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A Make-or-Break Moment in Humanity's Perilous Journey
The polycrisis marks a historic inflection point in the story of civilization. Once we’re past a rapidly approaching moment, society won’t be able to maintain business as usual, even with significant reforms. The only real solution will be for humanity to inhabit the planet differently.
May 14, 2024
I’ve been watching global trends for a few decades, and have never before seen so many warning lights flash at once. That’s just one reason I’ve concluded that, as of 2024, humanity is at a make-or-break crossroads in its economic, social, and environmental history.
Let’s take a quick look at those warning lights, and see if we can grasp why so many risks are converging at once.
Things Are Deteriorating Fast
Nearly everyone knows that the climate is heating up. But a flurry of alarming recent studies about rapidly warming oceans, climate feedbacks, and tipping points suggest that the rate of warming is suddenly accelerating. Last year was the warmest on record “by far” according to NASA, with the global average temperature leaping above the next-warmest year, 2016, by an unprecedented 0.27 degree F (0.15 degree C). And it’s been revealed that the international community of climate experts, rather than fear-mongering, has actually downplayed the severity of the crisis.
Democracy globally is on life support, most notably in the U.S., but also Britain, Europe, and India.
For years the oceans have been devastated by plastics pollution, overfishing, and the expansion of “dead zones” resulting from fertilizer runoff. But oceans also absorb most of the energy from global warming. Just within the past few months, ocean heating has accelerated dramatically, with temperature records being shattered literally every day.
At the same time, armed conflicts have erupted in Europe and the Middle East. Far from showing signs of resolving themselves, these wars now threaten to intensify, drawing in more countries and combatants. Old alliances are fraying and shifting, make this one of the most perilous moments for global geopolitics in decades.
The global economy is also on a precipice. It’s always volatile, because it rests on an inherently unsteady foundation of shifting relations between natural resource extraction, energy, technology, investment, and labor. The modern economy has come to depend on perpetual growth in order to repay debt, and growth has been enabled primarily by the use of fossil fuels. Those fuels now typically require more extraction effort, due to the ongoing depletion of high-quality conventional resources. The economy has made up for the declining efficiency of its main energy sources by increasingly using debt to fund growth. Recently, total global debt, public and private, has hit a new record, both in terms of dollar amount and (for less industrialized nations) as a percentage of GDP. Meanwhile, the economy faces extraordinary headwinds, including climate impacts, energy challenges inherent in efforts to decarbonize industries, and a new tech revolution centered on artificial intelligence (AI). Technology revolutions are always transformative, but AI is potentially a wrecking ball for both industries and jobs. Tech entrepreneurs love the word “disrupt”; however, disruption on this scale and speed is treacherous.
One of the likely impacts of both AI and climate change is increasing economic Inequality. Over the past few decades, income inequality has risen in wealthy economies and rapidly industrializing economies, which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s population and 85 percent of global GDP. This increase in wealth disparity has been particularly acute in the United States, China, India, and Russia.
A typical macrosocial effect of rising inequality is the destabilization of governance institutions. In democratic societies, extreme inequality erodes trust in leadership and paves the way for takeovers by authoritarian regimes. Political polarization is also driven by conspiracy theories and lack of consensus among major news outlets about basic facts such as election results. As AI begins to ramp up the volume and sophistication of fake news, public consensus may become ever harder to achieve or maintain. Altogether, democracy globally is on life support, most notably in the U.S., but also Britain, Europe, and India. Even in already authoritarian countries like Russia and China, rulers face new challenges from persecuted ethnic minorities, popular dissent, and rival political factions.
We’re also seeing a sea change in the relatively slow-moving realm of demographics. For decades, world population has increased. The percentage rate of growth peaked in the 1970s, but the absolute number of people added per year has continued to hover at around 80 million. The number of humans alive is probably still increasing. But fertility rates are now falling rapidly nearly everywhere—not because everyone has suddenly realized that the world is overpopulated, or because most people have gotten rich (the “demographic transition”), but increasingly because young would-be parents around the world fear for the future and don’t expect to be able to afford to raise children.
Humanity has seen dramatic changes in the past century—world wars, pandemics, the introduction of new technologies, and the growth of new industries. Human population more than doubled, and the world’s geopolitical map was redrawn several times. However, the developments described above, taken together, suggest that the pace of change is about to explode; that change will, in many instances, be destructive to bedrock human institutions; and that change will increasingly elude human efforts to direct or control it. Longstanding growth trends will reverse themselves, making past experience a poor guide for adaptation to unexpected and often frightening ecological, political, and economic events.
