Green leader talks waste-free society

By ROLLIN HU For The News-Letter

Ralf Fücks, a former leader of a German green party, gave a talk on Friday titled “Green Growth, Smart Growth.” He discussed how to maintain economic growth without sacrificing environmental sustainability.

Dr. Ben Hobbs, one of the organizers of the event as well as the director of the University’s Environment, Energy, Sustainability and Health Institute (E2SHI), introduced Fücks.

“Ralf has degrees in social science, political science and economics from Heidelberg and Bremen. And he has a long history with the German Greens. He was their co-president in 1989 to 1990,” Hobbs said, “And there he played a role in moving them from the fringe to the center of power of the Social Democrats in the 1990s.”

Fücks began his talk by addressing the conception that economic growth and environmental sustainability is incompatible.

He then countered this thought by proposing a method of promoting economic growth that prioritizes environmental protection.

“Today, part of the global environmental green community is deeply convinced that sustainability and growth are in competition,” Fücks said. “This was the basic thinking and worldview of the paradigm of politics, that saving the planet will demand ending economic growth and even reduce the level of production and consumption.”

Fücks then looked at the history of human economic development and noted how the trend justified the previous maxim that environmentalism and economic growth are inversely proportional.

“At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century we had a rapid ascent, almost an explosion of technological innovation and production. At the same time we can see that there was a flip side of the economic growth and this was rising CO2 emissions,” he said. “So economic growth happened at the expense of natural resources and economic wealth was accumulated by consuming natural capital. There was the basic law of economic of growth until now.”

Fücks’s solution is to combat the association between economic development and environmental degradation and instead strive to make them complementary.

“The answer is decoupling economic growth with environmental degradation. This is the core, or the meaning of green growth: growth without undermining the environmental systems,” he said.

He then outlined three trends that would lead to this decoupling: the efficiency and energy revolution and the emergence of circular economies.

“First, one is an efficiency revolution, making more out of less, producing more wealth more services with less energy and less natural resources,” Fücks said. “There are thousands and thousands of examples in which we could reduce energy consumption without reducing living standards of people,” he said.

The second main transformation will be energy revolution, the substitution of fossil fuels by renewable energy. The substitution of coal, oil and also gas by solar, by geothermal, by hydroelectric which will result in the decarbonization of our economy.”

Finally Fücks spoke about the circular economy, a concept that eliminates waste while maintaining economic growth.

“The third one is moving towards a circular economy where we consume waste in which every reusable substance will return either in the agricultural field or the biological process or the industrial process of recycling,” he said.

Fücks said that society’s priorities also must change to encourage this trend towards green growth.

“There is not only a great transformation in technology, there is also a transformation of values where we are moving towards more values in which consumers are more and more willing to pay slightly higher prices to promote environmental standards,” Fücks said. “Customers are becoming more and more sensitive to environmental sustainability, and this motivates companies.”

Dr. Hobbs, one of the organizers of the event, spoke of the importance of the E2SHI program.

“Our purpose is to create multi-disciplinary resource teams to address environmental problems. We are also trying to create an intellectual community across Hopkins from people from Arts & Sciences and Engineering, all of whom are interested in environmental problems and whose skills and energies are absolutely required to solve those problems,” Hobbs said.

Sophomore GECS student Claire Gray agreed that ideally society should produce no waste, but she said that this was unlikely.

“We obviously have a waste problem... One way we could use [waste] is through energy generation, like the waste to energy incinerator in Baltimore City... We’re going to continue to produce waste anyway, so we might as well put it to use,” she said.

Sophomore Kyra Meko, another GECS student, agreed with Fücks’ ideas.

“As much as humans consider ourselves separate from the ecosystems we live in, we’re not and we would not exist without the services they provide. By degrading those ecosystems through the use of fossil fuels and the creation of waste we are existentially harming ourselves,” Meko wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “Transitioning from fossil fuels to sustainable energy would not hinder economic growth because the resources provided by the environment (like solar or wind) are not finite the way coal or oil are.”