2020 VISION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
MELBOURNE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY INSTITUTE
The Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, brings together researchers from different disciplines to help create a more sustainable society. It acts as an information portal for research at the University of Melbourne, and as a collaborative platform where researchers and communities can work together to affect positive change. This book can be freely accessed from MSSI’s website: www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au.
Cite as: Pearson, C.J. (editor) (2012). 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Society. Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne Published by Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute in 2012 Ground Floor Alice Hoy Building (Blg 162) Monash Road The University of Melbourne, Parkville Victoria 3010, Australia Text and copyright © Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher. A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Society, ISBN: 978-0-7340-4773-1 (pbk) Produced with Affirm Press www.affirmpress.com.au Cover and text design by Anne-Marie Reeves www.annemariereeves.com Illustrations on pages 228–231 by Michael Weldon www.michaelweldon.com Cover image © Brad Calkins | Dreamstime.com Proudly printed in Australia by BPA Print Group
Foreword
T
he last two centuries have seen extraordinary improvements in the quality of human lives. Most people on earth today enjoy access to the necessities of life that was once available only to the elites. Most people enjoy longevity, health, education, information and opportunities to experience the variety of life on earth that was denied even to the rulers of yesteryear. The proportion of humanity living in absolute poverty remains daunting, but continues to fall decade by decade. The early 21st century has delivered an acceleration of the growth in living standards in the most populous developing countries and an historic lift in the trend of economic growth in the regions that had lagged behind, notably in Africa. These beneficent developments are accompanied by another reality. The improvements are not sustainable unless we make qualitative changes in the content of economic growth. The continuation of the current relationship between growth in the material standard of living and pressures on the natural environment will undermine economic growth, political
stability and the foundations of human achievement. The good news is that humanity has already discovered and begun to apply the knowledge that can reconcile continued improvements in the standard of living with reduction of pressures on the natural environment. The bad news is that the changes that are necessary to make high and rising standards of living sustainable are hard to achieve within our current political cultures and systems. Hard, but not impossible. That is a central message from this book, drawn out in Craig Pearson’s concluding chapter. This book introduces the reader to the many dimesions of sustainability, through wellqualified authors. Climate change is only one mechanism through which current patterns of economic growth threaten the natural systems on which our prosperity depend. It is simply the most urgent of the existential threats. Climate change is a special challenge for Australians. We are the most vulnerable of the
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developed countries to climate change. And we are the developed country with the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions per person. There are roles for private ethical decisions as well as public policy choices in dealing with the climate change challenge. This book is released at the time of ‘Rio+20’, a conference in Brazil to review the relatively poor progress we have made towards sustainability in the past 20 years, and soon after the introduction of Australia’s first comprehensive policy response to the global challenge of climate change. Australia’s emissions trading scheme with an initially fixed price for emissions permits comes into effect on 1 July 2012. The new policy discourages activities that generate greenhouse gases by putting a price on emissions. The revenue raised by carbon pricing will be returned to households and businesses in ways that retain incentives to reduce emissions. Part of the revenue will be used to encourage production and use of goods and services that embody low emissions. The policy has been launched in controversy. Interests that stand to gain from the discrediting of the policy argue that it is unnecessary either because the case for global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the associated climate change has not been proven, or that the new policy places a disproportionate burden on Australians. The health of our civilisation requires us to bring scientific knowledge to account in public policy. Everyone who shares the knowledge that is the common heritage of humanity has
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a responsibility to explain the realities to others wherever and whenever they can. The argument that the new policy places a disproportionate burden on Australians can be answered by seeking honestly to understand what others are doing. The critics of Australian policy argue that the world’s two largest national emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States, are doing little or nothing to reduce emissions, so that it is either pointless or unnecessary for us to do so. China has advanced a long way towards achieving its target of reducing emissions as a proportion of economic output by 40 to 45 per cent between 2005 and 2020. It has done this by forcing the closure of emissions-intensive plants and processes that have exceptionally high levels of emissions per unit of output, by imposing high emissions standards on new plants and processes, by charging emissionsintensive activities higher electricity prices, by subsidising the introduction of low-emissions activities, and by new and higher taxes on fossil fuels. China has introduced trials of an emissions trading system in five major cities and two provinces. This adds up to a cost on business and the community that exceeds any burden placed on Australians by the new policies – bearing in mind that the revenue from Australian carbon pricing is returned to households and businesses. The US Government has advised the international community of its domestic policy target to reduce 2005 emissions by 17 per cent by 2020. President Barack Obama said
