This phrase has sat as the strapline to my blog since its inception back in 2008.

 

The first of my children was born in a different century, before the World changed.

The second was born early in the 21st Century after the catastrophic events of 9/11.

Compared to the generally impoverished and challenging upbringings my wife and I had, with her losing her father at the age of four and both my parents being badly disabled, my children have led a relatively charmed existence so far. It was always our goal as parents to give them the happiest childhoods possible and we will remain focused on that.

We have recently returned from a lovely relaxing family break at our faithful Spanish bolthole. The sun is shining for a change in the UK, the girls are busy preparing for the long holidays and my wife and I are encouraged by the progress of our respective small businesses, with signs that the economy is starting to recover a bit from the grind of the last few years. All things considered, life is good.

Then came an enormous slap round the face !!!

I read this book – 10 Billion by Stephen Emmott.

As the Amazon review I wrote about the book suggests, it didn’t take long to read and therein lay its power to shake me to my core.

As also mentioned in the review, it didn’t tell me a great deal more than I’ve already seen and heard on the great climate change debate but it was the succinct, no nonsense and blunt way it was presented that woke me sharply from my post holiday malaise.

Professor Emmott’s graphic “I think we’re fucked” conclusion and the subsequent recounting of a comment from one of his respected ‘rational’ colleagues about his own response to the scenarios described in the book that he will ‘teach his son how to use a gun’ leave you in no uncertain terms about the fear and anger his work in advanced computer modelling has induced.

Some of the book reminded me of  early exploratory posts I wrote on this blog back in 2009, such as the thinking of Thomas Malthus and contemporary viewpoints of James Lovelock. Other bits burst my bubble somewhat on hopes for the future, such as the wider environmental impact of solar panels that I was generally unaware of.

And I have learnt a new word too – ‘externality’ – that would appear to me to be absolutely fundamental to the World my children will inherit.

In our 21st Century world we seem to have become very adept at ‘kicking the can down the road’ – particularly when it comes to financial crisis and I see it repeatedly in other areas of life – health, education and crime. When it comes to climate change however, that ‘can’ is so immense that nobody dare try to kick it and so it sits in the road getting bigger and bigger and even more of an obstacle to human progress.

Just how much of an obstacle to progress it will become was laid out in some pretty stark and topical forms in Professor Emmott’s book.

Let’s take one of the top news stories of the day as an example – the death of 19 US firefighters tackling an enormous wildfire in Arizona.

10 Billion is a book full of steeply ascending charts – some shockingly so – and amongst them is the rise of major US wildfires in recent decades – from one or two per decade to almost 100.

What I got from this book, more than other such ‘we’re all doomed’ commentary are the challenges this triple whammy of population growth, energy demands and climate change is going to throw at us as we progress through the 21st Century.

Something as basic as “more drought equals more wildfires” or “heavier rainfall equals more flooding”  have their own set of ‘externalities’ that build up the negative inheritance for our children. These though are far more visible and tangible than the ‘externalities’ of the way we live our lives today. The damage to the ecosystem, infrastructure and people is all too obvious when fire rages and floodwaters rise and we seem to be able to attach price tags pretty quickly to major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.

But how much does our addiction to things like cars, gadgets and food really cost in terms of our children’s inheritance? It’s very clear from this book that we are paying nowhere near the ‘real cost’ of these items once you start to factor in environmental degradation. Some sets of facts and figures I haven’t really noted elsewhere before are the volumes of water used in varying manufacturing processes.

It takes around 72,000 litres of water to produce one of the ‘chips’ that typically powers your laptop, Sat Nav, phone, iPad and your car. There were over two billion such chips produced in 2012. That is at least 145 trillion litres of water. On semiconductor chips.

And – irony of ironies – it takes something like four litres of water to produce a one-litre plastic bottle of water. Last year, in the UK alone, we bought, drank and threw away nine billion plastic water bottles. That is 36 billion litres of water, used completely unnecessarily. Water wasted to produce bottles – for water.

