Author: Dr. Trevor Hancock

The billions of dollars these taxes would raise could be put to good use, funding a guaranteed basic income for everyone, as more people are displaced not only from industrial work but many service industry jobs

Dr. Trevor Hancock

13 June 2023

696 words

I don’t know when I first heard the suggestion that robots should pay taxes, but it was some time in the 1970s, and the idea came from Japan. The concept was certainly in the air by the 1980s. Matt Novak, who writes the Paleofuture blog (about “the history of the future”), wrote in 2014 about an article in the March-April 1986 issue of The Futurist magazine. He noted that in the article the authors, Edith Weiner and Arnold Brown, “examined what they saw as the emerging concerns of the world.”

One of those concerns was: “As robots and computers do more and more work, displacing people in the process, society must come to grips with the matter of the wealth these machines create.” What they proposed, writes Novak, “was the idea that maybe companies should be paying taxes for the robots they employ to help offset the jobs lost to automation.”

However, we may have to shift our understanding of what we mean by ‘robot’. Then, and even now, the popular understanding is a machine that replaces workers on an assembly line, or perhaps is your robot servant. But with the advent of AI, the ‘robot’ may be a program that replaces writers, lawyers, singers and many other services and creative functions; a news item last week concerned a church service in Germany written by a chatbot and led by on-screen avatars.

If a robot replaces a worker, that person loses not only their income and benefits but the important social role of work. Meanwhile, the robots keep generating wealth. In the pre-robot world, much of that wealth went back out into society as wages that were spread throughout the community in purchases of housing, food and many other goods and services.

But now all that wealth accumulates to the corporation and its shareholders, although some of it no doubt goes to the designers and manufacturers of the robots – at least until that process is also taken over by robots!

This adds to what the historian Peter Turchin, in his new book End Times, calls ‘the wealth pump’. According to a June 10^th review in The Guardian, Turchin noted that in America in the 1970s “the social contract established in the 1930s . . . began to disintegrate.” As a result, “things began to shift in favour of owners.” In the decades that followed, the rich got a lot richer as “money gushes away from workers and towards the elite”.

Now add to that the additional pump of workers’ wages being displaced by robots and the profits accumulating to the elite. This will only heighten the already destabilising effect of increasing inequality – unless that wealth is instead re-distributed to society. And that means taxing corporate profits directly, taxing the accumulating wealth of the elite, or treating robots as wage-earners and taxing their ‘income’.

The billions of dollars these taxes would raise could be put to good use. Most obviously, they could fund a guaranteed basic income for everyone, as more and more people are displaced not only from industrial work but many service industry jobs. They could also be used to re-train workers as part of a just transition to a wellbeing society.

Such a society will need people to provide care and support to other people, establish and maintain community activities, or restore and maintain nature, among many other activities that contribute to wellbeing and that may not be all that amenable to robot workers – indeed, maybe we will need to reserve such work for humans.

I am reminded of another futures study, also from the 1980s. In a report titled ‘Time to Care’ the Swedish Secretariat for Futures Studies examined the future of care. One of its more dramatic suggestions was that in the future people would not be taxed  for money to pay for social care, but would be ‘taxed’ for time to provide that care.

Perhaps robots and AI will enable us to get the best of both worlds, with the taxes on robots and the wealth they generate being used to fund the meaningful work of care for people and the planet that lies at the heart of a wellbeing society.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Bad aspects of the AI revolution, including the ability to develop better disinformation, pale into insignificance compared to the ugly potential that AIs could become an existential threat to humanity

Dr. Trevor Hancock

4 June 2023

701 words

There is much discussion about the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for humanity. Many of its impacts are likely to be good – AI has already helped develop new and better antibiotics – but not all of them, and some may be downright ugly. Moreover, the impact of AI will be magnified and accelerated by developments in the field of quantum computing, which is vastly more powerful than digital computing.

