficient at producing things we need (but not, note, necessarily want, and the things that we need are most definitely not all material). It must then be efficient at making sure that people can get access to and afford the things they need – which could just as easily be more time with their families as something electrical to plug in.

Finally, efficiency must be measured against achieving all these things set within the unavoidable environmental limits of living on an island planet. The ultimate test could be summarised as, ‘How good is the economy at delivering the opportunity for long and happy lives, that don’t have to cost the earth?’ How, actually, we might do this is discussed at the end of the book.

I

A Short Walk to Venus

The fantastic game of monetary cutthroat was described as the process of ‘thrift and accumulation’; the outright fraud as ‘enterprise’; the gilded extravagances of the age as colorless ‘consumption.’ Indeed the world was so scrubbed as to be unrecognizable.

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1953¹

Venus: her principal attributes are a scallop shell and dolphins (she was born from the sea), a flaming heart, torch and magic girdle (to kindle love), and the red rose (stained with her blood).

Hall’s Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art, 1994²

Venus is a planet much like earth. But you wouldn’t want to live there. You couldn’t. Having a ‘sister’ planet might make earth feel less alone in the incomprehensible vastness of space. But Venus’ differences should be enough to make us tighten our grip on our own, still oddly hospitable home.

Venus and earth share roughly each other’s size and heftiness. Venus is our nearest neighbour, passing closer to earth than any other planet. Though, at 39 million kilometres away, you won’t feel the breeze as it passes. When Venus does go by every 584 days, it also disappears from view, turning its dark side toward us, lying too near the sun.

Until space exploration began in the 1960s human knowledge of the planet’s surface was arrested at the ‘made of cheese?’ level. Dense cloud cover prevented real observation. People speculated that the clouds hid a lush tropical world. A world where all the possible forms of life were fuel to fantasy. But the planet, the brightest celestial body in the night sky after the moon, has always been a muse. It was an early navigation point for finding out where we lie in the galaxy. The planet fed mythologies in ancient civilisations worldwide. Study of Venus supported the Copernican revolution that reshaped our view of the solar system. It forced us to realise that we were not the centre of creation.

Now it stands as a silent warning to respect the arbitrary fluke of earth’s liveable atmosphere – a fragile balance of gases that makes human society possible. Behind this warning lies a new revolution in thought, every bit as radical as Copernicus’. It holds another view that will set fundamental boundaries around how we live. It leads also to a profoundly different way of seeing the world. Compared to recent decades, it shows a world turned upside down, one where the global rich are seen to be massively in debt to the poor and not the other way around.

When in 1962 the Marina and later the Venera space probes, respectively from the United States and the former Soviet Union, began investigating the surface of Venus, it became obvious that we would not soon be shaking hands with our planetary neighbours. Beneath the thick clouds of sulphuric acid, temperatures on the planet’s surface were over 400 degrees centigrade. Considerably higher, about double, the heat you would use cooking anything in a household oven. Research revealed that Venus was so hot because it had experienced an extreme greenhouse effect. The same effect that, to a lesser extent, earth is experiencing right now.

The greenhouse effect is exactly what it sounds like. The atmosphere acts like a greenhouse trapping heat that would otherwise radiate away into space. Some greenhouse effect is a good thing. It is necessary to create the conditions for life. Too much, however, like too much of many otherwise good things, can be fatal for fragile species like ours.

Venus is closer to the sun and has a denser atmosphere. The powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is its most common atmospheric molecule. All of these help make Venus hotter than earth. Some believe that both planets when young may have had similar atmospheres, the result of volcanoes belching out gases. Yet today they could barely be more different. On earth the atmosphere contains 78 per cent nitrogen which is not a powerful greenhouse gas. Venus’ atmosphere, on the other hand, contains 96 per cent carbon dioxide, which is a potent greenhouse gas.

The difference is life. Over millions of years the carbon that was once in Earth’s atmosphere has been removed and stored. Today it exists in mostly stable forms like fossil fuel deposits such as coal and oil and in the limestone left behind by organisms. But, that life is fragile. And we are reversing the process that gave us the environment in which we now live with relative comfort. Humankind’s overuse of its planetary oasis means that species of life on earth are becoming extinct at anywhere between 1,500 and 40,000 times the natural background rate.³ At the same time our economic dependence on fossil fuels means that we are returning the powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere around one million times faster than natural processes removed it.

1. The solar system drops a hint. A heatwave conspires with the rare celestial event of Venus passing across the sun in the summer of 2004 to help educate one of the world’s major financial centres, London, about the prospect of global warming.

