World: That 30% chunk of greenhouse gases that comes from non-fossil fuel sources isn’t static. It is adding more to the atmosphere each year.’

Before this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken world temperature records by a shocking all. March broke all the records, too. In June our screens were covered with surreal images of Paris flooding, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, the floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two metres deep.

With such extreme events becoming additional commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-significant fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast.

But while this growing awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial shift in our consciousness, I can’t help but fear we’ve missed the point. As significant as clean energy may be, the science is clear: it won’t save us from climate change.

What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we’re doing with fossil fuels

Let’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that we are able to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% clean energy. There is no question this would be a vital step in the right direction, but even this best-case scenario wouldn’t be enough to avert climate catastrophe.

Why? Well, initial, the burning of fossil fuels only accounts for about 70% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The other 30% comes from a number of causes, inclunding deforestation, and industrial livestock farming, which produces 90m tonnes of methane per year and most of the world’s anthropogenic nitrous oxide. Both of these gases are vastly additional potent than CO2 at the same time as it comes to world warming. Livestock farming alone contributes additional to world warming than all the cars, trains, planes and ships in the world. There are as well a number of industrial processes that contribute significantly, and again there are our landfills, which pump out huge amounts of methane – 16% of the world’s total.

But at the same time as it comes to climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are using, it’s what we’re doing with it. What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze additional forests, build additional meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce additional cement, and fill additional landfill sites, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless compound increase, and for some reason we have not thought to question this.

Think of it this way. That 30% chunk of greenhouse gases that comes from non-fossil fuel sources isn’t static. It is adding additional to the atmosphere each year. Scientists project that our tropical forests will be completely destroyed by 2050, releasing a 200bn tonne carbon bomb into the air. The world’s topsoils could be depleted within just 60 years, releasing additional still. Emissions from the cement industry are growing at additional than 9% per year. And our landfills are multiplying at an eye-watering pace: the by 2100 we will be producing 11m tonnes of solid waste per day, three times additional than we do presently. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.

If we keep growing at 3% a year, that means that each 20 years we need to double the size of the world economy

The climate movement made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil fuels, at the same time as we should have been pointing to something much deeper: the basic logic of our economic operating system. Next all, we’re only using fossil fuels in the initial place to fuel the broader imperative of GDP increase.

The root problem is the fact that our economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. Our politicians tell us that we need to keep the world economy growing at additional than 3% each time– the minimum necessary for large firms to make accumulation profits. That means each 20 years we need to double the size of the world economy– double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining, double the McFlurries and double the iPads. And again double them again over the next 20 years from their by presently doubled national.

Our additional optimistic pundits claim that technological innovations will help us to decouple economic increase from material throughput. But sadly there is no evidence that this is happening. World material extraction and consumption has grown by 94% since 1980, and is still going up. Current projections show that by 2040 we will additional than double the world’s shipping miles, air miles, and trucking miles – along with all the material stuff that those vehicles transport – almost exactly in keeping with the rate of GDP increase.

Clean energy, significant as it is, won’t save us from this nightmare. But rethinking our economic system may . GDP increase has been sold to us as the only way to create a better world. But we presently have robust evidence that it doesn’t make us any happier, it doesn’t reduce poverty, and its “externalities” produce all sorts of social ills: deficit, overwork, inequality, and climate change. We need to abandon GDP increase as our primary measure of evolution, and we need to do this instantly – as part and parcel of the climate agreement that will be ratified in Morocco later this year.

It’s time to pour our creative power into imagining a new world economy– one that maximises human wellbeing while actively shrinking our ecological footprint. This is not an impossible task. A number of nations have by presently managed to achieve high levels of human development with very low levels of consumption. And Daniel O’Neill, an economist at the University of Leeds, has demonstrated that even material de-increase is not incompatible with high levels of human well-being.

Our focus on fossil fuels has lulled us into thinking we can continue with the status quo so long as we switch to clean energy, but this is a dangerously simplistic assumption. If we want to stave off disaster, we need to confront its underlying cause.