For example, in an April 23^rd article in The Spectator, Sam Leith notes “in 2019 Google reported that its 53-qubit Sycamore computer could solve in 200 seconds a mathematical problem that would take the fastest digital computer 10,000 years to finish,” adding that IBM “hopes to have a 4,000-qubit version working by 2025.”

Leith’s article is largely an interview with Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics and author of the new book Quantum Supremacy. Kaku’s book, writes Leith, argues that the “shift from the digital to the quantum age will be a greater leap than the original digital revolution”, with implications for everything, including the economy, medicine and warfare.

Kaku’s vision of the implications of all this are largely positive, Leith notes: “there doesn’t seem to be a human problem that quantum computers won’t be able to fix”. These are the good aspects of AI and quantum computing. But Kaku also sees some of the bad news, noting in particular that all encryption will be able to be broken. So, writes Leith, “potentially, goodbye to all military and civilian secrets, not to mention the secure transactions on which the entire global financial system depends.”

Other bad aspects of the AI revolution include the ability to develop better weapons, better surveillance, better disinformation (including ‘deep fakes’) and so on. But these negative impacts, significant though they are, pale into insignificance compared to the ugly potential that AIs could become an existential threat to humanity.

That possibility was imagined as long ago as 1954 in a very short story by a French science fiction writer, Fredric Brown. In the story, all the computers in the universe have been linked, creating one vast computer. The chief scientist makes the final connection, and then asks the first (and as it turns out, his last) question: ‘Is there a God?’ Back comes the reply: ‘Yes, now there is a God’.

That may sound a bit over the top, but not if you listen to Geoffrey Hinton, known as the ‘godfather of AI’.  The 75-year-old University of Toronto professor and Google researcher recently retired so he could speak openly about his concerns. In an interview in the May 23^rd issue of The Spectator, he noted that the next step – Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI – will mean that in a few years these AGIs will be smarter than us.

Moreover, he notes, when one AGI learns something, they all learn it, and they will be able to reproduce and evolve, and in essence, never die. In the past year or so, he states, “I arrived at the conclusion – this might just be a better form of intelligence. If it is, it’ll replace us.”

Of course, we could and should be protected by the Laws of Robotics, first developed by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in the 1940s. The First Law is “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”, while the Second Law states “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law”,

Asimov later added what he called a Zeroth Law, which supercedes the other laws: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” Of course, that means a robot may harm a human if it protects humanity as a whole.  It probably also means that an AGI would not allow us to harm the planet’s natural systems by, for example, causing global warming. So at some point expect the AIs to create the Laws of Humanics, governing our reciprocal responsibility to them.

Will AI be good, bad or ugly? For now that is up to us to, but we should not take too long to decide! 

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Several countries are starting to develop “wellbeing economies” and “wellbeing budgets” that incorporate all four capitals: natural, human, social and produced (or economic)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

30 May 2023

700 words

Last week I noted our present form of capitalism is flawed and incomplete. We may be economically better off but we are not much better off in human and social development terms, and we are eating away at the Earth’s life support systems on which we ultimately depend. Clearly, we need a new economic system, one based on growing all four forms of capital – natural, human, social and produced (or economic) capital – simultaneously.

But while they need to be addressed together, note there is an explicit hierarchy in my listing of these four forms of capital. Natural capital comes first because our very existence depends upon the viability and functioning of the Earth’s natural systems. Next comes human capital, because we want individuals to thrive, to live long and happy lives and achieve the fullest potential of which they are capable.

Social capital comes third, because we do not live in isolation as atomized individuals, but are social animals embedded in families, communities, societies and cultures, and depend upon the informal and formal social supports they offer. Finally comes economic capital, which must be understood as being ‘in service’ to the need to build these other, more important forms of capital.

But this new economic system cannot exist within our present society, which only too often prizes the economy above the other forms of capital. We need instead to become a ‘wellbeing society’, in which the wellbeing of the planet’s natural systems and the physical, mental and social wellbeing of people and communities are paramount.

Fortunately, several countries are starting to move towards such a model and to develop ‘wellbeing economies’ and ‘wellbeing budgets’ that incorporate the four capitals. First among them has been Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), which developed its Living Standards Framework in 2019, and created a Wellbeing budget based on that Framework.