And it’s all coming to a head now—i.e., roughly in the period from 2024 through 2030.
We’re Not the Only Ones Who See It This Way
The word “polycrisis” became a buzzword in 2023, and, during the last couple of years, a network of think tanks has sprung up to study the confluence of worrisome global trends. Post Carbon Institute is part of that network, and we’ve contributed to the literature on the polycrisis (in a long-form report and a shorter summary article, as well as other articles and podcasts).
However, we do see things a little differently from some who use the term. Many seem to think the polycrisis is just a rough patch in the inevitable evolution of larger, more powerful, and more technologically sophisticated societies. Human groups have always had problems, say these macro-optimists, but eventually challenges are overcome. In this view, the source of the polycrisis has a lot to do with increasing human connectivity: old problems (geopolitical rivalries, financial panics, and ecological issues) are rebounding on each other faster than before. Humanity just needs to find ways to speed up its responses.
I try to maintain both a systems-oriented view and a deep historical view of the world situation. From these perspectives, the growth trends of the past century are inherently unsustainable. They arose from a series of prior developments (innovations in metallurgy and finance, the introduction of fuel-burning technologies like heat engines, and European colonialism)—but especially the increasing use of fossil fuels. The early results of growth, in the forms of increased wealth and mobility, expanding food production, and rising population numbers, appeared miraculous. However, fuel-based growth is intrinsically self-limiting because of the finite size of nature’s resource base and waste sinks. Increasing consumption and population merely accelerates our overshoot of Earth’s long-term environmental carrying capacity for humans.
I try to maintain both a systems-oriented view and a deep historical view of the world situation. From these perspectives, the growth trends of the past century are inherently unsustainable.
The most important pioneering work in global systems analysis was the “Limits to Growth” computer-based system dynamics project undertaken at MIT in the early 1970s and updated several times since (most recently in 2023). The goal of the project was not to produce a forecast of future events, but to provide a set of scenarios showing likely interactions between resource depletion, pollution, industrial output, food production, and population. The actual evolution of these societal growth drivers, inputs, and outputs has generally followed the “standard run” scenario, in which growth trends continue until the early-to-middle decades of 21st century, but then reverse themselves, initiating decades of decline.
From my perspective, the polycrisis can be seen as an expected foreshock of peaks in resource availability, industrial output, population, and food production. As growth sputters, economic, ecological, and political events will present disturbing surprises on a nearly daily basis.
One of the defining characteristics of a polycrisis, by all accounts, and one of the sources of its surprises, is the increasingly chaotic interactions between system drivers and outputs. For example, as the climate heats up and triggers worsening droughts, heat waves, and storms, resulting waves of refugees will seek to move to places less affected. But rising immigration sometimes leads to more political polarization in host nations, which in turn makes consensus on climate action harder to achieve.
Another example: many efforts to reduce the severity of climate change involve building more renewable energy generation capacity while electrifying industries. The amount of new infrastructure that would be needed in order to phase out fossil fuels altogether, while providing the same energy services as today, would be vast. Building that infrastructure will take energy and raw materials, which will in turn entail mining and transport. So, ironically, efforts to solve one environmental problem (climate change) will likely worsen others (resource depletion and habitat destruction).
These sorts of complex interactions make for wicked problems—i.e., ones whose solution requires sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, or ones that generate still more problems.
The polycrisis marks a historic inflection point in the story of civilization. Once we’re past a rapidly approaching moment, society won’t be able to maintain business as usual, even with significant reforms. The economy will behave according to new rules. Solutions will backfire. And few people will understand why all of this is happening.
New Context, New Strategies
Understanding is vital if we are to avert the worst likely outcomes and lay the groundwork for sustainable societies in the future. Preventing harm requires us to anticipate coming shocks to our communities as much as we can, both so that we can protect ourselves and our loved ones, and so we can promote and model more sustainable ways of living.
Given the momentum of events, it’s easy to become fatalistic, and to conclude that nothing we do matters. But, in fact, there’s much we can do to adapt positively to the polycrisis. More than ever before, it’s important to undertake strategic efforts to save nature and culture. We can do that by identifying and pursuing “no regrets” (or “multisolving”) strategies such as restoring nature as a way to capture and store carbon.
Given the momentum of events, it’s easy to become fatalistic, and to conclude that nothing we do matters. But, in fact, there’s much we can do to adapt positively to the polycrisis.
At the core personal level, we all yearn to find meaning in what’s happening, and to make our lives a contribution to others, rather than a burden. That requires finding our place within the networks of restorative thinkers and activists around the world, and finding our unique voice.
