Global Compact International Yearbook 2016

their scale would have to be enormous
if we are to substantially reduce emissions
that way.
Emissions-free nuclear energy is no solution
either. The risk of such facilities
being attacked by terrorists is uncontrollable,
at the very least, and their costs
are exorbitant. The German debate over
nuclear waste demonstrates precisely
this fact. And if, rather than embracing
undesirable frugality, experts suggest
removing greenhouse gases from the
atmosphere through methods such as
seeding the oceans or carbon capture
and carbon storage, we face the threat
of equally incalculable risks and exorbitant
costs.
More frugality
The shift to a more sustainable society,
therefore, will not work unless we also
shift our way of life. We need to consume
less. But then less will be sold:
significantly fewer leisure flights, and
fewer cars. This implies that the end
of the growth-driven society is upon us,
first and foremost in those industrialized
countries that are called upon to make
progress on climate change under the
Paris Agreement. Neither will we get away
with visions of a purely service-oriented
world without any environmental footprint:
Services such as flights and IT technologies
also use a good deal of resources.
If we limited environmental protection
purely to what was technically feasible,
on the other hand, we would have to accept
considerable environmental damage.
This would mean tackling climate change
only partially and would be tantamount
to ignoring problems such as degraded
ecosystems. In the long term, we would
be destroying the physical foundations
of our existence, and in the worst case
this would happen through increased
international and civil wars over dwindling
food and water resources.
But here is the big problem: Until now,
central social institutions such as the
labor market, the pension system, the
banks, and the system of national debt
have depended on growth. So far, alternative
concepts to liberate them from the
growth compulsion have hardly gone
beyond individual ideas such as a reduction
in the number of hours worked.
Furthermore, we lack conceptions of
how to make the difficult transition
into the post-growth era without massive
upheaval and social unrest – as we
witnessed in the euro crisis countries,
where growth turned into contraction
in the briefest of times.
Many adherents of post-growth evidently
do not see this as a problem. Ultimately,
they say, the contraction will gradually
bring about an economy oriented toward
solidarity and the common good,
including the appropriate political majorities.
They argue that people would
be happier without capitalism because
the competitive society would then become
passé – that people are, in fact,
primarily cooperative or even altruistic
in nature, and only capitalism deforms
them to be selfish. A world without
growth, then, appears as the actualization
of true human nature. But this
misses the point.
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Global Compact International Yearbook 2016