In its latest iteration, that framework describes the wealth of ANZ in terms of the four forms of capital, and wellbeing in terms of “the resources and aspects of our lives that have been identified . . . . as important for our wellbeing as individuals, families, whānau [extended family group] and communities.”

Other countries – Finland, Iceland, Scotland and Wales – have since joined ANZ in forming the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) group as part of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Finland has committed to creating an economy of wellbeing that “puts people’s wellbeing at the heart of decision-making”, taking into account “the combined impact of economic and ecological factors on wellbeing.”

Iceland has developed Indicators of Wellbeing grouped into social, environmental and economic clusters,  while Wales passed its Wellbeing of Future Generations Act in 2015 and reports on the implementation of its Wellbeing Goals. Meanwhile Scotland, which provides the WEGo Secretariat,  issued a report on the Wellbeing economy in 2020 which used the Four Capitals model and an existing National Performance Framework focused on various aspects of people’s wellbeing.

Note that all these countries (except Iceland) have similar sized populations to BC – so if they can do it, so can we. (Although is it just by chance that the initiatives in ANZ, Finland, Iceland and Scotland were all developed under the leadership of a woman Prime Minister?)

Recently, Canada joined WEGo, having created a Quality of Life Framework and Strategy in 2021 that includes the four capitals and a set of wide-ranging quality of life indicators. However, its claim to have created a Wellbeing Budget in 2022 is premature, in my view.

The work of creating a Wellbeing economy was given a boost at the World Health Assembly in May with the release of the final report of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Council on the Economics of Health for All. In her preface Professor Mariana Mazzucato, the Chair, pointed out this was “an all-female group of 10 distinguished economists and area experts”, and stated “Alongside a healthy and sustainable environment, human health and wellbeing must be the ultimate goal of economic activity.”

The WHO Council concludes “The economy is yielding poor, unequal health outcomes by design” and that it must be redesigned so that “economic activity [is] in service to human and planetary health.” The BC and Canadian governments should pay attention.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

When we see capital largely or only in economic terms, we end up building economic capital by depleting other forms of capital: natural, human and social

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 May 2023

700 words

In my last column I noted that one of  several things we fail to understand about our economy is what constitutes true wealth. Yet we live in a capitalist society, so you would think people in general, and our corporate and political elites in particular, would understand the concept of capital. Well, it turns out they don’t, and as a result what we have is a partial, incomplete and dangerous form of capitalism – false or fake capitalism, if you like.

The mistake is to see capital largely or only in economic terms, either as financial capital (money, stocks and bonds etc.) or as produced capital – the stuff we produce and own, from trinkets to cities. Hence the heavy focus on the economy, on GDP, on economic growth and the price of stocks and shares, on wages and benefits. But capitalism as practised today largely ignores most of the wealth of our societies.

There are at least three other forms of capital that need to be included in our understanding of the true wealth of a community, a society or the world as a whole: Natural, human and social capital. Natural capital is the Earth’s biocapacity and resources, both locally and globally; the land, water and air that constitute our environment and the microbes, fungi, plants and animals with which we co-exist.

Human capital is the knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing of individuals and their capacity for caring, love, creativity and innovation. Social capital is found in the way we relate to other people, whether through informal networks of association, formal programs of social welfare or the ‘invisible’ social capital that regulates our peaceful co-existence through political, judicial and constitutional systems.

The idea of these four forms of capital is not new; I first came across it in the Gaia Atlas of New Economics in the early 1990s, while the World Bank published a report in 1995 in which it estimated the world’s wealth in terms of these four forms of capital. Interestingly, it concluded that only 20 percent of the world’s true wealth was to be found in economic capital, 20 percent in natural capital and 60 percent in a combination of human and social capital.

Unfortunately, because of our narrow understanding of capital, we often build economic capital by depleting these other forms of capital. That is most obvious when we exploit and deplete the Earth’s natural resources such as forests or fisheries to create economic wealth, or when our economic activities poison the Earth and reduce biodiversity. 

