Below is the transcript for Transcript for: Jorgen Randers: Our Specie’s Biggest Risk is Our Lack of Coherent Long-Term Decision Making
Chris Martenson: Welcome to another PeakProsperity.com podcast. I am your host of course, Chris Martenson. What do we want the world to look like in forty years? It’s a really important question. In any credible business, one develops a strategic business plan and no matter which of the many excellent strategic methodologies one employs, the basic output is the same and it consists of the answers to just two questions – where are we going? How are we going to get there?
Of course the challenge goes beyond deciding where you’d like to be and then simply arraying your always too limited resources intelligently against that task, because there’s uncertainty, there’s competitors, potential disruptors – both positive and negative along the way. Nothing is ever really linear and neat; the future instead is typically shaped by chaotic systems, and exponential growth. So any good strategy must take note of these realities, put a stake in the ground and yet remain flexible. What then is our national, or even global strategic plan? Do we even have one? Where are we headed? Do we have a far-reaching crisp and flexible strategic plan that all the key stakeholders understand and intelligently align their activities around?
Well, if such a plan exists, it’s well hidden from my view. A simple reading of the daily newspaper reinforces the idea that if our current trajectory had to be defined by a single word, I would choose the word “unsustainable.” Now forty years ago, a group of researchers at MIT ran a study to address the question of how humans would adapt to the physical limitations of a finite planet? That study became the book, “Limits to Growth”. And it should have been a starting point for a discussion but sadly, instead became a lightening rod for controversy with many, some dismissing the study without even having read it as far as I could tell, let alone having a serious adult size conversation about it. So here to discuss that study, is Jorgen Randers, one of the authors of “Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update”. As well as his new book “2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years”
Welcome Jorgen!
Jorgen Randers: Thank you!
Chris Martenson: So could you tell our listeners a little bit about your background, what you currently do and what you are up to in life right now?
Jorgen Randers: I am a 67 year old professor and obviously from Norway, as you can hear from my wonderful accent. I’ve spent one third of my life in business, one third of my life in academia and one third of my life in non-governmental organizations. So I have a fairly broad perspective on life. I’ve spent the last year trying to write a clear description of what I actually think will happen over the next 40 years and I’ve done this because I have spent the last 40 years trying to make the world a more sustainable place. And I admit, I don’t think I’ve had very much positive impact. And so now since I’ve only 20 to 25 years left to live, I thought it would be interesting to find out what actually will happen, what kind of decisions humanity actually will be doing over the next 40 years.
Chris Martenson: Excellent, so let’s start with “Limits to Growth” Because there’s some history there, some experience with what worked – what didn’t. First, what was the purpose of the study of that book? What aims were you seeking to achieve in its publication?
Jorgen Randers: This was way back in 1970, ’72 was the two year period of work, largely what we tried to do, was two-fold. First of all to try to tell the world that the planet is actually very small, much, much smaller than you think in resource and pollution terms that is. And secondly, and much less observed was the fact that we tried to answer the question “What will happen when rapid population and economic growth hits the limits of the planet? You know: what happens when you crash with the boundaries of Planet Earth? And basically, the way we told the story was to say that there are various possible scenarios, we described different ways in which the world future could evolve from 1970 to the year 2100. We had a fairly long time horizon and the aggregate conclusion from all of those studies was that most likely what would happen was that the world would continue to grow throughout the 20th century and for a generation into the 21st century. And in the process, would at reach levels that could not be sustained in the sense that they would require more resources and generate more pollution than the world could handle. And then we could get the crash basically back down into sustainable levels in the middle of this century.
The book was however, not only a warning that this was the likely development on a 100 year horizon. It was largely written by young, enthusiastic and optimistic people like myself who all believed that once people listen to this message; they would quickly do those very few things that are necessary in order to create the sustainable world. And that’s of course where I’ve been disappointed over the last forty years.
Chris Martenson: It turns out that sometimes information alone is not sufficient to really create the change we’re seeking. Before we talk about that, let’s get a definition under our belts. “Sustainable” – and its derivative “sustainability”? Can you define those for us?
Jorgen Randers: Yes I can, and it’s actually simple although most people think it is very complicated. Sustainable simply means that it can be continued for a very long time without change. So if you rely for your well being on the use of a non-renewable resource, you know that clearly is and that non-renewable resource, be it oil, or coal, or gas or titanium – if that resource is limited and you are using a little part of it every year, this thing is not technically sustainable in the very, very long run. However, if at the same time you spend money on R&D to develop a substitute for this non-renewable resource, which you can then shift into. Once you have used up the non-renewable resource, then I would say that your behavior is sustainable. So it’s simply to answer the question – how long can I do what I do now without changing style or behavior? And if that is more than a couple of hundred years, I would say that the thing is sustainable, if it is less than 20, I would define it as clearly unsustainable.
