EcoRadio

Author: admin

  • Consumption not population is killing us

    If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.

    The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

    The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

    People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

    People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32.

    Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.

    Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

    If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

    Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

    We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.

    The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?

    No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

    Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

    Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.

    The same is true of forests: we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.

    Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.

    Fortunately, in the last year there have been encouraging signs. Australia held a recent election in which a large majority of voters reversed the head-in-the-sand political course their government had followed for a decade; the new government immediately supported the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

    Also in the last year, concern about climate change has increased greatly in the United States. Even in China, vigorous arguments about environmental policy are taking place, and public protests recently halted construction of a huge chemical plant near the center of Xiamen. Hence I am cautiously optimistic. The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

     

    Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

  • NASA wants to cash in on renewables

    Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now.

    In terms of cost effectiveness, the two stumbling blocks for space solar power have been the expense of launching the collectors and the efficiency of their solar cells. Fortunately, the recent development of thinner, lighter and much higher efficiency solar cells promises to make sending them into space less expensive and return of energy much greater.

    Much of the progress has come in the private sector. Companies like Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences, working in conjunction with NASA’s public-private Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative, have been developing the capacity for very low cost launchings to the International Space Station. This same technology could be adapted to sending up a solar power satellite system.

    Still, because building the first operational space solar power system will be very costly, a practical first step would be to conduct a test using the International Space Station as a “construction shack” to house the astronauts and equipment. The station’s existing solar panels could be used for the demonstration project, and its robotic manipulator arms could assemble the large transmitting antenna. While the station’s location in orbit would permit only intermittent transmission of power back to Earth, a successful test would serve as what scientists call “proof of concept.”

    Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, on the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it’s time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment. (And for those who worry that science would lose out to economics, there’s no reason that work on space solar power couldn’t go hand in hand with work toward a manned mission to Mars, advanced propulsion systems and other priorities of the space station.)

    In fact, in a time of some skepticism about the utility of our space program, NASA should realize that the American public would be inspired by our astronauts working in space to meet critical energy needs here on Earth.

    O. Glenn Smith is a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

  • US role in Georgian war

    US oil policy is responsible for Georgian situation

    by Muhammad Sahimi from  Antiwar.com

    Much has been written about the war between Russia and Georgia. Neoconservatives, as Justin Raimondo pointed out, have suddenly discovered the “democratic” republic of Georgia, which has been a historical “victim” of the Russian “empire.” Never mind that not only was Georgia not a democracy before it was devoured by the Soviet Union in 1921, but also that the war, started by Georgia’s forces, was a strategic blunder by Georgia’s president, the confrontational, demagogic, American-trained lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, who dared foolishly to take on his giant neighbor, thinking naively that NATO would rush to help him.

    William Kristol, the “little Lenin” of the neoconservatives, who now has another outlet in the op-ed page of the New York Times, opines that the U.S. must not only give aid to Georgia, but must also help it become a member of the “League of Democracies” that John McCain has proposed. Never mind that in the Georgian “democracy” Saakashvili used police brutality to stop huge demonstrations after hotly disputed elections and shut down opposition publications, and never mind that when democratic elections in Palestine and Lebanon yielded results deemed undesirable by the U.S. (and people like Kristol), they were not only dismissed, but the voters were also punished by U.S. sanctions.

    And, as Robert Parry noted, the same neoconservatives who backed the illegal invasion of Iraq, and are now threatening to attack Iran over its nonexistent nuclear threat, are suddenly discovering respect for the rule of law and international agreements. Even Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, who supported the Iraq invasion, got into the act, writing in the Washington Post that “Whatever mistakes Tbilisi has made, they cannot justify Russia’s actions.”

    Where was Holbrooke when the U.S. invaded Panama, helped the Contra thugs in Nicaragua, encouraged – and later supported – Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, and was silent when the Saudi-Pakistani-created Taliban overthrew the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan?

