Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy

"Legacy , which took me a bit longer to write, is really saying, ‘Okay, so I’ve looked at climate change, I’ve looked at natural capital, and it’s very obvious that what we’re doing is not sustainable.’ This isn’t going well on climate change. We’re not going to do 1.5 degrees; we’re probably not even going to do 2. On biodiversity, it’s a disaster. I kept telling people, ‘Do you all agree this is not sustainable?’ Everyone says, ‘Yes, of course it’s not.’ But people are never willing to draw that to its conclusion. That’s my strapline: ‘What is unsustainable will not be sustained.’ What I set out in Legacy is a blueprint of what the economy would look like if it were sustainable. It’s bracing to people who look at the current world and think, ‘If we just tweak it a little bit here or there, we’ll get there.’ It isn’t. It’s not a disastrous world. It’s still a world with growth because technology marches on. But it’s fundamentally different from what we’re doing. Of course, there’s an obvious conclusion to this, which is, ‘If you think that we’re going to carry on being unsustainable because we won’t do what we need to do, how does it end?’ That’s what I’m writing now. How does it end if we carry on with climate change and biodiversity damage as we are? What does that world look like? What does the rest of this century and the next century actually look like? I can easily say to you, ‘We’re never going to do 1. 5, we probably won’t do 2.’ But what is our world like if it’s 2.8? What is it like if we wipe out half the species on this planet? Nature doesn’t care at all. The planet won’t cease to exist. It’s us that’ll reap the consequences. It’s a sort of game between optimists and pessimists. The optimists tell you, ‘Don’t worry about it, technology will solve it all.’ There are plenty of these ‘new enlightenment’ people around. The pessimists tell you, ‘We’re all going to die.’ Neither of them is helpful. It’ll be somewhere between the two. Every time I do a presentation someone asks, ‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’ It makes me so angry. I’m a realist!"