Time
Magazine February 22, 2011
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2052930,00.html
The
Natural Debt Crisis:
Learning to Live Within Our
Planet's Means
By Bryan
Walsh
Ask any
Republican - from the Speaker of
the House to a local sheriff
- what the
biggest problem facing the
country is today and you're
sure to get
the same answer: Debt.
Conservatives believe a public
debt of $14
trillion and growing is crippling
the economy and
condemning
future generations to penury. In
Wisconsin, new Republican
governor
Scott Walker says that a $137
million deficit leaves him no
choice but
to force public unions in the
state to accept drastic
benefits
reductions and curtailed
bargaining rights - a stance that
has brought
tens of thousands of protesters
to the streets of
Madison. In
Congress, the
Republican-controlled House has
passed a
budget that
would slash $60 billion in
government spending, most of
it from
discretionary programs. "We're
broke," Speaker John Boehner
told Meet
the Press last week. "It's time
to get serious about how
we're
spending the nation's
money."
It's not
that President Barack Obama and
the Democrats don't talk
about the
danger of spiraling public debt.
Obama's own fiscal 2012
budget
included a five-year freeze on
nonsecurity discretionary
spending.
But when it comes to serious
slash-and-burn deficit
reductions
- and alarming rhetoric about
what unchecked public debt
will do to
the country - Obama just can't
compete with his friends
across the
aisle. "We face a crushing burden
of debt," Wisconsin
Republican
Paul Ryan said in his response to
last month's State of
the Union
speech. "The debt will soon
eclipse our entire economy, and
grow to
catastrophic levels in the years
ahead."
Now, I'm
not a political reporter -
thankfully - but I've heard that
sort of
rhetoric before, this warning
that we're living beyond our
means,
running up a tremendous debt that
will one day cause
catastrophe.
It's the call of the
environmentalist, and it was on
display
just a few blocks away from the
Capitol in Washington this
weekend at
the annual summit of the American
Association for the
Advancement
of Science. Speaker after speaker
took the podium in
stuffy
halls around the Walter E.
Washington Convention Center to
warn that
we had exceeded the planet's
carrying capacity - with too
many
people, too much pollution and
too much carbon dioxide - and
that unless
we cut back drastically on
consumption, our world would
collapse,
and us with it. "Right now we're
living at about 1.5
planets'
worth of consumption," says Jason
Clay, senior vice
president
for market transformation at the
World Wildlife Fund. "We
are living
beyond what is sustainable. That
can't go on forever."
Even the
terms we use to describe our two
debts are similar, as the
language
used in finance bleeds over into
ecology. Conservationists
like to
talk about "natural capital" -
the stuff provided by the
planet that
underpins prosperity. Clean air,
clean water, soil,
forests,
fish, biodiversity - this is the
natural capital in our
balance
sheet, and without it there would
be no life, let alone
business.
One study done in the mid-1990s
estimated that the total
value of
such ecosystem services was
approximately $33 trillion -
considerably
more than the global GDP at the
time. The business of
the planet
is the environment.
If we act
sustainably - if we live within
our means, as conservatives
might put
it - our natural capital will
regenerate and sustain us,
like a bank
account delivering interest. But
we're not living within
our means -
not even close. Just to take one
example from the
conference,
Villy Christensen of the
University of British Columbia
(UBC)
Fisheries Center looked at global
fish stocks and found that
big
predatory fish like tuna and cod
have declined by more than
two-thirds
over the past century. Fifty-four
percent of that decline
has taken
place over the past 40 years,
when factory-fishing boats
began
sweeping the oceans. Christensen
explained the dramatic
disappearance
of our favorite fish in terms
that might be familiar to
any budget
hawk. "You can think of the fish
biomass as our capital in
the bank,"
he said. "We can draw an interest
from that capital every
year. But
we have been eroding the capital
year after year, and we
are now
left with so small fish stocks
that the world catches are
smaller now
than they were in the
1980s."
Admittedly,
there are economists who argue
that these fears are
overblown,
that humanity has been able to
keep growing through
technological
innovation that has multiplied
the carrying capacity of
the planet.
There were doomsayers in the
1970s who predicted imminent
global
starvation; instead, we've
thrived economically, pulling
hundreds of
millions of human beings out of
poverty. That's exactly
how most
conservatives talk about the
natural debt, if they talk
about it
all. We'll keep growing, keep
innovating our way out of
anything
nature throws in our path. And if
that doesn't work, there's
always
divine intervention. "God is not
capricious," Minnesota
Republican
Mike Beard said recently. "He's
given us a creation that
is
dynamically stable. We are not
going to run out of
anything."
But the
truly scary possibility is that
the collapse could come quite
suddenly,
after what may seem to be a long
period of global
prosperity.
It would only be in retrospect,
after the fall, that we
would see
that what we thought was success
was built on eating into
our
capital, like a consumer maxing
out his credit cards to buy a
second
house. The global rise in food
prices, which have hit their
highest
level globally in several
decades, might be an early sign
that the
agricultural system that sustains
(some more than others)
nearly 7
billion people with the help of
fertilizers and irrigation
may be
hitting its limits. "When the
crisis hits, we'll act rapidly,
but by then
it might be too late for hundreds
of millions or even
billions of
people," says William Rees, an
ecologist at UBC.
What's
amazing to me, though, is that
the very politicians who are so
worried
about the public debt - and who
want deep spending cuts now
to save our
future, whatever the cost -
utterly dismiss the idea that
we could
face an equal crisis of natural
debt. Politicians like
Boehner and
Ryan order us to tighten our
belts immediately, but they
utterly
deny the climate and resource
crisis the world faces. In
fact, the
Republicans in Congress are going
well beyond simple denial
- they're
now using their budget to erode
America's ability to
prepare for
that very scary
future.
The
Republican budget would cut the
Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA)
budget by one-third - $3 billion
- and would prevent the agency
from
setting any limits on CO2 and a
number of other pollutants. It
would
eliminate U.S. funding for the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate
Change - which would save all of
$12.5 million. It would cut
Department
of Energy budgets that promoted
renewable energy by $1.7
billion - a
23% reduction at a time when the
U.S. is in a
clean-energy
race with China. The National
Science Foundation budget
would be
cut by $395.5 million. "This is
probably the single most
irresponsible
bill I have seen either Chamber
of Congress pass in the
more than
20 years I have been in
Washington," wrote Dan Lashof,
the
director of
the Natural Resource Defense
Council's climate
center.
To which
the Republicans would respond, We
face an unprecedented
fiscal
crisis, and tough choices have to
be made. All right - but if
you believe
public debt is such a potential
catastrophe that it must
be defused
now, no matter the short-term
pain, it only seems right to
take our
natural debt just as seriously.
Either way, we're broke -
and it's
time we acted like it.