Sometimes it means learning more about what’s going wrong, without jumping immediately to the first “solution” that presents itself. As Donna Haraway puts it, we must “stay with the trouble.” That’s often uncomfortable, and it’s why many people merely seek escape—which usually takes the form of either fatalism or techno-optimism.
Fatalism is certainly no help. It just leads to depression and irrelevance.
More people take the route of techno-optimism, but that’s typically just a path to delusion, since it rests on a mis-diagnosis of the polycrisis. Our essential human problem is not that we’ve somehow chosen the wrong (i.e., fossil-fuel based) set of technologies, while another set (that’s renewable-energy based) will fix everything. Our problem is that a momentary energy bonanza has enabled humanity to grow its population and consumption levels far beyond what’s sustainable long-term. The only real solution will be for humanity to inhabit the planet differently. That will require vision, persuasion, and time; and the adaptation process will have to proceed in the context of societal and ecological breakdown.
We’re here for the journey, like it or not, so let’s stay with the trouble, understand as much of the situation and its possible remedies as we can, and do what we can to minimize the suffering of humanity and other species now and throughout the period of polycrisis and adaptation.
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Pandemic Response Requires Post-Growth Economic Thinking
The end of growth is painful. We had a foretaste of it in 2008, but the current crisis promises to be much worse.
Apr 09, 2020
Amid a horrific human tragedy of sickness and death, much of it taking place in hospitals staffed by brave but overworked and under-equipped doctors and nurses, we are all learning once again what it feels like when economic growth comes to a shuddering stop and the economy goes into reverse--shrinking and consuming itself. Millions have been thrown out of work, untold numbers of businesses shuttered. The St. Louis Federal Reserve estimates that Q2 unemployment could clock in as high as 32.1 percent (for comparison, unemployment at the depths of the Great Depression was 25 percent, and during the Great Recession of 2008-2010 it peaked at 10 percent). Though radical measures must now be adopted to slow the spread of the coronavirus, those measures are having toxic side effects on the economy.
Yet, economic growth was bound to end at some point, with or without the virus. A few moments of critical thought confirm that the exponential expansion of the economy--whose physical processes inevitably entail extracting natural resources and dumping polluting wastes--is destined to reach limits, given the obvious and verifiable fact that we live on a finite planet.
However, we also happen to live in a human social world in which a decades-long spurt of economic and population growth, based on the snowballing exploitation of a finite supply of fossil fuels, has become normalized, so that world leaders have come to agree that growth can and must continue forever. In response to this situation, clear-eyed systems and environmental scientists have, during the past few decades, proposed policies either to transition the global economy away from its near-suicidal requirement for infinite growth, or to cushion the impact when growth limits are finally reached.
At first, this post-growth train of thought was so marginalized by mainstream economists that few educated people were even aware of its existence. In other words, it lay entirely outside the Overton window of acceptable public discourse.
Then, in 2008, the wheels of the financial bus that we were all riding fell off, and there was an opening for discussion about different ways of organizing the economy. During the early recovery period after the global financial crisis, I presented a natural-limits-based view of economics in my book The End of Growth, in which I summarized heterodox policy proposals for getting society on a sustainable track without destroying livelihoods. However, central banks and national governments managed temporarily to bail out the wizards and quants who had precipitated the crisis, restarted the growth machine, and thereby narrowed the Overton window once again.
Still, during the decade that followed, a seed of post-growth economic thinking was planted and began to sprout. In Europe, ecological economists and environmental activists organized "degrowth" conferences. The tiny nation of Bhutan, which had been experimenting since the 1970s with Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), tallied up its findings and argued at the United Nations that other countries should likewise aim for widespread social satisfaction rather than growth in monetary exchange. Groups promoting public banking mushroomed across the U.S., and articles about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Universal Basic Income (UBI) appeared in major news outlets; the latter was even promoted by an early contender for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Still, the economic priesthood held tight to its dogma. Although it was patently illogical, the demand for endless growth continued to be defended using tortured reasoning and cherry-picked statistics. We can grow in green ways, the orthodox economists insisted--ways that don't impact the environment. Well, it's true that we can use resources more efficiently, we can recycle more, and we can find ways to reduce the toxicity of the wastes we produce. But the fact remains: over time, a growing economy will eventually and inevitably take up more ecological space than one that does not grow. Even the richest man in the world, who made his hundreds of billions of dollars from consumers, came to the conclusion that there are limits to energy and gains in efficiency, and that we face a future on this planet of limits. (He, less surprisingly, came to a different solution than I and other "limits to growthers" would offer, his being that we should harvest the moon and colonize space.)
