By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th January 2010

Who said this? “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Was it a. the boss of Greenpeace, b. the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c. an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d. the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society’s most subversive observation into the mainstream(1).

In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it isn’t. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions which sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

As the Guardian revealed yesterday, the British government is now split over product placement in TV programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers and ads will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Mr Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year(2).

Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and well-being. Last week, for example, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”(3). But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak”(4) and “gloomy”(5). High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.

Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world’s poor. Perhaps, but it’s a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800m people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.

In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit(6). There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

Most importantly, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for example, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures which seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.

You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the “I’m not a plastic bag” which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or lucrative new books on how to live without money.

Orwell and Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other partly by greed. Huxley’s nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, “the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly …We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending’”(7). Underconsumption was considered “positively a crime against society”(8). But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn’t work. Instead they used “the slower but infinitely surer methods” of conditioning(9): immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.

Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea which I have now heard a few times. “We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe. … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species.”(10)

This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.

So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and well-being rather than growth? I came back from the climate talks Copenhagen depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens’ summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/01/fsa-adair-turner-green-economy

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/03/backlash-plan-extend-tv-advertising

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/31/economic-growth-recession-uk

4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/01/christmas-consumer-spending-figures

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/marketforceslive/2009/dec/23/marketforces-enrc

6. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/5.full

7. Aldous Huxley, 1932. Brave New World. Flamingo 1994 edition, page 43.

8. p46.

9. p45.

10. EvilTory, posting at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/14/climate-change-battle-redefine-humanity?showallcomments=true#start-of-comments

Date: 12-01-2010

On Saturday 5 December 2009, people across Britain took to the streets to call upon their leaders, and their fellow citizens, to wake up to the dangers of human-assisted climate change, and to embrace difficult changes to our lifestyles and our political/economic priorities. Advent is an entirely appropriate time for us to ask about the challenges that confront us, what is required of us, and how we should act. But it also reminds us that there are no quick fixes and that the future we seek is not our own. Life is, in Christian terms, a gift that we need to learn to receive.

If you had your head screwed on and were looking to change the global system, it is probable that the recommendations of a zealous ascetic calling out from the wilderness (a place of desolation he had deliberately chosen above the lure of ‘civilisation’) would not be the ones you would naturally choose to start out with.

It would surely far be better, and much more realistic, to focus instead on those impressive corridors of power where influential deals are struck, savvy compromises made, and where “something can really be done” by people who are genuinely “in the know about the issues” – as newspaper commentators and leader writers like to put it. In which case the desert denunciations of John the Baptist might provide difficult guide and counsel.

The message of the forerunner of Jesus of Nazareth – another decidedly awkward character – is both far-reaching and alarmingly straightforward. The crises we face with our lives, he says, cannot simply be pushed onto someone or something else. They reside within our own hearts and choices. What you need to do is to choose another path and walk on it, to seek God’s upside-down kingdom before the top-down varieties on offer all around you. How? By living out an ethic of social righteousness (justice) and personal holiness (wholeness). In short, to co-opt some famous words of another prophet-from-the margins, Gandhi, the desert baptiser seems to be saying: “become the change you propose in the world.”

As the Gospel of Luke reminds us, however, this is no Victorian message of individualistic self-improvement and “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps”. It is a call first to undergo a radical transformation at the hands of God, and second to embrace a shared vocation of subversive behaviour and outlook – in the eyes of the conventionally religious and socially respectable, at least.

Luke makes three important contextual links to the preaching of John the Baptist, all of which help us to understand its true significance and radical nature. First, in chapter one, his father Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah, marks his birth with a message of praise to God for delivering the people from their overpowering enemies, and with an invitation to accept the coming judgment – recognising it to be one which is finally full of mercy and tenderness, not hell and brimstone.

There is an important twist in the Benedictus (as we call it), in that Zechariah’s order was one that did not manage to return from Babylonian captivity, as recorded in Ezra 2. 36-39 and Nehemiah 7. 39-42. So he speaks as a survivor, not a victor. Here, then, is a message of recovery and hope in the face of genuine historical tragedy: but one that is not trapped bitterly in the wounds of the past. Instead, it is full of vulnerable (and venerable) wisdom.

Second, the early preaching of John, as recorded in St Luke, prepares for the advent of Jesus with a clear ‘Jubilee manifesto’ – one echoed throughout that gospel. The valleys are filled, the mountains are flattened out, and that which is crooked is made straight. Maybe that doesn’t sound too environmentally friendly, but these are images are actually about social levelling. They are taken directly from Isaiah and refer in turn to the Levitical Sabbath year, intended to take place every 49 years, which proclaimed a radical reforming programme of economic equalisation – including particular favour for the sojourner, the foreigner, the outsider.

