The Hindu Business Line : More is not always better

Growth is no longer making most people wealthier, but instead generating inequality and insecurity. Continuing to expand the economy may thus be impossible; the very attempt may be dangerous, observes Bill McKibben in Deep Economy.

It used to be that with one stone, you could hit two birds, named More and Better, roosting on the same branch. Not so now, because “Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest.” As a result, “if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand,” you have to choose between the two, advises Bill McKibben in Deep Economy (www.landmark onthenet.com).

Growth is no longer making most people wealthier, but instead generating inequality and insecurity, he observes. “And growth is bumping against physical limits so profound — such as climate change and peak oil — that continuing to expand the economy may be impossible; the very attempt may be dangerous.”

Every action of a modern life burns fossil fuel, rues McKibben. “Before coal, economic production was limited by energy inputs, almost all of which depended on the production of biomass: Food for humans and farm animals, and fuel wood for heating and certain industrial processes,” reads a quote of Jeffrey Sachs, cited in the book. A turning point in human history was the invention of “the first practical steam engine” in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen. “He burned coal, and used the steam pressure built up in his boiler to drive a pump that, in turn, drained water from coal mines, allowing them to operate far more cheaply and efficiently… His engine replaced a team of 500 horses walking in a circle.”

Our current energy demands, driven by ‘growth’ imperatives, are not limited to what we can grow. We bank on fossil energy, or what had been grown eons before, “on all those millions of years of ancient biology squashed by the weight of time till they’d turned into strata and pools and seams of hydrocarbons, waiting for us to discover them.”

The diminished availability of fossil fuel is not the only limit we face, says the author. For, “even before we run out of oil, we’re running out of planet.” Environmental damage is happening in a thousand different ways, he warns. “Nitrogen runoff, mercury contamination, rainforest destruction, species extinction, and water shortage” are only a few examples. The overarching threat is ‘climate change’ caused by global warming — “the gaseous remains of oil fields and coal beds acting like an insulating blanket.”

More is really better only up to a certain point, argues McKibben. “Money consistently buys happiness right up to about $10,000 per capital income,” he says, citing research. “After that point the correlation disappears.” Past the point of basic needs being met, the ‘satisfaction’ data scramble in mind-bending ways, one learns. In a ‘quality of life’ survey, nearly three-fourth of the answers were non-materialistic.

“The best predictor of happiness was health, followed by factors such as being married. Income seemed not to matter at all in France, Holland, or England, and it was only the seventh or eighth most important predictor in Italy, Ireland, and Denmark.”

Closer home, homeless people in Kolkata ranked among the lowest in ‘life satisfaction’; surprisingly, however, their ‘satisfaction’ doubled “when they moved into a slum, at which point they were basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students drawn from 47 nations.”

For a deep study.

Six Cs driving ‘clean’

Solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, the smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration. These are eight sectors that Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder discuss in The Clean Tech Revolution ( www.harpercollins.com ).

The authors declare that close on the heels of the computer, Internet, and biotech revolutions, it is clean tech that is “brining unprecedented opportunities for wealth creation, high-growth career development, and innovative solutions to a range of global problems.”

Till not long ago, clean tech was seen as ‘alternative’, too expensive, in early stage of development, and so forth. Now, it is “a moneymaking enterprise moving solidly into the business mainstream.” For instance, hybrid cars are among the fastest growing segments, and solar PV (photovoltaic) industry is projected to continue expanding by more than 30 per cent. Sharp, a leading manufacturer of solar PV modules, “has expanded its manufacturing capacity from 54 MW in 2000 to a planned 710 MW in 2007.”

What is driving the clean tech revolution? Six Cs, say Pernick and Wilder, listing these forces: Costs, capital, competition, China, consumers, and climate. The most powerful force is simple economics, with falling clean-energy costs even as the costs of fossil fuel energy steadily soar. “The future of clean tech is going to be, in many ways, about scaling up manufacturing and driving down costs,” foresee the authors.

They lay out a six-point action plan to build ‘a robust clean-tech future’. These include: Investing more, to give the financial push; developing regional clean-tech clusters, with the right policies and programmes; and shifting subsidies. At times, however, subsidies can be unsustainable; in Germany, for example, “the solar rebate equates to approximately 60 cents per kilowatt-hour, considerably more than the prevailing cost of electricity.”

Carbon trading, the leading example of ‘clean development mechanism’, holds the promise to become ‘a huge financial growth area through 2020’ because it offers “a direct, tangible, predictable cost penalty for producing CO2 emissions, and an immediate economic incentive for reducing them.” Which is the rationale of ‘more than 800 clean-energy projects around the world,’ such as wind farms in India and sugarcane-waste-fuelled power plants in Brazil.
The United Nations Climate Change Secretariat is hopeful that clean development mechanism can “help reduce more than 1 billion tonnes of GHGs (greenhouse gases), or the current annual emissions of Spain and the UK combined, by 2012.”

Profitable read, even if you are a ‘clean’ greenhorn.
Giant metal mosquitoes

Get more than a glimpse of ‘the dirty politics of African oil’ in Nicholas Shaxson’s Poisoned Wells ( www.palgrave.com ). Do you know that “in 2005, the US imported more oil from this continent than it did from the Middle East”? Or that “by 2008 ExxonMobil will be producing more oil in Angola than it does in the US,” or that “in the last five years Africa accounted for a quarter of all new oil discovered around the globe, and this share will rise”?

Shaxson takes you on a tour of Africa’s western coastline to see oil rigs alighting all along the stretch “like giant metal mosquitoes, standing on the skin of the earth on spindly legs and drilling down with steel proboscises to suck out the fluid that is the lifeblood of the world economy.”

Like the biting insects, the rigs can cause irritation around the site of extraction, disrupting local communities or polluting farmland, narrates the author. The real threat, like malaria, is the resource curse — ‘the stealthier, time-delayed payload that accompanies the extraction…’

Chilling description.

D. MURALI
http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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