Now, the coronavirus pandemic has seismically shifted the discussion once again. The Overton window is broken and the wall that held it has caved in. Suddenly the first priority of world leaders is no longer economic growth; instead, it is public safety. Lives must be saved and health care systems salvaged regardless of the short-term hit to profits, employment, and investment returns. This sea change in priorities requires entirely different thinking and policies--ones much more closely aligned with heterodox post-growth thinking than with pro-growth economic orthodoxy.
Here is a quick survey of the post-growth economic policies recently introduced by sustainability theorists, and a brief discussion of how and whether each is relevant to our new pandemic-obsessed moment.
Universal Basic Income (UBI)
UBI is a government plan for providing all citizens with a given sum of money, regardless of their income or employment status. The purpose is to prevent or reduce poverty and inequality. However, UBI would also be useful in a post-growth scenario. Suppose, for example, that a nation decided to lower its greenhouse gas emissions by restructuring its economy so as to substantially reduce energy usage and material throughput. Eventually, many people could transition from jobs in airlines and other energy-intensive industries to become food producers and small-scale manufacturers within more localized economies (see below). But, over the short run, substantial numbers would be thrown out of work; how to avoid widespread economic hardship and social instability in the interim? Answer: UBI.
The U.S. federal government's just-passed stimulus plan includes the equivalent of a nascent UBI: It mandates one-time cash payments of $1,200 for each adult and $500 per child. It also sets aside $367 billion to help small businesses and $500 billion for loans to larger industries. (The Fed is meanwhile buying corporate bonds and securities from hedge funds, to the tune of trillions, putting the Treasury on the hook for them.) There is ongoing discussion among policy wonks about longer-term cash payments to individuals; if this indeed happens, the U.S. will be officially experimenting with UBI.
But where's the money to come from? For the time being, it's being conjured through a cozy arrangement between Congress and the Federal Reserve: Congress issues debt, which the Fed buys--without requirement for interest payments. This brings us to:
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
MMT says that monetarily sovereign countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada are not limited by tax revenues or borrowing when it comes to federal government spending. They can create as much digital or paper money as they need, and are (or should be) the legal monopoly issuers of their currency. Therefore, they should be able to create and spend as much energy as needed to create full employment.
I must confess some skepticism with regard to MMT. It's obvious how it would be useful in a crisis; but, over the longer term, if the money supply is growing faster than energy and materials, the result must be inflation. In fairness, Modern Monetary Theorists have given considerable thought to the problem of inflation, and have come up with ways of limiting it--such as by levying deficit-reducing taxes, during times of full employment, to reduce aggregate demand. Yet, in my experience, most Modern Monetary Theorists follow conventional economists in mistakenly assuming that energy and natural resources are effectively infinite, rather than finite and depleting. By focusing just on employment, they miss the essential basis of all economic productivity.
In any case, a crisis is what we have: Governments and central banks are being forced to resort to a form of MMT because of a sudden, dramatic spike in unemployment. And, over the short term, money printing is an essential economic tonic. However, over the longer term, the best outcome would be achieved if the current crisis forces economists to think anew about the nature of money itself--what it is, how it is created, and what are is social effects. Most economists still think of money as simply a medium of exchange, but it is better understood as storable, quantifiable, and transferrable social power. Renegade economist Steve Keen points out that conventional economic theory does a surprisingly poor job of explaining money and debt. Alternative currency theorists like Thomas Greco do a much better job of it.
Ecological and biophysical economists--the vanguard of post-growth economists--go even further. They start with realistic assessments of finite energy sources and natural resources, then explore how economic systems could fairly harvest and distribute resources without depleting nature's stores over time. For starters, they propose taxing all financial transactions and requiring banks to hold 100 percent reserves. They also tend to hold to the principle, first propounded by American economist Henry George (1839-1897), that each person should own what he or she creates, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, should belong equally to all humanity.
Public Banks
Today most money is created by private banks through the process of issuing loans. Digital money is called into existence when a loan is granted; when the loan is repaid, that money vanishes. The problem is, interest must be paid on the loan, and the money needed to pay that interest isn't created when the loan is issued. The borrower must earn or borrow money for interest payments from elsewhere. As long as the overall economy is growing, that's usually possible. But if the economy isn't growing, defaults ensue. Lending slows to a dribble, with more money disappearing than is being created. That's called a deflationary depression, and it's something to be avoided if possible--though it's an inevitable feature of debt-based economies in a finite world.
