Premises for a New Economy: An Agenda for Rio+20

"Let us choose life," concludes a joint statement issued in preparation for the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, scheduled to take place in Rio de Janeiro on the 20-year anniversary of the Earth Summit.

Participants at the May 2010 workshop that produced the consensus statement included: Frank Ackerman, Peter Brown, Robert Costanza, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Tim Jackson, Ashok Khosla, Paul Raskin, William Rees, Jeffrey Sachs, Wolfgang Sachs, Juliet Schor, Gus Speth, and Ernst von Weiszacker.

The statement reads, in part:

A necessary condition for avoiding the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming is to “decarbonize” the economy, that is, to reduce energy use, neutralize carbon emissions from fossil fuels and to shift to renewable sources of energy that do not add to the atmospheric accumulation of CO2.

Can a decarbonized economy continue to grow? Technological optimists believe so. ... Very rapid improvements in efficiency could theoretically permit such “absolute decoupling.” …

Our considered view is that the range of problems the world faces require nothing less than a civilizational response, a change in how we live, work, and understand. Rio + 20 must recognize the need for a dramatically different way of being in and acting on the world – as distinct from a purely technological fix for the huge, but limited problem, of replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. …

Bringing the economy within the safe ecological operating space will require significant innovation in respect of both technologies and social institutions, at all levels. This will require a very different conception of the market.

A global organization may be needed with powers to enforce new international law created to maintain, and where necessary, restore the planet’s ecological health. Nationally and locally each country will need both government action and strong market and non-market incentives to direct innovation and technological change towards dramatic increases in resource productivity. In addition to enhancing resource productivity, these new institutions will need to foster a new sense of global solidarity, underpinned by a strong commitment to international social justice, accompanied by a renewal of local community and social interconnectedness in the places where people live and work. …

Markets have been with us since time out of mind and are an important part of most human societies. ... The problem begins when markets are conceived of as a self-regulating system and the market is disembedded from society. ... A new economy will need a new economics, which goes beyond the calculating, self-interested, individual to take account of community, compassion, and cosmos. ...

In all likelihood, some form of global polity will emerge in the coming decades – good or bad, beautiful or ugly. In one scenario we will descend into a latter day version of Hobbes’s war of all against all, powerful nations fighting for access to the limited sources of materials and energy for growth, as well as for access to the limited sinks into which to throw out the garbage that comes with growth. In another we will go forward in appreciation of what unites us, building solidarity and equality, justice and compassion, quality of human life and ecological flourishing.

We have a choice between a blessing and a curse: either we live in harmony with each other and the planet, or we destroy each other and – perhaps – life on the planet. Let us choose life.

(Hat tip to Juliet Schor's recent article at Real Climate Economics, "The Plenitude Path to Sustainability.")