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ECONOMICS Doughnut Economics - Kate Raworth Video of presentation at This is a TVM image enhancement PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqJL-cM8gb4 Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I have known about Kate Rayworth for a very long time, and have a huge respect for her work. But that begs the question of why it is that truly important issues are not on the agenda in 2025. I have reached an age when 'I have no future' ... but it is incredibly liberating because I can now can say what I really believe knowing that it cannot have any impoact of my future career! I am watching this video in 2025 ... about 12 years after it was recorded. Bottom line ... things are far worse in 2025 than they were in 2013 ... and most everyone in the United States, and a substantial part of the world's population have tuned out away from meaningful engagement. I don't think this is 'nornmal' ... rather I think that this has happened by design and it is about time that the 'good guys ... and gals' got engaged and pushed back. One of the issues that needs to be addressed is the several inter-related roles that fossil fuels are having in the world's current socio-enviro-economic system. For me, 1973 was an important 'wake-up call'. That was the year that Sheik Yamani in Saudi Arabia organized the Arab oil boycott and subsequently OPEC ...the Organizatioin of Petroleum Exporting Countries ... that completely changed global oil economics! In 1973, I live in Trenton, New Jersey and prior to the Arab Oil Boycott was paying US 17 cents a gallon for gas at the pump! My daily commute to work was costing me areun $2.50 a day! As the price of a barrel of crude went from $3.00, to $13.00 to $30.00 the price at the pump went up to 80 cents, and then $1.50 ... and $2.00 ... and $3.00 and in some areas of the USA to more than $6.00. At these higher prices, more US production became financially viable and there has been a significant increase in US production and a stabilization of prices in the range of $3.00 to $4.00 at the pump. Some of this price reflects US State fuel taxation which is quite substantial! Peter Burgess
Doughnut Economics - Kate Raworth RSA 784K subscribers ... 106,396 views 1.3K likes Jan 9, 2013 Oxfam senior researcher and former co-author of the UN's annual Human Development Report Kate Raworth visits the RSA to explain 'doughnut economics' -- the bold new theory that is sweeping the development world. Listen to the podcast of the full event including audience Q&A: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-an... Follow the RSA on Twitter: / thersaorg Like the RSA on Facebook: / thersaorg Our events are made possible with the support of our Fellowship. Support us by donating or applying to become a Fellow. Donate: http://www.thersa.org/support-the-rsa Become a Fellow: http://www.thersa.org/fellowship/apply Transcript 0:01 anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus Politics on a notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens were organize their lives we are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would [Music] think I'm fascinated by a question and I know I'm not the only one and that question is what should economies be aimed at I mean if you were in charge of a country's economy where would you be trying to take it or if indeed you had to give the impression of being in charge of a country's economy what would you be trying to deliver with it well I studied economics at University 20 years ago and we never actually asked that question even though it seems like a very fundamental one because the answer was a given it was economic growth we were aiming to gener 1:00 economic growth in the way we were studying and modeling economies since 1970 it's quadrupled and if you believe mainstream predictions which it's hard to do in the current atmosphere but if you do it's set to quadruple Again by 2050 on the global scale so economic growth has been doing very nicely in the long-term big picture and yet there are some things that we fundamentally care about that aren't coming along with it and there are three I want to highlight one deprivation secondly degradation and thirdly inequality more and more social commentators are talking about the rise of inequality and the importance of tackling it 2third of the world's population today live in countries that are now more unequal than they were in 1980 and just taking one country as an example in 2010 the top richest 10% of people in the United States captured 93% of the increase in national income that year so inequality is really quite extraordinarily at the heart of the way 2:00 economies are growing our politicians know it we're hung up on talking about economic growth but because they know that we need more than this there's one leave doesn't really capture everything we care about they're increasingly trying to qualify what they're calling for with with extra terms so Merkel has called for sustainable growth David Cameron for balanced growth Barack Obama for long-term lasting growth baroso wants the EU to have smart sustainable inclusive and resilient growth and all these terms I mean sometimes I feel like I'm walking into a New York Deli bar and what kind of growth do you want today you can have it balanced and Equitable add in some good you want it green maybe that seems too hard just a bit Greener you know so many different terms are being added to this idea it's clear that we want something more than growth the fact that we want something more than growth though shouldn't seem like news because when the very idea of national income and its growth was conceived it's inventor warned us that 3:01 we needed something more than that in 1934 when Simon KET wrote the first report to the US Congress describing how you could measure national income he said but the wealth of a Nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of its national income he gave us that caveat on day one but it's as if we just tuck that quietly aside and carried on with the obsession on on economic growth GDP growth itself so 75 years later two Nobel prizewinning economists Amara sen and Joseph stiglets brought together an assemblage of of top economic thinkers to have a good hard look at GDP and our focus on national income and they said those attempting to guide the economy and our societies are like a pilot trying to steer without a reliable Compass we're still there and no wonder our politicians are searching grasping for the language that they need to describe where we're trying to go because growth isn't enough as an idea of what we're trying to achieve so what 4:01 would it look like if we actually tried to come up with the kind of compass that we could put in their hands and give them something to steer the economy with what if we could actually help politicians get away from the very short-term thinking