Should the global community not change its trajectory, humanity faces not only a climate crisis, but economic crisis as well.
Those were among the dire warnings heard earlier this week during a panel discussion at the Resources for Future Generations (RFG) conference.
On a panel discussion on resource opportunities and constraints June 28, environmentalist Tzeporah Berman warned the world could still be on track to “runaway” climate change, even if all nations live up to current Paris Accord commitments.
Mining and renewable energy magnate Ross Beaty warned the world is not only at risk of using up all of its resources, including water, it is also flirting with global economic disaster.
“We’ve actually been living off our natural capital,” Beaty said. “We’ve been consuming our resources at an unsustainable rate, and we’ve had all these negative reactions from that consumption that are starting to turn up
“We’ve also been borrowing like crazy and we’ve been asking our future generations to pay the cost of our profligacy today and our great lifestyle today.”
The RFG conference focused on a range of issues related to resources, energy and sustainability.
The single biggest challenge for resource industries and government is reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet climate change targets in a world that is likely to continue growing in both population size and prosperity.
Climate scientists have determined that the tipping point for disastrous climate change is a 2 degree Celsius warming of the planet.
Berman, co-founder of ForestEthics (now Stand.Earth), said commitments made by 146 countries under the Paris Accord to reduce GHGs won’t come close to keeping warming in check.
“The trajectory that we’re on right now is not just two degrees, it’s four to six degrees,” she said. “We have this massive gap in terms of our mitigation efforts globally.
“All of our nations – 146 now – have committed … to keep the world at below 1.5 degrees, but our policies, and certainly our current design of resource extraction nationally, globally, doesn’t reflect that.
“We already have enough oil, gas and coal under production or construction to take the world past a 2 degree limit. So actually that means that any further exploration of oil and gas or coal past what is currently under production or construction takes us out of the climate safe world.”
Beaty echoed some of Berman’s concerns, and added the spectre of global economic crisis. A growing population isn’t just using up the world’s finite resources, it’s also living on borrowed time financially, he said.
Beaty said governments are “obsessed” with maintaining GDP growth and relying on debt. Pointing to the U.S., he said America's debt grew 390% from 1981 to 2009, while GDP grew only 120%.
He said the global economy has grown by five times since 1950, at an annual average of 3.6%. If the global economy were to continue growing at the current average rate of 3.6%, it will be four times bigger in 2050 than it is today.
“But if population grows to 9 billion, as it is forecast, and if everybody has the living standards and the per capita consumption of Canada, the world’s economy would have to be 15 times bigger than today’s,” Beaty said.
“These numbers are just ridiculous. This is the very definition of unsustainable. We have neither the soil, ground water, mineral resources, land, ocean or any other resource to support these kind of numbers.
“The bad news is that nearly every government is using economic models that simply don’t work anymore, and this is a recipe for chaos,” Beaty said. “The good news is that millions of people are aware of this and are addressing these challenges.”
On a positive note, Beaty said decarbonization is a good news story for the mining sector, since so many metals are needed for things like renewable energy.
Gavin Mudd, associate professor of environmental engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, pointed out, however, that grades are going down, and mine waste increasing.
“Mining is not only getting bigger in scale, it’s getting harder, and grades are going down, there’s a hell of a lot more waste,” he said. “So more and more waste for every tonne of copper. That’s a trend that’s going up, and that’s not sustainable.”
It fell to Richard Chuchla, a professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas, to introduce some optimism into a discussion that otherwise sounded a bit like a Paul Ehrlich lecture.
He noted that, thanks to energy, including electricity, the world overall is enjoying unprecedented prosperity and has been going through “a naturally decarbonizing cycle” – from wood, to coal, to oil, to natural gas and, more recently, renewables.
“But the most important aspect, I think, of the energy economy today is it’s so much more efficient,” he said.
Pointing to his own country, he said per capita emissions in the U.S. have been reduced to levels of the early 1990s, partly due to fuel and energy efficiency.
But he also pointed out that the switch from coal to natural gas has done, through market forces, what European countries have struggled to do through regulation – reduce carbon emissions through heavy investments in renewable energy.
“It was driven by a shift from more carbon intensive fuels to natural gas," he said. “Interestingly, governments that chose to take a more intervening role, like the German government, have seen a significantly smaller reduction in their CO2 emissions than the United States.”
Chuchla also pointed out that the forecasts being used for climate change are 30 to 40 years into the future, and suggested that no one knows what dramatic technology advances may come in that time.
“There are solutions,” Chuchla said. “It’s not all bad news.”
Berman conceded there are glimmers of hope, and pointed out that there has been more investment in renewable energy last year than in oil, coal and nuclear power combined.
“We’re actually living that tipping point moment, and I think that’s really exciting and I think there’s lots of tremendous examples that can give people hope,” she said.