As a solution, why not create government-run public banks that loan money at no interest, at least in the cases of businesses that are operating for the public good? For example, if a state decided that it was in the public interest to promote renewable energy, its state bank could make zero-interest loans to solar installers.
Public banks have a long history, and operate in many nations. In the U.S., the prime example is the Bank of North Dakota, which partners with private banks to loan money to farmers, schools, and small businesses.
The idea of public banks is closely tied to MMT; think of public banks as MMT at the retail level. So far, the pandemic has not provoked wide interest in public banking; but, as the incipient recession deepens and lengthens, expect this to be a subject of increasing discussion.
Gross National Happiness (GNH)
In 1972, Bhutan's 16-year-old King Jigme Singye Wangchuck used the phrase "Gross National Happiness" to describe the economy that would serve his country's Buddhist-influenced culture. The label stuck, and soon the Centre for Bhutan Studies set out to develop a survey instrument to measure the Bhutanese people's general sense of well-being. That survey instrument measures nine domains:
- Time use
- Living standards
- Good governance
- Psychological well-being
- Community vitality
- Culture
- Health
- Education
- Ecology
Bhutan's efforts to boost GNH have led to the banning of plastic bags and re-introduction of meditation into schools, as well as a "go-slow" approach toward the standard economic development pathway paved by costly infrastructure projects paid for with huge loans from international banks.
There's nothing in the recent stimulus package that resembles GNH, but policy makers increasingly could be forced into considering something like it, out of necessity. As people are stuck at home for long periods, some are descending into loneliness and depression brought on by isolation; others are filling their time with art, music, home schooling, and gardening. Leaders will eventually realize they must do something to discourage the former and encourage the latter. They may eventually conclude that gauging their success using GDP is pointless, and that directly measuring safety, health, and life satisfaction makes a lot more sense.
The Sharing Economy
The last time the U.S. suffered through an economic depression, in the 1930s, government economists and leaders of industry responded by creating a new economic paradigm--consumerism. Henceforth American citizens would be termed consumers, whose duty is to buy and discard products at an ever-accelerating rate so as to steadily increase overall employment levels, the size of the economy, returns on investments, and government tax revenues. Two key strategies of consumerism were planned obsolescence, in which products were designed to have limited useful lifetimes, or to soon become aesthetically undesirable in comparison with new versions of the same product; and redundant consumption, in which individuals were encouraged through advertising to prefer owning their own products (such as cars and lawn mowers) rather than sharing them with family members, neighbors, or friends.
Unfortunately, while consumerism succeeded in overcoming the problem of overproduction (which was one of the causes of the Great Depression), it resulted in the steady ramping up of resource consumption. At the same time, it had a negative impact on many people's psychological health, as they spent more time viewing advertising messages and shopping, and less time engaging with family, friends, and nature.
The idea of the sharing economy took hold around the time of the Great Recession of 2008; it proposed a peer-to-peer (P2P) way of organizing the economy in which the sharing of goods and services is facilitated by community-based online platforms. Many pioneers of the sharing economy were motivated by the ecological ideal of reducing overall consumption levels.
Unfortunately, however, the sharing economy quickly became equated with the gig economy, and with ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft--which promised to eliminate the perceived need for everyone to own a car, and thereby reduce carbon emissions from transportation. Unfortunately, it turned out that Uber and Lyft generate more carbon emissions than the trips they displace, and aren't always model employers.
Nevertheless, the original ideals of the sharing economy persist among advocates of the maker movement, collaborative consumption, the solidarity economy, open source software, transition towns, open government, and social enterprise--as well as bridging organizations like
Shareable, whose founder, Neal Gorenflo, has some ideas on why sharing is even more important during the pandemic, and how we could seize the current moment this as an opportunity to come together in cooperation and mutual aid even though we remain separated physically.
Green New Deal (GND)
GND proposals circulating in the U.S. prior to the pandemic aimed to provide 100 percent renewable energy in 10 to 20 years while supporting job retraining and aiding communities impacted by climate change. Some proposals also included a carbon tax (often with a fee-and-dividend structure that would rebate funds to low-income people so they could afford more costly energy services), incentives for green investment, public banks, measures to re-regulate the financial system, and the first steps toward a global Marshall Plan.
While GND advocates seldom publicly acknowledge that economic growth is both ephemeral and antithetical to a livable environment, their proposals are nevertheless largely consistent with policy advice post-growth thinkers.
