Generation Excess  

The weekend SMH had a jaundiced look at the record of the baby boomers, as part of a more general litany of impending doom ("Baby boomers practised scorched earth gluttony, and now the rest must pay the price") - Shame on you, Generation Excess.

We Australian baby boomers are among the most privileged human beings to have walked on planet earth. It's not just that we are the second longest living people in the world, after Japan. Or that we are exceptionally healthy, because obesity levels suggest we're not. Or wealthy, although we do pretty well by all relative standards.

No. It's because we've lived in that tiny slice of human history and phase of economic development where everything has been right. And let's face it, even for the least privileged of us, life has been relatively easy. Most of us have never had to face the hell of a civil war, or depression, and have been blessed by geography - the most powerful influence in anyone's life - by being born and raised in a "lucky country".

But is it all coming to an end? Are petrol prices and global warming just the tip of a melting iceberg primed to set humanity back on its heels, such that our kids won't enjoy anything like the fruits of life that we have? More worryingly, am I, and my generation partly to blame as the generation that tried to warn against all this in the '60s and '70s, but then said "wait for me" as the world took off again in the 1980s?

The much castigated Club of Rome, a group of wealthy industrialists concerned about resource depletion in the 1970s, rang the early alarm bells. They predicted that petrol (and other resources) would begin to be seriously depleted by around 2010. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, another casualty of that era, tried to reinvigorate the Malthusian debate about the world being finite and unable to cope with infinite population growth. There were even (bite my tongue) economists reflecting on the impossibility of exponential economic growth and the irony of the economic notion of "diminishing rates of returns" being totally ignored by their fellow dismal scientists in cahoots with politicians who strove to drive the growth train ever faster.

But these all went the way of the dinosaurs with the discovery of new oil in the 1980s, an invigorated debate against birth control by the major religions, and a dumbing down of questioning and discussion by politicians and large corporations stung by, among other things, the successful public reaction against the Vietnam War.

Now all our chickens are coming home to roost. Peak oil appears to have occurred around 2006 (although we won't know until we're well into decline). Climate change is a reality, food shortages are beginning to hit worldwide. In this light, current arguments about which political party can pull off a five-cents a litre reduction in petrol are akin to Nero arguing with his butler about whether his toga is clean enough to play the fiddle.

In the follow-up report 30 years after the Club of Rome, doctors Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, two of the chief authors, admit they were wrong - not because they predicted problems early in the 21st century, but in the basis of those problems. Using mathematical modelling, the Club of Rome suggested the sources of energy would dry up by around 2010.

This doesn't look like happening. But what they didn't see, and what has now become one of the world's top concerns, is that the sinks for soaking up the emissions caused by exponential fossil fuel use would become saturated, causing climate change and global warming. Species extinction, natural disasters, and sea level rise are just some of the expected consequences.

The rise in petrol prices following the inevitable rundown of supplies of crude oil is likely to cause dramatic changes in prices and availability of a vast number of consumer products derived from oil - plastics, furniture, electronic goods, and so on. This will affect the way we live, work and consume. The potential flow-through would undoubtedly have affected the unsteady sharemarket even more had it not been for avaricious traders driven by insatiable desire to have everything, but too young to appreciate that sharemarkets have serious down-time.

All this, of course, would not have happened had we not believed we could have it all at no cost, that economic growth could continue exponentially forever, driven primarily by exponential growth in world population. ...

I could launch into one of my customary complaints about people misunderstanding "The Limits To Growth" (as this columnist has) or about "population bomb" doomerism, but I've said it all before - check out the links if you haven't heard my stump speeches on these topics.