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Current Economic Growth Model Is 'Immoral', Says Prescott
With the world's population growing to nine billion by 2050, Britain's former deputy PM predicts far more crucial and complex talks in Copenhagen than in Kyoto
John Prescott, the former UK climate negotiator, called on developed nations today to accept a new model of economic growth that would create a more equitable spread of carbon emissions in the world. Speaking to the Guardian in Beijing, Prescott said talks at Copenhagen would probably not be decided until an 11th-hour crisis, but that no global consensus could be reached without a fairer spread of emissions.
Talking populations … John Prescott in China earlier this year. (Photograph: Guardian) Since helping to bang heads together to set the first targets on carbon in Kyoto in 1997, Prescott said the world had started to develop a new model of restraint.
"The reality is that the world has found a rationing process. It is not ... get growth as fast as you can and get the jobs and sod the rest," he said. "The world will have 9 billion people by 2050. If you still want growth and prosperity, do you keep on the model you have now? It's immoral."
Prescott has no say in the final decision this time but will attend the talks in Copenhagen as a rapporteur for the Council of Europe, allowing him to be a vocal observer. His remarks address a core issue: how to allow developing nations such as China and India to grow their economies and lift billions from poverty without generating enormous greenhouse gas emissions, as past growth in the developed world did.
But his experience as a former deputy prime minister and key figure in the Kyoto talks sheds light on some of the problems that are likely to lie ahead of negotiators in Denmark in December.
He said Kyoto was about setting a framework, whereas Copenhagen is an attempt to get every country involved. Although the US and China are now far more involved and the science is more widely accepted this time, he believed negotiations will be "10 times harder" than those of 1997 because more countries are taking part and the issues are more complex.
A deal will depend on a last minute display of political will, he predicted.
"The deal at Kyoto came when politicians sat down and faced the reality that we were we going to have a breakdown (of talks)," recalled Prescott. He said he and the Japanese, European and American negotiators huddled in the early hours to achieve a breakthrough. "We got together in a room. I rang Al Gore (the then US vice president) and said we were closing the hall soon because they are going to have a wedding. The Japanese said, 'We will go one point more, so long as it is less than America. And the Americans said we will go for one point more providing it is lower than Europe. At which point I said if we have to take the moral stand then we will."
Prescott has since been accused of giving too much ground at Kyoto, but he said compromise would probably be necessary again if a deal is to be secured. He also emphasised that any deal must be seen to be equitable.
"If we are deciding a global formula not to suffer consequences of climate change, we had better make it fair to achieve a consensus because that is the key at the end of day. "
Although, he said, none of the nations are showing their hands yet, he predicted politicians would have to find an agreement.
"The science is so clear. For policymakers to just walk away from that would be disastrous. I can't believe they will do it."
In line with many developing nations, Prescott says targets should be set according to emissions per person rather than percentage cuts from past levels, as was the case in Kyoto. If wealthy citizens try to maintain their high-polluting nations, he predicted a political crisis.
Although his time as UK transport secretary saw a massive expansion of car ownership, Prescott said he had called on China to do more to promote public transport and limit traffic congestion.
Tomorrow, Prescott will travel to the southern Chinese city of Xiamen, where he will receive an honour that runs against his UK reputation as a mangler of language. " I am a little bit embarrassed. I am going to Xiamen university, where they will make me an honorary professor, which will create a lot of comment in Britain."
29 Comments so far
Show AllTruth to power. How far will it go?
Hooray to John Prescott!! Global warming is all about the greed of unrestrained corporate capitalism but this never seems to be in the conversation.
Error in sub-heading. It reads 9 million. It should say billion.
"With the world's population growing to nine million by 2050, Britain's former deputy PM predicts far more crucial and complex talks in Copenhagen than in Kyoto"
9 million would be nice. We'll get there after the global conveyor belt is destroyed and we descend into climate chaos. Stay tuned. They next dominant race will have museums with our bones.
And then, in the mean time, there are the likes of Chevron. Amazon Watch is providing online holiday film viewing (to get your ire up) and letters to Chevron to clean up their act in Ecuador
http://cts.vresp.com:80/c/?AmazonWatch/b6e95672ff/68a34956ac/92d8979435
Campaign for Justice in Ecuador
Regional, agricultural economies are globally available and ecologically sustainable. Expansion of the arable base, using organic rotations of Cannabis (an historically proven pioneer crop), works would reduce pressure on remaining forests, for the production of paper and building materials.
People are too cowed and confused by the "drug war" propaganda around 'marijuana' to consider Cannabis, even if industrial hemp cultivation is a viable strategy for healing the planet and redistributing resources equitably throughout the world.
The biggest stumbling block on the road to human sustainability seems to be our inexplicable acceptance of finite, toxic, unevenly distributed, expensive and inefficient, chemically-based economy. Ofcourse we will be extinct in a very few years unless we shift our values into respect for the Natural Order.
How bad do things have to get before all solutions are considered?
http://www.youtube.com/projectpeace
Yes,
Right Wingers believe the old propaganda that the "devil weed's" gunna get us all. What needs to be pointed out to them is that both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson raised Hemp on their farms. It is very American to grow hemp.
Then tell them that it would take a truckload of rope-hemp to make someone high: it's impossible. They would suffocate before it could happen.
What's gotten us into this pickle in the first place: The "consolidation" of big government in favor of the Fortune 500. Media Giants gobble up any independent voice and squelch it. Right now, the giant telecoms are trying to do the same to internet access priority. Already corp traffic flys on the net. Soon, if we don't put our foot down, sites like CD aren't going to function at all.
Look at the chit being pumped up about a "recovery" and green shoots etc in the face of understated half a million jobs lost a month. We are in a depression, but the gov keeps exluding things like "energy" and "food" in the CPI numbers and excludes "discouraged workers" whatever that means from the unemployement numbers. Also, people who run out of unemployment are dropped off into the dustbins of tent city. They no longer are included in any economic statistic. Real Unemployment right now might be over 20%, who knows?
Read this site given to us by one of our shrewd readers earlier:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
But predatory Disaster Capitalism is clearly a runaway Chernobyl and need to be contained.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Simple fix. Get rid of the private auto. Make public transit free as a start.
http://freepublictransit.org
I think the above is a wonderful idea! Just think how different our world would be without the auto; but the problem is how. Perhaps a cup of sugar in your neighbor's gastank would be a start.
"Perhaps a cup of sugar in your neighbor's gastank would be a start."
Mary Poppins would agree (a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, In the most delightful way!).
Maybe they could pass out that silicon dioxide solution that is put in the clunkers to permanently kill the engines.
from the article:
"His remarks address a core issue: how to allow developing nations such as China and India to grow their economies and lift billions from poverty without generating enormous greenhouse gas emissions, as past growth in the developed world did."
this is impossible...economic growth is planetary death...
Absolutely correct. We have already reached the point of questionable survival on the amount of carbon in the air now and there is about a 30 year lag in "feeling" the effects of the carbon at 330 parts per. The effect of 390 parts per which is where we are at now will be enormous.
The climatic effects now and into the future are the result of only the last "300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture".
We will pay dearly for our past behavior and any continuation of this exploitation of earth's air, water and earth.
Economic growth and the modern lifestyle are what's killing us. It may sound like a nightmare to most, but we need to go all the way back to pre industrial life styles.
It would be the only way to immediately stop the collection of Co2 in the atmosphere, NOW!!!!!
Wouldn't it be funny to see the rich people that have never done any real work, draw water from a stream to flush their toilets? they wouldn't be able to pay anyone to do it for them, because the dollar would be worth nothing except toilet paper.
Unrestrained growth on a small planet is like skydiving without a parachute.
We go faster and faster until we run into the hard reality of Mother Earth.
Love this metaphor
IT NEEDS TO BE SAID:
WHO LED THIS KIND of "growth"? good as technological and scientific advances are - as the heritage of the world - regardless of where they came from -
WHO USED SUCH advances to RUSH the world into THIS kind of rapacious, exploitative, PROFIT MOTIVE Centered structure, and FORCE the globe to "play ball" in THIS manner?
it needs to be SAID:
WESTERN, USA LED imperialism and rapaciousness.
Teddy,
I agree that the "greed is good" mindset in general and western civilization in particular has brought all this about. But the "genie" cannot be returned to the bottle. When did it start? Genghis Kahn would impregnate at least 10 young women in every village he plundered. His dna is all over the world! And this is one man. Can you stop the constant tinkering with nature that mankind so loves? The native americans called this violation of mother earth the "white man's ways". But I think it's a matter of degree. Eschewing science would have kept the human population in balance with disease, predation, inclement weather and poor shelter killing people off before they got too numerous. But we aren't a flock of ducks that just accepts their fate when there isn't enough food and begin to die in massive numbers. We aren't some plant life that, during severe droughts, produce copious seeds that will endure in suspended animation until the rains come again. No, we love to tinker with our environment. Socialism is only a tiny part of the tremendous change that humanity needs to undergo. Please see my other comment and tell me what you think. Thanks.
Countries will either airdrop condoms or bombs.
you mean raildrop
It's getting very crowded, and warm around here lately.
Paul Ehrlich's book, "The Population Bomb" was 'dead-on' afterall.
It is "Soylent Green" in grim reality. Mass cannabalism
and mass, voluntary euthanasia on a baking, desperate, corporate-controlled planet.
What a sad end to homo-sapiens---'They brought it on themselves.'
I guess they weren't truly intelligent after all.
"If wealthy citizens try to maintain their high-polluting nations, he predicted a political crisis."
IF? When haven't wealthy citizens, not only tried, but considered maintaining their high-polluting nations the norm?
A political crisis? What do you call what we are in right now, pal?
The problem is not simply to stop polluting. The problem is to market altruism and community consciousness as proper human behavior while simultaneously criminalizing greed, material possession accumulation and gluttony. This is impossible for most people today. I predict that, when those in power realize it's just too damned hard to kill off the excess humans, they'll massively push for space colonization. The elite will do anything but reduce themselves or demonize their "I've got mine" mindset.
I would love to see some kind of real advance in human society. Perhaps I am overly pessimistic but I believe those in power will not change their bronze age, warlike, plundering mindset. Anarchy will increase until the "space exploration and colonization" meme takes over.
We have a similar situation now to the initial concentration of humans in cities, but on a planetary scale. Those early cities were breeding grounds for disease from polluted drinking wells and improper waste disposal and hygiene.
But now the "plumbing" needed is in our mindset. No amount of scientific knowledge will free us of the psycopathic behavior of the elite. And as long as they are the models of success that most people long for, the polluting and greed will remain entrenched throughout society. Oprah needs to stop saying that having your own jet is great. She needs to put it in a museum in the section containing machines that almost wiped humanity out in the 20th and 21st century. And a private jet doesn't even drop bombs!
Yes, in order for humanity to survive, things have to change that radically. Do you see that happening? Look at your beautiful car. You are killing all of us with it. We are criminals killing our species. We won't change. Our only escape valve is the stars because we are just too young and immature to realize that we are just naked killer apes. When people lose all pride in fighting for this or that, then we might live in harmony. But I don't see that coming about for several hundred years.
The CD headline writer understands the problem, but not Prescott, which makes it a misleading headline:
"how to allow developing nations such as China and India to grow their economies and lift billions from poverty without generating enormous greenhouse gas emissions, as past growth in the developed world did."
The answer is, you can't and you don't.
As long as regions, states, and countries around the world seek economic growth, they will continue to impoverish the people and the world and continue to overheat the planet until the human species can no longer be supported.
Excellent comments here in this forum….
The chances that our political leaders will use yet another “climate conference” to initiate the huge change in economic policy that we urgently need are practically zero...
It is like a group of dinosaurs gathering to discuss their future without understanding that they must transform themselves into birds in order to survive... (following the Schumacher motto “Small is beautiful”...)
Evolution did manage to create birds out of dinosaurs but economic dogma (...why is economics called a science anyway? Because it tries to explain human behaviour in “markets” with absurd mathematical models?) like the neoliberal form of capitalism they inflicted on us in the 1990s, is extremely hard to eradicate (just look at the reaction to the “Financial Crisis”).
We have been conducting a war against the ecosystems that are the basis of our lives and although the evironmental problems are mounting (accumulating toxic and radioactive waste, polluted water, soil degradation, erosion, loss of biodiversity, etc.) they only talk about “greenhouse gases” and cling to the illusion that the system will continue with a few technical changes and “innovations”like transgenic plants and animals and - even scarier – the combination of nanotechnology and genetic engineering (they are already experimenting with new forms of life to solve our environmental problems (e.g. create a new form of bacteria or virus “at your service”..)Talk about hubris...
The idea of infinite economic growth is not immoral, it is insane. Immoral are the outcomes of the neoliberal “constitution” the world has adopted: (see WTO and EU treaties and “Washington Consensus”) increasing poverty for the great majority of people, widening social inequality, no food democracy and obsene concentrations of wealth at the top.
As long as we vote for the usual “business parties” and buy our stuff from transnational corporations nothing will change...
It is time for a revolution: we must demand to be included in economic decisions not just watch as helpless spectators how the “wrecking crew” is destroying our future...
Democracy is nothing without economic democracy... but we are now ruled by a cartel of bankers and corporate crooks....
ThomasJefferson,not only did Washington promote Hemp,but produced Hashish too. He wrote letters to friends about removing the males to create sensimilla (potent seedless female Marijuana plants)in some of the strains he cultivated.Industrial Hemp could only help the natural,and economic environment ,as would ending drug prohibition.At the very least it would probably end the wildfires set by Mexican grow-ops deep in California forests. peace
Thanks johnny,
I didn't know that. All my Costco books on history seem to have a sinister Right-Wing bend to them and omit such knowledge. You wouldn't have a source for that would you? I'd like to use it to promote the use of these very American products.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Actually economic reform is iminate.
In fact each day that passes brings the world closer to the 'economic collapse' iniated by the US economic collapse.
After the smoke clears, and the 'stench from the dead' has blown away with the wind; the world will have the opening to make the changes.
Hopefully they will have the USA and UK and others as their 'negative example'-----and learn something from the 'previous fool's' mistakes.
One can only hope.
Native Son,
I gotta tell you, I think the collapse already happened. I think the MSM is just trying to vainly cover it up until they can find another bubble to suck everybody into. This Ponzi scheme has been going on in one form or another actually, I suspect, since Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1972. The French demanded their Silver back. We didn't have either one after the war in Vietnam drained us. From that day forth, there's been nothing at all backing our dollar economy up except worldwide perception.
In the housing crash, the stock market should have tanked to the bottom, but the PTT (plunge protection team) in unholy communion with the Federal Reserve Bank started buying up deflated stocks and bonds to give the impression that the fall was not so great according to info on www. Wikipedia. org
So I suspect, there are no free markets any more. International trade agreements only foster monopolies from what I can tell. The Oil market is a Cartel called OPEC, which has as its very definition: Cartel:
cartel - n. a consortium of independent organizations formed to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service; "they set up the trust in the hope of gaining a monopoly"
The Republicans socialized housing and banking by making the fed/ treasury buy out freddie mac and fanny mae (80 percent of home mortgages) and most of the big banks and also insurance companies pretending to be banks. But something that would improve the health of the nation like single payer, is off the table.
Meanwhile, back in the shipping lane,
The bay on my island is full of parked container ships that have no business any more. They are moored in a pickled condition as if no one expects to use them for a very long time.
This should reduce pollution, except that the Chinese are now selling their crap to themselves; so a new coal power plant is still coming on line every week. Two Billion Chinese now want to drive a car and eat steak. GM is shifting over there to sell all of them chitty automobiles that have bad MPG performance.
This planet is still in deep, deep, doo-doo.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
a response to AGG & his comment about 'marketing alturism'---I whole-heartedly agree--& let me add some flesh to dem bones! If I may take some liberty & elaborate some. The problem is 'how to make alturism habitual' to when it perceives a 'hostil situation' says to inself, 'how can I make this hospitiable'---this 'fram of mind' or mindset view of the world---is a thumb-nail sketch of the 'psychological profile' put together regarding those individuals who risked their lives & the lives of their family members, to rescue/hide/protect Jews during WWII---referred to today as 'the righteous among the nations.'
They were not born with this sensebility, it was learned, taught in a conscious manner during their upbringing.
There is a way.
In order for 'alturism to become habitual' it requires the character trait of 'empathy.' Before one can have an internalized sense of 'empathy' one's imagination has to be alive to the possibility, anotherwards the 'empathetic imagination' needs to come alive.
HOW is this accomplisehed? Education, as longterm transformation, through the following mechanics, which are the first goal of the first phase of the UN Millenieum Project. To get a Human Rights Education Literacy Curriculmn in all elementary & secondary schools throught the world.
In India, the largest Democracy in the world, they want this extended through grad school. Once an individual is aware of their 'rights' via a HR framework, they then know their responsibilities to others. Which in a nutshell goes something as follows, respecting the worth & dignity of all, just because... The accepted benchmark for human behavior.
Through daily lessons of HREdLit. one becomes more sensitive to the HR of others & their violations as well as your own. Human Rights are our birthright, not entitlements---Not only civil & political rights recognized here in the USA but also & as argued by many, more importantly, economic, cultural, & social rights, along w/newly added Environmental Rights as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights & signed by one n all in the UN.
It is percisely the mind-set, frame of mind, that you & I & the majority of posters here champion. Yet if this vision/narrative paradigne shift-- is not in the market place of ideas, alive to the imgination, what more can one expect of his/her fellows.
We know how to create a 'habit of thinking'---teach it every day directly & indirectly. Health Care a commodity or a HR! Water, a commodity or HR!
Without courage wisdom will not bear fruit.
so what do ya think!
I think that if everyone thought as you do, we would not have our present problems. You obviously understand the challenge. However, I believe you are not giving sufficient weight to the counter-empathy education that the most powerful and influential citizens of privilege receive from birth. If an educational campaign convinced 90% of the world's people to treat all people and nature with habitual respect and live disciplined, frugal lives, you would still have the gigantic proplem of that rich 10% that pollute MORE than the other 90%. Another poster compared the present situation to a group of dinosaurs which don't realize they need to become birds. I'll take that a step further; we who already respect each other and the environment are those that have become birds. We do not run the show but some of us might survive the anarchy. There aren't going to be a lot of elite Scarlet O'Harras around setting their chin and vowing to do "whatever it takes" to prevail. This is the "might makes right", "true grit" bullshit that got us here. The Scarlet O'Harras have to die or the rest of us will. Talking about education dances around the morality of this issue. No amount of education to convince people that such and such behavior is necessary for survival will work unless:
1) The elite lead by example and
2) The old behavior is widely accepted as wrong, destructive and criminal.
You have more hope than I have but I wish you well. Are you part of the elite? Work on them and you'll get several hundred times the return on your time if you can convince even one of those greedy pigs that being a greedy pig is wrong. They are our real problem. If you don't see that, then your goals will not be met.
Here's an idea...let's switch the whole world to solar and wind, stop the oil wars and devote all labor to making a liveable place for all.