Mainstream sustainability is a bust

Jevon's Paradox runs our world

I was writing something recently in my sustainability day job.

It was about the pros and cons of what people are calling “AI”. Some writers had listed the ways it could be used to help “tackle climate change”. As if, as always, climate change was a rugby player you could run up to and “tackle”, rather than a global multi-faceted existential crisis embedded into everything around us.

I pointed out that “AI” is a commercial concern within competitive capitalist geopolitics. Therefore, aside from its eye-watering and increasing direct use of energy and resources, it will almost exclusively be used to accelerate exploitation for profit and warfare worldwide.

Then I realised, again, that this goes for any and every technological and conceptual development within that system. That is, unless and until the system changes to include meaningful global safeguards.

It even applies to most of the current ideas of sustainability - especially the kind of professional sustainability that this system is willing to pay for.

I knew this from thinking about Jevon’s Paradox, where the more efficiently resources are used, the more we use them.

Take Fair Trade coffee. Fair Trade, as you probably know, provides premium payments and working standard regulations to growers to bulwark a minimum standard of living. It first came to the coffee industry in Holland in 1973. As of 2021, approximately 13% of the world's coffee production was Fairtrade certified.

But world coffee production has grown by 130% since 1973.

Yes, I know Fair Trade is not primarily intended to reduce the environmental impact of coffee. It’s more of a social equity push. But we can see that Fair Trade has not replaced conventional worldwide coffee bean production. It’s happening in addition to the growth in conventional, exploitative worldwide coffee bean production, with all its environmental consequences.

In fact, we could argue it has effectively assisted and facilitated that growth in terms of increasing the ethical appeal and acceptability of the product. It’s helped enable us middle class liberals to feel good about drinking a stimulant thousands of miles away from its source.

And most of the time we don’t even buy Fair Trade. We’re busy. We feel skint. Or we’re confused by all the branding and marketing.

Let’s take another example.

The Tesla Roadster is often considered the world’s first serious commercial electric car. It went on the market in 2008, to a relatively niche audience. EVs have only really started to make in-roads into the car market in the last few years. About 20% of the 90 million cars the world builds each year are now EVs.

Car production overall has increased by about 35% since 2008. So even since EVs got serious, there are currently more and more fossil fueled cars on the world’s roads, and definitely a lot more cars in general.

Studies suggest that EVs create about a third less greenhouse gas emissions compared to their Infernal Combustion Engine counterparts throughout their lifespan. The jury is still out on the full ecological impact, with developments underway in battery production and recycling.

But what we do know is EVs don’t grow naturally near you and return to compost.

We’re in a world where billions more people would like to drink coffee and drive cars. Companies the world over are, true to their nature, vying to supply them. Fair Trade and EVs give them another angle. And everyone’s countries are still paved with concrete, not gold. And the cars keep getting larger and more elaborate. I’d like, for example, to see a full Life Cycle Assessment of the ecological impact of a 1963 Hillman Imp compared to a Tesla Cybertruck…

The direction of travel is clear. Groovier cars, like groovier coffee, doesn’t mean less coffee and cars. It means more of them, negating all the grooviness.

You may think the same every time you trip over the scattered e-scooters in your city centre. They were supposed to replace the Ubers that you still have to duck round, which were supposed to replace the private cars, that are still there too.

A lot of sustainability advocates will tell you that this time, with whatever it is, it’s going to be different. This new technological advance will be the one that reaches escape velocity. From the “nuclear energy too cheap to meter” to “AI will do all the work while you play”.

But it turns out that the old adage: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”, which was written for an ad for the US government, isn’t really true. In fact, you’re part of the problem unless you’re part of the revolution.

Very few of us are part of any genuine revolution as yet. And most of them are in poverty and/or prison. That, by the way, is not a coincidence.

Essentially, degrowth is the only pathway to humanity becoming more sustainable. That’s not the fancy, delusional light green techno-fabulist degrowth espoused by many on the conference circuit. That often falls into exactly the same solar powered fallacies I’ve discussed. It’s more like the Welsh government’s efforts to allow people to live low impact land-based lifestyles, which tends to mean a lot more mud and turnips than most of us want in our lives right now.

But that’s where we’re really going.

Our only choices are how we get there. Do we deliberately and collectively impose limits on some things, like driving four litre engined tanks to the shopping mall, to preserve other things, like, say, our grandchildren not living in abject poverty and misery?

Or do we continue as we are now, saying drill baby drill and let the bullets fly where they may?