Low Carbon Economies

By: Kirstin Miller
Date: December 2008
Source: Ecocity Builders (ecocitybuilders.org)

The Low-Carbon Economy (LCE) is an increasingly popular term for a proposed new global economic environment to replace the current high-carbon economy, which requires pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and is hurtling the planet towards ever increasing catastrophic climate change disaster.

The LCE was being discussed in China at a UN sponsored conference I attended last month; US President-elect Obama is crafting an economic reform package for the United States that he says simultaneously addresses climate change issues; UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has described this task as the "defining challenge of our age"; and recently European Commissioner for the environment, Stavros Dimas, said that the European Union has "high hopes that the US will be our partner in the necessary shift towards a low carbon economy."

A planned transition to a LCE is necessary for our long-term survival. Discussions about the largest things we build, (cities, towns and villages) and power, (with energy, food, water, goods and services) -- the very systems that currently demand the high carbon outputs -- are key to focusing LCE discussions into a comprehensive and practical dialogue about how to build and maintain an enduring world civilization.

At this time Old Thinking is still prevalent -- that we should figure out how to maintain high carbon cities and societies with partial and/or potentially dangerous solutions like "better" cars, nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (an unproven technology), and cellulosic biofuels (a proposed technology, and biofuels are in direct competition for soil and acreage with hungry people and the planet's remaining biodiversity).

But why tune up an unsustainable model with partial solutions, when, in likely the same amount of time it would take to build all those nuclear plants and finish work on questionable next generation biofuels and "clean" coal, we could instead reshape and rebuild the model to run indefinitely on clean renewables?

The New Thinking argues that we should utilize the remaining gift to the Industrial Age, fossil fuels, to rebuild our civilization so that it can operate into the future on a fraction of the energy it demands currently. This transition would require a huge effort, the kind of massive global project that we've been hearing world leaders hinting about more and more, just without a clear vision as of yet.

Ultimately, the economy isn't based on theories, products, indicators and investment portfolios. It is based on time and labor, dirt, minerals, water, wood, wind, decomposition, the sun. The faster we reconnect with our economic base, the sooner we will be able to stop climate change, set up the LCE and usher in a new era where humanity lives in balance with living systems. Only then will we have an enduring civilization.

As we build, so shall we live.