Deflating the Bubble Economy Before it Bursts - Lester Brown
Daniel J. Lavigne
>From Earth Policy Institute
September 4, 2003
DEFLATING THE BUBBLE ECONOMY BEFORE IT BURSTS
Lester R. Brown
"We are creating a bubble economy--an economy whose output is
artificially inflated by drawing down the earth's natural capital,"
says Lester R. Brown in his new book, PLAN B: RESCUING A PLANET
UNDER STRESS AND A CIVILIZATION IN TROUBLE. (Available for FREE
downloading in PDF format http://www.earth-
policy.org/Books/index.htm or to order.)
"Each year the bubble grows larger as our demands on the earth
expand. The challenge for our generation is to deflate the global
economic bubble before it bursts," says Brown, President and Founder
of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent
environmental research organization.
Throughout most of human history, we lived on the earth's
sustainable yield--the interest from its natural endowment. But now
we are consuming the endowment itself. Our existing economic output
is based in part on cutting trees faster than they grow, overgrazing
rangelands and converting them into desert, overpumping aquifers,
and draining rivers dry. On much of our cropland, soil erosion
exceeds new soil formation--slowly depriving the land of its
inherent fertility. We are taking fish from the ocean faster than
they can reproduce.
"We are releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere faster
than the earth can absorb it, creating a greenhouse effect. Rising
atmospheric CO2 levels promise a temperature rise during this
century that could match that between the last Ice Age and the
present," notes Brown in PLAN B, which was funded by the U.N.
Population Fund.
Bubble economies are not new. American investors got an up-close
view of one when the bubble in high-tech stocks burst in 2000 and
the NASDAQ, an indicator of the value of these stocks, declined by
some 75 percent. The Japanese had a similar experience in 1989 when
the real estate bubble burst, depreciating stock and real estate
assets by 60 percent. As a result of the bad-debt fallout and other
effects of this collapse, the once dynamic Japanese economy has been
dead in the water ever since.
The bursting of these two bubbles most directly affected people
living in the industrial West and Japan. But if the bubble that is
based on the overconsumption of the earth's natural capital bursts,
it will affect the entire world.
Thus far the consequences of most excessive natural capital
consumption, such as aquifer depletion, collapsing fisheries, and
deforestation, have been local. But in sheer number and scale these
events are now reaching a point where they may soon have a global
effect. Food appears to be the economic sector most vulnerable to
setbacks, largely because the impressive production gains of recent
decades were partly based on overpumping and overplowing.
Overpumping is historically recent because powerful diesel and
electrically driven pumps have become widely available only during
the last half-century or so. Aquifers are being overpumped in scores
of countries, including China, India, and the United States, which
together account for nearly half of the world grain harvest.
Overpumping creates a dangerous illusion of food security because it
is a way of expanding current food production that virtually ensures
a future drop in food production when the aquifer is depleted. In
the past, the effects of aquifer depletion on food production were
confined to less-populated countries, like Saudi Arabia, but now
they are becoming visible in China.
After a remarkable expansion from 90 million tons in 1950 to its
historical peak of 390 million tons in 1998, China's grain harvest
dropped to 330 million tons in 2003. This drop of 60 million tons
exceeds the grain harvest of Canada. Thus far China has offset the
downturn by drawing on its vast stocks of grain. It can do this for
perhaps another year or two, but then it will be forced to import
massive quantities of grain.
Turning to the world market means turning to the United States, the
world's largest grain exporter, presenting a potentially delicate
geopolitical situation in which 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, with
a $100-billion trade surplus with the United States, will be
competing with U.S. consumers for U.S. grain, driving up food prices.
Water shortages, such as those in China, are becoming global,
crossing national boundaries via the international grain trade.
Countries facing water shortages often import water in the form of
grain. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain,
this is the most efficient way to import water. Grain has become the
currency with which countries balance their water books. Trading in
grain futures is now in a sense trading in water futures.
Farmers may now also face higher temperatures than any generation
since agriculture began. The 16 warmest years since recordkeeping
began in 1880 have all occurred since 1980. With the three warmest
years on record--1998, 2001, and 2002--coming in the last five
years, crops are facing record heat stresses. Crop ecologists at the
International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and at the
U.S. Department of Agriculture have developed a rule of thumb that
each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature during the growing season
reduces grain yields by 10 percent.
Falling water tables and rising temperatures help explain why the
world grain harvest has fallen short of consumption in each of the
past four years, dropping world grain stocks to their lowest level
in a generation. If grain shortfalls continue, they will lead to
price rises that could destabilize governments and impoverish more
people than any event in history.