Chris Martenson: Right, when I read “Limits to Growth” I saw it as first of all, it’s a modeling study so there’s lots of inputs and of course uncertainties around these inputs. But the thrust of the argument to me seemed to be to say “Listen, if we try and maintain status quo, indefinitely, that’s impossible.” Because status quo requires us to indefinitely use up what are clearly non-renewable natural resources. So that will have to shift and you are saying there will be some adaption to this scarcity that might arise because we all find substitutes and find other ways around some of these. And some of these will require us to adopt new stances of course. Because once you run out of something that doesn’t have a clear substitute, then you just.. there’s not much you can do about that. You just have to simply adopt a different stance. So solar thin film that requires some thing like indium or gallium which we just don’t have enough of and some day we run out of that, well if that’s it. We probably won’t be relying on those particular types of solar panels but we will shift to something else would sort of be the message. As you look into again, with “Limit’s to Growth” I’m very interested, like to me that seems so sensible? What was the controversy about then?
Jorgen Randers: Well I think that you are absolutely right, that there was controversy in spite of as I said, their message being very optimistic and very positive. You know it basically said that you know as long as we watch out for the physical limitations on the planet, the planet is more than big enough. You know and I know our ability to find substitutes or a re-direct our society’s behavior. It’s big enough that we can create a sustainable world for very many people. But the reception was not along those lines.
First, since people apparently dislike intensely to change behavior. You know they are of course quickly looking for ways out. And the simplest way out was to attack the assumption that the world is small. You know in 1972, most people seemed to live with the belief that the world is actually very big, that there are places where you can find those resources that are currently limited in one place and that you can easily dump the pollution somewhere without bothering too many people. And so I think most of the discussion in the ‘70’s was on the question of whether or not the world is small. And the antagonists argue that it is much bigger than we assumed in our model systems. And in many ways, they won the argument because 20 years down the line, when the Rio, the first Rio meeting occurred in 1992. “Limits to Growth” was in many ways discredited in the sense that it was viewed as a weird report by the Club of Rome, not to the Club of Rome but by the Club of Rome, which actually had the wrong message.
Chris Martenson: So this is an interesting sort of a point here, is which is around how, what we might consider a challenging message – how that gets out and gets adopted and understood by people? And one of the things that I run up against a lot is sort of .. one of the primary logical fallacies sometimes when I’m discussing my work. People will say “Oh, you know there was this guy Thomas Malthus who said something like that once.. and he was wrong. Therefore, you’re wrong.” Which is one of the largest logical fallacies there is. So forty years ago, you were definitely ground breaking and I’m really thankful that the conversation, even if it didn’t go swimmingly, got started on some level. First unpleasant messages are ignored, then they are attacked and then you win. So maybe we’re somewhere along that spectrum, forty years has passed, and here we are today. And I would argue that the world is in a different position to begin to accept the idea – that there are limit’s to somethings. Maybe to groundwater – that’s certainly known in some parts of the world; maybe to the amount of soil that you have. Maybe to the amount of oil, that’s certainly becoming clear – at least cheap oil is in the rear view mirror at this point. There are other forms but it’s vastly more expensive that what we used to get, etc. and so forth. So let’s just before we dive into your new book, tell me about what you’ve seen shift. Here we are forty years later, what kind of a reception are you experiencing now?
Jorgen Randers: That’s a good question and an important question because I think that the major thing that has occurred over the last forty years is that most people know that we are in unsustainable territory in the sense that the current way of life on Planet Earth requires more planets than the one we have got. You know we are requiring more resources than the planet can supply every year and we are dumping more pollution every year than the planet can absorb. So we are in overshoot; which is the technical term when the footprint of humanity exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet. The simplest example of this is of course climate change, and the fact that humanity is emitting roughly twice as much CO2 every year as is being absorbed by the world’s oceans and it’s forests. And so for practical purposes, in the practical debate about the limit’s and growth and sustainability, I think for the time being, it’s helpful to concentrate only on climate, on energy and the use of fossil fuels and the resulting CO2 emissions. Because that’s such a clear case of overshoot and it has the other pedagogical advantage namely that the technology necessary to reduce our greenhouse our gas emissions, while at the same time maintaining the quality of life that we have; and the purchasing power that we have. All those technologies are available – as we speak, and the cost of implementing them if we decided to do so are miniscule, a couple of percent of your income.
