CLIMATE BYTES
By Rudy Rogalsky
LEAVING GROWTH AND OTHER MAGICAL THINKING BEHIND
The net-zero goals of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have a built-in precondition to “maintain prosperity” through perpetual economic growth and also the inherent belief that, if all else fails, human ingenuity will come through to solve the climate problem. Two levels of magical thinking.
Climate scientist James Hansen and ecological footprint analysis developer William Rees are skeptical of that thinking and propose that, to avoid catastrophe, we should turn back the dial of human interaction with the natural environment to a time when CO2 emissions were almost at pre-industrial levels and there was no human ecological footprint. Those are destinations, but neither Hansen nor Rees articulate the pathways to getting there. That void is filled by ecological economists who advocate for the process of degrowth or achieving a Steady State Economy. Both types heap scorn on the idea that economic growth is an imperative and propose instead to scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use and scale up meeting basic human needs.
Either approach would require a broad spectrum of fundamental societal changes: world views, governmental policies, international agreements and, especially, mandatory reduced production of unnecessary goods. For many, no longer having access to unconstrained consumerism would be disconcerting or even frightening. But, such people are making the wrong comparison. Their choice is not between their accustomed lifestyle and a much-diminished economy. Their accustomed lifestyle is almost certainly doomed and their real choice is between 2 forms of a smaller economy: one is a 2.8oC hot-house earth with the poverty that would accompany uncontrollable economic, social and environmental chaos; the other is a world where we have fewer choices and less “stuff” but where we actually have used humanity’s planning and creative abilities to control down-sizing to a scale needed to curtail and maybe even reverse climate change while still providing basic human needs.
The first order of business in the second paradigm would be to continue our pursuit of reduced GHG emissions but more successfully. Our failure up to now in this endeavor has been in part because we have purposely neglected to pick the low-hanging fruit. Stringent regulation of the worst-emitting parts of fossil fuel industries could be easily implemented especially if it were preceded by a legislated termination of corporate donations to political parties. At the same time, governments could bring in capital and income taxation measures directed at the very rich. Swedish analysts have calculated that, world-wide, the richest 10% are responsible for 49% of emissions. Cut those emissions by half and a quarter of total emissions would disappear. Other legislation also could end the obligation of corporate directors and management to maximize profits and, instead, require enhancement of community well-being. Similarly, an international agreement to limit the mobility of capital would return the basis of international trade from profit-maximizing capital flows to something akin to comparative advantage as it was originally expounded and as it is still taught in Economics 101. Nations could also legislate shorter work days and weeks as well as earlier retirement.
We learned from Covid-19 and World War 2 that, in an emergency, governments are never short of money. Week after week during the pandemic, the Bank of Canada created millions of dollars in new money to fund Government initiatives. To fund down-sizing, other revenue would be needed and that could come from eliminating subsidies to fossil fuels and through taxation on wealth either directly or through taxes on GHG emitters and ecosystem rogues like air travel, automobile production and usage and meat production.
With such revenue, public programs could be initiated to insulate buildings, revitalize ecosystems, improve public transit systems plus other social system modifications needed for a smaller world. This would, no doubt, result in a mix of public and private ownership of economic resources. For those who think that the private sector is the main source of ingenuity and creativity, economist Mariana Mazzucato in her book The Entrepreneurial State, documents that it has been government and not the private sector that has been the boldest and most valuable innovator in such revolutionary break-throughs as the internet, computer technology, the iphone and, as well, health research and development of new medications. Still, this writer believes that competitive (not monopolistic) market structures can allocate resources efficiently and should be integral to a down-sized economic system.
The thoughts outlined above are a beginning. To document more fully the parameters of degrowth and the stationary state would be beyond the scope of a one-page essay. Hopefully, these few words are one miniscule step toward avoiding the hot-house catastrophes of magical thinking. Some readers will say that changes to a smaller world make sense but they are too radical to get political traction. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has correctly pointed out that there are no futures for humanity that are not radical. Let us hope that we will not have travelled too far down the road to radical catastrophe before that “oops” moment when we collectively wake up to the reality that survival requires getting back to marching with nature’s drummer.
