This piece was written by Caroline Lucus (leader of the Green Party, UK) in ‘do good lives have to cost the Earth?’ It describes how well being and the envrionment need to be the primary goals of policy makers. Also, how both are undermined by GDP and the pursuit of endless growth. Its a smashing article, have a read!
As politicians jump on the bandwagon and support Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a new science, a positive indication that politicians are beginning to understand that happiness does not depend on endless economic growth and material wealth, but rather on contented families, strong communities, meaningful work and personal freedom. They are beginning to understand that treating GDP as a useful proxy for wellbeing can be extraordinarily misleading; and they are therefore groping towards conclusions that good lives, defined as happy and fulfilling ones, don’t have to cost the Earth. And whilst Government ministers might accept the proposition that it is relative, rather than absolute wealth which matters most in addressing wellbeing, they have still presided over a period in which policies have widened, not reduced, inequalities.
But nowhere is the gap between the warm words on wellbeing, and the reality of business as usual, more apparent – or more serious – than in the debate of how to tackle the greatest threat we face, climate change.
Nevermind that Nicholas Stern (author of a government funded review on the impacts of climate change) has demonstrated unequivocally that the impact of economic growth of inaction would is hugely more serious. And nevermind either that this is the best possible occasion to demonstrate that the politics of sustainability and the politics of wellbeing go hand in hand: that if policies to address climate change do require a different economic paradigm, one that isn’t based on ever increasing resource-based growth, then that’s to be welcomed, since such a paradigm might just have a better chance of improving our well-being as well. Put simply, the policies we need to lead good lives are precisely the policies we need to tackle climate change. The failure to grasp this opportunity risks devastating consequences. Let me explain what I mean. Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientific advisor, accepts that in order to keep the rise global temperatures to below 2oC, we would need to keep greenhouse gas content ratios in the atmosphere at a maximum of 450 parts per million (ppm). However, he has refused to call for a target of less than 550ppm on the grounds that this would be ‘politically unrealistic’ by which he means that it would involve such a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that levels of GDP might be affected.
Sir Nicholas Stern echoes him. According to Stern, stabilisation at 450ppm would require global emmissions to peak in the next 10 years, and then fall by 5% per year, reaching 70% below current levels by 2050. “Stabilisation at 450ppm is almost out of reach” Stern says, “given that we are likely to reach this level within the next 10 years and that there are real difficulties in making the sharp reductions required with current and foreseeable technologies. Costs rise significantly as significantly if mitigation efforts become more ambitious or sudden.
Since aiming for 450ppm would as much as 3% of global GDP annually to achieve, Stern implies we should aim for between 500 and 550ppm, a more politically achievable objective, since it would only cost 1% of GDP. And yet, with all probability, this upper target will take the climate beyond tipping point, with temperatures rising above the 2% increase – the point Stern makes clear carries ‘significant risk’ of major environmental collapse, albeit less risk of economic meltdown. We are effectively playing a game of Russian roulette, and betting against a scenario which according to the science, could have a 63-99% probability of tipping us into the worst of climate chaos. If we loose, we risk the lives of million of people and face a future of ever more devastating famines and floods. No wonder Stern himself calls this ‘the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen’. Indeed, it is the centre of our economic paradigm.
The merge of sustainalbility and wellbeing: Enlightened consideration of what contributes to happiness and wellbeing points not only to the direct need to protect the environment, but more deeply to the need to move away from the endless consumerism and materialism: the very changes that lie at the heart of a more sustainable society. Put the other way round, a society based on green policies, rather than on the endless economic growth, would in fact be one which resulted in much greater levels of happiness and wellbeing because of both the direct and indirect effects of greater environmental protection and stewardship, and the multiple positive direct and indirect social, cultural and spiritual consequences.
This is the real challenge for green politicians and campaigners: to emphasise that the changes we need to make to deal with climate change are positive ones, and that the outcomes are desirable in themselves. A low-carbon world is likely to be one in which we experience greater levels of happiness and wellbeing. In richer countries, once our basic needs are met, it seems that greater money does not make us happier. Beyond a certain point, people’s satisfaction with their income depends on its comparibility with a norm which is governed by two universal forces in human nature: social comparison and habituation. Since both of these tendencies are very strong, as Richard Layard puts it, ‘it is quite difficult for economic growth to improve our happiness. For, as incomes rise, the norm by which income is judged, rises in step.’ Clive Hamilton in his book ‘Growth Fetish’ eloquently charts this process in more detail:
“It is vital to the reproduction of the system that individuals are constantly made to feel dissatisfied with what they have. The irony of this should not be missed: while economic growth is said to be the process by which people’s wants are satisfied so that they become happier - and economics is defined as the study how scarce resources are best used to maximise welfare – in reality, economic growth can be sustained only as long as people remain discontented. Economic growth does not create happiness: unhappiness sustains economic growth. Thus, discontent must be continually fomented if modern consumer capitalism is to survive.”
Worse yet, research shows that as we have become richer, indicators of real mental wellbeing have been deteriorating. The environmentalist Alan Durning found that, compared to the 1950s, the average US family owns twice as many cars, uses 21 times as much plastic and travels 25 times further by air. GDP capita has tripled since the 1950s, and yet satisfaction levels have fallen. More Americans say their marriages are unhappy, their jobs are unfulfilling, and they don’t like the place where they live. In the UK, per capita grew 66% between 1973 and 2001, but has failed to translate into higher satisfaction levels. Suicide rates have risen, as have the levels of violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, and substance abuse.
As more and more people come to recognise that good lives don’t have to cost the Earth, there is cause for hope. The last 50 years has shown us all the things that don’t work for human happiness and wellbeing (principally what Oliver James calls ‘selfish capitalism’: ever more growth, privatisation, deregulation, and material accumulation.) The last few decades have shown us, with increasing starkness, what doesn’t work for the planet (principally burning fossil fuels). The urgent task before us now, is to put these facts together.
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