Our obsession with economic growth is deadly | All Hail The Planet

we're surrounded by stuff kitchen stuff office stuff useful stuff useless stuff single-use stuff never use stuff environmentally toxic stuff marginally less toxic stuff we buy and buy and buy it's the foundation of how our economies run and how they grow but all this buying all this economic growing is devastating people and our planet [Music] thank you from Fast fashion to flights smartphones to skin care today our consumer-based societies are gobbling up the planet's resources at a rate that's 1.75 times faster than it can regenerate how do we know well there's an international NGO called the global footprint Network who for many years have been tracking something called Earth overshoot Day it's the date in the annual calendar when according to available data more of the Earth's ecological resources have been used and can naturally be replenished in a year in 2021 Earth overshoot day was on July 29th this year in 2022 it landed a day earlier on July 28th this follows a 30-year Trend that has steadily pushed overshoot days earlier and earlier there are variations though depending on where you live for instance if all of humanity consumed resources like Qatar a small nation in the Middle East Earth overshoot day would be as early as February 10th after all they are a major Global provider and consumer of fossil fuels like natural gas on the other end of the spectrum a country of roughly the same size and population Jamaica currently consumes in a way that would make Earth's resources last all the way until late December meanwhile the UK's overshoot day in 2022 fell on May 19th Japan May 6th Norway April 12th Australia March 23rd while in the U.S and Canada it was even earlier still on the 13th of March once you've heard all these dates it's easy to think consumers especially those of us in the global North we're the problem there are people who think it's all just about consumers and if consumers could just change we could stop the climate crisis and I think that's not the right way to look at it I spoke with Dr Juliet Shaw an economic sociologist at Boston College who has habits it's much more that production drives the system and although consumers are a key part of it and they have to play their part to keep the system going the sort of power in the system is located much more on the production side it's not really about consumer culture as such it's really more about the underlying economic system that we live in and that governs our lives right which is of course capitalism Dr Jason hickle is a an economic Anthropologist whose work centers on questions relating to ecological economics and global inequality now under capitalism the objects of constantly increasing production is not to meet any specific concrete human or social need so the other system that produces an extraordinary amount of outputs is profoundly productive and in order to keep this constantly going then you have to somehow have people absorb all that output right so the consequence of this is that people are effectively forced to become consumers 20th century capitalism established itself as the economic system across most of the world and Central to the capitalist model is the idea that people are first and foremost independent consumers it was the end of World War II that triggered an extraordinary spurt in consumerism in the west rebuilding war-torn Nations and societies resulted in an employment Bonanza and is more money flowed Goods became cheaper and more abundant the consumerist genie had been let out of the bottle in decades to come environmentalists would look back at the late 1940s and call it the great acceleration a period in which human impact on the planet increased exponentially in the post-world War II period there was a big move in the West in the global North countries to de-politicize consumption no industry can prosper long without the consent of the consumer to sort of Market off as a spear that should not be subject to social concerns and citizenship concerns that what you consume is A Private Matter rather than a public matter and it's the way of stabilizing the economy and providing more employment to increase increase consumption to maintain consumer demand and so forth [Music] so businesses and corporations keeping the consumerist engine run ICS of the trade to keep people buying one of them is something called planned obsolescence it's a complex name that basically means deliberate poor design the idea here is that you want to design products to break down after a relatively short period of time make them very difficult to repair so that people have no other alternative but to replace them quite frequently a huge number of tech firms use the strategy we know that white goods like refrigerators and washing machines dishwashers and so on have increasingly short lifespans they could last much much longer with very little additional costs to make them more robust but basically companies are incentivized to ensure that they break down in a short period of time obsolescence of the operational kind is one thing but what about perceived obsolescence when the product is still working but has become obsolete in your eyes this happens so often and so insidiously that you probably don't even know which kitchen gadget phone case or pair of sneakers you bought because you really needed to replace something or because you were persuaded into thinking you needed something new even though what you already had was just fine advertisers have been affected strategies to keep us buying by exploiting our emotions our fear of not fitting in or our desire to be more attractive lift your beauty to new heights with new revitalizing supreme plus youth power cream good amount of today this kind of advertising is not telling you what the company's products are but instead what you could be with their product so if they want to call you crazy show them what crazy can do however in Juliet's view an even more powerful