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I’m Grant Symons. I convene Transition Edge to help us understand how we can transition to a low carbon sustainable world using leading thinking and practices.

It is often said that the balance of anything you have right now, be it the money in your bank account, assets in your portfolio or friends in your network, is the sum of all you have ever added, less all that you have ever used, lost or taken away.

It sounds quite obvious, doesn’t it? But most of us live our lives without even paying attention to that measure of flows and stocks and tend to carry on assuming that life is just for living, surviving and thriving - that there isn’t really any need to be concerned with balances, especially if they are external, without cost or direct impact to us.

Today we take a look, critically, at some of our depletions and accumulations.

Firstly, why do we ignore significant balances?

There are many reasons and here are just some examples:

• we have gradually become used to having more stuff
• the money system seeks to make us captive to debt, continually on the credit card hamster-wheel or mortgage treadmill;
• governments need to keep the show going, otherwise their own balances cannot be maintained; and
• the food system needs to keep expanding to support the population.

Incredible spoils

And there have been some incredible accumulations, when we look at the amount of content and knowledge that abounds. Breakthroughs in food production, computing, science, engineering, manufacturing, financial and business models, healthcare, and the list goes on.

We now have super computers, cryptocurrencies, share-trading platforms and pension schemes that theoretically enable everyone to share in infinite growth and wealth accumulation. You can even select your favourite pizza toppings on your phone, have it delivered to your home while watching dozens of TV channels or touring far off museums and galleries and enjoying master art works, as if you were there.

Keeping the show going

One of the often-touted enablers of these accumulations is human ingenuity. The ability to create new things, work our way around a tricky problem, or substitute one thing for another, when we run out of it or it gets too expensive. However, this game is getting tougher as the most available and highest quality resources have been extracted. And in some societies the innate desire to have more, get more and compete more has led to considerable conflicts and distortions in resource use and distribution. Just look at the Amazon and how indigenous people are fighting back, or the conflicts over water flowing from the Himalayas. 

The natural world

The parallel to this story is the one about the ecosystem. On the depletion side of the equation, our activities have been vastly reducing the quantity and quality of habitats and the species that live in them. This process is sometimes coldly described as an abatement in ecosystem services, which is duly quantified in terms of the risk it presents and its cost to the financial machine we are running. Others call it ecocide or onset of the Anthropocene, the period in which human activities dwarf everything else.

There are many other forms of depletion which we won’t touch on in this article, other than to say that by rule of thumb, each and every one can be matched with an equally dangerous accumulation - think pollution, rubbish, mental health issues. After all, we do live in this closed system we call earth.

Existential threat accumulation

Arguably the single most significant, immediate and existential accumulation is that of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. For those of you that are not aware, most of the gases we emit into the atmosphere, could stay there for potentially thousands, if not millions of years, depending on what happens on the surface of the earth in future.

• They don’t dissipate into outer space.
• They don’t get soaked up by the Amazon rain forest.
• They don’t magically disappear at an equal rate to which we produce them.
• They don’t get processed by big machines that store them under ground.
• Most of those that do get removed are absorbed by the ocean, but it turns out this is an accumulation with future consequences also.

The truth is - that every time we do something that produces greenhouse gases, those gases get added to the total in the atmosphere. Virtually all the carbon that we have ever emitted is still up in the atmosphere. All the fuel burned up in WW2, that jet our family took to the USA in 1972, the emissions from the Greyhound bus we took across the states, all the overseas trips you have done and everything since then… it’s most likely ALL STILL UP THERE...or in the ocean!

Population amplifier

Another key point to understand is that due to our growing population and growing use of fossil fuels, the rate at which the accumulation is happening has been growing exponentially. So, it seems obvious that if we can curb exponential growth, that would help. This is true, but it is nowhere enough.

Because of the effect of accumulation and a finite limit to the capacity of the atmosphere, we need to completely stop emissions and if possible, reverse them, if we want the climate to stabilise. This is the call to action ‘net zero by 2050’ and while no one is saying that it isn’t a formidable challenge, our current actions are far from in alignment.

Money amplifier

The amount of financial stimulus pushed into the economic system following the 2008 financial crisis and more recently the Covid response has been accumulating at an exponential rate itself, and this has the effect of increasing our activities and emissions, not decreasing them, which in the end, will become higher atmospheric levels.

We now have a vicious cycle of increasing emissions perpetuated by the need to grow economically and the need to pay, for the increasing accumulated debt. That debt is not something to be taken lightly either, as a proportion of it is associated with future income and expenditures for retiring workforces, aged care, health services, ongoing social and essential services.

Striking a balance

So, striking a balance is something we should seek to do.

The good news is that it can be done.  We can taper off carbon emissions and regenerate natural ecosystems and resilience. Part of the solution is reducing our need for energy and resource consumption in the first place.

As we have mentioned in previous articles, there are many promising options emerging to enable us to travel this path.  If you would like to know more, please get in touch.