Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
The kind of value orientation demonstrated in this experiment is showing up in the real world. Millennials are not only less materialistic but also far more supportive of environmental stewardship than older generations. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., 75 percent of the Millennial Generation favors a shift out of fossil fuels and into renewable energies—surpassing all the other adult generations.
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A Gallup poll conducted several years ago is even more dramatic. Some 58 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 said that environmental protection should be a national priority in the United States “even at the risk of curbing economic growth.”
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So what do all these experiments, studies, and surveys show us? First, that money doesn’t buy happiness. While poverty breeds despair, increasing wealth, after a modicum of comfort is reached, also breeds increasing despair. Second, rampant materialism, far from making people happier, makes them increasingly alienated, fearful, mistrusting, and lonely.
Third, the primary human drive is not insatiable material wants, as the economists would have us believe, but rather the quest for sociability. What makes us happy, after our minimum requirements for material comfort are met, is affection and companionship. We seek to belong, not to possess and devour—all of which puts into doubt the two governing assumptions of economics: that the things we want most in life are scarce, and that our wants are unlimited. In reality, the things we want most are not scarce but infinitely abundant—love, acceptance, and recognition of our humanity. The advertising industry understands this even if the economists do not. Hundreds of billions of advertising dollars are spent each year appealing to these deeper drives, suggesting, in a twisted way, that they can best be met by buying, hoarding, and consuming more material things, knowing full well that in reality these fabricated wants only pull us further away from our search for community. Imagine how quickly human behavior would change were the advertising industry to suddenly disappear from our daily lives. The obsession with materialism would quickly fade, allowing us the breathing room to rediscover our yearning for one another rather than for things.
But what about the argument that in a near zero marginal cost society, where everyone can have many of the things they desire, whenever they want, for nearly free, human beings will likely gobble up Earth’s remaining resources even more quickly, bringing ruin to the planet? Not likely. It’s scarcity that breeds overconsumption, not abundance. In a world where everyone’s material needs are met, the fear of going without is extinguished. The insatiable need to hoard and overindulge loses much of its currency.
So too does the need to grab what one can from others. Moreover, in a world where everyone’s needs are more or less met, social distinctions based on material status become less relevant. Society is no longer solely divided up on the basis of “mine versus thine.” Nor is everyone’s worth determined by what they have.
That’s not to argue that an era of abundance takes the human race to utopia. No one is naïve enough to believe that the dark side of human nature will suddenly vanish from our cultural DNA. It’s only to say that when abundance replaces scarcity, the human disposition is likely to be far less consumed with the relentless drive to have more and more for fear of what tomorrow might bring. Although, at first glance, the very notion of replacing an economy of scarcity with an economy of abundance might conjure up the prospect of runaway consumption of the planet’s remaining largesse, in fact it is likely, for all the reasons mentioned above, to be the only effective path to securing a sustainable future for our species on Earth.
At least a portion of the younger generation growing up in a new world mediated by distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer networks is starting to break out of the materialist syndrome that characterized much of the economic life of the capitalist era. They are creating a shareable economy that is less materialistic and more sustainable, less expedient and more empathic. Their lives are being lived out more on a global Commons and less in a capitalist market. The new ethos of sharing is just beginning to have a measurable impact on the ecological footprint of a younger generation in the advanced industrialized economies.
This shift from materialism to a sustainable quality of life opens up the prospect of dramatically reducing the ecological footprint of the wealthiest human beings on the planet, making available more of Earth’s abundance so the world’s poorest human beings can lift themselves out of poverty, raise their standard of living, and enjoy the happiness that comes from meeting their basic needs and comforts. Whether these two forces can come together and meet at the gateway of comfort where the whole of humanity can live off Earth’s ecological interest rather than its capital in a sustainable quality of life is an open question.
I’m quite sure that at this point many readers are asking, is this enough? Even if the richest 40 percent of the human race narrows its ecological footprint, it will be of little solace if the poorest 40 percent increases its numbers and expands its ecological footprint. Agreed. We not only have to narrow the ecological footprint of the rich, but also reduce the rising tide of population of the poor if we are all to enjoy the fruits that an abundant planet can provide.
Handing out condoms and counseling families on limiting births is a futile exercise as long as they are mired in poverty. We know that in the poorest countries of the world, large families serve as a de facto insurance
policy, guaranteeing that additional bodies will be available to take on the work should some siblings die prematurely. Women and children in impoverished communities in the developing world are the beasts of burden. In particular, they are the mules that marshal much of the scant resources to assure their families’ survival. So how do we encourage smaller families?
We are beginning to learn that the key to population stabilization on Earth is access to electricity. That’s why Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, has made the universal access to electricity the centerpiece of his administration’s economic development agenda.
It was electricity that freed women in Europe, the Americas, and certain other countries in the twentieth century. Electricity liberated women from the yolk of household chores that chained them to the hearth as little more than indentured servants. Electricity allowed young girls, as well as boys, enough time to pursue an education and better their lot in life. As women became more independent as well as breadwinners, their lives became more secure and the number of births dramatically declined. Today, with few exceptions, the fertility rate in industrialized countries has fallen to 2.1 children per woman, the rate at which children replace parents. Population has fallen precipitously across the wealthiest nations of the world.
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Still, more than 20 percent of the human race is without electricity, and an additional 20 percent has only marginal and unreliable access to electricity. These are the very countries where population is rising the fastest. The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has made a commitment to help empower local populations to lay down a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) infrastructure that can bring green electricity to 1.5 billion impoverished people. In 2011, I joined Dr.