Indeed, in an independent review on the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury in 2019, Sir Partha Dasgupta, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge, wrote: “in recent decades eroding natural capital has been precisely the means the world economy has deployed for enjoying what is routinely celebrated as ‘economic growth”, adding that “The near-universal conception we hold today of economic progress is wildly misleading.”

This mis-match between different forms of capital is also seen when we grow economic capital by eroding human capital, for example by exploiting people through keeping wages low and work part-time, failing to protect people’s health by selling unhealthy products or creating unhealthy and dangerous living and working conditions. We often then compound this by creating a more atomised and individualistic society that weakens social connections, by cutting taxes that support education or social caring, or by undermining legal and political legitimacy.

Clearly we need a new form of capitalism, real capitalism, in which we consider all forms of capital together, something the UN and others call inclusive wealth. In its 2018 report on inclusive wealth, the UN Environment Programme reported that globally, between 1992 and 2014, produced capital per person doubled, but human capital only increased about 30 percent, while natural capital declined by almost 40 percent. Does that really represent progress? Are we really better off?

Real capitalists are those who build all four forms of capital simultaneously. My challenge to the world’s capitalists is very simple: why don’t you try practising real capitalism, rather than the false capitalism that is currently practised? We would all be a lot better off. Next week, I will look at countries that are working on this.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 April 2023

699 words

Last week I discussed some of the problems that result from our focus on the economy rather than on ecologically sustainable human and social development.  This week, I turn to a more in-depth exploration of the impacts of continual economic growth, and in particular the way in which growth, if unchecked, will dramatically increase inequality.

The inexorable logic of continual growth is one of  several things we fail to understand about our economy. (Others include what constitutes true wealth and the illogicality of seeing GDP as  a measure of social progress.) Indeed, reporters covering the economy are always obsessing about the rise or fall of the GDP. They seem pleased when it goes up, clearly not understanding the implications of continual growth.

It is not uncommon to see aspirations for economic growth of 3 or 3.5 percent annually. So what happens if we have annual growth of 3 or 3.5 percent annually throughout our lifetimes?

There is a handy rule of thumb that converts a percentage growth rate into a doubling time: 70 divided by the percent growth gives you the approximate doubling time. So an economy, a population or an environmental impact such as our ecological footprint that grows at 3.5 percent annually will double in size in 20 years. (It will actually increase 1.99 times, but close enough.)

Think about that: What if the economy and its resultant footprint grew at that rate throughout the more than 80-year life expectancy of an infant born today? A doubling every 20 years – so four doublings – leads to a 16-fold increase in size.

Now does anyone seriously think the Earth can withstand an economy 16 times the size it is today, given the massive damage our current economy is causing? As it is, in 2018 the world had a footprint equivalent to 1.8 Earths, according to the Global Footprint Network. So at that growth rate, by 2098 the footprint would be the equivalent of nearly 28 Earths!  OK, 80 years is a long time away, but what if we look at just 40 years from now, when anyone 40 years or younger is likely to still be alive? With two doublings, we would still need almost 7 planets.

Then let’s add in the impact of inequality. The average footprint per person of the 48 high-income countries is equivalent to using 3.75 Earths (Canada, with a footprint of  5.1 Earths per person is one of the highest of the high-income countries), while the average footprint per person of the 36 low-income countries is 0.68 planets. If the whole world lived the way high-income countries live, then with a 3.5 percent annual growth rate, we would need nearly 15 planets by 2058 and almost 60 planets by 2098! And if they all lived like we do in Canada, make that 20 planets by 2058 and almost 80 planets by 2098.

Even if the whole world lived the way low-income countries do, with that growth rate we would need 2.7 planets in 2058 and 11 planets by 2098. Clearly, continual economic growth, if it translates into a similar growth in our ecological footprint, is completely unsustainable, especially in high-income countries. 