to the Australian Parliament that all countries should take seriously the targets that they had reported to the international community, and made it clear that the United States did so. United States efforts to reduce emissions are diffuse but far-reaching. They now include controls on emissions from electricity generators, announced in March 2012, effectively excluding any new coal-based power generation after the end of this year unless it embodies carbon capture and storage. From the beginning of next year they will include an emissions trading system in the most populous and economically largest state, California. The United States is making reasonable progress towards reaching its emissions reduction goals, with some actions imposing high costs on domestic households and businesses. Australia has now taken steps through which we can do our fair share in the international effort, at reasonable cost. It would be much harder and more costly to do our fair share without the policies that are soon to take effect. What Australians do over the next few years will have a significant influence on humanity’s prospects for handing on the benefits of modern civilisation to future generations. This book will help Australians to understand their part in the global effort for sustainability. Ross Garnaut University of Melbourne 15 April 2012
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Contents Foreword by Ross Garnaut Table of Contents
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Author Biographies
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Drivers
1
1 Population Rebecca Kippen and Peter McDonald
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2 Equity Helen Sykes
10
3 Consumption Craig Pearson
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4 Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change David Karoly
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5 Energy Peter Seligman
37
People
47
6
Ethics Craig Prebble
48
7
Culture Audrey Yue and Rimi Khan
57
8
Awareness and Behaviour Angela Paladino
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9
Local Matters Matter Kate Auty
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10 Public Wisdom Tim van Gelder
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11 Mental Health Grant Blashki
86
12 Disease Peter Doherty
94
13 Corporate Sustainability Liza Maimone
104
14 Governance John Brumby
114
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Natural Resources
123
15 Ecosystem-Based Adaptation Rodney Keenan
124
16 Water Hector Malano and Brian Davidson
132
17 Food Sunday McKay and Rebecca Ford
141
18 Zero Carbon Land-Use Chris Taylor and Adrian Whitehead
150
Cities
161
19 Changing Cities Peter Newman and Carolyn Ingvarson
162
20 Affordable Living Thomas Kvan and Justyna Karakiewicz
170
21 Built Environment Pru Sanderson
177
22 Infrastructure Colin Duffield
184
23 Transport Monique Conheady
192
24 Adaptive Design Ray Green
200
25 Handling Disasters Alan March
210
Outcomes
221
26 Twenty Actions Craig Pearson
222
Further Reading
234
Index
241
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03 Consumption Craig Pearson
A
sustainable society is a society that can continue: we can continue to consume, create and recycle resources. Ours is not sustainable: the accelerating increase in the world’s population and growing affluence and consumption are driving our accelerating use of resources. Consumption of most goods like coal, iron, phosphorus, water and soil (which we consume by eroding it into waterways) are increasing at 2–5 per cent per year, approximately following an exponential rise since the start of the industrial revolution in Europe. For example, the United States Department of Energy estimates that consumption of coal has risen from 4.1 billion tonnes in 1980 to 6.7 billion tonnes in 2006 and continues to rise at 2.5 per cent every year. Common sense says this increasing consumption cannot continue indefinitely or even to the end of the 21st century. Our accelerating appetite leads us closer to crisis.
Cars and Houses To illustrate this trend in consumerism and resource use, consider cars. In 1950 the world had about 2.6 billion people and 53 million cars (about 1 car for every 50 men, women and children). There are now 6.3 billion people and
550 million cars. That is one for every 11 people from Lagos, Nigeria, to London, England, and a lot of them can’t drive! Figure 1a shows how quickly the total consumption of cars has risen in developing counties: by 2008 the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, were consuming as many cars as the United States. Figure 1b shows the inequity among countries that we would expect, with almost one car for every person of driving age in North America, but rising access to cars in developing countries. Rising consumption in China on the one hand helps fuel Chinese demand for Australian iron ore, and on the other, embeds enormous resources of iron (steel) in a highly inefficient and arguably unnecessary consumer good, that produces undesirable side effects such as social isolation, time-consuming congestion, and air pollution. There are alternatives, which would be less resource-wasteful but still use Australian ore, such as public transport and hire or community-owned cars that would use fewer resources and have less damaging side effects. There are also alternatives to traditional construction of vehicles, such as using renewable resources – very strong composites based on corn fibre for example – that would
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2020
Car Sales*
Car ownership per 1000 population of driving age
0
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United States
200
400
600
800
1,000
United States
15 Western Europe
10 5
BRIC countries 2000 01
02
03
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Japan Russia Brazil
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07 08†
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*Includes MPVs SUVs and LCVs †Forecast
Figure 1a.