about the next three months of GDP outcomes is it going up or down and just get away from that short-termism and go to the long term so if we're going to go to the long term let's go to the really really long term and look at the last 100,000 years of the plan planet and its temperature and what you can see here is that the temperature of the planet has varied incredibly and yet the last 10 to 12,000 years have been remarkably relatively stable compared to all of that other history and that last 10 to 12,000 years is the geological era known as the hollene it's no coincidence that we began agriculture in this era it's no coincidence that Humanity began to master the resources that we had around us because this has been an extraordinarily Ben prent period 5:00 of the planet's history for Humanity and so we need to say well what is it about this period that's made it so benevolent for us and that's exactly what Johan rockstrom of the Stockholm resilience Center did he said hang on what is it about the holos what are the critical Earth system processes we need to hold on to to keep ourselves in this extraordinarily benevolent phase of the planet's history and just stepping back a minute that's it's fascinating that that's almost the first time someone's asked the question question like that because we've been trying to understand how the human body works since the 14th century trying to understand the limits of how high a temperature can go before you collapse how fast the heart can beat how long you can go without water we understand the limits of our bodies it's now the 21st century scientists are trying to understand the limits of pressure that Humanity can put on planet Earth before we push it out of this state that sustained us so rock Strom and his fellow scientists came up with a set of nine boundaries that they call 6:00 the nine planetary boundaries and they said if we can keep Humanity's pressure on the planet within sustainable limits on these boundaries so that we don't push ourselves into tipping points push these processes over the edge so that they change catastrophically then we'll be in a safe space for Humanity so we mustn't put so much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we cause catastrophic climate change change the world's rivers and Waters diverting through dams and water withdrawals so that we actually dry River beds mustn't use so much nitrogen phosphorus in fertilizers that we create the runoff creates dead zones in the ocean mustn't again increase so much carbon dioxide use that the oceans acidify killing off much of the sea life creating chemicals such as heavy metals or radioactive materials or persistent organic pollutants that start to change the very reproductive abilities of humanity and other animals loading so many aerosols into the atmosphere sulfates and other kinds of gases that we put up that we 7:00 start to change cloud formation and move Monsoon patterns and actually give ourselves lung disease from All That pollution we mustn't put so many gases in the air that plete the ozone layer that we have a hole in the ozone layer that gives us skin cancer and that destroys marine and terrestrial systems we must hang on to biodiversity because its loss makes us all the more uh vulnerable to to sudden shocks and changes and again land use mustn't be so changed from its original state that we create a vulnerability and lack of resilience in the planet's systems and then they said well if that's if those are the boundaries where are we at today in relation to those boundaries and they tried to estimate first estimate of where they think we are on a global scale and what this shows us is that on at least three of them we're over the boundary so on climate change we already know this we are putting far too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and really on the verge of causing catastrophic climate change but also on nitrogen they estimate we're putting three times more reactive nitrogen out 8:00 in the atmosphere than the planet can sustain and we are massively over on biodiversity loss and on those other boundaries though we may be below the global boundary we know that within regions many regions are already experiencing severe stress so we may not have gone over the fresh water use boundary globally but some regions live at the Ping water scarcity think of Lake Chad which has shrunk around 10% of its size over the last 30 years over 1 billion people live in water scarce regions already and we're moving towards the boundaries on those on those other areas so they've defined this safe operating space for Humanity from that standpoint and it's really important to say at this point that this is not an environmental agenda these boundaries have not been defined for tree frogs and for polar bears sure they need them too but these boundaries have been defined for us for Humanity because it is these Earth system processes that keep the planet in a benevolent state for us to thrive in we need to come back within the pressure that we're putting on those 9:00 boundaries back below the environmental ceiling and yet still that's only half the challenge we face because just as there's beyond that environmental ceiling is lies unacceptable pressure on the environment unacceptable resource degradation so too at the center there's unacceptable human deprivation where people lack the resources they need to meet their human rights to having Health to having enough food to eat and water to having income the rights to education to be resist iant in the face of shocks to having voice in their society to having jobs access to energy and to having social equity in a society and gender equality this diagram in a way captures the challenge that we face in the 21st century and that challenge is to say how can we ensure that every human being has the resources they need to meet their human rights but that collectively we do it within the means of this one planet we've defined the boundary and an outer environmental 10:01 ceiling or or a planetary boundary and our challenge is to move into that safe and just space for Humanity between the two shaped like a donut and in the space there that is where inclusive and sustainable Economic Development would take place and just as the natural scientists said where are we in relation to the planetary boundary so too we can say where are we in relation to that social foundation and looking at United Nations data we can see that we're falling far below it on every single dimension ion for which we can get those data together so for example on food 13% of people in the world don't have enough food to eat 19% of people in the world live without access to electricity indeed millions of people around the world still live with the most fundamental deprivations of access to resources to meet their human rights far below the social Foundation while collectively we've already gone over at