Jeffrey Sachs’ Shortsightedness

Jeffrey Sachs’ prescriptive work, Common Wealth: Economics For A Crowded Planet, offers up solutions to the increasingly dire straits of our planet and species survival. Sachs relies, not surprisingly, on the goals of his very own Millennium Promise Alliance, which propagates the same global panaceas formulated during his tenure as the Director of the United Nations Millennium Project. Sachs’ optimism of these technological solutions, which will be explained in some depth later, is tempered by a realism borne of the study and experience of the failures of policy development. The question one finds oneself asking throughout the book, however, is this: are these solutions possible given the continually increasing consumption of the world? Sachs fails to address a reduction of consumption, and, in doing so, leaves his argument incomplete and highly flawed.

Sachs draws upon the work of his colleagues in his analysis of a myriad of survival-threatening Anthropocenic changes within our natural environment. The Anthropocene refers to a new period of the Earth’s history, in which for the first time the radical changes to the environment are due to the actions of a species, in this case an evolved great ape known as homo sapiens. Humanity’s insatiable desire for resources to provide for its ever growing population has had catastrophic results for the vast majority of life on the planet. Sachs details the damage, beginning with an observation of the increasing human population and the requirements of the planet to support it. Sachs goes on to discuss the fallout of these requirements, climate change, water overuse and species decline. Much, if not all, of this information is gleaned by Sachs from his colleagues at The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and there is no real reason to doubt the veracity of his claims due to his citing of data and use of graphical, numerical and literary explanations to elucidate each point. The Anthropocene is well documented within the book, and its consequences are obvious and dangerous to the survival not only of man, but his entire planetary ecosystem.

Sachs leaps right into providing the way out of this global mess which humanity has created. He relies mainly upon finding politically feasible means to convince the disparate nations of the world, with their varied and antithetical interests, to work together to find common ground on which to base successful intervention in the worst abuses of the world and one another, and, indeed, to reverse as much as possible the mistakes of the past in order to create a better future. These are admirable goals, and goals which it is difficult to find fault with. Sachs endorses several far ranging techniques to stem the flow of greenhouse gasses into the environment, including renewable sources of electricity production, electric powered cars and a cap and trade system for industrial emissions. As far as water, Sachs endorses rainwater harvesting, more efficient means of crop watering and even desalinization of salt water as a last resort. For the global human threat to just about every other species imaginable, Sachs is hopeful that implementation of biodiversity protections, the introduction of more aquaculture based farm fishing to offset the danger and damage to the already possibly irreversibly depleted global fish stocks and pricing of meats relative to their actual cost in land use and feed will lead to a more sustainable and fair world for all species. All these solutions (and these are but a sampling, though the following is true for all) are reliant on global treaties.

Now, these treaties are an easy place to take issue with Sachs, as they are all but unenforceable and completely dependent on the signatory nations accepting and abiding by them. One could easily argue that Sachs’ entire work is admirable, but hopelessly utopian. “You see,” one might say, “it’s all well and good to promote the benefits to world security that execution of the treaties referenced and called for by Sachs, but that will never, ever happen. The nations of the world can not be trusted to act in concert!” This view is not exactly incorrect, although much of the blame for the impossibility of treaty enforcement lies with the more powerful nations whose interests are usually at odds with the interests of the treaties and whose support for said treaties is usually conditional on public advocation and legislative realization. The United States is undoubtedly the greatest offender in this regard, mainly because of its standing as an influential world leader and the repercussions and examples of its action, but it is not alone. China and India are two great polluters of the world and also resist taking action for the future and good of the planet for the short term goals of economic growth. With these impediments to global communal action, it is easy to put down Sachs’ work as mere idealism. But what Sachs is calling for is more than simply the solutions laid out in the book, he is calling for a paradigm shift in how the world interacts.