China India
Figure 1b.
Figure 1a. Total annual car sales in the United States and BRIC countries. Figure 1b. Car ownership per thousand people of driving age. The Economist, 15 November 2008. Source: Morgan Stanley.
meet rising demand for personal cars while husbanding globally-finite and non-renewable resources such as iron. Houses are another example of resource consumption. As communities become more affluent, family size decreases and separations increase, so the percentage of one-parent families is growing. Further, our houses are filled with efficient labour-saving and entertainment devices: small washing machines and dishwashers have replaced laundries and sculleries, plasma-screens and iPads increasingly substitute for bulkier televisions and radios. This might lead us to think that house size and the need for resources such as glass, steel, bricks and timber decreases. Not one bit: in 50 years in Australia, house size per person has risen from 32m2 in 1955 to 83m2.
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Figure 2 illustrates that, although this rise in consumption has occurred throughout the world, there has been a growing discrepancy among countries, so that Australians now lead the world in building the most wastefully-large houses, no doubt fuelled by McMansions in new housing developments. Europeans, who have renewed most of their housing stock since the World War II, use about 40 per cent of the space we do. So what, you say? But size matters: if we accepted that personal happiness isn’t related to the amount of ‘stuff’ we accumulate (as researched by Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009, and discussed in chapters 20 and 21) then we would shift our mindsets to not ‘needing’ ever-larger houses, so we could live with greater sociability and consume fewer resources, both in the construction of the houses and their upkeep.
Consumption
Average new dwelling size per person
Figure 2. House size. Average new dwelling size (square metres per person) in Australia has grown from 32 m2 in 1955 to 83m2 in 2010, which is huge relative to other countries. Source: adapted from Australian Bureau of Statistics and The Weekend Australian, 30 April 2011.
The kinds of cars and houses we have are the result of personal decisions that are affected by public policy and government instruments like infrastructure programs, taxes and incentives. There are also other choices we make, that are very much up to us as individuals. The toys we buy our children, the holidays we take, whether we fly at the front or back of an aeroplane, and the tools or gadgets we use for play and work are individual choices. The box below provides an example of resource use: the resources that are embedded in a Kindle or iPad.
A Run on Resources There are two categories of resources: renewable (like wind and solar energy) and non-renewable (like oil, rock phosphate and minerals). Take the non-renewable example of rock phosphate, which is used primarily to make fertiliser, animal feed and industrial chemicals. It is true that birds are adding to our supply every day, but bird poop is not keeping pace with our rapidly rising consumption of phosphate, so deposits are declining, and some have been extinguished: the rise and fall of
eReaders – technological fix or resource disaster? In 2011, Amazon in the United States sold 20 per cent more eBooks than paperbacks and 300 per cent more eBooks than hardcover books. However, while eBooks seem cheap, the resource costs of electronic book readers are not reflected in the retail price: the silicon for the microchips is mined in China, crystallised in Germany, sliced in Oregon and made into microchips in Costa Rica. The microprocessors may use copper refined in Sweden, gold from Indonesia and tantalum from Australia. In addition, the long-life battery that puts the eReader ahead of the game in the electronics sector is made from lithium, which is currently under investigation after predictions that we have reached ‘peak global lithium’. Aluminium and stainless steel, which account for half the mass of electronic tablets, are derived from metals most likely mined in Australia or Brazil; four tonnes of bauxite are needed to produce one tonne of aluminium. Emma Joughin, MSSI staff member
