environment

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm ... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

Brussels sprouts grown in Norfolk are harvested by machines with incredible wastage and efficiency, taken by lorry to a packing department in the Midlands, sent to a factory where they are washed, cleaned, sorted by size, packaged or frozen and finally sent back again to Norfolk to appear in the supermarkets, wrapped in cellophane or a dinky little net bag... A study conducted by the SAFE alliance in 1995 showed that food was travelling 50% further before it reached the supermarket than it did in the late 1970s.

Capital throughout its history has long sought to evade certain costs, to treat them as "externalities" as the economists like to say. Environmental costs and the costs of social reproduction (everything from who takes care of grandmother and the disabled to child rearing) are the two most important categories that capital prefers to ignore. Two hundred years of political struggle in the advanced capitalist world forced corporations to internalise some of these costs either through regulation and taxation or through the organisation of private and public welfare systems...

Since the 1970s, there has been a concerted effort on the part of businesses to divest themselves of the financial and political burdens of dealing with these costs. This was what Reaganism was all about. Simultaneously, the high mobility of capital (encouraged by the deregulation of finance and capital flows) permitted capital to move to parts of the world (Asia in particular) where such costs had never been internalised and where the regulatory environment was minimalist.

Meanwhile, the preferred means for seeking solutions to the key problems of environmental degradation and global poverty – the liberalised markets, free trade and rapid growth and capital accumulation favoured by the IMF, the World Bank and leading politicians in the most powerful countries – are precisely those which produce such problems in the first place. The problem of global poverty cannot be attacked without attacking the global accumulation of wealth. Environmental issues cannot be solved by a turn to green capitalism without confronting the corporate interests and the lifestyles that perpetuate the status quo.

The compound rates of growth that have prevailed over the past two centuries are increasingly difficult to sustain. Is continuous compound growth (at a minimum rate of 3 per cent a year) in perpetuity possible in a world that is already fully integrated into the capitalist dynamic? The environmental and social consequences are bad enough but the potentially deadly geo-economic and geopolitical competition over markets, resources, land and uses of the atmosphere is even scarier.

Zero growth is a necessity and zero growth is incompatible with capitalism. The necessity is, therefore, that we must all become anti-capitalists. Alternative ways to survive and prosper must be found. That is the imperative of our times...

Two degrees Celsius is guaranteed disaster... It is equivalent to the early Pliocene epoch [between 5.5 and 2.5 million years ago] when the sea level was 25m higher. What we don't know is how long it takes ice sheets to disintegrate, but we know we'd be starting a process which then is going to be out of control. Because the way it works – the planet is out of energy balance, most of the additional energy is going into the ocean, which melts the ice shelves, which then allows the ice sheets to discharge ice more rapidly – if you want to stop that and you've pushed it up to two degrees, then you've got to cool off the ocean. Well that's going to take hundreds of years. So you would have a situation which can't be fixed except with some geo-engineering, which is a pretty awful inheritance to leave for our children....

We've reached a point where it's clear we can't burn all the coal or unconventional fossil fuels [such as oil from tar sands, deepwater drilling and sources revealed by melting ice]. We've got to phase them out. The large pools of oil and gas that are readily available to Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Middle Eastern countries is enough to get us well over 450ppm1.

• 1. In 2008 Hansen published a paper with some ten co-authors, "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?" which redefined our understanding of what constitutes dangerous climate change. It concluded that we need to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 390 parts per million (ppm) to below 350

The Ecological Footprint tracks the area of biologically productive land and water required to provide the renewable resources people use, and includes the space needed for infrastructure and vegetation to absorb waste carbon dioxide (CO2). It also shows a consistent trend: one of continuous growth (Figure 2). In 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, the Footprint exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity — the area actually available to produce renewable resources and absorb CO2 — by 50 per cent. Overall, humanity’s Ecological Footprint has doubled since 1966. This growth in ecological overshoot is largely attributable to the carbon footprint, which has increased 11-fold since 1961... However, not everybody has an equal footprint and there are enormous differences between countries, particularly those at different economic levels and levels of development.