    In reality, the Russia-Georgia war involves three important elements:

    1. The desire to encircle Russia with pro-U.S. clients in the former Soviet republics, from Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, and by setting up missile “defense” systems in Poland and the Czech Republic that are intended for the Russians, but are justified by the bogus threats posed by Iran’s missiles and its nonexistent nuclear weapons program.
    2. Recognition, over strong and angry objection by Russia, of Kosovo as an independent state. I suppose so long as such unstable mini-states as Kosovo are clients of the U.S., their Islamic identity poses no problem to the neoconservatives. Most other Muslims, such as those in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq are considered dangerous.
    3. But perhaps the most important element has to do with the control of the routes for transporting oil and gas from Central Asia and the Caucasus region to international markets and, in particular, to Western Europe. If the U.S., pressured by the Israel lobby, had not pushed for bypassing Iran, we would have perhaps been in a different situation than what we have now between Georgia and Russia, with all of its geopolitical implications.

    While many have written about the causes and consequences of the war, little emphasis has been put on the role that the U.S. government’s failed policy toward Iran has played in this rapidly developing situation.

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the three independent countries that emerged on the shores of the Caspian Sea, namely, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, declared that they would respect all the old international and bilateral treaties that the Soviet Union had signed. Crucial among them were two friendship treaties that had been signed by Iran and the Soviet Union in 1921 and 1940. An article in both treaties stated, “No country can take unilateral action regarding the Caspian Sea.” Therefore, the five countries of the Caspian area, particularly Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, could not unilaterally decide what to do about the resources of the Caspian Sea without the consent of the other countries.

    Even aside from the old Iran-Soviet treaties that Russia accepted legal responsibility for after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fact is that, according to all the international treaties, so long as a territory is in dispute, no country can take unilateral action regarding its resources and riches. A good example is the dispute between Iran and Kuwait over the Dorra gas fields in the northern Persian Gulf. Both countries have avoided any action toward developing the fields, waiting for their final status to be negotiated. But, supported by the U.S., Azerbaijan and later Kazakhstan took unilateral actions and contracted out disputed oil and gas fields. Compare this with a similar situation, the dispute between Iran and Qatar in the Persian Gulf over the giant South Pars gas field (the largest in the world). Iran, the “pariah” nation, did no work on the gas field until negotiations between the two countries resulted in a framework for the field’s development. Each country is now developing its own sector.

    But that was not the end of the U.S. meddling in the affairs of that region, particularly its wrong-headed policy toward Iran. Equally important is how to transport the oil and gas from that region to the international markets. The issue has remained politically charged, contributing much to the war between Russia and Georgia.

    There are several foreign-operated oil fields in the Caucasus region and Central Asia. The oil from the ChevronTexaco-operated field of Tengiz in Kazakhstan is transported through a pipeline north into Russia and by rail west to the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi. A second line was built by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium to Novorossiisk in Russia on the Black Sea.

    The Kashagan oil field in northeast Caspian is the largest of them all, but it is still being developed. In the southern Caspian, oil from the British Petroleum-operated field of Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli in the Caspian Sea has been producing several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.

    The most economical way of transporting all that oil is by pipelines through Iran. For example, the Kazakh government drafted a framework agreement for construction of an oil pipeline from the Tengiz field to Belek on the eastern coast of the Caspian and from there to the Iranian port of Khark, on the Persian Gulf. The pipeline was supposed to pass through Tehran, Qom, and Esfahan. The estimated cost for the 900-mile pipeline was only $1.2 billion. But, the U.S. strongly opposed this, and, as a result, the Tengiz oil is transported through routes that cost much more.

    The French oil firm TotalFinaElf, with support from the National Iranian Oil Company, studied a pipeline that would take crude oil from Kashagan across the Caspian to the Iranian border. From there another pipeline was supposed to be built to transport the Kazakh oil across Iran to its Persian Gulf export terminals. The Russian pipeline operator, Transneft, and its Kazakh counterpart, KazTransOil, also carried out a feasibility study for developing a pipeline to Iran in order to link Omsk, in Siberia, with Iran’s port Neka on the Caspian Sea. That pipeline would have allowed Russian, Turkmen, and Kazakh crude oil to be swapped for Iranian oil in its terminals on the Persian Gulf. Although some oil-swapping does take place between Iran and the Central Asian countries, U.S. opposition and pressure have prevented the pipeline from becoming a reality.

