The Sustainability Bubble

A couple of weeks ago, Yale e360 published a great article by Christian Schwägerl titled "A Planetary Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste." It's a nice straightforward piece highlighted the similar dynamics in the failing economic system and failing ecological system.

The two of course are inexorably linked - or I should say, the economic system is a subset of the ecological system, the former doesn't exist without the latter (ecological systems of course would go right on truckin' in the absence of a human economic system).

Image: Erik Madigan Heck for 
The New York Times

This recent article about Jeremy Grantham - "Can Jeremy Grantham Profit from Ecological Mayhem?" - reinforces this basic tenet of sustainability.  As we approach "Peak Everything Else," we are inflating the biggest bubble of all time - but it's not prices that will fall when it bursts, it's our complex modern society.

Image: Chelsea Green

Given the size of the 'sustainability bubble' it inflates more slowly and there are factors that periodically let air out or enable it to grow bigger without popping, but eventually we know it will pop if we don't make dramatic changes to the way we do things.  Just like there were plenty of people who were brushed off for years as they pointed out the housing and credit bubble would burst, people who have been bringing attention to the sustainability crisis have had trouble really breaking into the mainstream - dismissed as alarmists.  Forty years ago the authors of Limits to Growth faced this dismissal.  Many often point to the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon that the article references as proof that technology and innovation will save us when the price signals demand it; they picked 5 commodities and bet if their prices would be higher in the next 10 years.  Simon bet innovation would bring the prices down and he was right, 5-0.  But, as the article points out, today Ehrlich's winning 4-1.

Image: Chelsea Green

Alan AtKisson's Believing Cassandra does an excellent job of articulating this dilemma.  Of course, those of us who are shouting from the rooftops that there's trouble ahead want to be wrong.  We work every day to ensure that we are wrong.  The changes we need to make -- in our policies, our lifestyles, our technologies, our economic systems, our worldviews -- will enable us to create a sustainable future.  When we're successful in doing that, by definition, we will be wrong about the sustainability bubble bursting.  We will have avoided it.  And if we're not wrong - if we don't enact the shift to sustainability fast enough; well, it will make our current bubble-burst woes look like a holiday.

To systems-thinkers the parallels between economic bubbles and sustainability are obvious.  As a system is pushed beyond certain thresholds, it collapses or jumps to a new state.  We will cross that threshold as a global human society.  Our great challenge is to ensure that we do so by jumping to a new state - a sustainable society - and avoid devastating population collapse and further wholesale destruction of the life-support system upon which we depend.

It's encouraging to know there are investors like Grantham out there - sharing this perspective with a voice that is respected and credible with the mainstream investment community.  And it's heartening to see that his foundation is making such smart investments as well.

Stay going.

The Glorious Mess

In this recent piece for Yale e360, Eric Pooley, deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek and author of The Climate War gives a great analysis of the current status of a national climate bill this year (near dead).

While the disastrous downsides of this failure to act are many, this quote sums up pretty well what we're looking at for next steps, and why it is about as far from a strategic and effective approach as we can get:

Welcome to the “glorious mess” — Michigan Rep. John Dingell’s phrase for the tangle of regulation and litigation that will follow when Congress fails to act. We are about to experience precisely the sort of costly, protracted, plant-by-plant trench warfare the cap was intended to avoid. Since the utilities and the manufacturers weren’t willing to cut a deal, this is what they get. The fragile period of compromise and cooperation between environmentalists and big business may now be coming to an end. Green groups that have invested time and money into the legislative process are now putting on their war paint and returning to the courts, with a renewed focus on stopping new coal-fired power plants and shutting down the oldest and dirtiest ones.

I remain hopeful that good sense will prevail, that we will be able to remove poisonous partisan politics from this issue and realize that this is one we're all in together, and we're way overdue in responding to.  My optimism also leads me to believe (or at least hope) that maybe the glorious mess won't be quite as messy as suggested above - the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, and the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) are getting more and more established, and looking into linking.  These states and provinces account for nearly 40% of US GHG emissions, and are taking important steps in internalizing more of the true costs of carbon emissions and driving the investments in better design, efficiency upgrades, and product innovation that will not only reduce emissions but also spark economic activity and create jobs.

State and regional precedent is important for federal policy, and now I expect NGOs, businesses, and local and state government to refocus energy on effective programs that will set that precedent while reducing emissions and creating jobs at the same time.

Sector-wide approaches continue to lay the ground work.  Hundreds of colleges and universities are demonstrating real leadership, educating students, driving research, eliminating their own emissions, and engaging with communities to create solutions.  Through the ACUPCC hundreds have publicly reported comprehensive climate action plans on how they will do this.  ICLEI continues to help municipalities ramp up progress, and the C40 Cities initiative has the world's most influential cities stepping up and trying to out-do each other in the most productive ways possible.

It's painful to dwell on the missed opportunity the Senate's inaction represents, but it's possible it will open up more unexpected opportunities that will enable us to avoid the worst impacts of climate disruption.

Stay going.