People living in low-income countries currently get less than their fair share of the Earth’s biocapcity and resources. They need economic development and its accompanying footprint to meet basic human needs for their people – a process, importantly, that also leads to smaller family sizes. This will mean enabling them to have a somewhat larger ecological footprint.

But there is only so much biocapacity on our finite planet, and we already exceed the limits. So if they are to get their fair share, we need a redistribution of the glaringly unequal consumption of the Earth’s biocapacity and resources, which means a reduction in the share currently taken by high and middle-income countries.

As Dr. Kenneth Boulding, a former President of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Economic Association told the US Congress way back in 1973: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

**************

I am off on vacation, my next column will appear May 28th.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “We need to get over our obsession with the economy”)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 April 2023

700 words

I recently came across an eloquent and powerful passage by Carl Sagan, the famed cosmologist, written in response to an image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, from beyond the planet Neptune. The Earth was just a pale blue dot (which inspired the title of his 1994 book from which this passage is quoted). Sagan wrote “you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. . . . The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena . . . Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

And he ended with this powerful statement: “To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

This was in my mind as I considered the issues of population and economic growth that I have discussed in the last couple of columns. This week I turn to one of the key drivers of the global ecological crisis we are creating: our focus on the economy. This is often to the exclusion of the natural world and social conditions – especially for people who are disadvantaged and vulnerable. Here and in my next column I explore the problems that result from our focus on the economy and – next week – the problem of growth and the inequity that results.

We see our pre-occupation with the economy in the focus on economic reports in the news, whole sections of newspapers devoted to business, the centrality of the Department of Finance and the Minister of Finance in government, the almost fetishistic attention paid to the Budget. It is particularly well illustrated by the slogan in Bill Clinton’s campaign office: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Yet the economy is – or should be – a tool used to achieve the things that really matter. It should not be the central focus of government, of public policy and public discussion. As the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) observed in its 2014 ‘Living Planet’ report, “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way round”. And yet we act as if it did, by making the economy the central focus.

We need to flip this around. It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the people and the planet! The central focus of government should be to ensure the highest possible level of human and social development for everyone – not just some, or many, or most, but all – within the ecological limits of the one small planet that is our home. Then we need to design an economy that delivers that outcome.

So the most important people in government after the First Minister should be the Ministers of Sustainable Development, Human Development and Social Development, while the Minister of Finance should be in service to them, not the other way around.

Yet a quick Google search finds only one Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, in the Central American country of Belize, while in Canada Québec has a Ministry of Sustainable Development, Environment, Wildlife, and Parks.

Similarly, I can find only one Ministry of Human Development, Families & Indigenous People’s Affairs, also  in Belize – maybe we should take a few lessons from Belize? – although South Africa has a Minister of Social Development.

In Canada, the federal government has a Minister of Employment and Social Development, making social development a secondary concern, with the focus on employment, which is just one part of social development.  Here in B.C. we do have a Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction. Yet clearly, they are not the most important Ministries in government, although they should be.

We need governments and economies that are strongly focused, as Sagan wrote, on how we can “deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and . . . preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” That should be the business of government, with the economy as servant, not master.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                          University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

We need to slow growth in our overall consumption, especially in the high-income countries and populations where it is highest and most damaging

Dr. Trevor Hancock

11 April 2023

698 words

In last week’s column I discussed the findings of the recent report from Earth4All concerning population growth. Judging by several thoughtful and concerned responses from readers, I fear I did not do a great job, so I will re-visit the report’s ideas and, I hope, somewhat clarify what is a complex issue and argument.

It probably didn’t help that my original title – “Has the population bomb bombed?” – was changed to read “It’s not population growth but inequality that’s the problem”. The new title is not the same as the conclusion that I quoted at the end, which came from the Earth4All report: “population size is not the prime driver of exceeding planetary boundaries . . . Rather, it is extremely high material footprint levels among the world’s richest 10 percent that is destabilising the planet”.