Over the last five years I have written a number of posts concerning onehundredmonths.org as I admire the simplicity of the message and the associated communications. It makes me ‘think’ every month and those thoughts more often than not inspire some type of positive action. Like Stephen Emmott, I share a major dislike of ‘tokenism’ and also deep anger and frustration at the ineffective  political processes concerning these challenges.

Having worked across a number of industry sectors over the last 25 years, the type of corporate mindset that creates ‘externality’ after ‘externality’ for future generations to pay for has been all too apparent and I very much agree with this statement by Pavan Suhkdev from 2008 recounted in the book …

‘The rules of business urgently need to be changed, so corporations compete on the basis of innovation, resource conservation, and satisfaction of multiple stakeholder demands, rather than on the basis of who is most effective in influencing government regulation, avoiding taxes and obtaining subsidies for harmful activities in order to maximize the return for just one stakeholder – shareholders.’

Professor Emmott does not believe this will ever happen and I am inclined to agree with him although I detect generational shifts in corporate management are starting to shift the pendulum in the right direction. It’s reckoned that the ‘externalities’ generated by the top 3000 corporations alone amount to around $ 2.2 trillion per year – This is the legacy we are leaving our children and grandchildren!

And on the subject of ‘technology coming to our rescue’ Emmott says this …

Certainly, the rational optimist’s view is that our cleverness and inventiveness mean we don’t have to worry: we will invent our way out of our current predicament. And – even I have to confess – it is immensely tempting to believe something so appealing.

But it’s a staggering leap into fantasy.

Given where we are, it would be very prudent, in my view, to be a rational pessimist right now.

I have fantasised quite a bit on this blog over the last few years about how things like nuclear fusion could deliver that holy grail of abundant clean energy within my lifetime and I do still believe it is a matter of when rather than if this will happen but the sheer scale of the energy demands for a population of 10 billion and the propensity for us to fall back on our addiction to fossil fuels at the drop of hat to address immediate needs and keep the wheels of capitalism turning means that those hopeful CO2 emissions targets are also staggering leaps into fantasy.

The book also opened my eyes more to the things that are happening around us right now, with comments like this …

In the heatwave of 2010, the Russian government placed an embargo on grain exports, which caused chaos in the commodities markets, an unprecedented food price spike and, consequently, food riots across Asia and Africa – unrest that led to the violence of what we now refer to as the ‘Arab Spring’.

It’s often said that society is only three meals away from revolution and this is the first time I have seen a correlation being made between food prices and the ‘Arab Spring’ rather than such revolutions being attributed to the rise of Facebook. I am inclined to agree that the former seems a much more plausible reason than the latter.

In a book with such an ominous outlook there was one particular comment that jumped off the page for me …

It is no coincidence that almost every scientific conference that I go to about climate change now has a new type of attendee: the military.

During my recent break I read a book called Task Force Black that had been left behind by previous visitors to our holiday home. Written by BBC reporter Mark Urban, it is a fascinating insight into Special Forces operations in Iraq over the last 10 years. As well as giving some context to a couple of topical stories this week – the court martial of SAS sniper Danny Nightingale and NSA spying scandal – this book illustrates how the military has evolved following the events of 9/11 and subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

My summary of Task Force Black is that after 10 years of fighting radicalised, ruthless and brutal opponents, our forces have become far more ruthless and brutal themselves with much greater propensity to shoot first and ask questions later. Likewise, the military and its associated intelligence agencies have become incredibly efficient and effective at using technology to monitor societies and the complex inter-play between individuals within them. So when Professor Emmott talks about the term ‘climate migrant’ and how the ‘fortunate’ countries might well respond to them, one can only start imagining the heavily defended, militarised countries he describes …

More ‘fortunate’ countries, such as the UK, the United States and most of Europe, may well look like something approaching militarized countries, with heavily defended border controls designed to prevent millions of people from entering, people who are on the move because their own country is no longer habitable, or has insufficient water or food, or is experiencing conflict over increasingly scarce resources. These people will be ‘climate migrants’. The term ‘climate migrants’ is one we will increasingly have to get used to.