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phosphate extraction from the island of Nauru illustrates that resources do run out. ‘Peak oil’ is believed to be following a similar pattern on a global scale, with most authorities asserting that reserves peaked in about 2006 and are now declining. The optimistic view is that as oil (and other non-renewable resources) become more scarce, prices will rise, technology will become more innovative and we will access greater reserves, albeit of poorer-quality materials. Not only will the price rise; the environmental costs of extracting poorer-quality or less accessible resources will also, such as deep-ocean oil. And that’s the optimistic view. As this expansion of accessible reserves happens, if it does happen, there will be severe shifts in our lifestyles and likely tensions between countries that have reserves and those that do not. For example, China holds 37 per cent and Morocco and Western Sahara 32 per cent of the
world’s phosphate reserves, and already China has a policy to keep its reserves for its own use, and there are disputes over ownership of the Sahara reserves. Ultimately though, phosphorus, peak oil, and any other resource that we do not conserve and recycle, will run out. Just like phosphate on Nauru, where societal wellbeing depended heavily on phosphorus – extraction of rock phosphate peaked in 1972, fell below 1 million tonnes per year for the first time in 1990 and mining stopped in 2004. Figure 3 shows generalised changes in reserves of non-renewable resources, and how we can extend their ‘life’ through technology and extraction from previously inaccessible places (eg, beneath oceans). Ultimately though, these resources will run out: we need either to shift to a substitute or develop technologies to recycle the resources so they’re used within new products without a net change in total quantity consumed.
higher grades lower costs
O res cean ou b rce ase s d
e/r e
cy
cli
ng
Incremental technological development
Future technological development & uptake
Re -us
Annual production (t)
Technology and Peak Minerals
lower grades higher costs
time Figure 3. Non-renewable resources run out. Source: Prior et al. 2011.
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Consumption
Figure 4. The ‘Super Pit’ (in Kalgoorlie) is Australia’s largest open-cut gold mine. It is 3.5km long, 1.5km wide and 350m deep, and is large enough to be seen from space. It produces around 28 tonnes of gold per year.
Figure 4 visually reminds us that we extract nonrenewable resources: we don’t produce them. Humans are adept at recognising that localised caches of non-renewable resources are finite, like the example of Nauru, but we are not good at appreciating that there may be a coming global problem. It stands to reason that as population increases and consumption per person increases, so total consumption must rise. Further, as the world’s non-renewable resources are finite, there must be a narrowing gap between what we are using and the total reserves of any resource.
Recognition of this issue by some has led to a measure called the ‘ecological footprint’. This calculates the area of land and sea that would be equivalent to the area needed to furnish our resource needs. Our ecological footprint varies enormously from nine and eight ‘global hectares’ used by each person in the United States and Australia respectively to less than one global hectare in India and Indonesia. In the space of one generation, the resource use per person has risen but, by simple arithmetic, the reserves per person (or ‘biocapacity’) have declined. Thus we have a closing gap,
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2020
Australia Global Hectares per capita
Ecological Footprint 30
Biocapacity
25 20 15 10 5 0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 20002 005
China 2.5
Ecological Footprint
Global Hectares per capita
Biocapacity 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 20002 005
Indonesia Global Hectares per capita
3.0 2.5
Ecological Footprint Biocapacity
2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Figure 5. Country footprints. Growth in per-person demand for resources (Ecological Footprint) and resource supply (Biocapacity) in Australia, China and Indonesia since 1961. Ecological footprint rises with rising consumption, as increasing population does not enter this figure. Biocapacity varies each year with ecosystem management, agricultural practices (such as fertiliser use and irrigation), ecosystem degradation and weather.
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Consumption
or in some countries a cross over wherein consumption exceeds biocapacity. While Figure 5 imperfectly illustrates this closing gap using modern language of ecological footprints and biocapacity, the concept of closure is not new; for example, Barry Commoner’s seminal 1971 book The Closing Circle.
based on ecological economics are becoming widespread. We are moving to planning or scenario development in enlightened countries that aims for a broader accounting than GDP and is based less on consumption: a growing, maybe more satisfied society but not necessarily one that keeps consuming.
