Our Planet at the limit E-Book

Helmut von Siedmogrodzki

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 172

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Only if we succeed together in overcoming the mantra of seemingly eternal economic growth can we save our planet and thus ensure our survival as humanity. Renouncing excessive consumption that goes beyond all limits is not really a disadvantage at all. Instead, it makes us happier and our world more peaceful. The author urgently appeals to us to recognise the limits of growth before it is too late.   Helmut von Siedmogrodzki presents a wealth of facts to show that the current "solutions" lead to a dead end. For example, the call to overcome capitalism is senseless, because socialism does exploit "Mother Earth" any less. It is also a misconception that technological progress could curb the consumption of resources - on the contrary, as the enormous power requirements of artificial intelligence show. And in the end, we will have to pay dearly for growth on credit with a dizzying level of national debt.   However, Helmut von Siedmogrodzki does not stop at saying what will not work, but shows concrete ways to escape the growth trap. Step by step, the author explains the basics of sustainable economic activity. He identifies three key factors. Firstly, the transformation to a service society in which the focus is on the needs-based use of goods rather than their possession. Secondly, a strong regionalisation of our value chains in order to put a stop to completely excessive globalisation. And thirdly, a modernisation of our financial system that dispenses with transactions that bring no benefit to the community.   As a successful management consultant for decades, Helmut von Siedmogrodzki also sees his work as a concrete guide to action for the economy. He methodically explains how companies can position themselves for the future and how the economy must be rethought in order to preserve the world for our children and grandchildren.

Leseprobe

For my sons Arndt und Michael

Contents

Foreword

Time for a paradigm shift

Limits to growth

The Growth Mantra

Society in transition

Growth and socio-ecological balance

The decade of action

Living in abudance

The throwaway society

Wrong incentives

Fight for the habitats

Growth on Credit

The debt trap

Too big to fail

The dead end

The flood of money

Trust in Innovation

Artificial Intelligence

Limits of the progress

Capitalism versus Socialism

The future-proof company

Agility and adaptability

Sustainability is not a strategy

Entrepreneurship as a service

Globalization versus regionalization

Increasing corporate value with sustainability

Rethinking the economy

Post-growth equals zero growth

Social performance instead of Material throughput

Efficiency-consistency-sufficiency

Fundamentals of the economy of tomorrow

Sustainable Finance

It doesn't work without change

Who is joining in?

False role model

Closing remarks

Acknowledgement

About the author

About the Diplomatic Council

Books from DC Publishing

Bibliography

References and Notes

Foreword

We were sitting on the terrace of the small café of the former Herrenmühle. The Kinzig rushed over the weir with a loud roar so that you could barely hear your own words. Severe weather had hit Germany in the last few days. Masses of rain had washed away entire houses, devastated villages, turned streets into raging rivers; dams collapsed under the masses of water.

The flood of the century caused over 170 deaths and destroyed countless livelihoods. The damage totalled more than 12 billion euros. The Kinzig was also filled to the high banks. The news and talk shows had no other topic for days. The consequences of climate change had now also become brutally visible on our doorstep. Our conversation involuntarily led us from the increasing natural disasters worldwide to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic to the importance of sustainability and the limited natural resources on our planet.

"These topics have been on my mind for quite a while. I've finally found someone I can share my thoughts with," said my dialogue partner happily. How can we constantly increase our economic output and boost our consumption, even though the necessary global resources are limited and diminishing year on year? Can we continue to accept that forests are being cleared on an enormous scale and animal and plant species are being wiped out just to satisfy our hunger for consumption? How long can we keep the people of the so-called "Third World", who produce our haute couture for low wages and under sometimes unsocial conditions, in their home countries and prevent them from taking a slice of the prosperity cake?

We quickly had to admit to ourselves that we ourselves are part of the causal system and that a solution is only possible by changing our own consumer behaviour. In the light of our discussions, the arguments of Fridays for Future and Scientist for Future no longer seemed so radical. On the contrary, it seems that only compelling demands can bring about a gradual change in society.

It is almost a truism that we cannot continue to grow indefinitely on our planet with only limited resources. Nevertheless, after centuries of growth and the incomparable economic miracle after the Second World War, we find it difficult to say goodbye to our cherished consumer habits. But it is almost certain that we will have no other choice in the future.

