Chalk and cheese

by Gavin Maclean

On Tuesday night last week the hall at St Andrew’s Church was crowded for an address by scientist Mike Joy, on degrowth and climate change. Clear, factual and consistent, it was a marked contrast to the muddled and contradictory speech by Christopher Luxon the day before, which, also by contrast, was extensively quoted in The Herald.

Degrowth is not a vague idea for the future, but already upon us, according to Joy. The costs of our extravagant lifestyle are bearing down in the form of climate change, ecological overshoot, scarcity and inflating material costs, and escalating poverty worldwide and close to home.

“All growth requires more consumption, which requires mining more non-renewable materials and more energy, which is unsustainable. On a planet on the verge of multiple tipping points, the extraction required to even begin to replace fossil fuels would be suicidal. To decarbonise, managed degrowth is our only possible option. ‘Green growth’ just replaces fossil fuels with renewable energy and traps us in this spiral of environmental damage.”

Energy alternatives all bring extra costs. Most alternative installations are built with the aid of fossil fuels and have short lives, and at our present rate of consumption, the world simply cannot provide the materials. Worst of all, the wide-ranging overshoots are not just in carbon dioxide and climate change, so alternatives, without massive degrowth, do not cure the problems, but postpone and prolong them.

Luxon had no consistent approach to centralisation. His speech attacked, with some justification, the Labour Government’s attempts to centralise health boards, water utilities and polytechnics, among other things, but then he contradicted himself by calling for a national infrastructure agency, because “infrastructure funding is too fragmented,” and “we are one country”.

He decried the divisions in society; but nothing is as divisive as that outstanding product of economics as we know it, and he would boost it — inequality.

He hopes to fix the problems of the economy by exacerbating all the economic madness that generated them. He played simplistically on fear of inflation by recalling the 19 percent of decades ago — an unlikely scenario now.

The idea of net zero, according to Mike Joy, is a sham, as the corporates and conventional economists use it as an excuse to keep on polluting in false hope of compensating, whereas all growth beyond the limits that we’ve already reached is destructive.

“The word ‘net’ is based on a delusion and avoids the need to reduce our energy consumption and protect our environment.”

His wealth of evidence showed the amazing accuracy of scientific modelling, ever since the Club of Rome in 1972, and the urgency of the environmental crisis pressing upon us. We do not have until 2050 to balance things up, but need to act — or is it stop overacting? — now. The faster the degrowth, the better the result. The time is now.

By contrast, Chris Luxon ignored all the available science and offered a merry ride to Hell, calling for fast-tracking of consents, and 30-year long-term certainty to reduce project costs.

Erudition and jingoism: as different as chalk and cheese.