Tim Jackson on Economics Of Climate Change – TED Talk (Transcript)

In this July 2010 TED talk, Tim Jackson, an economist, speaks on economics of climate change…

Audio-Only:

Tim Jackson – Economist

I want to talk to you today about prosperity, about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity. And not just us, but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished. And hope actually is at the heart of this.

In fact, the Latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity. “Pro-speras,” “speras,” hope — in accordance with our hopes and expectations. The irony is, though, that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth. And we’ve grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope — running down resources, cutting down rainforests, spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, changing the climate — and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession.

And recession, of course, isn’t exactly a recipe for hope either, as we’re busy finding out. So we’re caught in a kind of trap. It’s a dilemma, a dilemma of growth. We can’t live with it; we can’t live without it. Trash the system or crash the planet — it’s a tough choice; it isn’t much of a choice. And our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently. Now I haven’t got anything against efficiency. And I think we are a clever species sometimes. But I think we should also just check the numbers, take a reality check here.