Sustainable development: the way forward or a mirage?

As the 21st century unfolds, people realise that something is amiss with our modern civilization and this in spite of tremendous advances in sciences, technology and economic welfare over the last 300 years.

In the developed West immense strides in technology and material wealth over the past decades have not resulted in large scale improvements in the quality of life. India and China have improved the human condition there but at great environmental costs that impact human welfare. Similarly, in the rest of the rest of the world improvements in human welfare and economic wealth come at heavy environmental costs.

It is clear that increases in wealth, obtained by destroying part of the environment are no longer sustainable over the short or medium term. Impacts of modern civilisation on the general environment worldwide are on the earth, its waters, its air, its biodiversity and its mineral wealth.

Large tracts of land are laid waste due to deforestation, poor agricultural techniques and intensive husbandry whilst urbanisation is covering increasingly large areas of good agricultural lands.

Most coastal waters and rivers are heavily polluted by liquid and solid wastes from industrial and commercial activities and shipping whilst uncountable masses of plastic debris floating in the seas and kill millions of sea creatures.

Air pollution afflicts most large cities of the world due to heavy vehicular transport and industry with often lethal health impacts whilst climate change slowly melts the poles, glaciers and pushes world climatic systems into more extremes of weather.

The gradual but now virtually unstoppable erosion of biodiversity is undeniable and gravely threatens our food security through the destruction of plant and genetic resources. Major fisheries worldwide are collapsing worldwide beyond repair.

The mineral wealth of the earth has also been significantly spent, including the mineral energy resources of coal, oil and natural gas indispensible to our civilisation. Foremost, conventional oil resources have been severely depleted worldwide thus increasing our dependency on non-conventional oil resources like US light tight oil, deep sea oil, polar arctic oil or bituminous sands from Canada which are difficult to exploit and expensive, hence pushing prices upwards.

The collapse of oil prices from US $ 100 per barrel in 2014 to US $ 70 today may well be a temporary phenomenon. So watch out for oil prices it is well capable of derailing economic growth on its own and of delivering body blows to our civilisation.

Our modern industrial civilisation comes at a heavy environmental price. The bounty of the earth has enabled our civilisation to offset environmental costs. Left unchecked, these costs directly diminish human welfare and trigger political unrest for Governments.

In response during the seventies, many industrialised countries passed legislation and created agencies to address environmental issues. The same phenomenon is now beginning to unfold in China and India after decades of wanton industrialisation and near total disregard for the environment.

In 1987, the Bruntland Commission report launched the “sustainable development” concept in an effort to accommodate environmental stewardship with the juggernaut of development. There are many definitions, but basically sustainable development means “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

There are considerable philosophical conundrums with that definition. Development refers to a process that has a beginning, middle and an end, whereas sustainable development implies a process with no end in sight. After all, if it is sustainable, why stop?

Furthermore development implies expansion of economic activities and so to increased consumption of material and energy resources. With technical efficiencies it is sometimes possible to reduce resource consumption per monetary unit. Yet the growth of economic systems always outrun technical efficiencies thus aggregate consumption of resources increases.

To circumvent these obvious difficulties, the concept of circular economies has been invented whereby wastes are recycled anew and input back into the economy, similar to what nature does when dead organic matter is decomposed back into nutrients by micro-organisms and used by plants for new growth. However, modern economies recycle little of their wastes especially plastics and many of our technological gadgetry, such as ubiquitous cell phones, tablets, and personal computers, are still technically challenging to recycle.

The greatest and least discussed challenge to a transition to a fully circular economy is energy. Renewable energy is touted as the path to tread for the future. Let us examine that claim. All renewable energies ultimately come from the sun and it is a fact that the surface of the Earth receives from the sun far more energy in an hour than humanity uses in a year.

But then in a rhetorical leap, it is argued that this solar abundance will somehow translate itself into useable forms of energy thanks to technology so that our future is assured.
Yet this energy is diffused across the surface of the Earth and needs to be collected, concentrated and stocked into a useable form. Currently solar energies are exploited via thermal collectors for heat, solar panels or wind turbines for electricity or via biomass.





Liquid fuels essential for modern transports such as cars, lorries, ships or aircrafts are the Achilles’ heel of renewable energies as it is currently not possible to transform solar energies into liquid fuels except via bio-fuels whose available volumes are very small compared to oil based liquid fuels.

The current drive towards electric vehicles is a response to the pesky issue of renewable energies and transport. However, given that there are close to one billion land vehicles and only a few million of electric vehicles worldwide, the full electrification of land vehicles will require decades, even when assuming that it is entirely technically feasible. Reality is that technical hurdles are still extant concerning the power storage capacity, speed of recharge and durability of batteries. As for air and maritime transport there are NO substitutes for oil based fuels given that electrification is currently unfeasible.

