Comment: To have banks and money supply determine rates of growth is obviously nonsense, and completely undermines any aspiration toward living within our ecological means. Greens have long held that it's the Earth's natural resources and its capacity to sustain human life that determine what is sustainable and what is not. Solutions to the inevitable climate-terror that await ourselves and our descendents involve both governments - in delivering the right regulatory frameworks to enable and encourage carbon reduction measures - and corporations who must adapt and develop their operations and products to a low carbon future.

This is the new reality. Politicians need the courage to look beyond the next ballot box or market survey and strive for climate justice for tomorrow's generations.  Corporations need to accept the reality of finite resource supply, and the fact that they'll not sell produce to communities suffering from widespread climate degradation.

Robert Newman says we have to start planning for a system of personal carbon rationing or domestic tradable quotas. Greens would agree, but he also says we are caught between climate change and peak oil. This implies there is no escape: oil depletion and a certain degree of climate change are inevitable. Assuming there is any choice left, we are caught between growth and climate damage - but there is still a hope that we can steer between them. If we are to do this then we must link personal carbon rationing and the widely supported international scheme of carbon rationing known as contraction and convergence. C&C and DTQs are now both the subject of private member's bills to parliament - we need all to support them.

 
Another issue is that we need to stop measuring economic success in terms of GDP
growth alone and prioritise such factors as sustainability, quality of life and environmental protection too.

See elsewhere in this 'Big Issue' section that Jonathon Porritt has suggested that: "Capitalism is now the only game in town."


1. It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

Robert Newman writes in The Guardian (2/02/06) "Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change. There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.

"Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with."

See the rest of this excellent article at:
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1700409,00.html

2. Boardrooms feeling the heat - The old economics is dead.

Larry Elliott writes in The Guardian: "Its death knell was sounded this month, not by a practitioner of the dismal science but by Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser. Sir David King said concentrations of greenhouse gases were already at a level where the warning signs were flashing red: a comment that starkly illustrates the impending clash between economic orthodoxy and environmental sustainability.

"Economics is a discipline in which the factors of production - capital and labour - are supposed to be harnessed to maximise production at the cheapest price. By this yardstick an economy is doing twice as well if it is growing at 4% rather than 2% and disastrously badly if consumers are not in the shops from dawn till dusk. Globalisation is seen as the ultimate form of a market economy, according to the prevailing model, because a more efficient use of the factors of production leads to lower prices and therefore permits higher levels of consumption. In a globalised world, you're only as good as your last GDP number."

See more at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1710401,00.html
    
3. Economic growth won't deliver benefits to those with the greatest need.

David Woodward and Andrew Simms write in The Guardian 923/01/06): "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails," says the old adage. This is the problem with economic growth. Whatever the issue, whether it is poverty, unemployment or an ailing environment, we are constantly told that growth is the answer. But the latest evidence contained in our new report says the opposite. Growth isn't working reveals a double dynamic of failure. Firstly, the share of economic benefits from growth reaching the poorest is drying up. At the same time, the poorest are paying a disproportionately large share of its environmental costs.

Read article at:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1693024,00.html