The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World - Paul Gilding (2011)

Notes

CHAPTER 1: AN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HURRICANE

1. There is, of course, subjective judgment in defining quality of life, heavily influenced by one’s own relative situation. Median world income in 2007 was $1,700. While this would seem very low to many, it is over twice the generally accepted definition of poverty at $2 per day and well above the definition of extreme poverty at $1.25 per day. So around half the world’s people, or over three billion of us, live above this $1,700 per year level—more than double the defined poverty level. Another way of considering it is that as of 2009, half of the world’s population was defined as “middle class” for the first time—that is, they had roughly one third of their income left for discretionary spending after basic food and shelter. I therefore choose one billion, the top third of those defined as middle class, as an estimate of the number whose lives are reasonably “comfortable” with respect to basic needs, in global terms.

CHAPTER 2: THE SCREAM—WE ARE THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN

1. “Scream Crash Boom” is available in full on my Web site, www.paulgilding.com.

2. Henry David Thoreau, Walking (Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2007). and Journal (August 30, 1856). Available online at http://www.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/.

3. Peter Matthiessen, “Environmentalist Rachel Carson,” Time, March 29, 1999.

4. William Darby, “Silence, Miss Carson!” Chemical and Engineering News 40 (October 1, 1962): 60-62.

5. Michael Smith, “ ‘Silence, Miss Carson!’: Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 733.

6. See http://www1.umn.edu/ships/pesticides/library/monsanto1962.pdf.

7. Priscilla Coit Murphy, What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring (2005), 24-25 (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

8. “The Cities: The Price of Optimism,” Time, August 1, 1969.

9. Newsweek editorial, March 13, 1972.

10. Graham Turner, A Comparison of the “Limits to Growth” with 30 Years of Reality, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, 2008 (Canberra, Australia: CSIRO, 2005). Available online at http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf.

11. Ingrid Eckerman, The Bhopal Saga—Causes and Consequences of the World’s Largest Industrial Disaster (India: Universities Press, 2005).

12. I first heard of this phrase in 1999 when used by John Passacantando, then of Ozone Action and later of Greenpeace.

13. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), 343.

CHAPTER 3: A VERY BIG PROBLEM

1. Principle 15, Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992. Available online at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm.

2. Article 2, Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992. Available online at http://unfcc.int.

3. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

4. Greenpeace International, Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, 2010; see http://www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries for the full report.

5. Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science 306, no. 5702 (December 2004): 1686, doi:10.1126/science.1103618.

6. William R. L. Anderegg et al., “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 21 (June 2010), doi:10.1073/pnas.1003187107.

7. These reports include those by the U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, an independent international panel set up by the University of East Anglia, and the Independent Climate Change Email Review. All concluded that the e-mails did not undermine the findings of climate science or the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists involved. The reports are available at http://www.cce-review.org; http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP.

8. The full reports and summaries are available online at http://www.millenniumassessment.org.

9. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/17/saving-fish-stocks-cost-jobs.

10. World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization, The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, 2008. Available at http://worldbank.com.

11. Joshua Bishop (ed.), TEEB—The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Report for Business, Appendix 2.1, available at www.teebweb.org.

12. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2009. Available at http://www.iea.org.

13. The papers can be found on their Web site, www.stockholmresilience.org. See Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472-475.

14. Walter K. Dodds et al., “Eutrophication of U.S. Freshwaters: Analysis of Potential Economic Damages,” Environmental Science & Technology 43, no. 1 (2009): 12-19.

15. Robert Costanza et al., “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” Nature 387 (May 15, 1997): 253.

16. See www.footprintnetwork.org.

17. WWF and Global Footprint Network, Living Planet Report 2008, and the National Footprint Accounts 2009 data tables, available at www.footprintnetwork.org.

CHAPTER 4: BEYOND THE LIMITS—THE GREAT DISRUPTION

1. See the UN Population Division Web site for world population projections, at esa.un.org/unpp.

2. Australian Treasury and Department of Climate Change and Water, Australia’s Low Pollution Future: The Economics of Climate Change Mitigation, 2008. Available at http://www.treasury.gov.au/lowpollutionfuture/.

3. Dominic Wilson and Anna Stupnytska, “The N-11: More Than an Acronym,” Goldman Sachs, Global Economics Paper No. 153, 2007. Available at http://www.goldmansachs.com.