influence than traditional marketers are our neighbors co-workers or the people we follow online in today's video I'm going to show you everything I bought from Primark on my most recent spree when you see other people who got a new uh phone that has a better camera it's bigger it does all these things that your phone does do even if it's still working people are going to want that new one so there's a sort of performance and social obsolescence it's less that the thing is going to just break down which is the old idea of planned obsolescence it's a much more sophisticated version of it today the point of building obsolescence into products is to create demand something that justifies continuous buying in the sphere of luxury goods though generating demand isn't enough so-called exclusive brands have to be able to justify steep prices so a sense of scarcity is needed in 2018 high-end brand Burberry incinerated 35 million dollars of unsold clothes precisely to manufacture that shortage of goods what's remarkable about the transformation of humanity into a giant mass of insatiable consumers is how even fundamental needs have been sucked into the market system meaning we're competing with each other to buy the things we need for a decent life for things like healthcare and public transportation and housing these are core human need satisfiers and there is a need in a growth oriented system to ensure that needs are not satisfied as much as possible and one of the ways you do that is by privatizing these core Goods so as the cost of housing and medicine and Healthcare increases then we're under compulsion to work and produce more than we otherwise might need to in order to satisfy those basic needs as long as the goal is growthism then the objective quite often is to avoid meeting human needs or even sabotaging people's capacity to meet their human needs if you have the money then being a consumer has never been easier with a click swipe tap about things appear before us products are cheaper than ever even the ones that have to travel across the world to get to us and the more we're able to buy the less we know how our stuff gets made what goes into it what it demands of those who make it and what impact this manufacturing has people have no idea about the story of the products they consume this is Dr nadongo Sila a development Economist in Senegal for example you you have let's say address you don't know under which conditions a bad press have been produced maybe it has been in Bangladesh with people working let's say 20 hour out of 24 you know if we just pay attention to the products that are all around us the clothes that we wear our tech gadgets where do those resources come from where do the impacts of that extraction happen they're not happening in Southern England they're not happening in Finland the majority of that impact is happening at the resource Frontiers in the Congo for example or in Indonesia or in Brazil so we don't have to deal in rich countries with the social and ecological costs of growth because they're offshore right and it just so happens that they're externalized not to space or into nothingness but rather they're externalized onto the lives and ecosystems of communities in the global South Jason is an authority on how and why the global South suffers so much of the impact of out-of-control consumerism that is centered in the affluent North there's no real way to narrate this as a short story the factors at play are numerous this history for example the long Legacy of colonial empires this the Battle of politics and ideologies capitalism versus communism Western democracies orchestrating very undemocratic coups elsewhere there's economics and especially the rise of neoliberalism which is an academic term to describe an accelerated form of capitalism where the cost of wages and commodities are suppressed through monopolized International Trade rules and almost everything is privatized the result has been inequalities that are so baked into how Global Systems operate that it becomes inevitable that the South Services the North and pays a huge price for it much of that economic capacity in the global South is actually organized around servicing Global North consumerism and capital accumulation rather than meeting domestic human needs you know the factories and the lands in the global South and the resources you these things are not being mobilized around housing and nutritious food and Healthcare and education for the domestic population rather they're organized around fast fashion and tech gadgets which are shipped to the global North but for those goods to be consumed by an average people individual knows the goods in the garage sales have been producer with lower and lower cost that means that the producers have to be paid very low wages and that means that the prosperity in the global knows is somehow dependent on maintaining workers in the global South in the permanent state of deprivation so as long as the global South is put in a position where they're dependent on the whims of foreign direct investors then what they'll do is they'll compete with each other in order to cut wages and cut environmental Productions and cut taxes and so on to create a so-called attractive business environment for multinational firms the inequalities in global economic development have a parasitic relationship between the North and South at their core one theory is of unequal Exchange it lays out how growth in so-called advanced economies often relies on a large net appropriation of resources and human labor from the global South at prices that are unjustifiably low even if they are supposedly explained through market-based systems according to Jason and his colleagues today the global North drains the south of Commodities worth 2.2 trillion dollars per year when calculated in Northern prices yes money does flow the other way but they calculated that for every dollar of Aid the global South receives they lose 30 through unequal exchange with