Chris Martenson: Right and yet, in many cases that isn’t being done. So but at this time, across the surface of the globe of course, adoption of anything is going to be uneven. Where have you been invited to speak lately? Who has actually at say a national level, beginning the process of looking at this idea of sustainability of limit’s, of things like that?
Jorgen Randers: It’s interesting that in spite of it being both technically feasible and relatively cheap to solve the climate problem – it is largely not being done. We have no one speaking as humanity for twenty years or so, since the Rio meeting in 1992. When we started the UN Convention on climate change and decided to do something. Since then we have basically been speaking and emissions are growing faster now than they have grown ever. You know in the history of man. So mostly nothing is being done except talking. If you then start looking at how actually does something, it’s interesting that first of all, the European Union, you know is amazing progressive on this score. The Commission in Brussels which is a non-elected group of bureaucrats are of course.. actually quite progressive on this score and are trying to push the members of the European Union into sane policies with some degree of success.
Another interesting player that is doing much more than people think are the progressive multi-nationals. You know the really big multi-national corporations. They are often doing a number of useful things in this area, largely because they have a much longer time horizon than most people. They are concerned about their own reputation twenty years down the line and would like to avoid mistakes.
And the third group, which is of interest and actually does much, much more than you should expect is the Communist Party of China. The Chinese are at the same time organizing a tremendous economic growth and a tremendous increase in their resource use and in their pollution output. But at the same time, they are probably going to be the ones who will solve the climate crisis on behalf of the world because they are putting enormous amounts of money and effort into climate friendly technologies and climate friendly behavior.
Chris Martenson: Well I think that, my reading of China is that they clearly do understand the resource limitations. Obviously their mercantilist policy of open checkbook, acquiring land in Madagascar, copper mines in Afghanistan, oil rights all over the world – they are scouring the globe looking for resources and it turns out that good, good economic policy in a resource constrained world happens to be good climate policy. It happens to be good environmental policy, it happens to be good reduced, reuse recycle policy – they all actually converge.
An so this is one of the mysteries to me is how the debate has been framed as you are either pro environment or pro business when in fact, if you frame it correctly they are on the same side of the playing field.
Jorgen Randers: I agree and I think the most interesting example here is the United States of America. Where, you know a sane energy policy would of course to try to stop the reliance of the United States of America on imported oil from the Middle East. And this can of course can be very easily done in the United States by building a number of windmills in the prairie and then instructing Detroit to make electric cars. And you know as described by Al Gore in his book a couple of years ago, within that ten year period, you could do this with great support from the farm lobby which would be happy to have the windmills on their wind blown territory. And Detroit is of course; capable of producing electric cars if instructed to do so, you know instructed to sell them. This policy, which would be sane energy policy, which would have short-term benefit’s in the United States because it would drop the reliance on the Arabs. You know it’s also exactly what you would do if you wanted to introduce a climate policy in the United States – namely trying to phase out the use of coal, oil and gas as fast as possible. And of course this is the way to phase out the use of oil – which is largely used to run automobiles.
Chris Martenson: So it is a complete mystery because there are many things that we can identify, using existing technology and in many cases, decades old technology which would, whether your lens was “I care about national security,” or “I care about the climate.” Or “I care about social justice.” Meaning people can’t afford energy anymore as it rises in price against disposable income. Or “I care about jobs.” I don’t care, which lens you look through, I can find all kinds of technologies out there that you’d say “Well listen.. like heating hot water.” You can do that very simply with a solar thermal panel – very easy technology. And we are currently burning hydrocarbons, lots of them to heat water, which we don’t have to. We could cut that either to zero in many parts of the country and by at least half in the remaining parts. And we don’t do it – even though it makes economic sense, political sense from the job standpoint, you know social sense. It makes all kinds of sense but we don’t do it so.. we need to.. that to me says we have a problem with our narrative. It’s not the information it’self, it’s the story – there’s something they’re blocking us from doing that. And I want to turn now to your new book, “2052 – A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.” I presume one of the intents of this book is to sort of lean on the conversation – to open that narrative up. Tell us about your book, you spent a year writing it. What are you seeking to achieve and then we’ll move into what’s in there?
Jorgen Randers: At the personal level, what I’m trying to achieve is rather selfish, I would like to know what will actually happen over the next twenty to twenty five years in the sense that I have been worrying about the future for forty years. And it has really bothered me every day; you know that humanity tends to make the wrong decisions every week, relative to my world view. So no I thought it would be interesting to try to find out how much damage, how much wrong decisions in democratic society and in capitalist system – is going to create on that forty year or that twenty to twenty five year horizon which is my remaining lifetime. So that’s the personal motivation. The professional motivation is basically to try to kick the system in another way. I’ve tried to work for sustainability in all possible ways thus far but I’ve not tried to scare people into doing something. So this is, that kick trying to say that you now if we continue more or less as we have done in the past, you know we will really get the climate crisis in the second half of this century.
