People are becoming more skeptical about climate change. Much of the change has to do with the failing economy, although the recent embarrassing emails from several scientists hasn’t helped win the public over. Coupled with this increased skepticism (which is wholly disconnected from the reality of climate change) is a decrease in focus on the so-called “green economy”, those jobs that will appear with the shift to a carbon-neutral, less-wasteful economy. This is terrible news, because the green economy is not just about the environment or climate change. It has far more importance.
Currently, the United States gets the lion’s share of world resources. People can (and do) debate the morality of this setup, but whether or not you regard this as fair, it’s how things are. But only for the time being. There are two billion people living in the rapidly growing countries of India and China. Rapid economic growth means a rapid increase in the size of the middle class, and hence the desire for all of the trappings that it affords. We may have a good deal of the world’s iPhones, computers, cars, flat-screen TVs, and other consumer items, but there are hundreds of millions of other people who want their share.
This economic boom has a dark side: scarcity. While Peak Oil has been the main scarcity that people worry about in recent years, it is by no means the only one. There are projected shortages in many resources, everything from rare earth metals to the lithium that powers all of those cell phones. For many metals, the situation is far more dire than that of oil, but it has so far been under the radar.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where this is going: a burgeoning middle class, finally able to afford many of the items we in the U.S. take for granted, can’t get them due to running out of these resources. The fight for these resources like rare earths could drive geopolitics in the same way that oil has shaped the Middle East, and possibly with the same disastrous results.
The green economy can help turn this around. By reducing waste and increasing efficiencies, we are able to better stretch out these limited resources. Recyling and zero-waste become not some pointless effort to reducing the heating of our planet, but methods by which to ensure that scarcities do not become so acute that they lead to conflict.
Many times throughout history humans have hunted to extinction, always thinking there will be “plenty more” until they are gone. Now it is not animals, but neodymium and gallium that are dwindling. While it is possible to find other food sources, short of mining asteroids the only neodymium we have is what is on the planet. The green economy can help us figure out the best ways to most efficiently use these resources before it is too late.