the North in effect poor countries are developing rich countries not the other way around there's always this idea that countries in the global South lack money but in fact the eggs are foreign that's how it works the type of States we have they are modeled around the meanings of the development system so even if they call them Democratic they maintain this colonial input the solution to this is that the South needs to be able to pursue economic sovereignty it needs to be able to reduce its dependence on uh on foreign capital on foreign creditors and on imports from the global North as much as possible organizing production around meeting domestic and National and Regional needs rather than around servicing Northern growthism I think that the calls to decolonize the global economy are are really Central I mean here you have the poor countries of the world who are desperate for climate action because they are the most vulnerable to climate impacts and they've done the least to create carbon pollution and yet their power on the world stage is drastic quickly limited because of that ongoing neocolonial structures it is deeply ironic that while consumerism is such a driving force in climate breakdown there is an entire industry actively trying to persuade us that we can actually consume our way to a better world [Music] let's wear the waste [Music] the shared Deluge of quote unquote eco-friendly climate conscious sustainably sourced products around us raises the question why does reducing our resource use require so much resource use the only agency that we have is basically to choose between different kinds of products that the system produces are a sense of concern it's short-circuited right we're sold some new green products and told that look everything can stay the same and we'll still be able to achieve our ecological goals this is not true but in the meantime what it does is it absorbs our discontents that would otherwise be organized around producing a more just and sustainable society and asking real intellectual and systemic questions about the underlying economic model right that's sad there are really important reasons for consumers to consume differently number one is we actually have to do it we've got to stop driving cars with internal combustion engines and you know reducing meat consumption and reducing apparel consumption the middle class and above consumers of the world do have to consume fewer carbon intensive goods and we've got to consume different Goods but we have to do it in as part of a social movement several decades a dominant environmental message has been about individual action you have the power to make a difference from the moment you wake up power your home with the sun refresh with a low flow shower eat more leftovers and reuse a humble bag these things are undoubtedly positive changes but when you set them up against a system that keeps using energy intensive machines or churns out streams of single-use packaging or pushes fossil fuel guzzling Vehicles then individual action is exposed for the self-defeating Endeavor that it can so often be trading systemic consumerism as if it was a personal responsibility rather than the result of entwined commercial and governmental interests is both wrong and mostly ineffectual it's really important to get the balance right in terms of the focus on uh Collective action and individual action and I think you know in many countries we've gone too far to the individual action side of things that's where the corporations want us to be and and you know a person can have an outsized role but that's only by changing other people so what are the things that are going to empower you as an individual and enable you as an individual to get involved in that political action that's the key our ability to interact with our society as active political agents or citizens as severely curtailed within a system that requires us to play one Central role which is to be consumers we need to have the political courage and the intellectual Acumen and the personal creativity and sense of social Innovation to be able to imagine ourselves Beyond a capitalist growth model because it's extremely dangerous um ecologically when we see people consuming exactly products or ethical products they want to do something but they don't know how that means that we have to free to liberate our political imagination how could we reinvent political participation it's only store struggles through reflection critical thinking that we might come up with a progressive agenda our current economic modus operandi is incredibly costly for the Earth but growth Remains the focus for economists and politicians the world over and they're trying to convince themselves and us that we can have it all green growth green growth good grain growth this discourse that we can maintain capitalist growth and somehow make it green um is in fact not new it's actually been around for about 50 years uh it was first voiced and articulated by Major economists in 1973. and of course it's been half a century now uh there's no evidence that it has made any substantive difference you know emissions are uh are not going down uh resources is still going up in 2009 South Korea decided to lead from the front in pursuit of green growth it committed two percent of its GDP around 38 billion dollars into environmental projects hoping to create one million jobs over the following five years the aim was to Turbo Charge growth in a slumping economy while simultaneously encouraging a low-carbon society South Korea's economy came back on track however emissions climbed nearly 12 percent over five years that's despite massive investments in clean energy Railway expansion and Energy Efficiency if you need any clear single case study of evidence that demonstrates the fallacy of green growth claims South Korea is a wonderful example here and this is consistent with Scientists broader claims that green growth is not feasible to achieve and the reason basically is that