Consumption versus Satisfaction
Closing Consumption Cycles
Consumption drives Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an annual measure of a country’s financial activity. For the past 30 years, however, there has been increasing questioning as to whether GDP is a truly useful measure, or whether continuing growth in GDP, which depletes resources, is necessarily good for society or individuals. In 1972 the king of Bhutan introduced the term Gross National Happiness, and that country has since used a mix of quantitative measures, financial and otherwise, as well as qualitative surveys, to evaluate quality of life and social progress in the small Himalayan democracy. In the past 30 years, accumulated research findings show convincingly that affluence and consumption do not necessarily create a satisfied society. Beyond a certain level of consumption, it is equality, rather than personal consumption, that is most important, and satisfaction drops and crime increases with increasing inequality. These results are set out in The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett. Research into societal happiness and wellbeing (which takes account of things such as violent crime as well as personal satisfaction) and alternative measures to GDP
There are three ways in which we can use resources: the end-use can extinguish the resource, disperse it, or embed it. These categories are helpful if we wish to address the issue of unsustainable consumption. For example: coal is burned to create electricity. The coal is extinguished and unless alchemy is discovered, it can’t be regenerated. The electricity is dispersed. Unless we make an effort to reconcentrate the electricity, or one of its products, heat, it too is unrecoverable. Heat can be concentrated and re-used, through co-gen and tri-gen power plants. Co-gen (combined heat and power) traps the heat dissipated from electricity generation and/or use, and uses this to heat water, rather than releasing the heat as waste into the air or through cooling towers. Tri-generation uses heat to produce useful electricity, heat and cooling. Water, food and phosphorus are examples of resources that are dispersed. Water is in increasingly short supply as industrial processes and expansion of irrigated agriculture use not only rainfall (arguably renewable) but also draw-down aquifers: ancient water that has remained trapped between rock and soil strata for millennia, and thus is non-renewable. The
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Figure 6. Food cycles. The food chain: an illustration of a vital and complex resource that provides nutrition by embedding resources such as water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and many other minerals and vitamins. The chain is usually shown as a linear ‘value adding’ from paddock to plate but this conceals the substantial losses along the chain; usually only 40–50 per cent of in-field food is consumed. This schema shows the food resource chain as two interconnecting cycles, based on farm and transformation-and-consumption cycles. There are 13 points where substantial food is wasted, representing losses of resources such as minerals and water. Using this representation it is clear that there are opportunities for closing the cycles: wasting less, and returning what is not passed along the chain to urban or field compost. Source: Pearson 2012.
Ogilalla aquifer in central western United States, and the Great Artesian Basin in Australia are examples of water storages that, once used, will not be replaced. While the main users of water are industry and agriculture, as individuals we could be more economical with water we use for human consumption and domestic purposes: in developed regions such as California, domestic water consumption averages about 400 litres per person per day. In Australia during the dry years 1990–2010, cities publicised restraint in use and introduced restrictions such as not watering household lawns, and consumption
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in southeast Queensland and Melbourne fell to less than 150 litres per person per day. Some of this was due to a change in attitudes about what is acceptable, or even what is good: a green lawn in summer in a dry climate is no longer necessarily good. Nonetheless we retain attitudes that result in extravagant consumption. For example, washing of clothes is as much a social expectation – I care for you, therefore I wash your jeans every week – as a necessity. As a regrettable consequence, when the drought ended and floods followed, water consumption in our cities has risen to 180 litres per person per day.
Consumption
Phosphorus is a key element because all life depends on it. Phosphorus is mined (extracted from ancient accumulations of bird faeces) and a lot is dispersed as fertiliser and remains within the soil. An approximately equal amount is embedded with plant and animal products and dispersed within the food chain. Phosphorus cannot be substituted: there is no alternative way for living organisms to obtain energy, and no known way to synthesise phosphorus. Thus we need to take actions to both use phosphorus more efficiently, and develop technologies to recover phosphorus by extracting and concentrating it after we have dispersed it through soil, or along with waste products in water and sewage. In other words, closing the leaks in our consumption cycles. Techniques are being developed to extract and concentrate the mineral but they are, at this point, expensive relative to the easy option of mining more from Morocco. Figure 6 presents the food chain as an example of one of our most important consumption cycles, in a novel way: as two interlocking cycles rather than a linear chain. It reminds us that there are numerous points in the cycle where humans have responsibility: our actions determine how much food (including phosphorus, and all other elements within food that are essential for our nutrition) is wasted or irrevocably dispersed. We are starting to recognise that we can close the food and nutrient cycles by stopping leakage at many points. This will address global hunger and allow us to harvest and re-use essential minerals.