Chris Martenson: And I would go ever further, faster and suggest that preservation of the status quo will lead to an economic crisis of an extraordinary dimension. We’re already in the early throes of this because our economic model is based on infinite growth – exponential growth. Not a lot, two or three percent a year – maybe five if we are having a good year. And that requires you know what is an economy but the flow of goods and services. So those goods, what are those? You chase them back, those are resources. So what we are really saying is we need two, three, four percent more stuff coming out of the ground next year compared to last year. And that’s just.. I think we’re already pretty close to that limit in a number of places so this is fine, you know we have slightly less stuff coming out of the ground, it doesn’t sound like a disaster. But in fact, when your economic model, your money system requires that growth in order to behave. It can be a problem – a huge problem and so the reason I care about that is that many of the things you are talking about, in your book in terms of things we could do or that Amory Lovins talks about from the Rocky Mountain Institute. About things we could do, require a complex and functioning economy to get them done. Because these are in many cases very sophisticated technologies and to adopt and implement them on a grand scale will require extra ordinary resources. So I concur with the idea that it’s time to kick the can.. kick the patient? [laugh] Because time is wasting at this point compared to the size of the predicament. So status quo, we don’t change anything, we just trundle along until circumstances really force us to take a good hard look at this as a culture, as a society, as a globe. What does that future look like?
Jorgen Randers: Well this is the one interesting finding, I had thought a year ago since I have spent forty years thinking about these things that I have thought about most of the things that one could think about in this context. But I think I have learned one new thing from doing this study and that is what you just said needs to be phrased. Basically what will happen in the rich world, or the oil rich countries – the one billion people that are in the industrial world. What will happen? Half of which are in North America and the other half elsewhere. What will happen is largely that we will try to continue economic growth, you know we will try to pursue the model over the last forty years and we will discover after the fact that we do not achieve any growth. So to speak about it in simple terms. You know the autoworkers in Detroit – you know have of course have been hoping to have a raise sometime over the last thirty years but when you look back at the raises, they have actually gotten, they have been eaten up by inflation. So in reality, the take home after tax pay of a guy in Detroit now, a blue collar worker is the same as it was thirty years ago. In spite of living in a society that is trying to grow, has been trying to grow all along and to some extent, even has succeeded in growth. What I think will happen over the next forty years is that the guy won’t get a raise even during the next forty years and most of the Americans will be in that category, that America will try to increase it’s GDP but it will not succeed. Basically meaning that the upturns in the economy through one or two or three years will be eaten up basically by the ensuing downturn two or three years and so we will come out fifty years down the line more or less at the same GDP numbers as currently. And we will luckily have a slightly smaller footprint because there will be technological advance in the use of energy per unit of GDP and there will be also improvements in the climate game so that the footprint will be lower. The economy will be the same, and people will feel much, much poorer than they feel today because they will have been through a endless forty year period of stagnation basically.
Chris Martenson: Well I agree with the general sweep of that, the part that I personally am concerned about is the idea that it’s around money it’self and that money is a marker for real things and as long as there’s a balance between your real stuff and the amount of money, things are okay. What we are discovering now is that a lot of promises have been made in Europe, in the United States, Japan. There are pension promises and entitlement. They are fairly long-range projects that say “We are going to take some money in today, and we are going to give that back to people over time in their purchasing power.”An important concept that you are bringing up, what will be delivered to them? We take it today; we deliver it back in the future? Those promises now are many, many times larger than the GDP of the world currently is, and so one thing is absolutely true in this model as it’s constructed right now. That in order for the pension and entitlement promises – those cultural, societal promises we made to ourselves to be true or to be kept, we need the economy to grow a lot, not in nominal terms but in real terms. Nominal meaning not inflation adjusted, real being inflation adjusted. What you are describing is that we’ve already hit a period of stagnation for a set of reasons. It’s a very complex system so those reasons could be many fold but at least part of that in my mind has got to be around what we are seeing with our net return from energy that we are getting back out of the ground, that’s a cornerstone of my set of arguments and thinking. And so as we cast forward over this next period of time, what do you see as – here’s the general sweep. I can describe all non-renewable natural resources like this. They are all of much, much, much lesser quality than they used to be. So we are not chasing ten percent copper grades anymore, we are chasing 0.2% copper grades. We are not chasing oil that is 1,000 feet down, we are chasing oil that has to be cooked off of sand because it’s not actually oil, it’s bitumen or something worse like karogen. We are no longer finding vast surface deposits of things like coal, we are out of anthracite, we are through the bituminous practically, we are into the sub-bituminous. Now we are looking at lignite. So to these stories are all a story of saying less and less concentrated resources which require more and more energy in order to extract. So we have those sweeps coming along and we are on our way to nine billion from seven billion and all of these things come together. When you put all those in your model, what turns up in forty years?