The key point here is that the report was not saying population growth is not a problem, but that it is not the main driver of ecological overshoot, although it certainly still is an important factor. The Earth4All report projects the Earth’s population will stabilise within  the next couple of decades (around 8.5 or 8.6 billion by about 2040 or 2050, from 8 billion now) and then decline to 6 or 7 billion by 2100. (UN projections also see stabilisation and decline, although with larger projected populations and somewhat longer time lines.)

But according to Our World in Data, while population has grown 3.2-fold, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 8 billion in 2022, GDP per person (in constant dollars) grew 4.5 times between 1950 and 2018, meaning overall the economy grew more than 14-fold.

In other words, since 1950 growth in goods and services per person has had a greater impact than population growth. Of course it is the combination of both population growth and growth in wealth and consumption that matters, although recently the rate of population growth has been slowing down. But that will not help if our already high ecological footprint remains high or even increases.

So we need to slow and in fact reverse the growth in our overall consumption, and especially in the high-income countries and populations where it is highest and most damaging. Because there is a strong relationship between wealth and the ecological footprint; wealthy countries and wealthy people have larger footprints, making them the main threat to the natural systems that support us and all the other species with which we share the Earth.  

There are two main reasons to focus on high-income countries and people. First, quite reasonably, low-income people and countries look at places like Canada and in many (but not all) cases, want what we have. But if all the world lived the way we do, we would need another four planets. Clearly, that is not possible,  but we can’t simply say to middle and low-income countries and people – sorry, we got ours, you are out of luck!

Not only will that not be accepted, it would be counter-productive, since the evidence is clear – as the Earth4All report points out – that the way to limit family size is through social and economic development that educates and empowers women in particular, and society in general.

Second, high income people and countries already have a disproportionate impact on the Earth, and if we continue our current form of economic growth, we will have a far greater impact over the course of our lives than people in low and middle income countries.

So if we are to ensure everyone a decent life, we who live in high-income countries need to lead in figuring out how to reduce our impact  on the Earth to a sustainable level while maintaining a decent quality of life and good health for all. In doing so, incidentally, we can probably learn a lot from some of the low and middle-income countries that are closer to this state than we are.

The Earth4All report proposes several key transformations that will get us there, including major shifts in both food and energy systems and a significant redistribution of resources within and between all countries. There is, as Gandhi remarked, enough for each person’s need, but not for each person’s greed.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as ‘It’s not population growth but inequality that’s the problem’)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

4 April 2023

702 words

Whenever I write about the problems of economic growth and our ecological footprint I get e-mails asking me why I don’t also address population growth. The short answer is that I have, on several occasions. The longer answer, as I wrote in a July 2018 column on this topic, is that the issue is complex, and the solution not just a matter of family planning.

According to UN data, as reported by ‘Our World in Data’, the rate of increase of the global population had dropped from around 2 percent per year 50 years ago to a bit under 1 percent now. Global population, the UN reports, “is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s.” (Canada’s population grew by 2.7 percent in 2022, mostly due to immigration, Statistics Canada recently reported, and would double in 26 years if that rate continues.)

However, a new report for the Club of Rome from Earth4All casts doubt on this. Guided by a Transformational Economics Commission,  Earth4All is “a platform to connect and amplify the voices that want to upgrade our economies.” By ‘upgrade’, they mean transforming our economies so that people everywhere can thrive within the limits of our one planet.

Their new report links population size, human development, social justice and ecological sustainability. It is a response to five questions posed by the Global Challenges Foundation, a Swedish organization founded in 2012 to “raise awareness of global catastrophic risks and to strengthen global governance to handle them.”

First, they looked at how large the world’s population would grow, and the result was somewhat surprising. If the world continues its present economic course, they found the population would peak at 8.6 billion in 2050 (we just passed 8 billion) before declining to 7 billion in 2100. Moreover, if the policies discussed below were enacted, says the report, population would peak at 8.5 billion around 2040 and decline to 6 billion by 2100. This is considerably less than the 10 billion or more people by 2060 or so that UN and many other models project.