This law was never fully implemented, it seems (modern human beings are not alone in their persistent waywardness!), but it was clearly understood as mirroring the heart of God for a true community of restoration and common life. In Luke 4 it forms the core of Jesus’ famous Nazareth sermon – good news for the poor, release for the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed… and the final dawn of what is termed “the acceptable year of the Lord”: a personal and social Jubilee revolution based on the righting of relationships among people and with God.

Third, John’s call for repentance, metanoia (literally, turning right around and heading in a different direction) is set consciously against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, of Tiberias and his delegates – named one by one at the beginning of chapter three, along with the religious establishment. Herod, ruler of Galilee, is specifically reprimanded at the end of this passage. Meanwhile, the examples John uses of a ‘new righteousness’ address distortions in communal living (whoever has two shirts must give one to the person who has none), in the economic system (the unjust imposition of Roman tax), and among the occupying armed forces (extortion).

It would be hard to think of more provocative examples of restitution. No wonder he ends up being imprisoned and executed. The important point is that John is not calling on people to seize control and overthrow the system in favour of a competing one; he is calling on them to subvert all dominating systems by living differently and identifying ways in which what is wrong can be challenged at its roots.

Most importantly, John’s message, though demanding, is practical and creative. It helps to bring into being a new community (depicted elsewhere in the Beatitudes) where status and position do not rule, but active love and solidarity does. His instrument for achieving this is not coercion, legal observance, or religious ceremonial and position – the things that Paul sets aside at the beginning of Philippians 3 – but voluntary baptism. That is, immersion into the life-giving of God: something that will be made fully known and operative through the One who is to Come and by the power of God’s spirit, he says. There is fire here, the destruction of all that destroys (Luke 3.17). But the purpose, echoing the words of Baruch 5, Malachi 3.3 and anticipating Paul (Philippians 1.10), is to refine and purify; to bring out and shine what is truly good and life enhancing.

What all this perhaps reminds us is that in the culture of modern civic religion, baptism has become something very far removed from its New Testament origins. In its early practice baptism signified, via its Jewish Passover roots, being taken down into the waters of death with Christ in order to be released from fear, raised up with him, and joined to a new community committed to living out the difference God’s love makes to every decision we have to take about our lives, our neighbours and indeed our environment (creation).

Later, in much of the 1700-year history of Christendom, it became an oath of loyalty to the concordat of state and church – one that some Christians, Anabaptists and others, resisted as a corruption of the Gospel message, even to the point of death. Now, in the hands of those churches still residually required to offer it for infants rather than adults as a civic duty, baptism is more often seen as a naming ceremony, as a social ritual, as a ‘rite of passage’, as a bit of religious insurance, or – if you are that way inclined – as a way of the institutional church counting or claiming those it thinks of as its own.

All this is quite removed from the disturbing wilderness preaching of the Baptiser, or the even more troubling invitation of Jesus to share his way of the cross. Perhaps the time has now come for the Church of England and others to distinguish between the kind of blessing we Christians should be prepared to offer any and all people at important stages in their lives (like the birth and naming of a child), and an event which embodies and signifies the joy and burden of being fully part of the Body of Christ, constituted and offered sacrificially for the life of the world. To recover, in other words, a sense of church as “a peculiar people” committed to an alternative way of living established by gift rather than possession, grace rather than mortgage, and (in John’s and Jesus’ footsteps) resistance to the powers-that-be when appropriate.

Of course, this is relatively easy to say, and difficult to do. To be a people who are, in the words of the Apostle, “growing more and more in love” so that we can form “truthful judgement and knowledge” and so “be able to choose what is best” in the light of the advent of Christ (Philippians 1. 9, 10a) is a testing vocation, to say the least. But it is precisely what is required of the constant companions of Jesus – a community of commitment and character.

This kind of ‘climate change’ in the church is also what might enable us more effectively to bring to bear on the larger problems of the world (like the other kind of climate change) the impact of the message of Advent hope. The message is this. Change is possible because, in the One who is always coming, always inviting, deep transformation is offered – starting, as John reminds us, with routine faithfulness in the face of human and systemic imperfection. For as Zechariah says (Luke 1. 79), our job is to point with our lives to “a light that is shining on all who live in the shadow of death, and to guide our steps into the path of peace.”

Date: 07-12-2009

Why the sudden surge in climate change denial? Could it be about something else altogether?


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 2nd November 2009

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months(1). Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes (44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action (41%)(2).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that manmade global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled in 2008(3). The Science Museum’s Prove it! exhibition asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they’ve seen the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday afternoon, 1006 people had endorsed it and 6110 had rejected it(4). On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1,2,4,5,7 and 8 in the global warming category(5). Never mind that they’ve been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

It certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically over the past two years. If you don’t believe me, open any recent edition of Science or Nature or any peer-reviewed journal specialising in atmospheric or environmental science. Go on, try it. The debate about global warming that’s raging on the internet and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

An American scientist I know suggests that these books and websites cater to a new literary market: people with room-temperature IQs. He didn’t say whether he meant Fahrenheit or Centigrade. But this can’t be the whole story. Plenty of intelligent people have also declared themselves sceptics.

One such is the critic Clive James. You could accuse him of purveying trite received wisdom, but not of being dumb. On Radio Four a few days ago he delivered an essay about the importance of scepticism, during which he maintained that “the number of scientists who voice scepticism [about climate change] has lately been increasing.”(6) He presented no evidence to support this statement and, as far as I can tell, none exists. But he used this contention to argue that “either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can’t call it a consensus. Nobody can meaningfully say that the science is in.”

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies - climate scientists on one side, rightwing bloggers on the other - he too might have realised that the science is in. In, at any rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the evidence for manmade global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer. I am constantly struck by the way in which people like James, who proclaim themselves sceptics, will believe any old claptrap that suits their views. Their position was perfectly summarised by a supporter of Ian Plimer (author of a marvellous concatenation of gibberish called Heaven and Earth(7)) commenting on a recent article in the Spectator. “Whether Plimer is a charlatan or not, he speaks for many of us”(8). These people aren’t sceptics; they’re suckers.

Such beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, that it’s caused by humans or that it’s a serious problem(9). This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

There are some obvious answers: they won’t be around to see the results; they were brought up in a period of technological optimism; they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to wherever they wish. But there might also be a less intuitive reason, which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology.

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with “vital lies” or “the armour of character”(10). We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker’s thesis(11). When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it and increasing their striving for self-esteem(12).

One of the most arresting findings is that immortality projects can bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self that we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that people who reported that driving boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after they had been exposed to reminders of death(13).

A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption(15). Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

Date: 04-11-2009

What is the worst verse in the Bible?

A poll on the UK-based Ship of Fools website has come up with the 10 worst verses in the Bible. The site invited readers' responses on the verses that most offend, embarass, or are outdated.

The results are a mixture of the most brutal parts of Scripture and instructions that are at odds with today's values.

Topping the list is Paul's instruction to Timothy that women must remain silent before men.


Top Ten Worst Verses from the Bible

1. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.
1 Timothy 2.12

2. This is what the Lord Almighty says... 'Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'
1 Samuel 15.3

3. Do not allow a sorceress to live.
Exodus 22.18

4. Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!
Psalm 137.9

5. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go.
Judges 19.25

6. In the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
Romans 1.27

7. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, 'If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord's, to be offered up by me as a burnt-offering.'
Judges 11.30-1

8. Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.
Genesis 22.2

9. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
Ephesians 5.22

10. Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel.
1 Peter 2.18
Click here to view answer

Date: 11-10-2009

People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 29th Septeember 2009

It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”(1) But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions(2).

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together(3). Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm(4).

The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development, points out that the old formula taught to all students of development - that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I=PAT) - is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I=CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children.

While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a look at a few superyachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they’re accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour(5) I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 l/hr(6). But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3400 l/hr when travelling at 60 knots(7). That’s nearly one litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre(8).

Of course to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jet skis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in ten minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we’re burning, baby.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation”. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”(9) The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise.

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons, except among wealthier populations.

The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century(10), probably at around 10 billion(11). Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing.

But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich.

So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it?

It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Optimum Population Trust, 26th August 2009 Gaia Scientist to be OPT Patron.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/releases/opt.release26Aug09.htm

2. David Satterthwaite, September 2009. The implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change. Environment & Urbanization, Vol 21(2): 545–567. DOI: 10.1177/0956247809344361.

3. http://www.foei.org/en/publications/pdfs-members/economic-justice/gasnigeria.pdf

4. For example, Satterthwaite cites the study by Gerald Leach and Robin Mearns, 1989. Beyond the Woodfuel Crisis – People, Land and Trees in Africa, Earthscan Publications, London.

5. http://www.ybw.com/auto/newsdesk/20090802125307syb.html

6. http://www.jameslist.com/advert/5480

7. http://machinedesign.com/article/118-wallypower-a-high-end-power-boat-0616

8. 15 US gallons/nm = 56.775l/nm = 31 l/km.

9. John Harlow, 24th May 2009. Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation. The Sunday Times.

10. Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov, 20th January 2008. The coming acceleration of global population ageing. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature06516

11. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2005. World Population Prospects. The 2004
Revision. http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf

Date: 02-10-2009