The third category of resource use refers to those that are embedded, or concentrated, in a product. Minerals in a Kindle or iPad tablet are examples of embedded resources. As with the example used at the start of the chapter, iron ore is extracted to manufacture steel that is embedded in vehicles, buildings and large infrastructure such as bridges and railways. We can conceive of alternative building materials and we can fabricate non-steel structures strong and large enough for buildings and bridges, etc. There is the opportunity to develop technologies based on renewable resources such as plant material, before iron ore becomes so expensive that the shift to new technologies will disrupt all but the most affluent society. There are two things to consider with this example. First, companies, and often governments, use the language of ‘production’ to describe the extraction or mining of iron ore, which is misleading. We are not producing anything; we dig holes in the ground that we never refill and deplete a non-renewable resource. The second point, however, is more positive. Because steel is embedded, rather than extinguished or dispersed, it is easy to recycle. Logistically and financially, it is relatively easy to gather all the steel within used cars and turn it into more cars or other steel products. We also have the option of substituting other resources for steel when it is in a concentrated product, such as renewable organic polymers created from plant cellulose, to make cars just as strong but lighter, degradable and less extractive of limited resources.
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ACTIONS FOR 2020 We can cut back consumption without reducing happiness or satisfaction within our lifestyles, and Figure 6 shows there are numerous points within consumption chains where we can reduce losses and capture and recycle what is currently lost. It is obvious that there are many actions we, and our governments, can take to reduce consumption. Water and food are clearly critical, as over-consumption already causes problems such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes. It is unlikely that increasing efficiency of use (of water) or production per unit area (of land) will meet the needs for food arising from the increase in population that is predicted by 2050. We can reduce wastage, increase efficiency, reduce our use of resources such as phosphorus and make a major contribution to meeting this growing demand for food by buying on nutritive quality, not looks, as recommended in chapter 17, buying more carefully so we waste less, and supporting food rescue so that unwanted food from farms, supermarkets, restaurants and homes is passed to less affluent tables. A second vital action to achieve sustainability is to address our consumption of non-renewable resources. On the one hand we need to slow down our rate of consumption (while developing economies such as China and India necessarily consume more) and on the other hand we need to put in place incentives to develop new technologies and products that will eventually substitute for the ‘old’ resources. This substitution is epitomised
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by the slogan ‘corn for car parts’. Substitution of renewables for non-renewables is one aspect of the much-hyped shift to a ‘green economy’. However, unless we take purposeful action before 2020, it is likely that there will be substantial economic dislocation associated with the running-down of reserves and rising prices associated with scarcity. An action arising from this chapter would be for the government’s resource tax, which starts this year, to be applied to all nonrenewable resources. The impact would be to socialise the benefits from resource depletion, so that a sovereign wealth fund is created while the market value of the non-renewable resource is low, but climbs with increasing scarcity. The purpose of such a fund – established by countries as diverse as East Timor and Sweden – would be to invest in research into technologies that will enhance the pool of scarce resources (for example, by extracting phosphorus from sewage, concentrating it and converting it to a usable form again) or developing technological alternatives (for example, timber laminates instead of steel). A broadly based Australian wealth fund for green innovation would position our country as a leader in research and technology for a sustainable society.
Further Reading Consumption Commoner, B. (1971). The Closing Circle. Knopf, New York. Pearson, C. (2012). A fresh look at the roots of food insecurity. In: Rayfuse, R., Weisfelt, N. eds. The Challenge of Food Security. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Prior, T., et al. (2011). Resource depletion, peak minerals and the implications for sustainable resource management. Journal of Global Environmental Change. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378011001361 Rees, W. E. (2006). Ecological Footprints and Biocapacity: Essential Elements in Sustainability Assessment. In: Dewulf, J., Van Langenhove, H. eds. Renewables-Based Technology: Sustainability Assessment. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, UK. State of the Planet declaration (2012). From: Planet Under Pressure conference, London. http://www. planetunderpressure2012.net/pdf/state_of_planet_declaration.pdf