A paradigm shift in the way the global village interacts is not an unattainable goal, but it does not go far enough. The global village we can define as all nations and peoples of the Earth, and the interaction within it as international relations. Thus, the paradigm shift called for by Sachs involves a radical readjustment in how nations deal with one another and further their interests. Yet Sachs’ entire premise has a fatal flaw. Sachs refuses to even address two simple facts. The first is that the levels of consumption in the highly developed countries far outstrip those of the underdeveloped, so much so that the United States’ consumption alone, if adopted with the rest of the world, would require 5.3 Earths to sustain our current population. The second is that the drive of the world economy which Sachs pins much of his hope on- the development as freedom ideal- relies specifically on increased global consumption as economic pilot and leader. It is somewhat easy to determine where this idealism comes from, Sachs’ positions within the UN and his harshly prescriptive austerity measures to open up Eastern Europe’s markets after the fall of the Soviet Union are indicative of a somewhat optimistic neoliberal conception of the world show his faith in and adherence to the principles of capitalism (although he does acknowledge the flaws of pure market societies). Unfortunately for Sachs, when this idealism drifts into the realm of consequences, his thesis begins to shake. This is shown in two specific examples.

One of Sachs’ main points of hope and activism is the act of spreading information technology, in the form of cell phones and computers, to the developing world. This is not in itself a bad thing, connectivity to the rest of the world often has the result of higher education, tolerance and freedom. And it would be the height of hypocrisy for this student to deny the right to this technology to those far less fortunate as he writes this essay on his laptop. But there are very real consequences to the increase of information technology production, and they must be made clear when discussing the dissemination of the idea of their spread. First, most if not all information technology is made possible by a rare mineral known as coltan. Coltan is a very rare and precious mineral which possesses the ability to conduct the electronic transfers our cell phones and wireless devices require to work. It is mined around the world, but nowhere so much as the Congo. The Congo has been torn apart by the hunt for this and other resources, unspeakably horrific dehumanizing violence is practiced daily in the name of power grabs and resource access. The Congo is currently the battleground for no less than four surrounding nations, and coltan plays no small part. The strife, combined with the environmental degradation of the mining of the resource, are parallel to the very problems Sachs would have the spread of information technology assist in reducing. Secondly, the insatiable world desire for information technology joined with the lightning speed that the technology is created and developed has the consequence of swift equipment redundancies. These redundancies are seldom recyclable, and therefore the toxic computer waste of the developed nations has found a home on the shores and in the land of those poor nations who have traded their ecological well being for a measure of economic security. With the spread of information technologies to undeveloped nations, even the option of displacing their waste will not be feasible, let alone recycling, and the waste will have catastrophic effects. So here we see that despite Sachs’ well-intentioned desire to see a spread of information technology to grow economically the poorer nations so they can take their place in the global capitalist order, increased consumption can only lead to more problems.

The second problem of Sachs’ book is its attempts to maintain the developed world’s obsession with the automobile. Sachs endorses plug-in hybrids, which would be charged on the electric grid during low power times (night, mainly) and use gasoline only after a certain threshold of power has been used or high power is needed. The idea works as long as there is a way to enforce the charging of the cars on the grid during low energy consumption and the electric grid is not dependent on dirty energy sources for its power. Right? Well, not exactly. Hybrid cars have already been shown to use up close to the amount of energy in their production that their use ostensibly saves. With the computer technology inside these hybrids, and their potential successors, the toxic waste and environmental cost of these supposedly green technologies are irrelevant. The damage of their production and eventual disposal equal or even outweigh the potential savings to the planet of their use. Yet Sachs does not even mention this, does not even recognize that there may be a need for the strict curbing of consumption around the world for the environment and ecological balance he professes to be concerned with to survive.

The issue of consumption is an issue we need to analyze in great detail if our societies and species can be expected to survive our own activities. When we consume, there are consequences for our environment. Humanity’s history has been one of resource use and habitat manipulation, but it is only in the past two hundred years that resource overuse and habitat destruction have become the accepted and expected ways of life. Industrialization, for all the fringe benefits it may have provided humanity with, has had consequences which have been devastating to all species- including ours- on the planet. Therefore, to endorse a point of view, as Sachs does, that the solutions to these problems is not less but more industrialization, albeit a cleaner industrialization, is foolish. Sachs seems to think that if the entire world is developed and consuming at a rate to provide economies and people with health and prosperity (this rate is unreasonable to even imagine as a possibility), then these global problems can work themselves out. Greenhouse gasses? Don’t stop driving alone or buying cars, buy electric! Industrial pollutants in the air? Develop your economy using dirty fuels then slowly phase them out! Destitute poverty? Don’t take ownership of your resources or labor from foreign companies, buy a cell phone! Consume, consume, consume is what Sachs tells us, only do it in such a way that is palatable to your leisure class sensibilities of the white man’s burden and charitably share your superior knowledge with the lesser, poor of this Earth. Change only what will not matter.