The impacts of global warming, both within the EU and around the world, means that we can no longer justify the marginal benefits reaped from our current high and inefficient levels of resource consumption. The price paid by future generations and people alive today in poorer countries, who have far fewer resources with which to adapt, is simply too great.

Not my words, reader - the words of the New Economics Foundation, who recently issued a new report entitled the "European Happy Planet Index". This study, they write, "reveals for the first time, the carbon efficiency with which 30 European nations produce long, happy lives for their citizens". The results of their research? "Europe is less efficient now at delivering human well-being than it was 40 years ago."

It might seem like basic common sense to include some consideration of both the level of improvement to human wellbeing and the costs to the sustainability of the ecosphere in our calculations of economic efficiency. Yet by mainstream standards, it is worth noting just how radical an approach like the NEF's here actually is. Most conventional political discourse tends to fetishise the concept of "economic growth" - a measure of the amount of economic activity within a particular country - to such an extent that "higher growth" has become almost a synonym for "good", "low growth" for "bad". But this measurement, as is becoming clearer by the day, is entirely irrelevant to basic ethical considerations, like the level of happiness a country's population enjoys, or the state in which we are likely to leave the planet for future generations. If, as is currently the case, the rate of economic growth severely outpaces both the rate at which the environment can regenerate itself and the rate at which it can absorb the waste we produce, economic growth is likely to be more curse than blessing. And if its contribution to human happiness and fulfilment is negligible - as current research in the social sciences is demonstrating - then we have to ask exactly what benefit we are in fact reaping from the excessive level of damage we are doing to the environment.

When re-examined in these terms, our current value system, and system of economic relations, can appear simply insane. (Indeed, one of my favourite commentaries on this topic is this Swiftian hymnal to the culture of consumption by (who else?) George Monbiot, which exposes brilliantly the fundamental madness at the heart of our current economic system.) But actually, this pattern - constant and increasing levels of consumption, with severe costs and negligible pay-off in terms of happiness - is all too recognisable. It is the behaviour of an addict. And as such, things are unlikely to improve until, to borrow a pertinent phrase, we admit we have a problem.

In pursuit of this goal, research like that of the New Economics Foundation makes a major, vitally important contribution. You can read a summary of their latest report's findings here; or the whole thing here.