So will such advanced sensor and surveillance capabilities be used to ensure fairer distribution and use of resources – I doubt it. In the same way that enemy ‘insurgents’ have become classified as ‘reconcilable’ or ‘irreconcilable’ by the military in recent years in a battle that is about ideology, I can imagine a time when ‘climate migrants’ will also be categorised in such black and white terms. And what will happen to these ‘irreconcilable’ climate migrants, the ones unwilling to accept their position and the fact they may have been born in the wrong place, at the wrong time? They will be eliminated with no questions asked!

If technologising our way out of this is indeed a staggering leap into fantasy then what about the prospects for radical behaviour change? Having spent the last 12 months working on a government sponsored ‘behaviour change’ programme I am inclined towards rational pessimism for the very reasons Emmott highlights …

In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more.

To accomplish such a radical change in behaviour would also need radical government action. But as far as this kind of change is concerned, politicians are currently part of the problem, not part of the solution, because the decisions that need to be taken to implement significant behaviour change inevitably make politicians very unpopular – as they are all too aware.

I very much hope that the type of ‘friendly’, ‘cajoling’ behaviour change campaigns we are running at local council level for things like sustainable transport really can make a measurable and meaningful difference but when you put it in the broader context Stephen Emmott describes, it is but a tiny drop in an increasingly acidified ocean.

We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe.

But I don’t think we will.

I think we’re fucked.

So, do I tell my lovely eldest daughter that – having invested all that effort in her exams and selected a new path of learning – everything she has done and intends to do will be utterly worthless and meaningless?

From an interview with Stephen Emmott in the Times, it is clear he does not have children and I am wondering, given the bluntness of his message, how he would approach a conversation with someone just starting to make their way in the adult world?

Here are a few of my thoughts on this …

1. National and international political efforts to tackle climate change have a history of inaction and little prospect of meaningful action in the foreseeable future so I would encourage my daughters to align their thinking with a global movement. Of those I am currently tracking,  Global Power Shift seems the flavour of the moment and is gathering momentum. No doubt it will evolve rapidly as it learns what works and what doesn’t.

2. Learn to consume less and conserve more. The sooner everyone in the ‘fortunate’ countries starts breaking their unsustainable consumption habits the better – and for any child born in the 21st Century, this will, through necessity, become the mantra of their lives. Ultimately, much of the ‘fortunate’ world will feel a lot better for it and it will be far less painful to learn the lessons early in this Century rather than having them forced on you later in life.

3. Understand the ‘real cost’ of the things that you buy and make the corporations you transact with accountable for those ‘externalities’. You have already been screwed over, big time! The longer these organisations are allowed to continue their bad ways, the bigger bill you will end up paying in the longer term.

4. Challenge the rich. Too many of my generation missed the irony of films like Wall Street and made the likes of Gordon Gecko and his ‘greed is good’ philosophy their inspiration. The result? the greatest level of wealth inequality in US history. We undoubtedly are part of the 99%  but being anywhere above the 50% mark in today’s world is a privileged place to be. Don’t abuse this privilege yourself but feel justified in challenging those above you who do.

5. Expect to have less freedom. As the NSA scandal is revealing, you are being watched more than you might imagine and this trend will undoubtedly increase as the Century progresses. Facebook has a noble agenda in wanting the world to be a more transparent place but it is a Utopian ideal that is more likely to backfire than succeed. Why? because with all of the deeply engrained vested interests in our societies there will always be an imbalance of transparency. Don’t show them yours until you have seen theirs …

The idea that Stephen Emmott’s respected rational colleague thinks his top priority should be to ‘teach his son how to use a gun’ has been seized on by some early critics of his book as irrational sensationalism. Clearly I don’t have access to the advanced computer modelling work that these people do as their day jobs but I certainly sense the anger and frustration it has generated. I imagine something like that scene from that 80’s classic War Games where the computer is taught through playing tic-tac-toe that every outcome for nuclear war that it models results in Mutually Assured Destruction.

Perhaps Professor Emmott and his colleagues are running these models and achieving similarly ‘MAD’ results only this time there is no mutuality involved. Our World will keep spinning regardless of what we do – it just won’t have us on it – Mankind’s Assured Destruction.

Time to stop this MADness!