3rd article that shaped my career: “Is an environmentally sustainable future for the European Community compatible with continued growth: carbon dioxide and the management of greed.” Slesser, 1993

I bumped into this article completely by chance. My former lab had a subscription of the journal ‘Science of the Total Environment’, and one day, while I was organizing the issues in a shelf, this one felt in front of me open at this article page. The title called my eye. I started to read and have got completely amazed.

For the time being the environmentalists have won the moral high ground. (…) Unless they come to grips with the real significance of sustainability, which is not simply to care for the environment, but also to sustain the creation of the wealth needed to maintain its integrity. The issue is as much economic as environmental.

Slesser, 1993

For the first time I realized how much the environment is not an environmental problem.

Decision makers must (…) start thinking about the sort of development that can be sustained in the face of social, environmental or resource constraints. Growth is necessarily quantitative, development need not be.

Slesser, 1993

The author suggests that for now, we even cannot stop growth. We probably need it to create the wealth that can provide the means to end up unsustainable choices of the past, and because there is still much to be done regarding infrastructure and distribution of wealth to a satisfactory level (even in developed countries), and matching population growth. For example, it is a complicated political and social issue to convince developing countries, specially the big ones like china and India, to respect environmental constrains while a huge part of their population is still in poverty. Why should China wait for clean technologies to produce the energy and goods they need to reduce poverty, while they have, right now, huge coal reserves that we know how to use for at least 200 years?

While economic growth has its roots in optimism the recent emphasis on sustainability has its roots in fear; that it may soon be too late to do something about the state of planet Earth. Countering these emotional factors are (…) the ‘real world’: production, management, and economic competition.

Slesser, 1993

The world urges for clean technology, but also for jobs. It looks conflicting but in my opinion it is not. It seems amazing to me that politicians only see jobs in old and dirty technology industries. Trying to develop and produce more clean goods can create so many jobs and bring so much wealth. So why is there still a conflict that prevents us to get to any consensus in environment reunions all over the world? I guess two reasons: first that we would need a new world order to do that in a sustainable way and second that in the face of fear, rarely humans answer with problem solving logics. Our brain have learned over the last million years that in the face of a uncertain future, we should accumulate as much as we can in the present.

It is greed. (…) We, both adults and children, are simply not educated to perceive the links be tween money, wealth, environment and sustainability. Nor is it a subject one finds on the curriculum of Management Schools. Greed (…) provided motivation. Unfortunately greed creates desires which are rarely sustainable.

Slesser, 1993

Can we develop sustainable development in the face of human greed? He built a theoretical model to test his ‘greed hypothesis’.

The means of analysis we used was to construct a dynamic structural model of the European Community at a high level of sectorial aggregation in which capital stocks and output are measured in the energy embodied in their production. (…) money can go round and round; energy, once used is degraded, and can do no further useful work. Furthermore it may produce by products detrimental to the environment like waste heat or carbon dioxide. A model in which the availability of energy is tracked assists one in determining what is physically possible, as opposed to economically conceivable. (…) These are carrying capacity (…) which seeks to track that output of the system which can generate the wealth with which to maintain and expand the system.

Slesser, 1993

They analyzed over time (100 years) the behavior of 4 variables, Carbon dioxide output (measure of pollution), industrial output (measure of production), consumption and tertiary sector output (measure of life quality). In their very first scenario, with continuous growth, carbon dioxide goes to the roof and services (tertiary sector output) falls to zero.

This unlikely trend arises from the fact that one is imposing simultaneously three growth rates (services, industry and consumption) which the ECCO model finds incompatible. By imposing the scenario l growth rates of industry and consumption, there is eventually not enough wealth generation left to support services! By consuming so much, we starve the very sector that adds to the quality, as opposed to the quantity, of our lives.

Slesser, 1993

It is so obvious? How come I have never thought about that before? The answer for this very important question is easy: I have never read about that before. Most of the times, being smart alone is not enough. You need some ‘priming’ to put your brain to work. And that is what reading is and that is what it will ever be unbeatable.

He moves on trying different options: use of alternative energy, more efficient energy consumption in industrial processes… nothing was able to reduce CO2 emissions. Nothing until… they reduced consumption.

It works! Not spectacularly, but it works slowly. (…) by early next century carbon dioxide output declines, material standard of living and quality of life (i.e. tertiary sector output) is holding up (…) 50% higher than today, Industrial production growth is slowing, but it is still 30% more than today, and best of all, energy self-sufficiency falls more slowly.

Slesser, 1993

The author claims that the scenarios are simple examples on of how ECCO may be used for policy testing. On the end of his article, he wonders if it all falls to the management of greed, if we would make it. It reminded me of the second article, where Ludiwig et al. (1993) suggest that we should include ‘all human motivation in matters related to resource exploitation.  I wonder how many people on the IPCC could benefit from reading this article.

But how can you stop growth with an increasing population? This is one question the article does not answer. But it is an important one.

Every additional person creates the need for more food, energy and infrastructure, and hence the prior production of wealth to provide those needs.

Slesser, 1993

The second law of thermodynamics, one of the fundamental law of physics and an important rule of the universe, ultimately, says that Energy cannot be recycled. There are two important consequences of that. First, for anything to be recycled it needs ‘new’ energy and second that everything that is consumed produces waste. The way nature copes with this important restrain is that the waste of one species is the input to another species and can never be used by other individuals of the same species. This means the pollution is inevitable and that and growth or recycling will Always requires more energy. On the other hand, the biological goal of every species, including ours, is to reproduce and grow in size. This seems a true conflict and one I think we will never solve. It does not mean we should not try.