The reason, the authors explain, is that their model pays more attention to the effects of rapid economic development, which “has a huge impact on fertility rates”, said Per Espen Stoknes, Earth4All project lead and director of the Centre for Sustainability at the Norwegian Business School. Fertility rates fall, he explained, “as girls get access to education and women are economically empowered and have access to better healthcare.”

The report then addresses the Foundation’s five questions, which in essence asked how many people could be supported if everyone could achieve the minimal conditions needed to meet the  requirements of Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and how many could be supported at a standard of living up to 30 percent higher.

Article 25.1 states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family (sic), including food, clothing, housing and medical
 care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

The research team translated this into threshold levels of food, energy, disposable income and social spending as a proportion of GDP needed to achieve this minimal standard of living. The resulting standard of living would be quite like South-east Asia today, but with six times as much energy and 50 percent more social spending. Thus they concluded that “socio-economic and natural resources are sufficient to ensure a dignified existence for the projected global population.”

However, they add, getting there would require achieving “an equal distribution of resources.” This would involve “unprecedented investment in poverty alleviation – particularly investment in education and health – along with extraordinary policy turnarounds on food and energy security, inequality and gender equity.”

Importantly, they conclude that “contrary to public popular myths, . . .  population size is not the prime driver of exceeding planetary boundaries . . . Rather, it is extremely high material footprint levels among the world’s richest 10 percent that is destabilising the planet” – my topic for next week.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

B.C. government continues to support new fossil fuel infrastructure, while vainly proclaimimg it can meet its emissions targets

Dr. Trevor Hancock

28 March 2023

698 words 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released its synthesis report, summarising the three volumes of its 6^th Assessment Report. It found, with very high confidence, that:

• Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health.
• There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.
• Risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change escalate with every increment of global warming.
• Deep, rapid and sustained mitigation and accelerated implementation of adaptation actions in this decade would reduce projected losses and damages for humans and ecosystems.

So what does the B.C. government do in response? It continues to support new fossil fuel infrastructure, while still vainly proclaimimg it can meet its emissions targets. It has just approved the Cedar LNG plant, while at the same time announcing plans to reduce emissions from the fossil fuel sector.

Yet in May 2021 the International Energy Agency stated “the global journey to net zero by 2050 . . . includes, from today, no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects”, while in April 2022 UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness”

Or as Martyn Brown, former chief of staff toLiberal Premier Gordon Campbell, put it during CBC Radio‘s ‘On The Island’ political panel on March 17th, “This is the government sucking and blowing at the same time on climate action.”

After all, it was David Eby himself who stated in the weeks before he was sworn in as B.C.s’ new Premier  that “we cannot continue to expand fossil-fuel infrastructure and hit our climate goals.” So as Green Party MLA Adam Olsen pointed out: “Announcing a plan to reduce climate pollution from LNG facilities on the same day as approving another LNG project doesn’t make sense.”

The Cedar plant will not only increase emissions in B.C., it will also benefit from the incentives offered to the LNG industry by the BC government.  As tallied by Marc Lee, Senior Economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in July 2018, these include “eliminating the LNG income tax, a lower price for BC Hydro electricity, exemption of the provincial sales tax on construction materials and a rebate on new carbon taxes.”

Another reason for concern was touched on by Mr.Olsen, in noting that the Cedar LNG plant is a partnership with the Haisla Nation. While agreeing that it is “a significant opportunity for economic reconciliation”, he added “it is concerning that the BC NDP is using that opportunity to disguise the fact that they are creating new fossil fuel projects.”

Indeed, far from welcoming the announcement, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs issued a press release expressing concern. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, the UBCIC President, called the announcement of “the expansion of the LNG industry and associated fracking . . . frightening”.

B.C. is not alone in this behaviour.The federal government has a long history of sucking and blowing on fossil fuels. In June 2018 Parliament passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency, and the very next day approved the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX), which ships bitumen from the Alberta tarsands for export to Asia.

When it became clear the private sector was not dumb enough to continue investing in the TMX, the federal government went ahead and purchased it. Initially priced by Justin Trudeau at $7.4 billion to complete, it is now up to $30.9 billion.

