Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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30 politics and governance
tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and
democracy (2005, pp. 4–5). The relationship is at least questionable;
as per capita wealth has increased, our willingness to help
alleviate both domestic and global poverty seems to have declined.
It is just as likely that, beyond some threshold, economic growth
generates consumerism, selfi shness, and egoism, corrodes character,
and foreshortens concern (Douthwaite, 1993; Sennett, 1998).
In either case, governments in the long emergency will have to
learn to manage the economy under conditions in which quantitative
growth will slow and eventually stop. Many otherwise
credible analysts, however, recoil at the idea of limits to growth,
in part because the ideology of growth has become so deeply
embedded in our economic orthodoxy, politics, institutions, and
personal expectations that we cannot imagine living with less in
a steady-state economy. More seriously, limits to growth would
require that we face the daunting political challenge of distributing
wealth fairly. 22 Instead, even the most progressive politicians
call only for “sustainable development,” one suspects without a
clue what that means or what it might entail. “What politicians
will not admit,” in University of Surrey professor Tim Jackson’s
words, “is that we have no idea if such a radical transformation
is even possible, or if so, what it would look like. Where will the
investment and resources come from? Where will the wastes and
the emissions go? What might it feel like to live in a world with 10
times as much economic activity as we have today?” (2008). What
is clear, however, is that growth predicated on the availability of
cheap fossil fuels and the belief that we could burn them with
impunity is coming to an end. So, too, the power of the developed
world to offl oad the ecological costs, risks, and burdens of
economic growth on the third world and future generations. One
study shows, for example, that between 1961 and 2000, 87 percent
of an estimated $91 billion of global ecological debt was imposed
on third-world countries, a number three times their total foreign
debt. 23 The doctrine of perpetual growth was also impervious