Now, a confession. Hopefully this chapter’s title – A short walk to Venus – caught your attention. It intends to summarise and focus the planetary predicament in which we find ourselves. A situation is always more clearly visible when seen in contrast. But there is both less, and more, to the invocation of Venus than an informative comparison of different planets’ atmospheric gaseous composition. Calling up Venus, or her Greek synonym Aphrodite, also has a metaphorical purpose. In mythology the goddess has many incarnations. She is not merely the standard-bearer for simple love or beauty. The reference books say she was a fertility goddess whose domain embraced all nature, plants, humans and other animals. Only later did she become, ‘the goddess of love in its noblest aspect as well as in its most degraded’.⁴ Inadvertently, Venus-Aphrodite steps forward from her giant sea shell as an emblem for our age. She symbolises, on one hand, a world of natural resources, inescapably the wellspring of our economic wealth. And, on the other hand, she represents the desires that drive both our necessary and our more profligate, destructive behaviour patterns.

There is an amount of consumption of natural resources that is necessary to meet basic human needs. For centuries it has included the burning of ancient bottled sunshine in the form of coal, oil and gas, to produce energy and also, unfortunately, the guilty greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. This pollution could be called ‘survival emissions’. But there is also conspicuous consumption, a term first coined more than a century ago by Thorstein Veblen in a critical and dryly satirical account of the social forces behind America’s emergence as a global economic superpower. His book was called, appropriately, The Theory of the Leisure Class. When we burn these stable stores of energy so that we can play with sports utility vehicles and heat the private swimming pool, it leads to what we might cautiously, while invoking the images of Venus and Aphrodite, call ‘luxury emissions’. The sexual overtones are curiously appropriate. Different incarnations of the great goddess stood for: ‘pure and ideal love’, the ‘impious’, as well as ‘lust and venal love’.

As a child I remember a sleazy man who worked for my father’s small business. The firm had the unenviable task of promoting innovations in the world of semi-conductors and microprocessors. The employee hit upon the idea, which to him was startling and original, of photographing a collection of products in the company of a topless, local teenage model. The photo-shoot had a backdrop of generic tropical paradise, painted by a street corner Botticelli more in the style of house decoration than fine landscape. At the time I thought hard, but could not understand the possible connection between the girl and the product.

Look anywhere in the British, European or US media and you will find advertisers offering you the promise of fulfilling love affairs with anything ranging from cars to double-glazing, and small white collectable limited-edition china ornaments. The apparently weightless service-led economies of the industrialised world are, in reality, heavy with rising consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions.⁵ Advertisers are the cheerleaders for environmentally destructive conspicuous consumption. Even the largest encyclopaedias lack words to describe the full list of unnatural relationships commercially on offer. It takes time to work out that the basic false promise of consumer societies is that the act of superfluous shopping is also an act of lasting sensual fulfilment.

In this way, in an economy still almost wholly dependent on fossil fuels, and their inconvenient side effect of global warming, our strongest life force is deliberately linked with a behaviour that is inadvertently our most destructive. Back to the parallel with Venus. In fact nobody knows precisely how the complex interactions in our biosphere will respond to global warming over coming centuries. We could be surprised in a few good ways, and many very bad. Earth is unlikely to develop an atmosphere as hostile to life as that on Venus either in our lifetimes or even in the distant future.

But the problem is that it doesn’t need to. Because life becomes very unpleasant for many millions, and impossible for many millions more, long before life is entirely unsupportable. We are now at the beginning of a game of climatic roulette where, already, we are second-guessing the behaviour of natural systems over which, for all our cleverness and technological sophistication, we have virtually no control. Exactly how fragile are we? According to the late pioneering Brazilian environment minister, Jose Lutzenberger, our situation is much more delicate than we usually credit:

The range of temperatures within which life can exist and flourish – that is, the range of temperatures that makes biochemistry possible, the chemistry of proteins, carbohydrates, hydrocarbons, nucleic acids, the building of living cells and organisms, which is also the range in which water can coexist in its three physical forms, liquid, gaseous and solid – is extremely narrow when compared with the temperatures that prevail in the universe at large.⁶

Temperatures range from close to absolute zero in deep space, 273 degrees centigrade below zero, up to hundreds of billions of degrees centigrade in the ‘furnaces of imploding stars’. Lutzenberger invites us to imagine this temperature range as a line where each degree measures 1 millimetre. The line would stretch for hundreds of thousands of kilometres reaching beyond the moon.

All the forms of life on earth could survive on only about 10 centimetres of that line. People could live comfortably on only a fraction of that. A step either side of our few centimetres of tolerable temperature range is a step into oblivion. So now we must walk with care because global warming is the journey we are embarked on. That is why the precautionary principle is so important, because what we stand to lose, simply, is everything.

