ABSTRACT
When looking at the ongoing discussions over policies for sustainability, it seems that the general understanding of the sustainability predicament is quite poor. In this chapter we give a few examples of bad narratives used in the current debate on sustainability. Using the insights gained by the applications of the MuSIASEM grammar, presented in the previous chapters, we claim that epistemological blunders and the obsessive attachment to collective perceptions impede a direly needed refocusing of the current discussion of sustainability on more relevant issues. We focus on five points:
Contrary to what seems to be assumed by the politically correct view on development, the population bomb is not diffused by demographic transition and the problem of ageing of rich societies is not solved by immigration.
The phenomenon of peak-oil is severely underestimated in current discussions over sustainability. Peak-oil is not about a looming exhaustion of fossil energy stocks, but rather it is about the end of the possibility of keeping expanding at will the pace of fossil energy consumption of the world economy. That is, world economy has moved from an “expandingpie” situation to a “zero-sum game” situation. This is taking place at the very same moment in which we are experiencing the maximum pace of expansion of consumption of less developed countries. In a zero-sum game, an increase in fossil energy consumption in developing countries will require a reduction of fossil energy consumption in developed countries, or vice versa. The most worrisome effect of peak-oil is related to the impossibility to pay back the huge amount of debt accumulated in the world economy. Without further economic growth it will be impossible to handle such a debt.
The obsessive compulsory attitude towards climate change. A well known human strategy to cope with stress is about transforming a complex phenomenon, which would imply reflexivity and the need of changing our own identity, into a simple technical problem, which can be fixed using a “silver bullet” solution (e.g. finding the right price of a ton of CO2). We claim that the society, rather than focusing the sustainability discussion only on technicalities over possible policies about climate change, should address the problem of how to generate a radical change of social institutions, which is required to move modern societies to a different metabolic pattern.
The cultural resistance to change (institutional lock-in) is behind the dangerous formation of “granfalloons”. Granfalloons can be seen as social crusades to save the world using wishful thinking rather than solid analyses. The movement of de-growth can be seen as an attempt to use economic narratives to fight the story-telling of perpetual growth. However, it is not clear what is special in this old wine sold in new bottles. In fact, should we make plans for de-growth, or rather should we be worried by it?
The progressive departure from Frederick Soddy’s biophysical understanding of the distinction between wealth (the actual production and consumption of goods and services) and virtual wealth (debt making). After abolishing the golden standard world economies moved from the use of “fiat-money” to the use of “debt-money”, that is, more and more the quantitative accounting done in monetary terms is based on beliefs of virtual wealth. This situation entails the serious risk of getting into the era of Ponzi scheme economics.