In view of the above we can only conclude that sustainable development appears to be a mirage.

Karim Jaufeerally

The sustainability of civilisations and the long view of History

The sustainability of civilisations and the long view of History

In a previous article we argued that modern economic systems require large quantities of raw materials and energy to run and generate equally large quantities of wastes and pollution. Technical efficiencies allow better use of resources per dollar of GDP but economic growth means that on aggregate more resources are required than before.

Sustainable development together with the circular economy and renewable energies are presented as a way out of this conundrum in order to allow the business as usual scenario to prevail. This arrangement is destined to fail as it is very difficult to put in place a circular economy and renewable energies cannot replace oil fully as transport energy. Sustainable development is a dead end that will lead many astray.
Instead, we should focus onto issues of sustainability. Etymologically, the word sustainable comes from the Latin word: sustinere which means to “hold and maintain things from below”. Indeed, what we want to sustain and maintain over the long term is human civilisation.

In our understanding, civilisation ought to be humane, cultured and sustainable. Let us see what we mean by those terms. A humane civilisation is one in which society acts so that individuals are able to meet their basic needs for food, water, energy, shelter and are granted a minimum of basic rights. A cultured civilisation is one that gives reasonable opportunities to its members to access the cultural resources available to it and that means its knowledge and skill bases, whether written or oral, formal or informal. A sustainable civilisation is one which does not undermine its own resource base via inconsiderate actions and short term thinking so characteristic of modern times.
Most readers will more or less agree with our definitions of a humane and cultured civilisation. Hence we shall focus on our understanding of what a sustainable civilisation is. For us this means a society which acts to ensure that (1) its food comes from agricultural and husbandry systems that do not deplete soil and do not depend on artificial fertilisers and that fisheries are not depleted, (2) its water resources stay clean and untainted by industrial systems, (3) its energy system depends on renewable energies, (4) all wastes, liquid or solid, commercial, industrial or domestic are recycled (5) its human population stays more or less constant and above all, (6) its population is not obsessed by the accumulation of wealth and power. Our incessant greed and desire for more wealth is at the core of our predicament. Accumulation of material wealth is incompatible with sustainability. This needs to be understood. As long as we do not address our greed and excessive wants, we are in a self defeating cycle of delusions based on wishful thinking fuelled by fantasies of sustainable development.

Conversely, sustainability does not mean to live as paupers in want and destitution, nor does it mean to live in austerity and self inflicted poverty. It means to strive for a balance between our legitimate needs and our desire for material comforts. It means to honestly re-assess our desire for more material goods.

Do we really need this latest electronic gadget with so much “apps” we shall never use? Do we really need this latest, trendy dress that we shall wear only a few times? Do we really want to travel by air to this far away place for a few days of stressful holidays? We really need to have a long hard look at our own personal consumption habits and see where we are satisfying reasonable needs or, in fact, just feeding the global machine of infinite economic growth. In so doing we might actually save some money and ease our financial burdens.

It bears saying that the path to sustainability is not only for Government or businesses to tread, citizens also are invited to travel down that road. Indeed, the commitment of citizens in changing their modes of consumption is an extremely potent force. Together, concerned citizens can overturn governmental and business practices by (1) buying goods and services that were generated in a more sustainable manner, (2) boycotting goods and services from businesses who fail to change, and (3) by ousting elected officials who promise a lot but deliver little. We should not underestimate the force of non violent collective action. On its own, collective action can change civilisations.

Indeed, civilisations which fail to respond adequately to existential challenges in due time inevitably decline and collapse. In the past, civilisations came and went for a number of reasons. For instance, it is highly probable that both the Roman Western Empire and the Central American Mayan Empire declined and collapsed in part due to environmental reasons, having depleted their agricultural bases and failed to respond adequately. In due time, ours will probably overshoot its main resource bases in terms of fossil energy and agriculture lands. If it fails to respond to the changing circumstances, it will enter decline and face collapse.

However, there are examples of civilisations which just about managed to avoid complete collapse and re-emerge sooner or later. The Egyptian and Chinese civilisations are prime examples. Both of them managed to avoid destroying completely their main resource base which was agriculture, thereby enabling another round of civilisation later on.

We need to do the same: maintain our agricultural base more or less functional so that we can rebound in due time (although re-mergence of a civilisation after collapse may take decades or a few centuries!). Alas, this is exactly what we are not doing. Due to technological prowess, our civilisation behaves as if it could grow indefinitely; perpetually find cheap substitutes for all its material and energy needs and use nature as dumping grounds for ever. Our modern industrial civilisation is hell bent on growth for ever with scant regard for the environment and resources. This type of thinking is leading us straight into the swamps of decline. Humanity will nevertheless emerge on the other side of these swamps but at high costs to people and the environment. We have indeed entered an age of consequences.

Karim Jaufeerally – Institute for Environmental Studies