It has taken 50 years and a pandemic for the findings of Donella and Dennis Meadows in their study on the state of humanity and the future of the global economy regarding the limits of our actions to become part of everyday political and social life.1

The predicted climate change is happening and can no longer be denied. The consequences of the progressive, accelerating overexploitation of our ecosystem's capacity are becoming increasingly visible.

We are robbing ourselves of our own livelihood with our eyes wide open.

"The key question is: how do we convince enough people on all continents to seriously address this issue and bring their social and economic systems into balance with the Earth's ecosystem?" my counterpart concluded.

A 15-year-old girl has made government and corporate leaders sit up and take notice. Greta Thunberg has managed to get the world to listen to her and set a movement in motion that has made people all over the world think.

We have reached red alert level, warned António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in his speech in Malaysia on 18 April 2021 in view of the inadequate plans to limit global warming by all 193 member states.2

We have to make the right decisions today for our lives tomorrow.

Helmut von Siedmogrodzki

Time for a paradigm shift

Forests the size of Sicily are burning in Russia, natural disasters are occurring one after the other with ever more devastating consequences, our fish stocks are contaminated with antibiotics and microplastics, animal and plant species are dying out on a massive scale and drinking water is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. These and similar events are the consequences of the unchecked overexploitation of natural resources and mindless mass consumption. Our economic model is geared towards growth - not only in capitalism, even in communist China. Without growth, there is no employment, no investment, no innovation and no prosperity - that is the dogma. But where do we want to grow to and for how long? It is an undisputed realisation that endless growth is simply impossible with finite resources.

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth could go on indefinitely in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." (Kenneth Boulding at a hearing of the US Congress in 1973).3

With a world population expected to reach 9.7 billion people in 2050, our ecosystem is likely to reach its limits if per capita income growth rates and consumer behaviour remain unchanged.

At the end of 2015, 193 member states of the United Nations adopted the "2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The agenda aims to end poverty, protect the planet and achieve prosperity for all. But what does prosperity mean? And does prosperity go hand in hand with greater satisfaction? The fact is that the catalogue of goods that count as basic needs has grown steadily in affluent countries, but satisfaction has declined in relative terms.4 Several studies show that the increase in life satisfaction not only stops increasing above a certain income level, but actually decreases sharply.5

This may explain the growing disenchantment with politics and dissatisfaction with living conditions, self-doubt and mistrust of governments in western industrialised countries, especially in times of crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic.

Urbanisation has brought more and more people together in anonymous blocks of flats and at the same time distanced us from nature. We want an egg for breakfast but complain about the annoying cockcrow. Digitalisation is doing the rest to remove us from the rhythm of natural time sequences. The consequences are social poverty, aggression and permanent stress situations. In this living environment, increasing dissatisfaction is making its way in the form of violent visitors to football stadiums, stone-throwing, aggressive demonstrators and attacks on innocent citizens.

Land-grabbing cities and the progressive destruction of flora and fauna habitats are narrowing the communities of humans and wild animals. This in turn favours the transmission of viruses from animals to humans and promotes the spread of pandemics such as Covid-19 or Ebola.

Continued growth will (perhaps) ultimately bring us a higher standard of living, but not more life satisfaction. Unchecked growth is exhausting ourselves and our ecosystem. In large parts of the world, living conditions will deteriorate dramatically and jeopardise this very prosperity. A paradigm shift in the organisation of our economic system and our understanding of prosperity is necessary.

Limits to growth

The authors of the 1972 Club of Rome study "Limits to Growth" already came to the conclusion that a paradigm shift was necessary, and many of the assumptions and findings have been confirmed in various subsequent studies and the current development of climate change.6

In particular, their statement that the outgoing winds from ruminants contribute significantly to global warming, namely through the methane gas released, was more likely to provoke laughter than serious discussion. In the meantime, this result has also become a fact.

Tim Jackson, British economist and professor of sustainable development, showed a way out of the "growth dilemma" in his updated work "Prosperity without growth - the update" (2017): Moving away from a materialistic, excessive consumerism that encourages us to buy a new smartphone every six months, the latest fashion and a new fancy car every three years, towards a service-orientated market economy that provides us with the goods we need and want to shape our lives.

