The sweet spot’s sour underbelly

To summarise, the sweet spot thesis totally fails to take into account the fact that there are savage limits to growth, and we have now gone through them. The planet's ecosystems are being destroyed, and resources are now becoming more scarce and costly. Yet, only one-fifth of the world's people are living like Australians. The rest, ably led by the Chinese and Indians, are fiercely determined to rise to our levels of consumption, because we have taught them that our affluent societies define the goals of "progress" and "development."

This has only been a comment on the sustainability theme, and our "prosperity," comfort and security is built on another enormous fault. The global economy is grotesquely unjust, and we could not have our "prosperity" otherwise.

Who gets the oil? Not the average Bangladeshi, or the other about 4 billion very poor people. A few in rich countries get it because the global economy is a market system and in a scarce market, valuable things go to those who are rich, because they can offer to pay more.

This explains most of the suffering and avoidable death in the world. Why are there a billion chronically hungry people at the same time as 600 million tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year? No puzzle; it's more profitable to produce feedlot meat for rich world supermarket shoppers than to feed hungry people, even though you could actually make a (small) profit doing that.

Even more disturbing is the fact that market forces determine that the "development" taking place in the Third World, is predominantly only development of whatever will maximise the global profits of transnational corporations. So Haiti produces baseballs to export, meaning that productive capacity is not put into producing basic necessities for impoverished people.

The rich countries will not tolerate any other option. The IMF and the World Bank force indebted countries to accept their "Structural Adjustment Packages," which arrange bail outs on condition that their economies are further oriented to free market principles – in other words, geared even more to the interests of foreign investors and rich world supermarket shoppers.

How sweet would things be if we Australians had to get by on something like our fair share of the world's scarce resources? How affluent and self-satisfied would we be if resources and products were distributed according to need rather than market forces? Rich world per capita resource consumption is 15 – 20 times that of the poorest 50 per cent of people on the planet.

The sweet spot claim also boasts about our security. How secure from conflict will we be in a world where 10 billion are trying to live like Australians and that is not remotely possible? Our empire is crumbling now. The US is not able to run it in our interests as it once was. It can't win the necessary wars any more.

The Chinese are far more energetic and ruthless at getting hold of the scarce resources and markets, and it's now not much good trying to lecture them about the greenhouse problem, when we created it and they are coming out of hundreds of years of being trashed by Western imperialism. Perhaps it is our turn to cop what they dish out now. My advice is that if you want to remain prosperous from here on, you better remain heavily armed.

So yes things are pretty nice right now, but that's very misleading. The prosperity is largely built on the rapid depletion of the planet's resources and destruction of its ecosystems, and on a global economy which delivers the benefits to a very few rich people. And there is a strong case that the party will end very soon.

In my book, "The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World," I argue that consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed. The problems are too big and more importantly they are inevitably generated by the fundamental structures, processes and values of this society. They can only be solved by scrapping the growth economy, the determination of society by the market, economic globalisation, and the pursuit of affluence.

Given the era of irremediable scarcity we are entering, a sustainable and just society has to involve mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies run by local people to meet local needs, in highly participatory ways, and not driven by the quest for profit, growth or affluence.

In my view there is little chance that we will have the wit or the will to accept this. Yet many in the Eco-village and Transition Towns movements are working for a transition to "The Simpler Way."

Trainer, T., (2010a), "Can renewables etc. solve the greenhouse problem? The negative case", Energy Policy, 38, 8, August, 4107 - 4114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2010.03.037

Trainer, T., (2010), Transition: Getting To A Sustainable and Just World. Sydney, Envirobook.