Jorgen Randers: So what turns up is the first thing namely that we will try to grow but we will not succeed. So that’s the first one and there are many reasons for that, which we can return to if necessary. The second thing, which turns up, is that I don’t think resources are going to be the problem. If we were to put the finger on one problem it is lack of coherent long-term decision making. So in order to make my view in contrast to yours or try to make the contrast between the two a little clearer, I think that the reason why the United States is not going to be on a per capita basis richer in 2050 than it is today has nothing to do with the resource unavailability. I think that are enough resources available to handle the U.S. need to 2050 particularly since the U.S. need is not going to increase very much over the next forty years. But the reason why I think there will be problems in the United States is that the U.S. is incapable of making the societal decisions that are necessary in order to move coherently in a progressive direction.
You know and the current stalemate in your Parliament you know between the two sides that basically keep each other from making clear decisions on anything is the real head of the monster, the way I see it. And that’s the reason why I think that China is actually going to do very much better. They are in the same resource constrained world as is the United States. And they are much less well endowed domestically with resources than the United States is. Still I think they are going to do much better because those gentlemen are at least capable of making a decision. You know they analyze the problem, they see what is the problem and if they have a problem – they solve it.
You used the example that when they observe the fact that they cannot grow enough food, they buy land or at least lease land in Africa and elsewhere in order to provide the food. I can tell you that that is true. But it’s also very much against what the Chinese want to do in the long run. China has been self sufficient for two thousand years, they are not interested in being elsewhere and they would like to make a good life for the Chinese on Chinese territory. And that’s their long-term aim. And so the way I see it, their purchasing or leasing of land in Africa is a temporary stopgap and a very rational measure over the twenty year period before they get their own agricultural system going. Plus their own population declining, you know they have pursued the one child policy now for twenty to thirty years, or actually since Deng so it’s only twenty-five years and the Chinese population will peak within the next ten years and then start to go down. You know which makes it much more easy to make China sustainable.
Chris Martenson: All right, so I agree with that, with that view of China – definitely has a view of the future, I can detect a credible strategic plan, whether they will succeed in it or not – open to question but at least I see that they are facing what I consider to be the realities of the world. In your book, you add up many of these realities and say “Listen, if we don’t change, this is .. there’s some disruptions.. potentially some very challenging times.” Sort of almost the best case is “we wake up in 50 years and discover we are all just a little bit poorer.” But there are some other outcomes that exist in there as well. And I note that you start the preface of your book with a quote from Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, which basically says, he says that “Hope is as important as life itself.” So you are 67, let’s subtract 47 years from that. What would you say to a 20 year old today who looks through this lens, to what you are seeing in your book? Even if they are just reading the newspapers? And they are looking at a world that’s just fully indebted and crumbling or lackluster infrastructure and they see all of these challenges? That narrative that we’re asking our 20 year olds to step into – how do you, what do you see for them and what advice would you give them?
Jorgen Randers: Two pieces, first of all, be in favor of a strong government. You know basically teach or learn that individual action or market system is not going to solve the problem. It will require collective action in the form of governments providing regulations or legislation that actually makes it profitable for the corporate world to do the right thing. Currently the whole world is doing what is profitable; the world is not doing what is needed. And the reason is that the ordinary voter carries the floor and most of those are not in favor of strong government and consequently we have a problem. So my first advice to a twenty-year-old person is to learn and understand the rationality and the smartness of stronger government in the next forty years.
The second thing the person should be doing is to be aware of the fact that the main challenge is the climate challenge. And that basically means that he or she should stop using coal, oil and gas. These are the main sources of climate gasses and it’s very, very simple. Each time you are faced.. you want to do something. Just stop – just be sure that it doesn’t require coal, oil and gas to do it. So it basically means that when you want to buy a home, be sure it is well insulated so that it doesn’t need a lot of electricity to run the air conditioning and when you want to buy a car, buy a car that uses little fossil fuel per kilometer. And when you to fly somewhere, instead of flying twice on vacation a year, fly once and stay twice as long. Reduce your three major parts of CO2 emissions.
Third one, when one is making a forecast over the next forty years and looking into the question of whether the young are actually going to repay the debt and the pensions of their fathers and mothers? My forecast is that they will not. Many of us, expect tha