4. John Hawksworth, “The World in 2050: How Big Will the Major Emerging Market Economies Get and How Can the OECD Compete?” PwC, 2006. Available at http://www.pwc.com. PwC’s figures are based on purchasing power parity (PPP), where amounts are adjusted to take account of how many goods or services one unit of currency buys. For example, $1 at market exchange rates buys a lot more in China than it does in the United States and slightly less in Scandinavia than it does in the United States. PPP is a useful measure for our purposes, since it has been closely linked with consumption and thus ecosystem demands. This accounts for much of the difference between PwC’s estimates and the others I have referenced, all of which were based on nominal US$.

5. Stefan Giljum and Christine Polzin, “Resource Efficiency for Sustainable Growth: Global Trends and European Policy Scenarios, background paper for the UN Industrial Development Organization’s International Conference on Green Industry in Asia (September 2009), available at http://oxford.academia.edu/ChristinePolzin/Papers/.

6. Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth? (U.K. Sustainable Development Commission, 2009), 48.

7. WWF and the Global Footprint Network, Living Planet Report 2008.

8. Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth,” Science 171, no. 3977 (1971): 1212-1217.

9. Gurdev S. Khush, “Green Revolution: Preparing for the 21st Century,” Genome 42, no. 4 (1999): 646-655.

10. National Academy of Sciences, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, Climate Research Board, 1979. Available at http://www.nap.edu.

11. David Archer, “Fate of Fossil Fuel CO₂ in Geologic Time,” Journal of Geophysical Research 110 (2005), doi:10.1029/2004JC002625.

12. Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth?: The Transition to a Sustainable Economy, U.K. Sustainable Development Commission, 2009. Available from their Web site at www.sd-commission.org.uk.

CHAPTER 5: ADDICTED TO GROWTH

1. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book IV, chapter 6 (1848). Available online at http://www.econlib.org.

2. See, for example, Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth?: The Transition to a Sustainable Economy, U.K. Sustainable Development Commission, 2009. Available from their Web site at www.sd-commission.org.uk.

3. Unnamed caller on ABC Radio 702, Sydney, Australia.

CHAPTER 6: GLOBAL FORESHOCK—THE YEAR THAT GROWTH STOPPED

1. National Snow and Ice Data Center, http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_index.html.

2. James A. Screen and Ian Simmonds, “The Central Role of Diminishing Sea Ice in Recent Arctic Temperature Amplification,” Nature 464 (April 29, 2010): 1334-1337, doi:10.1038/nature09051.

3. See http://bio-fuel-watch.blogspot.com/2010/04/large-scale-soy-farming-in-brazil.html; also see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=biofuels-bad-for-people-and-climate.

4. Lorenzo Cotula et al., “Land Grab or Development Opportunity?: Agricultural Investment and International Land Deals in Africa,” FAO, IIED, and IFAD, 2009. Available at http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/ak241e/ak241e00.htm.

5. Shepared Daniel with Anuradha Mitta, “The Great Land Grab: Rush for World’s Farmland Threatens Food Security of the Poor,” Oakland Institute, 2009. Available online at http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/pdfs/LandGrab_final_web.pdf.

6. Joachim von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, “ ‘Land Grabbing’ by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries: Risks and Opportunities,” IFPRI Policy Brief 13, 2009. Available at http://www.ifpri.org/publication/land-grabbing-foreign-investors-developing-countries.

7. Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt, “The New Colonialism: Foreign Investors Snap Up African Farmland,” Spiegel Online International, August 30, 2009.

CHAPTER 8: ARE WE FINISHED?

1. H. Damon Matthews and Andrew J. Weaver, “Committed climate warming,” Nature Geoscience 3 (2010): 142-143.

2. This is actually a myth, but the concept is well understood in popular culture.

3. The report was obtained by the Observer newspaper and reported on in that paper on February 22, 2004.

4. Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog, Kafka’s Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990).

CHAPTER 9: WHEN THE DAM OF DENIAL BREAKS

1. John A. Romley et al., The Impact of Air Quality on Hospital Spending, RAND Health, 2010. Available at http://www.rand.org/pubs.

CHAPTER 10: THE ONE-DEGREE WAR

1. Paul Gilding and Jorgen Randers, “The One Degree War Plan,” Journal of Global Responsibility, vol. 1, issue 1 (2010): 170-188. Available online at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1860356.

