Looking Beyond Technology

A sizable number of international organizations and governments have been drawing up blueprints for making the big shift to a green economy. But do they go far enough? Peter Brown doesn’t think so.

Rather than just focus on things like forging a carbon-reduced economy, we need to perhaps drastically realign our economic activities to what the planet can ecologically sustain, says Brown, professor at McGill University’s School of Environment and Geography Department. “We need to start with a quantitative biophysical goal of 350 or 400 parts per million (of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases in the atmosphere) and then work back to a policy agenda that gets you there,” says Brown, co-author of the recently published Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy.

What that calculation will show, he believes, is the need for a smaller, less resource-intensive economy, a much smaller human population, and an ethics of respect and deference toward the natural world. This flies in the face, he says, of the conventional wisdom that our economies, populations and consumption can keep growing – and that technology will fix the resulting problems.

“Technology is seen as the expedient solution because it seems that we can keep doing everything we’ve been doing. But there’s no empirical evidence to support the idea that it can do enough to keep us from overrunning the earth’s biophysical limits. In fact, emissions are soaring,” says Brown, who sees the U.S. government’s recently announced green stimulus package as a largely wasted opportunity.

He believes addressing the current economic crisis should be directly connected with the climate-change crisis and the general decline in the earth’s life-support systems. Simply making improvements in energy efficiency, he says, will only encourage people and industries to consume more energy.

“You can’t rely on energy efficiency gains to bring about substantial reductions in emissions unless you couple them with a rigorous regulatory structure. Technical innovation by itself is a very unreliable horse to bet on.”