Ecological Debt

Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations

Andrew Simms

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780745327273
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783710591
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Millions of people in the West are running up huge ecological debts: from the amount of oil and coal that we burn to heat our houses and run our cars, to what we consume and the waste that we create, the impact of our lifestyles is felt worldwide. Whilst these debts go unpaid, millions more living in poverty in the majority world suffer the burden of paying dubious foreign financial debts. Ecological Debt explores this great paradox of our age. Highlighting how and why this has happened, it also shows what can be done differently in the future. Now updated throughout, this is a passionate account of the steps we can take to stop pushing the planet to the point of environmental bankruptcy.

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 li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication page
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 A Short Walk to Venus
• 2 The Chemist’s Warning: a Short History of Global Warming
• 3 The Heaven Bursters: Tuvalu and the Fate of Nations
• 4 The Great Reversal of Human Progress
• 5 Ecological Debt
• 6 The Carbon Debt
• 7 Rationalising Self-destruction (Or Why People Are More Stupid Than Frogs)
• 8 The Car Park at the End of the World
• 9 Pay Back Time: the Law, Climate Change and Ecological Debt
• 10 Data for the Doubtful: the Lessons of War Economies
• 11 The New Adjustment
• 12 Minerva’s Owl
• 13 In the Footsteps of Stanley
• 14 Tick Tock Climate Clock
• 15 The Ducks’ Choice
• 16 How to Live on an Island
• Notes
• Index