Kandeh Yumkella, director general of UNIDO and the head of U.N. Energy, at the organization’s global conference in support of the TIR build-out in developing nations. Yumkella declared that “we believe we are at the beginning of a third industrial revolution and I wanted all member countries of UNIDO to hear the message and ask them the key question: How can we be part of this revolution?”
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The goal is to make electricity universally available by 2030. The electrification of every community on Earth will provide the impetus to lift the world’s poor out of poverty and toward the zone of comfort that can sustain a decent quality of life for every human being.
As the movement for universal access to electricity unfolds, the population surge in the poorest countries will very likely diminish as it has in every other country where electrification has brought people out of abject poverty. By midcentury, the falling fertility rate is likely to approach 2.1 children per family across the world, marking the beginning of a slow decline in human population, eventually bringing it down to 5 billion people—the number that will secure our ability to live off of nature’s ecological interest and enjoy an economy of abundance.
The Two Wild Cards of the Apocalypse
Reducing the ecological footprint of the wealthy, bringing 40 percent of the human race up out of poverty, and stabilizing and shrinking the human population to allow our species to live off the interest rather than the principal of Earth’s biocapacity are challenging but not impossible endeavors. These tasks, however, are made more problematic by two wild cards that could undermine our best efforts to replenish the planet and replace scarcity with abundance.
Industrial-induced climate change is now compromising our ecosystems and imperiling our species’ survival as well as the survival of our fellow creatures. If that weren’t enough to contend with, the same IT and Internet technologies that are connecting the human race in a sharable economy of abundance are increasingly being used by cyberterrorists to wreak havoc on the evolving Internet of Things infrastructure, with potentially catastrophic impacts that could result in the collapse of modern civilization and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
A Warming Planet
Climate scientists report that the global atmospheric concentration of carbon, which ranged from a 180 to 300 parts per million (ppm) for the past 650,000 years, has risen from 280 ppm just before the outset of the industrial era to 400 ppm in 2013.
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The atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, the other two powerful global warming gases, are showing similar steep trajectories.
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At the Copenhagen global climate summit in December 2009, the European Union proposed that the nations of the world not exceed carbon dioxide emissions of 450 ppm by 2050, with the hope that if we were able to do so, we might limit the rise in Earth’s temperature to 3.5°F (2°C). Even a 3.5°F rise, however, would take us back to the temperature on Earth several million years ago, in the Pliocene epoch, with devastating consequences to ecosystems and human life.
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The EU proposal went ignored. Now, four years later, the steep rise in the use of carbon-based fuels has pushed up the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO
2
) far more quickly than earlier models had projected, making it likely that the temperature on Earth will rush past the 3.5° target and could top off at 8.1°F (4.5°C) or more by 2100—temperatures not seen on Earth for millions of years.
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(Remember, anatomically modern human beings—the youngest species—have only inhabited the planet for 175,000 years or so.)
What makes these dramatic spikes in the Earth’s temperature so terrifying is that the increase in heat radically shifts the planet’s hydrological cycle. We are a watery planet. The Earth’s diverse ecosystems have evolved over geological time in direct relationship to precipitation patterns. Each
rise in temperature of 1°C results in a 7 percent increase in the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.
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This causes a radical change in the way water is distributed, with more intense precipitation but a reduction in duration and frequency. The consequences are already being felt in ecosystems around the world. We are experiencing more bitter winter snows, more dramatic spring storms and floods, more prolonged summer droughts, more wildfires, more intense hurricanes (category 3, 4, and 5), a melting of the ice caps on the great mountain ranges, and a rise in sea levels.
The Earth’s ecosystems cannot readjust to a disruptive change in the planet’s water cycle in such a brief moment in time and are under increasing stress, with some on the verge of collapse. The destabilization of ecosystem dynamics around the world has now pushed the biosphere into the sixth extinction event of the past 450 million years of life on Earth. In each of the five previous extinctions, Earth’s climate reached a critical tipping point, throwing the ecosystems into a positive feedback loop, leading to a quick wipe-out of the planet’s biodiversity. On average, it took upward of 10 million years to recover the lost biodiversity. Biologists tell us that we could see the extinction of half the Earth’s species by the end of the current century, resulting in a barren new era that could last for millions of years.
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James Hansen, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the chief climatologist for the U.S. government, forecasts a 6°C rise in the Earth’s temperature between now and the turn of the century—and with it, the end of human civilization as we’ve come to know it. The only hope, according to Hansen, is to reduce the current concentration of carbon in the atmosphere from 385 ppm to 350 ppm or less—something no government, not even the European Union, is currently proposing.
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Here, the wild card is the impact that climate change and the shift in the hydrological cycle is likely to have on agricultural production and infrastructure. The dramatic rise in floods and droughts are wreaking devastation on large swaths of agricultural land around the world. Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, ravaged the agriculture fields of the Philippines at the onset of the rice planting season in November 2013, destroying hundreds of thousands of hectares of plantable land, decimating the rice production in that country. Just a month earlier, cyclone Phailin stormed across east India with nearly equal destructive force. In the regions of Odisha and Bihar alone, crop losses were estimated at $45 billion.
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In June 2013, torrential rainfall across Central Europe caused rivers to overflow their banks, flooding agricultural fields. In Passau, Germany, where the Danube, Inn, and Ilz rivers come together, flood waters peaked at 42.3 feet, topping the worst flood ever recorded in the region back in 1501.
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I saw the devastation firsthand while traveling from the Frankfurt airport to the historic city of Weimar. Cropland along the route was underwater. Damage to agriculture production is expected to exceed $16.5 billion.
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