The end of an ideology

Has capitalism as we know it run out of answers?

As governments around the world slowly wake up to the challenges of climate change, energy security and environmental degradation, Jonathan Porritt argues that what we need is fundamental change in the kind of capitalism currently dominating the global economy.

I’m struck by how much of today’s writing about our looming ‘energy crisis’ is completely detached from the ideological context in which that crisis is being predicted.
This is baffling. The way we source, produce, use and waste energy today is a direct consequence of the particular model of growth-driven capitalism that has dominated peoples’ lives for the last fifty years. In many respects, the crisis is not so much a consequence of ‘things running out’ (be it oil or gas, or the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity), as the inevitable conclusion to a uniquely abhorrent and destructive system of wealth creation.

Even those who do not share the kind of analysis presented here, based upon an understanding of environmental limits,have good reason to be concerned about the durability of today’s particular model of capitalism.A combination of different factors – the deregulation of cross-border capital flows,the emergence of currency trading on an unprecedented scale in today’s ‘casino economy’, increased liberalization exerting downward pressure on wages and prices, growing disparities in wealth both within and between countries, extraordinarily high levels of debt in so many countries and particularly in the US, oil trading at around $60 a barrel – makes the maintenance of our current global economy look like an extremely dangerous high-wire act, with the prospects of a vertiginous collapse seeming ever more likely.

Nothing lasts forever, and there’s little doubt that viable alternatives to capitalism (or, at least, a very different model of capitalism) will emerge over time. Capitalism is a complex, adaptive system, and is clearly capable of profound and rapid shifts. The question is ‘when’ not ‘whether’, and in which direction.

Whether it’s a soft landing or a very, very hard landing, depends almost entirely on how quickly we can accelerate the transition to an ultra–efficient, sustainable and largely renewable energy economy. That is why exponents of renewable energy should not be naive about the ideological stakes for which they are playing.

Jonathon Porritt is Programme Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission
web: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/ and http://www.sd-commission.org/