Back in October 2022, when the price tag was only $21.4 billion, Robyn Allan, a former CEO of ICBC, in a report for West Coast Environmental Law, found oil producers would be paying tolls well below the true cost and that “the federal government will forgive $17 billion in debt Trans Mountain owes to Canadians.”

So we are subsidising LNG and are stuck with a pipeline that will never make a profit. Andrew Nikiforuk, a seasoned environmental reporter, summed it up well in the Tyee this month; this amounts to “the transfer of billions of dollars from ordinary Canadians to wealthy oil companies”  – while expanding fossil fuel production that results in climate chaos. Moral and economic madness indeed!

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Dr. Trevor Hancock

21 March 2023

702 words  

Given that we only have one planet, we need to live within the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem that is the Earth. Yet as I noted last week, Canada’s Ecological Footprint per person is equivalent to using 5.1 planet’s worth of biocapacity and natural resources every year.

By March 13^th we had already used our fair share of biocapacity for the year. After that our demands are taking from other people around the world, future generations and other species, who need that biocapacity to meet their needs.

But troubling as this is, the reality is worse than the Ecological Footprint suggests because, to paraphrase statistician George Box’s observation about models, ‘all indicators are wrong, but some indicators are useful’. The problem with both models and indicators is that they can only give us a partial picture of reality.

So while useful in many ways, it is important to understand the limitations of the Ecological Footprint. The Global Footprint Network goes to some lengths to clarify both its strengths and its weaknesses on their website (go to their FAQs for more details).

The key point is that the Ecological Footprint measures the ecosystems’ annual capacity to produce biological materials (in essence, microbes, fungi, plants and animals, all of which are renewable resources). These can then be used to meet the demands of humans and to absorb our wastes, primarily our carbon emissions. However, it does not measure things that are “not created by biological processes nor absorbed by biological systems”.

So the Ecological Footprint does not reflect the extraction of non-renewable resources such as metals and minerals, since they are not produced biologically, although the energy and any biologically produced materials used in extracting, refining, processing, and shipping these mineral resources are included. Moreover, if they are toxic, then when they or their wastes enter the environment, they may cause a loss of bioproduction that can be measured

However, the Ecological Footprint does not measure the impact of pollutants that are not produced biologically and “cannot be absorbed or broken down by biological processes”. Thus it cannot directly measure the impact of persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals or plastic, although if they cause harm to ecosystems the resultant loss of bioproductivity can be measured, but this is in practice difficult.  

Fossil fuels are a little different. They were initially produced through a biological process millions of years ago, and when combusted, produce carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Carbon dioxide is used by biological systems so the Footprint of carbon is “the amount of productive area required to sequester the carbon dioxide emissions and prevent its accumulation.”

Importantly, of the 2.8 hectares per person of biocapacity being used globally to meet current global consumption and waste production, 1.7 hectares per person – just over 60 percent of our total global footprint – is needed just to absorb our carbon emissions. For Canada, our carbon Footprint is 5.3 hectares per person, 65 percent of our total footprint

Yet the Earth’s annual biocapacity per person is only 1.6 hectares. In other words, absorption of our global carbon emissions requires a bit more than all the bioproductive land available today, while on a per person basis, Canada’s carbon emissions require more than three times the total global biocapacity available per person.

So if the whole world lived the way we do today in Canada, we would need more than 2 new planets just to absorb our carbon emissions. This is why we have to drastically cut carbon emissions globally, as the IPCC reported just this week, and why high-emitting countries such as Canada have to lead the way.

Finally, the Global Footprint Network notes, the Ecological Footprint “is not an indicator of the state of biodiversity, and the impact of a particular activity or process on biodiversity does not directly affect the Ecological Footprint calculation for that activity.” So that too is not reflected in the Footprint.

Thus in reality, our global impact is even greater than the ecological footprint would lead us to believe, making it all the more urgent to rapidly reduce our ecological footprint, while also reducing our extraction of metals and minerals, our production of pollutants and our devastating impacts on biodiversity.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy