Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey in Britain, uses a nifty back-of-the-envelope calculation to underscore the challenge of giving the world’s poor a shot at prosperity while preventing a global climate disaster.
Let’s accept, he proposes, that citizens of developing nations are entitled to become roughly as rich in 2050 as Europeans. Let’s take note that the world will be home to more than nine billion people by then.
What would it take, then, to prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees — 2 degrees Celsius — above its level before the industrial era, which is generally considered the limit beyond which global warming risks violent and unpredictable environmental upheaval to the world we all share?
Assuming incomes in Europe grow 2 percent a year between now and then, Professor Jackson calculates, by 2050 the world economy could emit at most six grams of carbon dioxide for every dollar it produced.
We are nowhere near that efficient. Advanced nations emit 60 times that much, according to the Energy Information Administration. Developing nations emit 90 times that much. It’s enough to make a sustainable development expert despair.
“Are we really committed to eradicating poverty? Are we serious about reducing carbon emissions? De we genuinely care about resource scarcity, deforestation, biodiversity loss?” Mr. Jackson wrote. “Or are we so blinded by conventional wisdom that we daren’t do the sums for fear of revealing the truth?”