The coronavirus pandemic cuts both ways with regard to climate change. Emissions are down, because businesses are closed and people are staying home. But the transition to renewable energy has slowed to a crawl. If we're to move to a post-carbon economy, we'll need massive investment in post-carbon transportation, building heating, manufacturing, and agriculture. President Trump has signaled he wants Congress to appropriate a couple of trillion dollars for infrastructure spending, but what he has in mind are subsidies for existing fossil fuel-dependent industries. MMT notwithstanding, the nation's money pot is not bottomless. If we are to have a Green New Deal, it must come soon.
Resilience
We have made the world more economically efficient by lengthening supply chains to take advantage of the cheapest labor and raw materials anywhere they exist, and by minimizing inventories with just-in-time supply strategies; but the result has been a withering of resilience--the ability to recover and adapt to a crisis or disruption. Post-growth thinkers tend to agree that the structural unsustainability of modern industrial economies has created a series of crises that are lined up to bite--from climate change to the threat of global pandemics. Therefore, preparing for the post-growth era requires building resilience--particularly at the community level.
Suddenly, in this moment of broken supply chains, and shortages of toilet paper, masks, and ventilators, the argument for resilience is easier to make: there are perfectly obvious reasons to shorten supply chains, and establish strategic stockpiles that are distributed locally. Trump's ham-fisted attempt to renegotiate globalization via tariffs hardly counts as a step in that direction. Unfortunately, because world leaders previously didn't listen to resilience advocates sooner, we will all be paying a price for some time to come.
Localism
The lengthening of supply chains is the essence of globalization; if this has made us more vulnerable to crisis, then it stands to reason that we should re-localize some of our economic activity.
Post-growth thinkers have been advocating localism for decades. Naturally there are objections and questions: What about xenophobia? What about sharing knowledge and best practices across cultures? What about global cooperation to meet global challenges like climate change? In answer, localists say we needn't view the recovery of local knowledge, local culture, and local economic vitality as all-or-nothing. Think of it as the rebalancing of a system that has become lopsided and dangerously unstable.
Meanwhile, in nations like the United States, where national leadership during the pandemic is absent or inept, citizens are being forced into thinking and acting more locally. Localism can have either a welcoming or an exclusionary face; it's up to us to choose. Fortunately, many people so far seem to be choosing to be neighborly.
* * *
The end of growth is painful. We had a foretaste of it in 2008, but the current crisis promises to be much worse. Our leaders are flying blind, just as they were during the Global Financial Crisis over a decade ago. We were unprepared for it, just as we were for the pandemic and the economic carnage that is accompanying it.
However, there are people who have been anticipating a moment like this for decades. If we are willing now to listen and learn from post-growth thinkers, the crisis and its aftermath can be a process of adaptation that leaves us more locally resilient, happier, and more connected.
That's not to downplay the immensity of the task. Redesigning national economies in the midst of crisis is a challenge perhaps comparable to redesigning an airplane in mid-air, while attempting to make a safe landing. Navigating the end of growth will require courage, new thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to make mistakes. It's understandable why, during "normal" times, people want to stick with what's familiar. But we're no longer in normal times. We are in a moment that requires us to undertake bold changes that have been put off for far too long.
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Could a Green New Deal Save Civilization?
To fully and systematically address the climate/energy crisis, the plan will have to be far broader in scope than what is currently being proposed. And while we need to mobilize society as a whole with a World War II-level of effort, the reality is that there's never been a challenge like this before
Jan 16, 2019
The idea is infectious. Could a big government jobs and spending program succeed in kicking into gear the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and ultimately save us from catastrophic climate change? The energy transition is currently going way too slowly; it needs money and policy support. And many people would need job retraining in order to work in re-engineered, renewable-powered industrial systems. In the 1930s, the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt helped create jobs while also building critical infrastructure, including rural electrification, roads, bridges, and government buildings. Today, as we confront the requirements to produce energy sustainably; to use it differently in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture; and to reverse the current trend toward increasing economic inequality--in effect, to save and reinvent industrial civilization--the need is arguably much greater.
The public champions of the Green New Deal (GND) in the U.S. include Democratic progressive representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Deb Haaland, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Antonio Delgado. The idea is also supported by writer-activists Naomi Klein and Van Jones; by the Green Parties in the US and Europe; and by the Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Climate Mobilization. The proposals currently circulating in Washington aim to provide 100 percent renewable energy in 10 to 20 years while supporting job retraining and aiding communities impacted by climate change. Some proposals also include a carbon tax (often with a fee-and-dividend structure that would rebate funds to low-income people so they could afford more costly energy services), incentives for green investment, public banks, measures to re-regulate the financial system, and the first steps toward a global Marshall Plan.
