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We should seek to drive changes so deeply that our country eventually emerges with a new system of political economy, one that routinely delivers good results for people, place, and planet.
Progressives and many others agree on one thing: Across a broad front of national life, the American economy and our politics are not delivering good results. The documented truth is that the conditions of life and living in our country are deplorable for most people, with almost all measures of public well-being behind other upper income countries.
That has been the case for decades, actually, and is one of the things that accounts for the widespread political disaffection in American today. When combined with extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the unsurprising result is public anger and resentment.
A host of reforms are advocated to improve key aspects of national life—in education, healthcare, child welfare, finance and banking, environmental and climate protection, taxes, social justice, advancement of women, and more. Getting such reforms adopted would make a huge difference. But more and more people are sensing that something deeper must be done, that what we should think of as our political economy—the combination of our economy and the politics that support it—is badly flawed and incapable of meeting today’s big challenges.
What we should be moving toward is the law of the next system, beyond today’s capitalism and yesterday’s socialism.
This realization has led to the now-frequent call for transformative change. There is a hunger for deep change but uncertainty about what that means. I want to spell out here what I think transformative change could and should look like. Overall, we should seek to drive transformative changes so deeply that our country eventually emerges with a new system of political economy, one that routinely delivers good results for people, place, and planet.
I know that this idea of a new political economy is too big to swallow whole. It can best be approached, I think, through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transitions—transformations that attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current system, while replacing these old structures with new arrangements needed for a flourishing of human and natural communities.
I believe the following transitions hold the key to moving to this new political economy. We can think of each as a progression from today to tomorrow. In each of these areas, there are currently laws and policies that shape today’s realities. Collectively, we can think of these laws as the law of today’s corporatist, consumerist capitalism. What we should be moving toward is the law of the next system, beyond today’s capitalism and yesterday’s socialism.
Economic Growth: From growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in social and environmental well-being and growth focused squarely on democratically determined priorities.
Indicators: From GDP (“grossly distorted picture”) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
The Corporation: From one dominant ownership and profit-driven model to new business models embracing economic democracy and goals other than profit, from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy.
The Market: From neoliberal market worship to powerful market governance in the public interest, from dishonest prices that neglect external costs to honest ones, from unfair wages that neglect productivity to fair ones, from commodification to reclaiming the commons.
Money and Finance: From money created through bank debt to money created by government, from investments seeking high financial returns to those seeking high social and environmental returns, from Wall Street to Main Street.
Social Conditions: From economic insecurity to a guaranteed income; from vast inequalities to equitable distribution and fundamental fairness; from racial, religious, gender, and other invidious discrimination to firm protection of rights and personal security.
Consumerism: From consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough, from materialism to finding meaning and value in non-material things.
Communities: from runaway enterprises and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and community solidarity.
Dominant Cultural Values: From having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from isolated to connected, from me to us, from apart from nature to part of nature, from near-term to long-term.
Politics: From weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty and empowerment of marginalized groups, from threatened civic and personal rights to secure ones.
Foreign Policy and the Military: From American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real national and international security.
The good news is that we already know a great deal about the policy and other changes needed to move strongly in each of these directions, even value change. There are books full proposals and, importantly, advocacy groups working for many of them.
Also, we are seeing the proliferation of innovative models along the lines sketched here, particularly at the local level: sustainable communities, transition towns, solidarity and local living economies, sustainable and regenerative agriculture, participatory budgeting, locally owned and managed energy utilities, local currencies, and community development and investment institutions. Campaigns proliferate: Black Lives Matter! Move Your Money! Take Back Your Time! Own Your Own Utility! Live Lightly That Others May Live!
We are also seeing the spread of innovative business models that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth—including social enterprises, for-benefit business, worker-owned and other cooperatives, and local credit unions—as well as numerous campaigns for fair wages, worker rights, pro-family policies, climate action, and minority justice. Together with new community-oriented and Earth-friendly lifestyles, these initiatives provide inspirational models of how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities. Practical utopians at work and play, bringing the future into the present!
Out there, between despair and hopium, are the grounds for struggle.
If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse.
A new study released today in Nature examines data from 1,600 regions of the earth for the last 40 years, and concludes that by 2050 climate change will be causing economic damage worth $38 trillion every single year. That seems like… a lot. The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year. $38 trillion is 150 Bezoses (which is sick in its own way).
