Rio de Janeiro, 19/6/12

Joan Martinez-AlierICTA, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Ecological Economics and Valuation

• Ecological economics has always emphasized incommensurability of values.

• Who has the power to simplify complexity and impose monetary valuation, thereby depriving people of their own valuation languages (livelihood, sacredness, environmental values)?

• TEEB and its silences (the Niyamgiri Hill and the Dongria Kondh / the Yasuni ITT initiative)

WE MOVING AWAY FROM A GREEN ECONOMY

Twenty years after Rio 1992, the victories of Sustainable Development and, now, the Green Economy, are more noticeable in the field of rhetoric than in reality. The indicators as regards climate change and the loss of biodiversity have steadily worsened at world level since 1992.

NEW AWARENESS

The dependence of the economy not only on current products and services from "funds" but also on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels is more widely recognised.E.g. FAO will soon realize that the EROI of modern agriculture and food system has declined compared to traditional agriculture, and that Via Campesina is right when claiming that "peasant agriculture cools down the Earth".

EXHAUSTIBLE STOCKS Oil extraction and gas flaring near Lago Agrio, Ecuador

(photo Mariana Walter, ICTA UAB, 2007)

MATERIAL FLOWS AND RESOURCE EXTRACTION CONFLICTS

The methodology for doing accounts of Material Flows in the economy has been established. Such research is done to give empirical proof to claims of relative or even absolute dematerialization of the economy.

This research is useful to see the links between increased social metabolism and the growing number of conflicts. (www.ejolt.org)

Metabolismocreciente

Flujo de materiales

Growing Metabolismand appropriation of biomass-photo BRL, 2009

INCREASED HANPP : PRESSURE ON BIODIVERSITY

There is an international failure to agree on objectives for reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. There is also a failure to agree on objectives for decreasing the HANPP. On the contrary there is a wave of land grabbing, and environmentally and socially damaging uses of the land for tree plantations , animal feedstuffs and agrofuels.

PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH ?

In the European Union it is rhetorically agreed that political objectives should move "beyond GDP" forty years after Sicco Mansholt, as president of the Commission, agreed to "below zero growth"in 1972.The idea of "prosperity without growth" appeals to public opinion. Physical objectives such as the EU 20-20-20 energy policy are accepted by policy makers.

THE THREE LEVELS OF THE ECONOMY

The financial level that can grow exponentially for a while as it did before 2008, and is still growing in some countries as public debts accumulate; The so-called real, productive economy of car production, building houses, medical services, which is stalled in OECD countries although some sectors (informatics, renewable energies) are growing; and The "real-real" economy, namely the entry of energy and materials and exit of waste including carbon dioxide in excessive amounts.

Environmental Liabilities• Growth of the so-called productive, real

economy produces large environmental liabilities or ecological debts.

• by private or public firms (Chevron-Texaco, Shell, Rio Tinto, Repsol, Petrobras etc)

• and by countries (climate debt, biodiversity loss)

• Accounts of environmental liabilities are done at the “real-real” level.

KEYNESIANISM AND GREEN KEYNESIANISMEconomists only worry about the first two levels. There are two main schools at present. •Keynesians argue that the real, productive economy should grow in order to absorb unemployment and to be able to pay for the immense mountain of financial debt. •Inside this school, there are Green Keynesians who preach that investments should be environmental investments preferably, including payments for environmental services. Emphasizing “funds” more than “stocks”. (Achim Steiner, Pavan Sukhdev).

The second school (let us call it the “Debtocracy") argues for fiscal austerity.

First you pay the financial debt, then you can grow (perhaps financed again by debts, as before 2008). It may be that the real economy is asfixiated in the meantime, as in Greece, but debtors should make sacrifices to safeguard the principles of the credit system for the future.

DEBTOCRACY

THE REAL-REAL ECONOMY

The "real-real" question is the following one.

If the economy of OECD countries would grow again (now it is in a de facto steady-state or slowly declining since 2008), what will happen to the supplies and price of oil, to world biodiversity, to carbon dioxide emissions?

SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Even an economy without growth, if based on stocks of fossil fuels, needs to go to the frontiers of extraction because energy is not recycled. We take today 86 million barrels of oil, we burn them, tomorrow another 86 mb.Materials are recycled in practice only in part.

A non-growing industrial economy does not guarantee sustainability.

Kalinganagar, Odisha, 2 Jan. 2007 (first anniversary of displacement and killings on behalf of TATA industries)

(photo Leah Temper, ICTA UAB)

INDIA’S SOCIAL METABOLISM

To achieve a less unsustainable economy we cannot rely (only) on technological improvements and the economic incentives and environmental investments of the so-called Green Economy. It is enjoyable to see the economy of India grow. India's material flows by person/year are now only at 5 tons, a lot of strife is caused already by the extraction of such materials. Many people lose their livelihoods because of displacement or pollution. We know that the European average is 15 tons. Moreover the EU imports four times the tonnage that it exports. And we wonder about the future.

SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

The so-called Green Economy risks being discredited because of rhetorical triumphalism. The Green Economy is certainly not the "real-real" ecological economics of Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (who sponsored Décroissance in 1979) or Herman Daly. We should not be pessimistic but not rely too much if at all on the reasons and policies provided by the Green Economy (technological optimism, economic incentives and PES, environmental investments).

ONE GOOD SIGN: PEAK POPULATION

There are three good signs. One good sign is that "peak population" is approaching towards 2045 or 2050, probably at less than 9 billion. The UN medium projection is too favourable to population growth by assuming that fertility will increase soon in countries where it is below 2. Local issues of depopulation will become a large field of study and policy making. There is top-down Neo-Malthusianism but also bottom-up, feminist Neo-Malthusianism.

DEGROWTH MOVEMENT IN THE NORTH

A second good sign is that movements for Degrowth (décroissance), or the steady-state, or Prosperity without Growth, are becoming better known and more respectable and influential in rich countries. They focus both on the physical, “real-real” economy (accounts of energy and material flows, accounts of virtual water, risks of rebound effects due to increased eco-efficiencies) and on the social aspects of the economy (dematerialized relational goods and services). They would be glad to recommend now and then a debt moratorium and even a default, against the Debtocracy .

GROWTH OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

A third and very important good sign, that should appear much more in the UN deliberations, is the growth of an international movement for Environmental Justice, composed of the myriad local movements and many international networks that have grown out of resource extraction conflicts at the "commodity frontiers" and also of waste disposal conflicts (including the Climate Justice networks).

UNEP should set up a unit to do the statistics of the thousands of environmental conflicts worldwide (as ILO counts labour strikes). (www.ejolt.org)

Resource Extraction conflicts: complaining at the Chinese embassy in Quito, 5/3/2012, against the

Mirador copper mining project

Waste disposal conflicts: shipbreaking at Alang, Gujarat (photo Federico Demaria, ICTA UAB, 2009)

SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

We should be realistic, and not despair. We should learn from catastrophes such as Fukushima, or those that will perhaps come soon from climate change.But I prefer to place my hopes not (only) on the teachings of catastrophes and not on the recipes of Green Keynesianism but rather on the collective decisions to stop population growth, to move in rich countries to "prosperity without growth", and to strengthen the environmental justice movements, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous.

UN rhetoric• In Rio 1992, “sustainable development”• In Rio + 20, in 2012, “green economy”

improved human well-being and social equity, while reducing environmental risks and scarcities

• In Rio + 40 in 2032, “sustainable economy”?• In Rio + 60 in 2052, “green development”?

• Meanwhile …

Many environmentalists are killed or “criminalized”

• In many countries, people who represent the “environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous” are killed. Or they are jailed.

• Recent case in Peru. Instead of bringing Xstrata to justice for damage to human health in the Tintaya mine, demonstrators were killed , and Oscar Mollohuanca (the elected major of Espinar) jailed in June 2012.

• Nevertheless. the Environmental Justice movement is growing in the South.

FROM THE SOUTH we hear that local economic growth is needed but

there are also new trends, new ideas

Proposals such as “Leave the oil in the soil, leave the coal in the hole, leave the tar sands in the land, leave the shale gas under the grass…” (Yasuni ITT) + Resource Caps

Sumak Kawsay + Rights of Nature (Bolivia/Ecuador)Claims for an Ecological Debt, climate justiceClaims for environmental liabilities from extractive industries (Shell,

Chevron/Texaco) + International Tribunal for Environmental Crimes

Critique of ecologically unequal trade, Latin American debates on post-extractivism (Alberto Acosta, Eduardo Gudynas)

Via Campesina: food sovereignty

Many environmentalists are killed or “criminalized”

• In many countries, people who represent the “environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous” are killed. Or they are jailed.

• One recent conspicuous case in Peru. Instead of bringing Xstrata to justice because damage to human health in the Tintaya mine, demonstrators killed and Oscar Mollohuanca (the elected major of Espinar) jailed.

• Nevertheless. the Environmental Justice movement is growing.

From the North

• The debates from the 1970s on Limits for Growth.

• Herman Daly’s Steady State Economy, 1973.• Décroissance (A. Gorz in 1972, Georgescu-

Roegen in 1979, Latouche etc. 2002…)• Ecological Macroeconomics without Growth :

Peter Victor, Managing without Growth, 2008, Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth, 2009.

1st International Conference on Degrowth, Paris, April 2008

(http://www.degrowth.net/)

The potential alliance of southern EJOs with the Décroissance (or Steady State)

currents in the North

Common perspective against the hegemony of economic accounting in favour of pluralism of values, emphasis on physical and social indicators,

recognition of environmental liabilities and the climate debt, the awareness of ecologically unequal exchange causing environmental damage,

defence of human rights, indigenous territorial rights, and the Rights of Nature, feminist Neo-Malthusianism.