The focus of this economic and social system is no longer on status symbols, such as the biggest and fastest car, the most expensive flat, the smartest outfit, financial success and image, but on self-acceptance, relationships and belonging to a community. "People who orientate themselves more towards these inner values are happier and at the same time feel more responsible for the environment than People with materialistic values," says Tim Kasser, Professor of Psychology at Knox College in Illinois.7 He has been researching values and well-being for years with many renowned colleagues and is known for his studies on the negative effects of materialism.8 "Turning to people's 'inner values' instead of emphasising outward appearances makes them happier and improves their quality of life." - These are the conclusions of a study conducted by Professor Helga Dittmar and colleagues in 2014.9

The Growth Mantra

Since the industrial revolution in the 19th century, countries, particularly in the western hemisphere with ist market economy, have experienced incredible economic growth. This growth scenario has been accompanied by technological advances at ever shorter intervals. Although there have also been setbacks during the last 100 years, economic crises, the Great Depression, hyperinflation and wars. However, fueling the arms industry only delayed the economic collapse, but did not prevent it. After the Second World War, almost all industrialised countries were more or less back to square one. This was particularly true for Germany. The reconstruction of Germany and other countries involved in the Second World War was driven by the irrepressible will to get the economy up and running again, create jobs and generate prosperity. This worked wonderfully with generous financial injections from the USA (the "Marshall Plan"), monetary reform and creative entrepreneurship. Year after year, wages rose, working hours were reduced and prosperity steadily increased for more and more people, supported by a steady increase in economic growth. However, despite the high level of prosperity achieved for the general public, trade unions continue to demand higher wages and salaries, while company owners want higher profits, which are secured through higher productivity and cost reductions on the one hand and price increases on the other.

The managers of corporations subordinate themselves to the shareholders' demand to constantly increase the company value of the investment. Cost-cutting programmes replace one another, employees are laid off, which in turn reduces general purchasing power. Where will this spiral of continuous growth lead?

The financial crisis of 2007/08 revealed the fragility of this economic system. A worldwide collapse of the financial system and the global economy was only prevented by immense financial injections and a still hungry China. The early collapse of our financial and economic system was postponed by a huge accumulation of debt. Once again, the mantra was that the economy must grow in order to maintain employment and prosperity. The financial crisis could have been a warning, an opportunity for a path to reorientation, but instead this warning went largely unheeded.

The coronavirus pandemic has done nothing to change this. The broad social discourse triggered by the measures to combat the pandemic mainly centred on the rights of the individual. First and foremost, civil liberties. In contrast, climate protection and the depletion of natural resources through insatiable consumption took a back seat. But without nature, there can be no freedom. What civil liberties remain to us when arable land becomes desolate, areas of land sink into the sea, poverty rises in developing countries and trigger an unimagined migration of peoples? Even during the pandemic, there were renewed calls for the growth of the slowed-down global economy.

According to the Institute of International Finance (IIF), global debt has risen by 87 trillion dollars to over 322 per cent of global gross domestic product since the 2008 financial crisis. In order to iron out the dent in the economic performance of its member states caused by coronavirus, the European Union has decided to set up a coronavirus recovery fund totalling 750 billion euros, which - how else? - will be financed by loans. US President Joe Biden even launched a 2.2 trillion dollar programme. The Federal Reserve of the United States of America was afraid to raise the interest rate, which would drive many countries into insolvency and could trigger a second global financial and economic crisis. We are our own prisoners of the growth mantra.

Society in transition

We live in disruptive times. Technological development is progressing at a breathtaking pace, leaving most of us unsettled. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and quantum computers can only be grasped using abstract mathematical formulas and remain a closed book for the general public. Our behaviour is determined by algorithms.

The mass processing of our personal data by market-dominating corporations that provide us with our daily, predicted wishes convey a feeling of manipulation, of no longer being able to determine one's own actions. This feeling of powerlessness is increasingly being countered by the desire for change. Young people in particular are drawing attention to themselves and emphatically formulating their demands for a new social consensus. This consensus calls for an economic sustainability model that is in harmony with the overall ecological system of the earth's satellite.

The limits to growth are defined by the sustainability and reavailability of resources and compatibility with the ecosystem that makes our lives possible. The consequences of the largely undisputed, negative climate change, the progressive extinction of animal and plant species, the increase in natural disasters and pandemics are already clearly visible today and set the limits for future action. While technological progress is rushing past us like a high-speed train, the changes to our ecosystem have so far only been apparent at longer intervals, like a snail's pace. This slowness across generations makes it difficult for us to recognise and understand the need to change our behaviour as consumers and economic agents. However, without adapting to the conditions created, the change in our ecosystem - and thus the negative consequences - is also likely to accelerate.