technological efficiency improvements and so on the gains from those in a capitalist growth economy are reinvested to expand the process of production and consumption right and so there are some relative gains but they end up resulting in absolute increases in resource and energy use okay there is a question that becomes quite hard to avoid when talking about the incredibly high cost the planet is paying for human consumption and that is well how do we keep economies growing without people buying there is a theory that says we're looking at this the wrong way called degrowth and Jason hickle gets right at the core of what it's all about basically Rich Nations need to actively scale down less necessary forms of production okay and that's what we refer to as deep growth right so instead of assuming that every sector of the economy should grow all the time regardless of whether or not we actually need it to let's have a conversation about what sectors we actually need to improve things like healthcare access public transportation et cetera et cetera and what sectors are clearly destructive and socially unnecessary and should be scaled down so you know SUV production Private Car production um you know arms production fast fashion advertising planned obsolescence et cetera et cetera there are huge sectors of our economy which are totally irrelevant to human well-being and we can actively scale those down without any loss to our ability to satisfy core needs and Achieve flourishing lives for all knowing that well uh the kind of growth we have in the global knows is highly dependent on exploitative condition being imposed on the global cells and that means that they close could not only be a northern agenda but a global agenda that has to take into account what is happening in the global South in the needs of the global South and also that means that if they are adjustment to be made those adjustments should come uh primarily in the global North because those who over consume uh those who have let's say an answer sustainable way of life our people in the global knows the key matter here is we have to ask ourselves what the economy is for and this is the very exciting part of the story which is that we know it's possible to slow down excess production in Rich Nations while at the same time improving social outcomes simply Again by reorganizing uh production around meeting human needs okay Jason but I have to ask what about jobs as your economy requires less labor to produce the things that are required to meet human needs then you simply shorten the working week and share necessary labor more evenly right and so therefore you eliminate even the possibility of unemployment you can maintain full employment uh even in a degrowth scenario and you can use something like a public job guarantee or a climate job guarantee at the same time to bolster the strategy to ensure that anyone who wants to can train up to contribute to and participate in the most important Collective projects of Our Generation you know rolling out renewable energy capacity regenerating ecosystems uh retrofitting houses for efficiency Etc et cetera inequalities in consumptionist stock globally the 20 of the world's people in the highest income countries account for 86 percent of total private consumption expenditures the poorest 20 a minuscule 1.3 percent d-growth does not mean that developing countries should sacrifice improvements in living conditions they must pursue economic growth to generate the resources necessary to invest heavily in healthcare and education but growth in and of itself shouldn't be the imperative and it cannot be infinite the goal is to achieve well-being in balance with the Earth's systems if we do not reason within the framework of an egalitarian society you could not address the challenges humanity is crazy because at the same time that there is over consumption in the global North there is also under consumption in most of the global South because if most people there are all and they could not have access to basic goals and services so they need somehow to consume more not in the capitalist sense but that to have access to a dignified life that means having access to busy goods and services so there are countries where economic growth is important but what I would say is that story has also been oversold in the South the Elites in these countries often sort of want to confine the poverty alleviation conversation to just growth because they benefit so much from growth um but we really the issue is sort of lifting people out of poverty giving them decent living conditions we seem to be trapped in a kind of paradox where for several decades there's been Earnest talk and even some genuine concerted action to try and make progress on the question of climate change and ecological breakdown and yet frighteningly little sustained systemic change has been achieved during that time and so we have to ask ourselves what is responsible for this failure until we are able to break free from these growth imperatives then we're going to be in a situation where we'd watch continued failure over the coming decades even as climate breakdown worsens before our very eye and so it's important that we um that we understand that this this failure to address the problem is not some kind of mistake there's a structural reason for it and until we start talking about the underlying economic system then we're going to continue to uh to make that that fundamental error thanks for watching episode 3 of all how the planet a series looking at the forces undermining meaningful action on climate change we have two upcoming episodes still to go one on plastic waste and one on urbanization which we'll be releasing in the weeks to come so if you'd like to follow along you can use the hashtag all how the planet otherwise check out Al jazeera.com [Music]

Channel: Al Jazeera English

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Id: KLiXmteCvUI

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022