"Unfortunately, the more deeply we think about the Green New Deal, the more roadblocks we tend to see. As a result of a decade of delay, the energy transition needs to happen even more rapidly now than it did in 2008 if catastrophic climate change is to be averted."
My organization, Post Carbon Institute, published one of the earliest Green New Deal proposals back in December 2008 (we called it the "Real New Deal"). At the time, the nation was in the throes of the Global Financial Crisis, and we were hopeful that the incoming Obama administration might be open to some radical thinking. As things turned out, our white paper--some of which seems a bit dated now--was almost completely ignored. Nevertheless, we now have the benefit of ten years of hindsight, and of the opportunity to reflect during that interval on the potentials and drawbacks of a government program aimed to transition the American economy so that it can better survive the 21st century. What follows are some thoughts based on that decade of reflection.
1. The fact that so many years have elapsed makes the job bigger and more desperately needed. Unfortunately, the more deeply we think about the Green New Deal, the more roadblocks we tend to see. As a result of a decade of delay, the energy transition needs to happen even more rapidly now than it did in 2008 if catastrophic climate change is to be averted; and, in the meantime, America's energy usage has grown. So the job now is both bigger and harder. Thus solutions have to be even more radical, implying more adjustment, effort, and pain. A truly effective Green New Deal was a monumental challenge in 2008; it is likely to be more so now.
2. The political challenges to a Green New Deal were formidable then, and have grown over time. Today's political scene (certainly in the US, but also in many other countries) is more polarized than it has been for many decades, and increased polarization tends to result in more time spent arguing and backbiting, and less time spent actually solving problems. Right-wing populism is on the rise in many countries around the world, feeding a tendency to blame government technocrats for perceived failures.
If the energy transition picks up steam, there will be winners and losers, and nearly everyone will have to sacrifice and adjust in various, significant ways. If sacrifices are seen to be unfair or unnecessary, blame may be the handiest recourse. Especially if policies are clumsily designed or implemented, the blowback may be swift and brutal (as the French government has learned via the "yellow vests" movement). In the face of all these pitfalls, timidity on the part of politicians seems understandable--even if the consequences of failure to act are ultimately suicidal.
Politics has become a self-reinforcing feedback loop: failure to address problems makes people's lives miserable; as a result, many people lash out in increasingly extreme ways, feeding polarization and fake populism; then polarization further reduces society's ability to solve problems. Rinse and repeat.
3. There are financial hurdles to a Green New Deal. From a financial perspective, the two central notions of the Green New Deal are that (1) deficit spending can effectively be used to jumpstart a major industrial shift and provide full employment, and (2) the economic consequences of increased deficit spending can be absorbed or blunted if government acts wisely. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) provides theoretical support for the latter assumption. So far, so good. But there are two hitches.
"Is there a set of policies that could actually avert climate catastrophe while saving civilization? Yes, at least in principle, but a Green New Deal would be only the first step."
First: a skewed approach to deficit spending in response to the 2008 global financial crisis has led to a financial policy environment that's not especially conducive to a Green New Deal. After 2008, deficits ballooned and the Federal Reserve Bank conjured up trillions of dollars via its quantitative easing program. But nearly all of the money created went straight into the financial system, not to the needed energy transition or to provide full employment (as Post Carbon Institute advised in our "Real New Deal" white paper). Unemployment did fall slowly over the years, but only as a temporary side effect of the injection of so much fresh cash into the financial system. A more direct side effect was the inflation of additional bubbles (including a short-lived spike in domestic oil and natural gas production, which has worsened the climate and energy crisis), whose inevitable bursting will create dire conditions in which politicians and financial leaders will call for more central bank heavy lifting and more government deficits. In that context, proposals for using the government's money creation authority for other grand projects (like making society more fair and sustainable over the long term) may once again be given low priority in the rush to put out financial fires.
Second: you can print money, but you can't print energy and natural resources; and more of the former without more of the latter causes inflation, which can be managed only up to a point. So, in the real world (that is, our world of finite energy and resources), MMT deficit spending can provide more economic equality, and a better way of managing the monetary system and hence the economy (since taking the power of money creation out of the hands of private banks opens the possibility to do away with bubbles, manias, and financial crashes). But, given the fact that the global economy has already overshot limits to annual drawdown of Earth's resources, even MMT cannot avert an overall decline in average material standard of living as the century wears on. And that is likely to make a lot of people unhappy and dissatisfied. See "political challenges," above.