least three of the planetary boundaries we're outside this donut on both sides and I think that's an indictment of the pathway that Global development has taken to date so 11:02 unsustainable and so inequitable and that's pretty depressing so here's some good news we could get everybody out of this level of poverty without putting pressure on the planet what would it take to end Hunger it would take around 3% of the current Global food supply 3% according to the International Energy agency they could get access to electricity to everybody in the world with just a 1% increase in global carbon emissions that's fantastic news because it means the challenge of tackling climate change and the challenge of ending ending energy poverty are completely separable so this begs the question if we could end poverty without pushing putting pressure on the planet where is this pressure coming from well it's coming from the other end of the global consumer base if we look at that challenge on climate change researchers at Princeton University estimate that around half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions are produced for just 11% of the world's popul population that the 12:00 richest carbon intensive users in every country in the world I call them the global carbon Easter and if you look at the sustainable budget that we could use on nitrogen right now onethird of that sustainable budget is being used to grow animal feed to produce meat for Europe so it's immediately clear that if we want to come back within the planet's boundaries we need to transform the consumption choices and the patterns and the production patterns of the world's highest resource using populations in every country in the world I'm really struck by the traction this diagram has had I drew it first time a year ago and it's been taken up in a lot of debates and I'm asking myself why and I think there are three good reasons firstly I think the framing of planetary boundaries is a very very powerful one it makes the complexity of Earth system science accessible to non-scientists and helps us to see the planet as a whole as a system of interlocking processes that 13:01 we depend upon for our well-being secondly by putting that social foundation in the heart of it it brings into one simple picture the world of development and the world of environment and it helps to end the false dichotomy that we fac that either you're for development and ending poverty or you're for protecting the environment and these are separate concerns but they're not separate concerns because we depend upon the environment and this state of the planet for all of our well-being and thirdly I think people are interested in it because it gives us a chance to rethink Economic Development instead of starting with economic growth we start with the fundamentals of what we care about everybody meeting their human rights living within the means of this planet and then we ask what kind of economic system would help to take us there and I think there are some changes that we clearly need to make to the way that we plan Economic Development the first one would be we need to bring a far more diverse group of people into economic decision making we need to listen to 14:00 scientists much more in terms of them telling us where those boundaries are and how close we are secondly we need to bring as well as a diverse group of thinkers we need to bring in diverse metrics so not just talking about economic development in terms of monetary metrics but talking natural metrics we've become used to talking about tons of carbon it's we hear it on the radio it's in the papers but we need to diversify and understand more of the planet's metrics because these are the metrics that we live by and also the social metrics that how how humanity is doing thinking much more at the center of our economic thinking are we meeting the human rights of all and are we ensuring that we're doing this without extraordinary inequalities in our societies and thirdly I think it gives us a chance to rethink what is economic development we've always assumed it was economic growth GDP growth now we're facing a much more fundamental question of is growth compatible with living in this safe and just space and many people argue it is some people argue that we need economic growth in order to 15:01 generate the investment and create the new technologies that will help take us there others will say the opposite they'll say we clearly need to move Beyond GDP growth in order to get here one thing I think is definitely true because that debate is still out there and unresolved one thing is true we need to widen our concept of what economic development is far beyond growth alone so we need to think about investing in the wealth that sustains us the human wealth the natural wealth and the social wealth because it's from these that everything that we generate in our economy flows imagine if an image like this a vision like this was actually put at the heart of decision- making and the way we thought about going forward with our economies imagine if we could each sit at a table with planter and social boundaries and think where's my life at in relation to this what can I do in my own life that would make sure that my actions what I buy how I consume what I eat how I vote how I travel how I power 16:02 my home am I making sure that I'm respecting people's human rights in that process and keeping down my footprint on the planet what if companies sat around a table and put their product at the middle of that table and ask themselves where is this product in terms of planter and social boundaries how can we bring our products and our supply chains into the space that we can be proud of saying these are 21st century products because they're helping take the 21st century where we need to go and what if the world's governments with apologies to do Strange Love what if the world's governments sat around a conference table and said how can we collectively bring Humanity into this space well amazingly enough they're actually taking on that challenge right now because the world's governments are facing the the opportunity to come up with a set of global development goals that will both ensure human rights are met and environmental sustainability and the question is will they be able to grasp the scale of this challenge will they be able to leave behind short-term 17:00 national interests that we're so often locked in and look for the long-term the collective and the global interest that we have to pursue can they do it on a scale commensurate with the urgency of the challenge we face can they in fact turn it into an opportunity to bring us into this safe and just space for Humanity because if they could that would really give us something worth aiming our economies at thank you very much indeed RSA 784K subscribers Videos About

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