    But the most contentious issue was about transporting Azerbaijan’s oil to international market. All that had to be done was the construction of a pipeline from Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, to the Iranian border, a short distance away. From there, an Iranian pipeline, when upgraded, could have taken the oil to the Persian Gulf terminals. But the U.S., pressured by the Israel lobby, opposed this pipeline. Israel wanted to reward Turkey for having established close diplomatic and military relationships with it. Therefore, its lobby went to work in Washington to advocate an alternative route through Turkey.

    The result is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that connects the Sangachal Terminal in Baku to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea, a 1,100-mile pipeline, 155 miles of which passes through Georgia. It was built at a cost of $4 billion and was officially inaugurated on May 25, 2005.

    The Baku-Tehran-Khark (BTK) pipeline could have been constructed at a fraction of the cost of the BTC pipeline. Another great advantage of the BTK pipeline would have been the fact that it would have passed through the politically stable Iran, whereas the BTC pipeline passes not only through Georgia, but also through the restive Kurdish areas of Turkey. The entire pipeline requires constant guarding in order to prevent sabotage. On Aug. 6, 2008, the pipeline was shut off by a major explosion and fire in the eastern Turkish province of Erzincan. The Kurdistan Workers Party took responsibility for the attack. The vulnerability of the Georgian portion of the BTC pipeline was also manifestly demonstrated when Russia bombed the areas around the pipeline’s route in Georgia, just to send the “proper” message to the West.

    One bogus justification for the construction of the costly BTC pipeline was that it would transport oil from several large Azeri oil fields to international markets, totaling 1 million barrels/day, without involving Iran or Russia. That has not happened. The Kurdashi field did not live up to the Italian oil firm Agip’s expectations. TotalFinaElf failed to find any significant oil in the Lenkoran-Talysh field, and ExxonMobil could not find any oil in its Oguz and Zafar-Mashal concessions. Chevron’s work yielded only lackluster results in its Absheron field. These failures would have made the BTK pipeline even more economical.

    But all such advantages of the BTK pipeline were set aside. Instead a political pipeline was built, just to satisfy the Israel lobby. Its construction was also accompanied by numerous violations of human rights by both the Azeri and Turkish governments, which have been documented in the Czech documentary film Zdroj (“Source”) and by Kurdish human rights activists.

    But the U.S., following Israel’s lead, was not yet done with its blind opposition to Iran’s participation in the oil and natural gas market of the Caucasus and Central Asian regions, which would have made negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program more susceptible to success. The U.S. even pressured Kazakhstan to build a trans-Caspian pipeline from the Kazakh port of Aktau to Baku, in order to connect the Kashagan’s oil to the BTC pipeline, which would have been a gigantic environmental disaster waiting to happen. But Russian and Iranian opposition killed that project.

    Thus, had the U.S. not decided that, in order to isolate Iran to appease the Israel lobby, it would make a minor nation like Georgia the cornerstone of its policy in the Caucasus/Central Asia region; had the U.S. not demonized Iran, creating “threats” from its nonexistent nuclear weapon program to justify what it does in Europe against Russia; and had the U.S. agreed to economical oil pipelines through Iran, not a political one through unstable, war-torn regions in Georgia and Turkey, the Georgia-Russia war would not have seemed as significant, and the U.S. and NATO would not have looked so impotent. In fact, the war might not have happened at all.

    But this is what happens when our foreign policy is held hostage by a foreign nation and its lobby.

  • Malthus theories are outdated

    As a consequence, the approach to hunger as a problem resulting from a growing disparity between “excessive population” and insufficient food supply should inevitably lose momentum. It is not that an aggregate quantity of individuals (population) is too large in relation to food supply. There is an unequal distribution of abundant food among countries and social groups. This inequality, quite often reinforced by waste of food determined by the market, brings about scarcity that specifically affects deprived individuals – the poor.

    However, the environmental debate has favored reformulation and resurgence of the Malthusian problematic. Again, certain social hazards, making up what is understood as an environmental crisis, are presented as resulting from differences between growth rates of population increase and the rhythm of regeneration of the material base for development. Therefore, the environmental crisis has also often been defined in terms of aggregated quantities. Its recurrent expression has been a tendency towards natural resource scarcity – biodiversity, water resources, capacity to absorb greenhouse gases, etc. Once again the large quantitative aggregates are blamed for the crisis: for some, the level of economic growth; and for the Neo-Malthusian environmentalists, the population increase that supports that growth, particularly of the poor layers of society.

