Dr. Mike Joy's editorial on the accelerating dissolution of the life-supporting capacity of our planet

This cris-de-coeur from New Zealand's leading academic on New Zealand's water coincides with my own position.

I can't imagine any academic in the public arena saying more and holding down a job.

Dr. Mike Joy's editorial

I am reproducing Mike Joy's editorial from the last IGPS newsletter in its entirety to ensure that this has a wider readership.

It echoes my own thinking but more eloquently put - that we must stop business as usual immediately and take action with extreme urgency to avoid the end of our life support systems. Also to save other species - we have no right to destroy their lives and futures.

Scientists have issued us with dire warnings about what is ahead: the time to take commensurate action is NOW!

Senior Researcher Mike Joy reflects on our ongoing failure to save ourselves from environmental disaster.

Via Facebook

"Because of my research arena, I’m inundated daily by revelations of the accelerating dissolution of the life-supporting capacity of our planet. While this realisation is depressing, what is worse is that as I absorb this information I feel more and more detached from society. Because despite all these warning signs, all I see and hear around me is business-as-usual with economic growth still the supreme imperative.

I guess my feeling of disconnection comes from the fact that there seems to be so little awareness of the reality of the dilemma that we're in, and no sign of any urgency, panic or concrete movement towards the monumental changes required for civilization on anything like its current scale to have a future.

I constantly struggle to understand this cognitive dissonance, while also realising I’m guilty of it myself. Why haven’t we made the changes, or even slowed down? It’s not as if there is doubt about what is happening. Since I was child we have wiped out 60% of animal species and this destruction is speeding up with the current extinction rate 1000 times higher than background rates.

The species loss is not surprising when you consider that now the biomass of humans, our food and pet animals are more than 30 times higher than that of all wild animals on the planet.

In my childhood there were warnings about our increasingly perilous environmental situation. Back then the idea of modelling limits to growth came into being, and despite being ridiculed at the time the predictions have turned out to be chillingly accurate.

Then in the early 1990s came the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity followed up last year by a more strident “Second Warning to Humanity“ this time signed by 25,000 scientists. Both warnings unambiguously declared that if we don't radically change the way we live the planet the planet will soon no longer support us.

In my lifetime carbon dioxide emissions have more than doubled. Even just since the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 they've grown by another 60%. Fossil fuel use is now more than five times higher than when I was born. We are burning 80% more coal now than we were as recently as the year 2000. Looking around, the impacts of this fossil fuel largesse on the climate and thus the planet are obvious; in the last 22 years we have had the warmest 20 years on record, the ice loss from Antarctica is 6 times higher than it was when I was a child and the Arctic ocean has lost 95% of its old ice in that period.

There is much optimism about techno-solutions to our dilemma. Sadly this has become a real opportunity for snake-oil salespeople to promote their hype, and often it is lapped up by a following desperate for a sign that we won’t have to change. Here in New Zealand many assume that because we have a high proportion of renewable electricity, we have started the needed transition. They don’t realise that electricity is a small proportion of our primary energy use. Despite the hype around renewables, globally our energy supply is not transitioning to renewable sources. In fact renewable energy has not replaced any other form of energy: it has only added to the mix. We now use proportionally more fossil energy than at any other time in our history.

The sobering fact is that the world economy remains hopelessly coupled to fossil fuel use. As my colleague Robert McLachlan from Massey University showed, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% per year from now until 2050 to have a hope. Given that GDP is inextricably locked to greenhouse gas emissions, achieving that reduction would require a 6% per year reduction in GDP. You would think this reality would have economists worked up, but they seem oblivious. Will we just march on to the inevitable collapse?

The only change I see is a ramping up of rhetoric about making change. Despite dozens of international conferences on fossil fuel reduction and even an international treaty that came into force in 1994, human-made greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. The agreements sound splendid, but they are unenforceable, they have no verification requirements and they do not require anything remotely close to the level of change needed to avoid catastrophe. Worse, they engender a false feeling among much of the public that the problem is being dealt with.

In a few hundred years we have expended energy which was stored up over millions of years. In doing this we have grossly overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity. Every year we have an extra 90 million people on the planet. That means 90 million more mouths to feed, 90 million more to house and supply with consumer goods mostly made from non-renewable resources. Take away fossil fuels, and we no longer have the ability to support our current population. Fossil fuels reserves are like a battery that was charged over millions of years, which we are recklessly discharging in a few decades.

I hope that through my role at the IGPS I can do something to reduce the cognitive dissonance that is impeding action. I am convinced that one big reason the required changes are not made is because people are not aware of how bad things are. Thus, politicians and policy makers avoid the required changes, because they know they will be rejected by voters, because voters lack the necessary sense of urgency. I want to push for real change through information dissemination; and I want to challenge others, especially academics, to be more outspoken."


This talk is from last year

These photos taken by Pam Crisp on a hike into Wellingtons' water catchment after a good flush of rain shows what we have to lose