SITTING UNCOMFORTABLY?

I am not. I am writing by the side of Loch Shiel in the West Highlands of Scotland, staying in comfort at the house of relatives. But even here there are inescapable reminders of what it means to live in a warming world. In the volatile Mesolithic period starting about 10,000 years ago after the last ice age, sea levels first rose dramatically by at least 5 metres as huge amounts of water entered the seas from the retreating glaciers. They then gradually fell again as the land lifted up, relieved from the weight of the ice. Scotland is littered with archaeological evidence of human settlements from that time, old beaches, cliffs and coastlines high above where they are today.

What should someone make of such information? Should we take comfort? The planet eventually found the different, more tolerable, balance we now enjoy. Our ancestors survived, after all. Or, should we take the opposite of comfort? Because history means that we know what the biosphere is capable of. It has been there before. A sea level rise of just a few metres would submerge most of the world’s major capitals. It would take tens of thousands of years to restore a more benign atmospheric equilibrium.

But regardless of global warming, human cleverness has found many other ingenious ways to make life for millions less comfortable than it needs to be. Often, invisible lines connect an international obstacle course of events such as colonialism and apartheid, and economic icebergs like the debt crisis affecting the majority world, and the power of multinational firms that litter the modern world’s landscape. To really understand what is happening those connections need raising into view.

One such avoidable cause of discomfort and, inevitably, death has been the orthodox debt crisis of poor countries. In the late 1990s one child was being born into unpayable debt every second in a way that bore all the characteristics of a new kind of slavery.⁷ I say orthodox because there are other burdensome debts that go unacknowledged, and there is now a new debt to shame the old. It is the ecological debt of climate change. Why call it that? For two reasons. First because we are spending, or rather burning, more of our fossil fuel inheritance than we can afford to in the sense that the atmosphere cannot safely absorb the resulting pollution without being disrupted. And second, considering that the atmosphere is a global commons which everyone alive has an equal claim to, some of us are using much, much more than our equal, safe share. Global warming is consequently an ecological debt that, in scale, will ridicule the convoy of international meetings of governments and financial institutions that have, over a decade, disingenuously claimed to be freeing poor countries of their unpayable conventional foreign financial debts.

THE IN-TRAY OF AN OFFICE IN WASHINGTON DC

It had been a bad day that morning in the Washington DC office of World Bank employee Axel van Trotsenburg. Axel was in charge of the Bank’s efforts towards writing off the foreign debts of a small number of very poor countries. But things were not going well. Few if any countries or people had received a dollar of debt relief.

Worse than that, there was a rising tide of suspicion that the Bank and its brother organisation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), weren’t serious about ending the debt crisis. Instead of winning maximum relief for the largest number of countries, they were foot-dragging because, as creditors, they had no self-interest in seeing the debts written off. Even more cynically, it appeared to many that the deal was being used to dump a package of widely discredited pro-big business ideas on the countries, with little consideration of whether or not they would work.

But that day Axel was a popular man. His postbag was full. For a typically invisible civil servant in a global financial institution it should have been reason to celebrate. The international campaign to end the debt crisis, best known under the collective banner of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, had turned him and his colleagues at the IMF into minor celebrities, doing radio and TV interviews and being quoted in newspapers. But his mail on this occasion was enough to spoil anyone’s breakfast.

An eight year old schoolboy had sent him a postcard asking him why he was killing poor people in Africa? In fact he had dozens of cards all questioning the Bank’s handling of a debt crisis that, according the United Nation’s Development Programme (UNDP)⁸ was responsible for the avoidable deaths of 7 million children a year. Money that could have been invested in health and childhood development was instead being allowed to pay back the governments of the rich world and their Washington DC-based financial institutions.

By 2001, five years on from the launch of an enormously hyped debt relief programme cumbersomely called the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries had met every year, and the financial institutions twice a year, to discuss and implement debt relief. The story was spun to the media repeatedly after these meetings that the poor countries debt crisis was virtually, and then definitively, solved. In the summer of 2001 it became apparent that something had gone disastrously wrong. All 23 countries that had qualified for HIPC, from an original list of 41, were returning to having ‘unsustainable debt burdens’. They were broke in other words. In spite of winning limited debt relief for a handful of countries, everyone’s best efforts had failed. The poorest countries in the world were back to square one. Possibly the problem was that their debts simply weren’t big enough. Unlike the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s that bankrupted several US banks and, it was feared at the time, threatened the whole western financial system, the poorest countries’ outstanding, unpayable foreign debt, mostly African,