If those numbers seem impossible to comprehend, then let Bloombergbreak it down for you, “planetary warming will result in an income reduction of 19% globally by mid-century, compared to a global economy without climate change.”
This is the largest study of this kind I know of; it comes from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, and as James Murray, writing in BusinessGreen points out, it’s more “granular and empirical” than past efforts. It concludes that these losses are already locked in, thanks to the carbon and methane we’ve already poured into the air.
“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected,” said PIK scientist and co-author of the study, Maximilian Kotz.
“These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure… We find that economies across the world are committed to an average income loss of 19% by 2049 due to past emissions. This corresponds to a 17% reduction in global GDP.”
If anything, as Murray points out, the numbers are quite likely conservative:
The projected damages are mainly the result of rising average temperatures and changes in rainfall and temperature variability. But other weather extremes that are harder to model, such as storms or wildfires, could result in higher economic costs. The study also assumes that over time economies start to adapt to more intense climate impacts, serving to curb the resulting negative economic impacts. As climate scientists have repeatedly warned, there are plausible scenarios where some regions find it near impossible to adapt and development is thrown into reverse. Such outcomes would trigger huge geopolitical risks that could impact the entire global economy.
What might cause even deeper problems? Just for fun, read another European study from last week, on the rapid slowdown in the Atlantic Ocean circulation and the possible looming shutdown of the entire system.
Oh, and if we don’t take strong action now to limit the rise in temperature, then the economic losses just keep growing—that 19% at mid-century becomes 60% by 2100, when people currently being born will still be alive, and cursing us.
There are a couple of things to say here.
One, some of you may remember the famous Limits to Growth report from the early 1970s. It predicted that without serious efforts to change our demands on the planet, economic growth would begin to suffer right about now. We thought about it as a society and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, rejected it; we are now harvesting that bitter fruit. If we don’t act now then our children may wish they still had bitter fruit to harvest.
These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did.
Two, capitalism—which regularly acts homicidally—is acting truly suicidally. Having been warned for years now, it resists every effort to rein in its excesses. As Exxon’s CEO helpfully explained earlier this year, it’s not that you couldn’t make good money from renewable energy—you just couldn’t make “above average returns” because sunshine is free. So instead we’ll tank the world, and with it the world economy (which is a subset of the first, not the other way round).
In Europe, for instance, climate protest has finally persuaded regulators to start slowing loans to the fossil fuel industry—but new data this week makes it clear that the slack is being taken up by American banks, and not just the mighty money center banks that are already most deeply implicated in this immoral trade. Now regional banks are taking it up too:
Some of the U.S. regional banks stepping up oil, gas, and coal lending are based in states that have either passed or are reviewing anti-ESG laws. In Oklahoma, which enforced its Energy Discrimination Elimination Act in late 2022, local bank BOK Financial recently soared up the league table to become one of the world’s 30 busiest dealmakers in fossil fuels.
Marisol Salazar, senior vice president and manager for energy banking at BOK Financial, says the bank is now seeing “much more opportunities” in the fossil-fuel industry.
“We’re not just picking up customers,” she said. “We’re also picking up talent, we’re picking up engineers, we’re picking up investment bankers, we’re picking up experienced relationship managers.”
All of this makes even more important the release of the Carbon Bankroll 2.0 report earlier this spring. You’ll recall the first version of this report a year ago, which made it clear that for many companies—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and on and on—the bulk of their carbon emissions came from the cash they kept in the bank, where it got lent out to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. That’s because, as the new report makes clear,
If the largest banks and asset managers in the U.S. were a country, they would be the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S.
So let’s think about this for a moment. If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress.
These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did. Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work.
This is not a radical proposition. A radical—and probably wise, if unlikely—proposition would be get past capitalism. But for the moment this is where we are, and the people who dominate it have an obligation to make it work, if only out of their own sad self-interest.
Here’s how the unradical Todd Stern—longtime American climate negotiator at international talks—put it in a quite powerful speech he gave last week in the U.K.:
“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic.”
“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told The Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”
Stern says that the ‘grownups’ will only listen when the rest of us push:
The original Earth Day in 1970 happened in a societal moment that isn’t easily replicated, but it does teach that there is still more to do in filling the streets and campuses with young people and people young at heart who see the danger of climate change for what it is.
What that original Earth Day represented was not just norm change but a sociopolitical tipping point in environmental concern—the kind of positive tipping point we need to reach on climate change as well. And it will come. But it has to be our collective mission to make it come sooner.
