Good reasons to hope we can become sustainable

As the changes occur more and more quickly, people are likely to notice that things aren’t always getting better and better. Most people remember when we didn’t need desalinisation plants and there were no water restrictions. Most people remember when petrol was 75 cents a litre. When people notice that things aren’t always getting better, they may look for reasons and they may start thinking more about the futility of trying to always pull more and more resources out of a finite earth.

The second hope for understanding that things aren’t always getting better is with the advancements in communications. We now see poverty in poor countries. We see the food riots in Mexico and Haiti. We see the refugee camps in Darfur. We don’t just read about it. We see the starving children and the violence.

Get money and use it wisely

Money rules our lives and prices are the landmarks that we use to travel through life. One of the strongest arguments against being sustainable is that things are always getting better and if things are getting better, why change. It follows then that if things are always getting better that means things must be getting cheaper. Economist Julian Simon famously won a bet with sustainability advocate Paul Ehrlich in 1980 that commodity prices would fall by 1990. If they had bet ten years ago (Simon died in 1996), Simon would have lost.

The last 10 years commodity prices have increased substantially. Coal is up more than 100 per cent. Oil is up 200 per cent. Iron ore is up more than 200 per cent. Wheat, corn and rice are all up more than 60 per cent. Median wages are up 40 per cent, so maybe that’s OK.

I believe there is logic in the Peak Oil theory, but I also believe that nobody is going to care about peak oil until the oil price goes up and stays up. We might be seeing the start of that now. There is no better proof that the earth’s resources are finite than rising prices. Endless growth economists have said for years that the ingenuity of the human mind would develop technologies to replace any resource that started to run out. They’ve also said we just need to let the free market be free, because rising prices provided incentives for new technologies.

If prices stay high with no new technologies coming along to bring them down, we probably won’t need any esoteric arguments about ecosystem destruction, water shortages, non-renewable energy and the logic of cramming as many people as possible, onto a finite earth. The high prices will make an argument that is much clearer.

Bigger is better

The age of electronics has made us hesitate when thinking bigger is always better. Everybody wants smaller phones and smaller computers. We are starting to see that things can be smaller and better.

Lessons not learned as a child

Long term thinking

Long term thinking has recently made the headlines with the changes to superannuation in the Federal Budget. With the discussion of intergenerational equity in paying for super and years like 2023 and 2047 being thrown around, the ice has been broken on talking about what the world will look like in 2023 and 2047. The more we think about 2023 and 2047, the more we will think that we need to live sustainably or we won’t have much of a world to spend our superannuation in.

Of course the trillion dollar question is: how long will all this take?