Peak Stuff?

A busy evening yesterday- I had to do the introduction for Mark Lynas (Author of the very excellent "Six Degrees" and "The God Species") at a Just Share Event at St Mary Le Bow Church, following which I was dining in very august company at Adjay Associates. (I will tell you about the latter in a seperate post.)

Mark was charming, and the Just Share event was well attended- by an exceptionally well informed crowd. The first half of his talk was an engaging canter through the concept of environmental limits, the topic of his latest book. We certainly see eye to eye on many topics, such as nuclear energy and GM.

However, the second half of his talk focused on the "good news" on the environment and much of it was drawn from  Chris Goodall's work on "Peak Stuff".

Chris' work is a really insightful look at evidence that economic growth can be decoupled from unsustainable behaviour. He bases his hypothesis on the fact that the UK began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade, well before the economic slowdown that started in 2008.

Personally, I can see why the argument is an attractive one, but the figures Chris produces hide a wealth of complexity- one of the sets of data Mark picked up on was a drop in UK Total Material Requirement (TMR) which by 2009 had dropped to 81% of 2001 levels. On the face of it this is good news, as this drop coincided with a prolonged period of economic growth in the UK- so does this mean we can have continued growth without damaging the environment?

One problem I have with this figure is it is an aggregated number, which does not differentiate between "guns and butter" (or i-phones and cod if you prefer)- in other words, despite the drop in total TMR, you cannot determine whether it contains unsustainable consumption of rare earth metals and increased consumption of collapsing fish stocks.

If anything the drop in TMR is a validation of classical economics- "stuff" is getting more expensive to make because of rising resource costs, driven by reduced supply and increased demand. Manufacturers are using smart design to reduce the material requirements of their products- replacing metals with plastics and changing the composition of those plastics to make them lighter and stronger.

Don't get me wrong, this is to be welcomed, but I disagree with Mark that this is "good news", for me this is a sign that the environment is under increasing stress and the economy and society are being directly affected.

My problem with Mark and Chris' analysis is that whilst their work is  thoughtful and pertinent, the ill-informed (or mischievous) can cherry pick statements to support the weakening of environmental legislation and the continuation of environmentally damaging behaviour.

I am not, you probably won't be surprised to hear, a hair shirt wearing hippy, who thinks we should all go back to living in tepees, so I am not arguing that economic growth automatically results in environmental destruction. What I am saying is that we need to be a lot smarter about the way we measure growth so that the Government develop policies that deliver long term benefits..

This is why I am heartened current discussions around GDP plus. Check this website for further information http://www.beyond-gdp.eu/index.html