Indeed! Watch this space.
With only six years left to cut global CO2 emissions by 45% from 2010 levels, are we on track to meet the aspirations of the Paris Agreement, or are we heading for the near-term collapse of our Earth’s systems?
As Maria Carey and Wham once again dominate the airwaves, and another year comes to a close, let us consider whether 2023 was another year wasted in our fight against the sixth extinction or the year we turned a corner, as the mainstream media claim?
With only six years left to cut global CO2 emissions by 45% from 2010 levels, are we on track to meet the aspirations of the Paris Agreement, or are we heading for the near-term collapse of our Earth’s systems? In a similar vein, the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Was 2023 the year we spared nature?
The first place to start will be global CO2 emissions. With 45% cuts necessary by 2030, we need our emissions to drop by 9.2% per year. Drum roll please… according to the Global Carbon Project, we added more than 40 billion tons of CO2 to our atmosphere and oceans, and our emissions, rather unsurprisingly, grew 1.1% to record levels. Methane and nitrous oxide emission forecasts are not yet in, but there is little reason to believe they will buck their long-term trend upward into the atmosphere—especially as it appears that a positive feedback loop may have been crossed with natural methane emissions rising between 2020 and 2023, potentially due to the three-year La Niña period, which saw increased rainfall in tropical wetlands.
The latest COP was proof of just how dysfunctional our response to these threats is. So, what can be done?
This year’s transition from La Niña into the warming El Niño phase gave us a glimpse of our future as we experienced record-breaking temperatures all over our planet. In 2023, around one-third of days exceeded 2.7°F (1.5°C) of global average warming compared to the 1850-1900 period. Avoiding global average warming of 2.7°F (1.5°C) was the aspirational 2050 goal of the Paris agreement, yet we have passed this threshold for much of 2023, admittedly due to the temporary El Niño period. As if this wasn’t terrifying enough, just a month after this news broke, global average temperatures exceeded historical levels by over 3.62°F (2°C), while the main Paris agreement goal was to limit global average temperature rise to 3.62°F (2°C). All this adds up to 2023 becoming the hottest year on record. Global temperature records only began in 1880, but the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service is “virtually certain” that 2023 will be the hottest year in 125,000 years, more than half the history of modern humans.
All this extra heat in our atmosphere, oceans, and soil has led to startling events this past year. Wildfires tore through Maui with at least 100 people killed. Canada saw 15.6 million hectares burned—leading to residents in the city that never sleeps literally wide-eyed due to smoke blanketing New York. Canada’s wildfire season was declared its worst on record; an area the size of England was incinerated. As Canada burned, California swapped its usual fiery summer season for its first tropical storm in 84 years, leaving 26 million people at risk of flooding.
Research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that in addition to surface warming, the strong El Niño in 2023-2024 is “predicted to trigger a cascade of climate crises including marine heatwave intensification, ocean deoxygenation, damage to marine ecosystems, sea-level rise, crop yield reduction, and oceanic diversity reduction.” A report from the University of Exeter further warned that we are at risk of crossing five boundaries known as “tipping points” within the next decade. Crossing these boundaries could lead to abrupt or irreversible changes in the natural world and “severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.” These systems are the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, warm-water coral reefs, North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre circulation, and permafrost regions.
Even more alarming, if that is possible, was the news that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), known as the Gulf Stream, could shut down completely by 2025. You would think the response to these reports would spur us into immediate far-reaching action, but we’ll get to that later. We are clearly failing on climate; what about biodiversity?
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has long been the gold standard when evaluating the percentage of species at risk of extinction. According to the IUCN, 28% of all assessed species are at risk: 41% of amphibians, 26% of mammals, 12% of birds, 37% of sharks and rays, 35% of corals, 21% of reptiles, and 34% of conifers.
If we are to avoid planetary turmoil, then we will need to stop being obedient and start to disobey those responsible for ruining our future in exchange for GDP growth.
A report from Queen’s University Belfast in May 2023 laid out the threat starkly. They focused on dynamic population trends in 71,000 animal species spanning mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. Their findings showed that, of the species on the IUCN’s Red List listed as ‘non-threatened,’ 33% showed population declines. Globally, 48% of species were experiencing declines, 49% were stable, and 3% were increasing. Clearly, the 3% showing population increases are insufficient to replace those species in decline. This led the authors of the report to state: “Our study contributes a further signal indicating that global biodiversity is entering a mass extinction, with ecosystem heterogeneity and functioning, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being under increasing threat.”