4. The transition has to be systemic. Achieving sustainability requires not just the building and installation of a vast number of solar panels and wind turbines, but also a major redesign of energy-using infrastructure (essentially, a redesign of our transportation, housing, food, and manufacturing systems) and the shift to a shrinking or steady-state economy. We at Post Carbon Institute have had the opportunity to study the requirements for a redesign and replacement of energy-using infrastructure in some detail, as explored in the book Our Renewable Future (co-authored with David Fridley); and also the shift to a shrinking or steady-state economy, as unpacked in my book The End of Growth.
Is there a set of policies that could actually avert climate catastrophe while saving civilization? Yes, at least in principle, but a Green New Deal would be only the first step. Other policies that would also be needed include:
- Reforms to financial system, beyond what is envisioned in the Green New Deal proposals offered so far. These might include MMT, as well as reforms long advocated by proponents of degrowth or a steady-state economy, including 100 percent reserve requirements for banks (effectively removing their money-creation powers).
- Reforms to economic measures and targets. GDP, which simply measures the amount of money sloshing through the economy annually, is currently our main measure of economic health. But it is a perverse and misleading one. It needs to be supplemented or even replaced with measures that directly track the factors that reliably contribute to the happiness and welfare of families and communities (see chapter 6 of The End of Growth).
- Universal basic income or a universal job guarantee. Policy proposals along these lines are being supported by some of the same people who support a Green New Deal, with some analysts arguing the greater efficacy of one over the other. The ideas make sense in the context of the existing economy, but will need rethinking as the days of GDP growth come to an end. Not everything that needs to be done in the course of the energy-economic transition will come with a salary. Rather than continuing to think in terms of jobs, we should think instead of all the possible ways to organize meaningful work while providing for everyone's basic needs.
- Reforms to the political system. Currently our elected representatives seem incapable of grasping the nature of our collective predicament, or of contemplating the truly radical measures required if we are to avert utter and irremediable economic, social, and environmental collapse. One reason for this failure of imagination is the degree to which politics is anchored in money. The beneficiaries of the status quo literally pay lawmakers to keep society headed on its current track to perdition. This can change only if we somehow manage to get money out of politics. Separation of private money and state is as vital as separation of church and state for running a functional democracy.
- Changes to the information ecosystem (i.e., social media). A successful transition will require near-unanimity in terms of public awareness of the crises facing us, and of willingness to sacrifice for the good of society as a whole (this is sometimes described as a wartime level of common commitment). Currently social media (and corporate media generally) drive us in the opposite direction--toward tribal allegiance and suspicion of outsiders. Either we will need some different versions of social media that are designed to build solidarity by helping us find common ground with one another, rather than stoking backbiting and division, or we will need to collectively abandon social media. During WWII the government essentially co-opted the entertainment industry for propaganda purposes, an anti-democratic effort which the American people tolerated. Would we tolerate something similar now? Or might state control of media simply help further undermine our already broken democracy? Here is an instance where there are no unambiguously good answers.
- An overarching goal of reducing energy and materials consumption, expressed through an integrated suite of practical strategies and tools for achieving that goal while minimizing human misery and social disruption. This is, in effect, a restatement of the items above, but it's important to keep in mind that they are not scattershot proposals for improving this or that area of human existence, but logical requirements stemming from a central goal--averting irreversible societal and ecological catastrophe resulting from population and consumption overshoot accompanied by worsening pollution dilemmas (primarily, of course, climate change). Policy makers and ordinary people alike will need to start from, and maintain, this integrated framing of issues if the project is to have any hope of success.
So, in sum, a Green New Deal that would fully address the climate/energy crisis would have to be far broader in scope than what is currently being proposed. Ultimately, we will need to mobilize society as a whole with a World War II-level of effort. Again, what's required is not simply to provide jobs to the un- or underemployed while building large numbers of wind turbines and solar panels; we will all need to live very differently and make some sacrifices. Given the already dangerously high and increasing level of economic inequality in the country, it would make sense to ensure that sacrifices fall mostly on those who are currently well-off, while the benefits of job creation are targeted toward those who are already feeling the pinch.
A Green New Deal is needed. It's an idea that deserves support from politicians and advocacy organizations. That said, it will be a difficult policy to negotiate in detail and much tougher to pass into law. But, in such a volatile political landscape, almost anything is possible--even a practical version of a Green New Deal that addresses our shared crises with the most equitable rules and institutions we can muster.
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