    Here again we should note that underlying the aggregate pressure on the resource base, one will find clear evidence of distributive inequality in access to the planet’s natural resources. There is no lack of data to clarify this issue, from the Worldwatch Institute’s statistics to the “counter-statistics” of the New Delhi Center for Science and Environment. For example, a Dutch baby consumes several dozens times more energy and material resources than an Indian baby. Therefore, if there is excessive quantitative pressure on planetary resources, it would be perfectly localized among social groups who concentrate economic power – the wealthy.3

    How can it be explained that a theory so devoid of empirical evidence should remain in the public debate? This is our challenge – to understand what makes it possible to present the environmental problem as associated with, or even more, resulting from excessive growth (biological) of the poor population. Neo-Malthusianism has not pointed to the struggle against poverty through distributive social policies but instead to controlling the quantity of poor individuals. It seems to have the intention of preserving poverty, although in the amount that is believed to be socially desirable. This is expressed as the number of poor compatible with a territory’s “ecological” possibilities, conceived and measured in terms of “carrying capacity”. Thus, it seems important to research intellectual instruments, discourses, and concepts – such as “carrying capacity” – which uphold diagnoses that obfuscate essential dimensions of social life and indicate policies that only legitimate and perpetuate inequalities.

    The current notion of territorial “carrying capacity” requires a great effort of abstraction regarding concrete conditions of social life. The goal of such effort is to suggest a determinant relationship between a territory’s “ecological” conditions and its population. Thus, for each territory, with its given natural conditions, there would be a limited population; going beyond this limit would degrade the environment. However, this affirmation makes the following assumptions:

    a) All economic activities developed in the territory are geared to the consumption of its inhabitants. Therefore, there is no production for export. In addition, it would be necessary to assume that all consumption of material goods by those inhabitants is from local production. Therefore, there are no imports from outside the territory. Thus, unless a closed economy without any exchange with external economic agents is assumed, there is no point in imagining a determinant relationship between a territory and the size of its population.

    b) There is equal consumption of material goods among the territory’s inhabitants. In the famous equation I=PAT4, disseminated by Paul Ehrlich and other Neo-Malthusian authors, the aggregate pressure on resources is expressed by total population multiplied by the average consumption per inhabitant. In this approach, the important aspect is aggregate economic pressure. However, the variable population was introduced basically to justify population control. Thus, to reduce pressure on resources, the important thing would be to reduce resource consumption by the rich, not to diminish the total number of inhabitants, including those whose consumption is very low, or in the Neo-Malthusian proposal, especially those who consume very little.

    c) The territory is homogenous, without internal biophysical variations and, therefore, with no potential for differentiated uses. Taking into account the biophysical diversity of each territory implies the acknowledgement of a possible diversity of sociocultural forms of territorial occupation and improvement with different population dynamics associated with them.

    d) The forms of territorial appropriation and use are not constants in time. They change with different technological trajectories and distinct patterns of material efficiency. Therefore, one cannot think of a fixed population size associated with the given “natural” conditions of each territory, as these conditions are undergoing continuous change over time, along with the techniques through which societies appropriate their resources and environments.

    e) It assumes that the territory has only a utilitarian purpose, being appropriated exclusively for material production. This means not considering the gamut of all possible significations attributed by societies to their territorial spaces, given the diverse values and cultural practices within different societies. Thus, for the same biophysical configuration of a territory, an infinite number of productive techniques, practices or significations can result in diverse spatial and temporal forms of appropriation and use of resources. Consequently, to this infinite number of cultural forms of appropriation correspond also distinct population dynamics. Thus, for a territory of multiple significations and uses, it is not valid to establish one single possible population size.

    Therefore, ignoring the complexity of the real world is the essential condition for maintaining the “carrying-capacity” concept. It assumes the de facto existence of a homogenous territory, disconnected from the global economy; and the de facto existence of an “average man” in the consumption of natural resources. It also assumes that techniques and biophysical conditions in the territory do not evolve over time, and that the environment is used only for appropriation with utilitarian goals, devoid of quality and meaning determined by culture, and expressed only by a certain number of imaginary useful services provided to a population also imaginary in its homogeneity and size.

