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Let me begin with four words
that will provide the context for this week,
four words that will come to define
this century.
Here they are:
The Earth is full.
It's full of us, it's full of our stuff,
full of our waste, full of our demands.
Yes, we are a brilliant and creative species,
but we've created a little too much stuff --
so much that our economy is now bigger
than its host, our planet.
This is not a philosophical statement,
this is just science
based in physics,
chemistry and biology.
There are many science-based analyses of this,
but they all draw the same conclusion --
that we're living beyond our means.
The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example,
calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths
to sustain this economy.
In other words,
to keep operating at our current level,
we need 50 percent more Earth than we've got.
In financial terms,
this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn,
going further into debt every year.
But of course, you can't borrow natural resources,
so we're burning through our capital,
or stealing from the future.
So when I say full, I mean really full --
well past any margin for error,
well past any dispute
about methodology.
What this means is our economy is unsustainable.
I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant
or that it's bad for polar bears or forests,
though it certainly is.
What I'm saying
is our approach is simply unsustainable.
In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics,
when things aren't sustainable, they stop.
But that's not possible, you might think.
We can't stop economic growth.
Because that's what will stop: economic growth.
It will stop because of the end of trade resources.
It will stop because of the growing demand of us
on all the resources, all the capacity,
all the systems of the Earth,
which is now having economic damage.
When we think about economic growth stopping,
we go, "That's not possible,"
because economic growth is so essential to our society
that is is rarely questioned.
Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits,
it is an idea so essential
that we tend not to understand
the possibility of it not being around.
Even though it has delivered many benefits,
it is based on a crazy idea --
the crazy idea being
that we can have infinite growth
on a finite planet.
And I'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes.
That the crazy idea is just that,
it is crazy,
and with the Earth full, it's game over.
Come on, you're thinking.
That's not possible.
Technology is amazing. People are innovative.
There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things.
We can surely sort this out.
That's all true.
Well, it's mostly true.
We are certainly amazing,
and we regularly solve complex problems
with amazing creativity.
So if our problem
was to get the human economy down
from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth's capacity,
we could do that.
The problem is we're just warming up
this growth engine.
We plan to take this highly-stressed economy
and make it twice as big
and then make it four times as big --
not in some distant future,
but in less than 40 years,
in the life time of most of you.
China plans to be there in just 20 years.
The only problem with this plan
is that it's not possible.
In response, some people argue,
but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty.
We need it to develop technology.
We need it to keep social stability.
I find this argument fascinating,
as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics
to suit our needs.
It's like the Earth doesn't care what we need.
Mother nature doesn't negotiate;
she just sets rules and describes consequences.
And these are not esoteric limits.
This is about food and water, soil and climate,
the basic practical and economic foundations
of our lives.
So the idea that we can smoothly transition
to a highly-efficient,
solar-powered, knowledge-based economy
transformed by science and technology
so that nine billion people
can live in 2050
a life of abundance and digital downloads
is a delusion.
It's not that it's not possible to feed, clothe and house us all
and have us live decent lives.
It certainly is.
But the idea that we can gently grow there
with a few minor hiccups
is just wrong,
and it's dangerously wrong,
because it means we're not getting ready
for what's really going to happen.
See what happens when you operate a system
past its limits
and then keep on going
at an ever-accelerating rate
is that the system stops working and breaks down.
And that's what will happen to us.
Many of you will be thinking,
but surely we can still stop this.
If it's that bad, we'll react.
Let's just think through that idea.
Now we've had
50 years of warnings.
We've had science proving
the urgency of change.
We've had economic analysis pointing out
that, not only can we afford it,
it's cheaper to act early.
And yet, the reality is
we've done pretty much nothing to change course.
We're not even slowing down.
Last year on climate, for example,
we had the highest global emissions ever.
The story on food, on water, on soil, on climate
is all much the same.
I actually don't say this in despair.
I've done my grieving about the loss.
I accept where we are.
It is sad,
but it is what it is.
But it is also time
that we ended our denial
and recognized
that we're not acting, we're not close to acting
and we're not going to act
until this crisis hits the economy.
And that's why the end of growth
is the central issue
and the event that we need to get ready for.
So when does this transition begin?
When does this breakdown begin?
In my view, it is well underway.
I know most people don't see it that way.
We tend to look at the world,
not as the integrated system that it is,
but as a series of individual issues.
We see the Occupy protests,
we see spiraling debt crises,
we see growing inequality,
we see money's influence on politics,
we see resource constraint, food and oil prices.
But we see, mistakenly, each of these issues
as individual problems to be solved.
In fact, it's the system
in the painful process of breaking down --
our system, of debt