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“Is humanity facing a looming ecological credit crunch?” - so asked Dr Chris Hails, Editor-in-Chief of the Living Planet Report and WWF-International Director of Network Relations, during his talk on Tuesday. A rhetorical question, no doubt, for the answer is a resounding yes.
He presented the findings of the Living Planet Report 2008, with an emphasis on the rather “worrying” trends gleamed from the Living Planet Index and our Ecological Footprint. Basically, that we are facing an ecological debt, that - in the economic terms for which a member of the audience made no efforts to hide his distaste - we are running out of capital, that demand is outstripping supply, that our consumption of natural resources is three times the rate of what the earth is able to sustain, and that humanity’s very existence (as well as that of all species) is being threatened.
The recommended solution? To use energy wedges:
Using a wedge approach (as pioneered by Pacala and Socolow in 2004)… moving to clean, efficient energy generation based on current technologies could allow us to meet the projected 2050 demand for energy services with major reductions in associated carbon emissions.
~ WWF, 2008
Calls for increased government regulatory intervention, cross-sector partnerships, it’s the same scripts everywhere. Same stories being replayed too: market failures, bureaucratic failures, the unreliability of social efficiency. So what’s new? What else can be new?