    Only such an effort of disconnecting from social reality allows Brazilian big landholders to claim that indigenous rights legislation allocates “too much land to few Indians”; or representatives of an “ecological authoritarianism” to affirm that there are “too many social rights” when referring to the capacity of rich countries to support immigrant workers. That is because any formulation of the environmental issue made exclusively in quantitative terms ignores the diverse meanings and uses the multiple social actors attribute to the environment. It is reduced to the exclusive quality that the dominant economic agents attribute to the environment and to what they take from it.

    [Translated by Jones de Freitas, edited by Phil Courneyeur]
    1 cf. P. Dasgupta, “The Population Problem: Theory and Evidence,” in Journal of Economic Literature, vol. XXXIII (12/95), pp. 1879-1902.
    2 “Indeed, average income and food production per head can go on increasing even as the wretchedly deprived living conditions of particular section of the population get worse, as they have in many parts of the third world.(..) The sense that there are just “too many people” around often arises from seeing the desperate lives of people in the large and rapidly growing urban slums – bidonville – in poor countries, sobering reminders that we should not take too much comfort from aggregate statistics of economic progress,” cf. A. Sen, “Population: Delusion and Reality,” The New York Review of Books, vol. XVI, n.15, Sept. 22, 1994.,p. 67.
    3 We know that a more sophisticated formulation of the environmental issue would abandon the simple quantitative approach and would introduce the problematic of models of production and consumption, technological patterns, and the mode of wealth accumulation. However, in order to understand the Neo-Malthusian approach to the environmental issue, we shall continue our dialogue with the current outlook of quantitative pressure on resources.
    4 In the equation I=PAT, I is the impact of human pressure, P is population numbers, A is the level of resource consumption and T, the technology used.

    Henri Acselrad is Professor at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning (IPPUR). He worked for four years at IBASE — the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis, one of the leading Brazilian environment and development NGOs — where he continues to be a collaborator. He was one of the key organizers of the NGO Global Forum parallel to UNCED, and organized the book Environment and Democracy edited by IBASE in 1992.

  • Giovanni on population and poverty

    Free event

  • Oil price changes politics forever

    Oil is the miracle that drove the twentieth century. It enabled an agricultural revolution that has doubled farm productivity since the Second World War. Incredible plastics have delivered cheap appliances, packaging, toys, furniture, shoes and synthetic fabrics. Cheap energy has enabled the globalisation of trade. All that is behind us.

    Oil is not the only resource that has peaked. Australia, the United States, China and India now use fresh water faster than the supplies are replenished. Aquifers are falling, rivers are drying up, lakes are shrinking. New dams straddle dry rivers. We face peak fish and peak food.

    The constant growth and permanent innovation that we have taken for granted will not continue.

    Businesses that depend on endless expansion will fail. Financial institutions are already in crisis.

    This will permanently alter the political landscape.

    A century ago, labour movements challenged the entrenched power of capital and social democracy movements were born. Over the last fifty years, political thinking has converged around a supposedly benign economic rationalism that keeps us all comfortable, as long as governments do not interfere too much with the market.

    That belief system has reached its use-by-date. The labour constrained economy is giving way to a resource constrained economy. We have reached the limits of a finite planet.

    This is not some high faluting theory to be discussed over red wine after dinner. This is the practical reality for every school council, every family and every local, regional and federal government.

    If you meet a political candidate who believes that housing estates designed around motor cars can solve the housing crisis, that new roads will improve traffic congestion or that regulation can bring down petrol prices, you have come face to face with a dinosaur facing extinction. Anyone who suggests that climate change can be solved by corporate investment in new technology or that growing algae or using sunlight to convert water into hydrogen will solve the fuel crisis, is dreaming and has not woken up.

    To be sure, new sources of energy will emerge to power the society of the future, but they will never be as cheap as oil. Certainly we will learn to harness local sources of energy and water, process our waste and grow our food locally, but that will require new attitudes to work and consumption.

    We will have to reduce our expectations, learn to fix things instead of throwing them away and clean up after ourselves.

    The people implementing these practical solutions now are the leaders of the future. Find and follow them.