The wealth of the planet

Leading economists of the world, including Nicholas Stern, have cautioned against delay in a global redoubling of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions to bring it down to 80 percent (of 1990 levels) by 2050. A global fund of $400 billion to be invested in low carbon technology can not only tackle climate change, but also help tide over the economic crisis and create jobs.

Looks like even the giant in a hurry to open coal based thermal plants, China, is considering the creation of Low Carbon Zones (LCZs) as against special economic zones (SEZs). The LCZs would aim to stimulate transformational regional political leadership, endorsed at the national level, to create an enabling environment for large-scale innovative low carbon private and public investment. They could pioneer approaches to decarbonisation, compatible with Chinese institutions and development approaches. A pilot has been planned for China’s heavy industrial province of Jilin.

Outlined in a new report, is another concept China is looking at - developing low carbon cities. The program aims to recruit, motivate, and engage 20 Chinese cities in a five-year campaign to transform and accelerate the local market for energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. MOUs have already been signed with the cities of Guiyang and Dezhou.

For all the brickbats aimed at China, its emissions that have overtaken those by the US (not per capita wise), and its pollution, does look like the rising giant is softening the blows to the climate in some ways.

Coming back to the economy, Sir David King, former UK scientific adviser, and presently director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, in a lecture to the UK government also advised politicians not to allow the financial crisis to distract them from tackling climate change.

King noted that with growing population and dwindling resources, fundamental changes to the global economy and society were necessary. “Consumerism has been a wonderful model for growing up economies in the 20th century. Is that model fit for purpose in the 21st century, when resource shortage is our biggest challenge?”

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations had proposed that everyone be free – free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory, free in choice of , and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (“free trade”). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.”

But has this opulence been achieved by everyone??

So, is it time to change the way we address economic growth? Is it necessary to cry a halt to unlimited growth? What better way than reigning in unlimited wants?

As ecological economist Herman Daly puts it: When you have to classify the very capacity of the Earth to support life as an “externality”, then it is time to rethink your theory.

Any theories, anyone?