2. H. Damon Matthews and Andrew J. Weaver, “Committed Climate Warming,” Nature Geoscience 3 (2010): 142-143.

3. Steven J. Davis, Ken Caldeira, and H. Damon Matthews, “Future CO₂ Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure,” Science vol 328, no. 5997 (September 2010): 1330-1333.

4. Economic History Association Web site, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/tassava.WWII.

5. Robert G. Ferguson, “One Thousand Planes a Day: Ford, Grumman, General Motors and the Arsenal of Democracy,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 149.

6. World Resources Institute, Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, available online at http://cait.wri.org/cait.php?page=yearly (accessed May 11, 2009). These percentages are based on 2005 emissions, excluding Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry.

7. We ran our assumed emission scenario (along with an IPCC “business as usual” scenario) through the C-ROADS model with the kind help of Lori Siegel. See T. Fiddaman, L. Siegel, E. Sawin, A. Jones, J. Sterman, 2009: C-ROADS Simulator Reference Guide, Ventana Systems, Sustainability Institute, and MIT Sloan School of Management, www.climateinteractive.org.

8. McKinsey & Co., Pathways to a Low-Carbon Economy (2009), shows how for every year of delay, the peak atmospheric concentration of CO₂e could be expected to be 5 ppm higher for the same level of action. Available online at http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/. Stern also argues the economic value case for “strong and early action” in Nicholas Stern, Executive Summary, Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 2006. Available online at http://www.sternreview.org.uk/.

9. Dollars or euros per ton of CO₂e is a measure of the estimated cost to take actions to achieve a ton of CO₂e reduction. The McKinsey study referred to categorized various actions (for instance, energy efficiency, nuclear power, solar panels, auto efficiency) into various cost categories.

10. See Prince’s Rainforests Project, An Emergency Package for Tropical Forests, March 2009, http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/content/documents/Report%20%20March%202009.pdf.

11. In this paper we assume there will be some six thousand major power plants in operation in 2018 (against some five thousand today). We assume that one thousand of these are closed down during the C-war in 2018-2023 (reducing emissions by 5 GtCO₂e/yr) and that a further one thousand plants will be retrofitted with CCS equipment (reducing emissions by a further 2 GtCO₂e by 2023). A big CCS plant sequesters on average 2 MtCO₂/yr—roughly 1 in a gas-fired utility and roughly 3 in a coal-fired utility.

12. CCS refers to various technologies designed to capture the carbon emitted from burning coal in power plants, then concentrating it and transporting it to underground basins, where it can be locked up indefinitely.

13. See http://www.desertec.org.

14. See Mark Z. Jacobson (Stanford University) and Mark A. Delucchi (University of California, Davis) in “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables,” Scientific American, November 2009, where an article summarizes their full study.

15. See V. R. Cardozier, The Mobilization of the United States in World War II: How the Government, Military and Industry Prepared for War (1995), especially chapter 10 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995).

16. Gilding and Randers, “The One Degree War Plan,” Journal of Global Responsibility, vol. 1, Issue 1 (2010).

CHAPTER 11: HOW AN AUSTRIAN ECONOMIST COULD SAVE THE WORLD

1. New York Times, December 18, 2008.

2. For an overview of DuPont’s performance and approach see: Scot Holliday, “A Case Study of How DuPont Reduced Its Environment Footprint: The Role of Organizational Change in Sustainability,” dissertation at The George Washington University, Washington, D.C (2010).

3. See various papers at http://www.isc.hbs.edu/soci-environmental.htm, including a twenty-year review of Porter’s hypothesis at http://www.isc.hbs.edu/PorterHypothesis_Montreal2010.htm.

CHAPTER 12: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION ON STEROIDS

1. A U.K. review by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology finds that coal power typically generates in excess of 1,000 grams CO₂e per kWh, versus 4.64 for onshore and 5.25 for offshore wind. That is, about 200 to 1, or a 99.5 percent reduction. See http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf.

2. From Al Gore, Our Choice (New York: Rodale, 2009), p. 57.

3. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/05/the_ministry_of_oil_defense

4. See Mark Z. Jacobson (Stanford University) and Mark A. Delucchi (University of California) in “A plan to power 100 percent of the planet with Renewables,” Scientific American, November 2009, where an article summarizes their full study.

5. Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), Renewables 2010: Global Status Report, 2010. REN21 is a network of governments, international organizations including the International Energy Agency, international NGOs, and industry. Available online at http://www.ren21.net/. See also UNEP, “Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2010 Report,” available at http://sefi.unep.org/english/globaltrends2010.html.

6. United States Energy Information Administration, statistics available at http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity _home#tab2.

7. See summary article at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article /IEA-cleantech-low-carbon-energy-technology-emissio-pd20100705 -73F5M.

8. http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/sizing-low-carbon-economy.

CHAPTER 13: SHIFTING SANDS

1. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05friedman.html.

2. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage.

CHAPTER 14: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

1. A Steady-State Economy, commissioned by the Sustainable Development Commission, April 24, 2008, http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=775.

2. Ibid.

3. Representative Barber Conable is credited as the source of this quote.

4. See http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/sizing-low-carbon-economy.

CHAPTER 15: THE HAPPINESS ECONOMY

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th ed., edited by Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1904).

2. Centre for the Advancement of Steady State Economics, http://steadystate.org.

3. See http://www.happyplanetindex.org.

4. Paper by Professor Clive Hamilton and Professor Tim Kasser, presented at Oxford University conference 2009, 4 degrees and beyond, http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/oxford_four_degrees_paper _final.pdf.

CHAPTER 16: YES, THERE IS LIFE AFTER SHOPPING

1. See http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/the_personal_im.html.

2. See http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com/2008/09/how-to-market-t.html.

3. See http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0929-04.htm.

4. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1538555/The-year-of-living-frugally-how-10-friends-survived-without-shopping.html.

5. See http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment /music/article6281684.ece and Reverend Billy’s site at www.revbilly.com.

6. See http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-story-of-stuff-20100713,0,2775603,full.story.

7. See http://www.neweconomics.org/projects/five-ways-well-being.

8. See http://www.lohas.com/forum/lohas8/market/index.html.

9. See http://www.ota.com/pics/documents/2010OrganicIndustrySurveySummary.pdf.

CHAPTER 17: NO, THE POOR WILL NOT ALWAYS BE WITH US

1. Barry Bosworth and Susan M. Collins, “Accounting for Growth: Comparing China and India,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 45-66.

2. United Nations University World Institute for Development Economic Research, The World Distribution of Household Wealth (2006), available online at http://www.wider.unu.edu/.

3. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (OECD, 2001), available online at http://www.theworldeconomy.org/.

4. I first heard this analogy in a conversation with Charles Secret from the New Economics Foundation.

5. Royal United Services Institute, “Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World,” Whitehall Papers 69 (2007, published April 2008).

6. Marshall B. Burkea et al., “Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 49 (2009).

7. Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008).

CHAPTER 18: INEFFECTIVE INEQUALITY

1. See http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/556.

2. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010) and Richard Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: The Affliction of Inequality (London: Routledge, 1996).

3. Ibid.

4. Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, “ ‘Economists’ policy views and voting,” Public Choice 126 (2006): 331-342.

CHAPTER 19: THE FUTURE IS HERE, IT’S JUST NOT WIDELY DISTRIBUTED YET

1. Adopted from a quote by author William Gibson.

2. See http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateS&navID=WholesaleandFarmersMarkets&leftNav =WholesaleandFarmersMarkets&page=WFMFarmersMarketGrowth&description=Farmers%20Market%20Growth&acct=frmrdirmkt.

3. See http://www.iea.org/press/pressdetail.asp?PRESS_REL_ID=395.

4. See http://www.socialinvest.org/resources/sriguide/srifacts.cfm.

5. See http://www.ica.coop/coop/statistics.html.

6. State of the World 2010, Worldwatch, “Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability,” article by John de Graff, http://blogs.worldwatch.org/transformingcultures/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/SOW2010-PreviewVersion.pdf.

7. See http://www.mensheds.com.au.

8. See www.cohousing.org.

9. See http://www.womensbusinessresearchcenter.org/research/keyfacts.

10. See http://connectedthebook.com.

11. Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21^st Century (REN21), “Renewables 2010: Global Status Report” (2010). REN21 is a network of governments, international organizations including the International Energy Agency, international NGOs and industry, available at http://www.ren21.net/. See also UNEP, “Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2010 Report,” available at http://sefi.unep.org/english/globaltrends2010.html.