There is no doubt that the challenge we face is enormous. Nothing less is required than to break with centuries-old paradigms. Our entire prosperity is based on the assumption of continuous growth, fuelled by constant innovation. So how can we maintain the prosperity achieved of the industrialised countries on the one hand, and yet with the world population increasing and the less developed regions having to catch up on huge demand, how can we achieve a balance between consumption and supply of available basic commodities and nutrients, while maintaining social peace?

Growth and socio-ecological balance

The massive impact of our economic activities on the global ecosystem of our planet has already thrown it significantly out of balance and is already overtaxing nature's ability to regenerate in parts. On the other hand, just how quickly the environment can recover can be seen, for example, in the growth of fish stocks in otherwise overfished waters that were left alone during the coronavirus pandemic.

Politicians, environmental organisations and scientists are therefore pursuing the "decoupling" approach. Continued growth should be made possible through more efficient production processes, the increased use of renewable raw materials, the reduced use of materials, the reduction of emissions and innovative and environmentally friendly products. The German government also focused on "decoupling" in its 2021 sustainability strategy. But do growth and decoupling really lead to a balance in the natural habitat and the mitigation of the consequences of climate change?

Growth and prosperity cannot only apply to the western industrialised nations. The 193 member states of the United Nations have pledged to eradicate poverty and hunger worldwide by 2030. We are miles away from this goal. At the same time, we in the Western Hemisphere produce food in abundance. As if that were not enough, we are wasting food and new products that have not found a buyer for the sake of price stability and growth - an absurdity! The wealth gap in our societies at home and around the world has now grown to a level that inevitably fuels social unrest. The flow of refugees to Europe or from Central America to the United States of America is just a small foretaste of the expected movements of peoples and the social conflicts that will accompany them.

Millions of people have been living in fenced-in refugee camps for decades with no hope of ever escaping this fringe of civilisation. Economic systems geared towards growth will further exacerbate this situation. Urbanisation and the associated sealing of arable land, the mass clearing of forests, the destruction of the habitats of diverse animal and plant species and the exploitation of the earth's natural resources have developed a momentum of their own, acting as a catalyst to accelerate climate change and the destruction of our habitat.

During his time as Finance Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2021, Olaf Scholz emphasised the seriousness of the situation: "We need a second industrial revolution in order to achieve the climate targets and maintain our prosperity." He continued: "If we fail to do this now, we will jeopardise our industry, our jobs and our prosperity.“10

The German Chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, also issued a warning, "the implementation of the sustainability goals cannot be achieved at the current pace.“11

At their sustainability summit in 2019, the member states of the United Nations postulated that the Sustainable Development Goals would not be achieved in 2030 if current trends continue. Climate change, species extinction and rising resource consumption are just as obviously reaching planetary limits as questions of justice between generations and regions are in need of a solution.12

At his second swearing-in ceremony as Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres emphasised to the assembled ambassadors: „We are truly at a crossroads, with consequential choices before us. Paradigms are shifting. Old orthodoxies are being flipped.“

But how is anything supposed to change when influencers suggest to us every day that we need a new car, youthful cosmetics, new clothes, a new smartphone, a bigger house and all of this super cheap, cheapest, for almost no money? The coronavirus crisis has also made us realise that these products can no longer be produced at such low prices in this country. Even China is already considered too expensive by many companies after wages and social security contributions have been raised by an average of more than ten per cent annually for decades. Since the invention of the discounter, our society has developed into an “I-want-everything-but-cheap” community. While in the early days of the discounter era, people looked down on the less well-off customers of the new competitors, today the Porsche and Mercedes drivers are not afraid to browse the shelves of discount retailers. Only those who spend little stay rich!

Can our social and economic system only survive if we have a generous pay rise in our pockets every year, if the dividends for shareholders are increased every year, and if the salaries of star company executives are in the hundreds of millions? Do football players have to collect million-dollar salaries while children in Bangladesh sew their jerseys for just a few cents? In the end, we all pay the price.

We are at a crossroads, said António Guterres. The necessary changes ahead of us may seem as utopian as the abandonment of horse-drawn carriages in the 19th century and their replacement by autonomous vehicles in the 21st century. Today's Generation Z will unlikely ever play car quartet cards where the most cylinders and highest horsepower wins. These descendants will only experience the adrenaline rush of the gas pedal of a 600-horsepower bolide in a motordrome. Self-driving, comfortably equipped communication vehicles that are available on demand in just a few minutes will take people to their destinations in the future without any noise or emissions. The car, long time a status symbol, is returning to its original purpose: transportation.

The decade of action