"Plan A--business as usual--is not working. It is creating a bubble
economy. PLAN B describes how to deflate the economic bubble before
it bursts," says Brown. "This involves, for example, reducing the
demand for water to the sustainable yield of aquifers by quickly
raising water productivity and accelerating the shift to smaller
families. With most of the nearly 3 billion people to be added by
2050 to be born in countries already facing water shortages,
pressure on water supplies will mount. If population is not
stabilized soon, the water situation in some countries could become
unmanageable."
Accelerating the shift to small families and population stability
means providing women with reproductive health care, filling the
family planning gap, and investing heavily in education to ensure
that the U.N. goal of universal primary education by 2015 is
reached. The more education women have, the more options they have
and the fewer children they bear. We now have the wealth and
knowledge to eradicate the poverty that fuels rapid population
growth.
"Avoiding the damaging effects of higher temperatures on crop yields
means moving quickly to stabilize climate. In PLAN B," says
Brown, "I suggest cutting global carbon emissions in half by 2015.
This is entirely doable, as a number of recent studies have
suggested. If higher temperatures shrink harvests, public pressure
to replace coal and oil with natural gas, wind power, and hydrogen
will intensify worldwide."
A simple measure, such as replacing old-fashioned incandescent light
bulbs with highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs would enable
the world to close hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Replacing
nonrefillable beverage containers, such as aluminum cans, with
refillable bottles can cut energy use by up to 90 percent. If all
U.S. motorists shifted from their current vehicles with internal
combustion engines to cars with hybrid engines, like the Toyota
Prius or the Honda Insight, gasoline use could be cut in half.
Cutting carbon emissions in half is less a matter of technology and
more a matter of political leadership.
"Not only do we need to stabilize population, raise water
productivity, and stabilize climate, but we need to do it at wartime
speed. The key to quickly shifting from a carbon-based energy
economy to a hydrogen-based one is to incorporate the costs of
climate change, including crop-damaging temperatures, more
destructive storms, and rising sea level, in the prices of fossil
fuels. We need to get the market to tell the ecological truth."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has calculated
the costs to society of smoking a pack of cigarettes, including both
the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses and losses in
employee productivity, at $7.18 a pack. Is the cost to society of
burning a gallon of gasoline more or less than that of smoking a
pack of cigarettes?
"Unfortunately," says Brown, "since September 11, 2001, political
leaders and the media worldwide have been preoccupied with terrorism
and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq. Terrorism is certainly a
matter of concern, but if Osama Bin Laden and his followers succeed
in diverting our attention from the environmental trends that are
undermining our future until it is too late to reverse them, they
will have achieved their goal in a way they have not imagined."
One of the keys to deflating the bubble is redefining security--
recognizing that military threats to our future are being eclipsed
by environmental threats such as falling water tables and rising
temperatures. Redefining the threat means redefining priorities,
shifting resources from the military to population and climate
stabilization. Unfortunately, the United States continues to invest
heavily in an ever-stronger military as though that were somehow
responsive to the new threats that are shaping our future.
The $343-billion defense budget in the United States dwarfs the
defense budgets of other countries--allies and others alike. U.S.
allies spend $205 billion a year; Russia spends $60 billion; China,
$42 billion; and Iran, Iraq, and North Korea combined spend $12
billion. As the late U.S. Admiral Eugene Carroll astutely
observed, "For 45 years of the cold war, we were in an arms race
with the Soviet Union; now it appears we are in an arms race with
ourselves."
The urgency facing the world today is at least as great as that
which faced the United States as it mobilized for war during the
early 1940s. Not only was the economy restructured within a year or
so at that time, but the automobile industry--then the largest
concentration of industrial power in the world, producing 3 million
cars a year--was closed down and converted to the production of
tanks, armored personnel carriers, and aircraft.
Today the stakes for the entire world are even higher. We study the
archeological sites of earlier civilizations that were based on the
overconsumption of natural capital.
"Advances in technology and the accumulation of wealth enable us to
build a new world," says Brown, "one far more stable and secure than
the one we now have. We can lead a richer, more satisfying life
today without jeopardizing the prospects for future
generations." "We can stay with business as usual and be the
generation that presides over a global bubble economy that keeps
expanding until it bursts," concludes Brown. "Or we can be the
generation that stabilizes population, eradicates poverty, and
stabilizes climate. Historians will record the choice, but it is
ours to make."
-END-
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT:
Lester R. Brown, Author & President (202) 496.9290 x 11
Janet Larsen, Research Associate (202) 496.9290 x 14
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