Most of the declines are happening in the tropics, but 34% of plants and 40% of animals in the U.S. are at risk with 41% of ecosystems threatened by range-wide collapse. In the U.K., the situation proves what happens in the tropics won’t stay in the tropics. Here, around 16% of all species are at risk of extinction, and 43% of birds, 31% of reptiles, 26% of mammals, and 54% of flowering plant species are threatened. The annual Forest Declaration Assessment states we are 21% off target to halt deforestation by 2030. It appears we are failing badly on biodiversity too.
With economic development causing the climate and biodiversity crises we see, you would think our societies would be in fine fettle, but this is not the case. Although the rise in global gross domestic product has remained largely unchanged since the advent of neoliberalism in the late 1970s, homelessness has continued to rise; around 1.6 billion are living in poor housing with 15 million being forcibly evicted each year.
Another metric that is useful when evaluating our progress as a species is the number of mouths which go unfed each day. The number was declining year on year until 2015, leading Steven Pinker et al. to declare we had never had it so good. Fast forward to 2023, and the number of humans facing chronic hunger has risen sharply since 2015 to 783 million. This has nothing to do with scarcity. Each human being needs to eat 2,250 calories per day, and we currently grow 6,000 calories per person per day.
The Numbeo Index is another useful guide to human well-being. Ostensibly set up to compare the cost of living globally, it can also illuminate quality of life. The data showed positive progress until 2016, but since then things have declined. Purchasing power also dipped from 2016 to 2019, and by 2022 all the gains made from 2012 to 2016 had been erased.
The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) also saw a regression in 90% of countries in both 2020 and 2021—the latest data available. Many will attribute the decline to the pandemic, but, due to a lag from data collection to publication, much of the data for 2020 was collected in 2019, and the decline was underway before the pandemic hit.
While most of us on Earth have felt the pinch in recent years, some of us are doing better than ever. The fortunes of billionaires is increasing by $2.7 billion a day, and the richest 1% have grabbed almost two-thirds of new wealth since 2020—equaling $42 trillion, leaving the remaining third for the bottom 99%. The system isn’t broken: It’s working just as intended.
So, how have governments, aware of all this data and much more, attempted to tackle the existential threats we face? At the 28th installment of the Conference of the Parties (COP) this month in Dubai, our elected leaders finally agreed that “transitioning away from fossil fuels” was necessary. Elementary school children could have told us this at a fraction of the cost, and they wouldn’t have taken the best part of 30 years to decide this.
It is hardly surprising when you consider that COP28 was presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber: the boss of the state energy giant ADNOC. At the outset of the COP, he stated there was “no science” that showed we need to phase out fossil fuel use to limit warming to 1.5°C. It is understandable that he declared the outcome “a true victory for those who are sincere and genuine in helping address this global climate challenge” and “a true victory for those who are pragmatic, results-oriented, and led by the science.”
When it comes to the largest cause of biodiversity loss, massive “success” was enjoyed yet again. This time, the criterion for success was a bar so low that an ant would struggle to limbo underneath. Pundits were applauding the fact that agriculture was actually discussed at all at a COP—an industry responsible for a third of global emissions and the primary driver of biodiversity loss has thus far been ignored at all prior iterations of the COP franchise. That we are even able to discuss food is shocking considering that major players like chemical giant Bayer, meat supplier JBS, and fertilizer company Nutrien were all present in record numbers to prevent the changes we so badly need from occurring. The latest COP was proof of just how dysfunctional our response to these threats is. So, what can be done?
This is the million-dollar question that can provide an equal number of answers. What we can all be clear about is that ignoring the situation and “hoping” for change will result in nothing but complete climate chaos and the breakdown of our societies. Before that, we will also be complicit in the genocide of the Global South, who are already badly affected by our lifestyles, apathy, and obedience. A few easy actions those of us in the industrialized world can do are change who we get our household energy from and change how we energize our bodies. Moving to renewable energy suppliers and plant-based diets could get us beyond the 45% cut we need by 2030. This will buy us time. Our governments, however, have shown that they are unable to offer us long-term security and have thus torn up the social contract between us. If we are to avoid planetary turmoil, then we will need to stop being obedient and start to disobey those responsible for ruining our future in exchange for GDP growth. One thing is certain: If 2024 is much the same as 2023, then we will be one year closer to extinction, not salvation.