19 May The Great Transition: A Long Read
An investigation into the social and economic transformations necessary to sustain ecosystems and improve human wellbeing.
CONTENTS
- Alarm bells
- How did we get into this mess?
- Capitalism vs the Climate
- The Great Transition
ALARM BELLS
In November 2019, 11,000 scientists from 153 nations published an alarming statement in the journal Bioscience, declaring “clearly and unequivocally that Planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”
Based on their predictions, those least responsible are set to bear the brunt of the impact, with people living in poorer nations at greater risk of devastation. Increased susceptibility to extreme weather events – droughts, monsoons and cyclones – will become more likely and more severe, bringing death, displacement and crop failure to those in vulnerable regions.
The scientists warned “the climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. The most affluent countries are mainly responsible for the historical greenhouse gas emissions and generally have the greatest per capita emissions.”
Twenty-four million people are displaced from their homes on average every year because of climate-related disasters. It’s only getting worse. Every one of us is twice as likely to get displaced than we were in the 1970s.
THE SCIENTISTS
Professor Christopher Wolf, of Oregon State University and the lead author of the statement, first realised there was a crisis when he learned about climate tipping points. “The idea that human activities have the potential to trigger major changes in Earth’s climate is very troubling. Especially because these changes can be driven by feedback loops, and may prove to be irreversible,” he shared over email correspondence one day.
Feedback loops are things that accelerate or decelerate a warming trend. Positive feedbacks accelerate warming and negative feedbacks decelerate it. Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about several positive ones such as melting ice. As the world gets hotter, ice which is reflective due to its light colour melts, revealing darker-coloured land or water below. As a result, more of the sun’s energy is absorbed, leading to more warming, which in turn leads to more melting ice.
The scientists behind the statement see limitless economic growth as part of the problem. They say excessive extraction of materials and over-exploitation of our ecosystems is putting increasing pressure on the biosphere and needs to stop.
They call for a new environmentally-based system of economics: “Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritising basic needs and reducing inequality.”
The purpose of their declaration of a climate emergency was first to acknowledge the threat of the climate crisis and secondly to spur action by policymakers and people across the globe.
“The social, environmental, and climate problems are systemic and so interdependent that we need a holistic solution. This change should address social justice issues and honour the diversity of humans around the world. We need a new carbon-free economy operating within the limits of the biosphere,” said Professor William Ripple, also of Oregon State University and co-author of the statement.
The good news: it’s completely achievable and there are various solutions out there already. The Green New Deal, for example, has become a somewhat fashionable policy. First put forward by Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the proposed package of US legislation lays out a grand plan to tackle climate change and economic inequality, dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions while also tackling other social problems. It has since sparked a global movement with several countries proposing their own versions.
HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?
Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has warmed more than one degree Celsius, increasing at 0.2 degrees per decade. Nearly everything we understand about global warming today was understood in 1979. Despite countless attempts to set binding targets in a great number of international climate talks, these have done nothing for our planet. Since the first meeting at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the annual global use of fossil fuels has risen by more than 60%.
Many argue that today’s problems have been exasperated by our current economic system. There is widespread agreement that something needs to change — from the scientists mentioned earlier to campaigners and academics whose opinions will be addressed later on in the series — division lies, however, in the next course of action.
Climate campaigners Extinction Rebellion question whether the current capitalist system can avert the worst effects of global climate change. Others, such as Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, believe it has an important role in raising funding for clean energy technologies. Both agree that financial intuitions have a role to play and the current course must change — however, if that’s by fixing or rejecting the system altogether, it’s undoubtedly one of the biggest questions of our time.
Image: Aimee Gabay // 31st November 2018 // Protestors gather on the road separating Parliament Square from the Houses of Parliament in an act of civil disobedience which called out Governments for not taking climate action.
A FIXATION WITH ECONOMIC GROWTH
At the moment, economic growth is equated with an improved society and global inequality is something we are told must be tolerated. Too often policymakers focus on whether our economies are growing and not if they are providing good lives for people.
In her book On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, Naomi Klein, Canadian author, social activist and award-winning journalist makes it clear: “In the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that’s failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion, challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.”
Global economic growth is driving energy demand up at a pace that’s outstripping our ability to install clean power. The 2018 IPCC report suggested that to stay under 1.5 degrees of warming, high-income nations must scale down their energy demand by significantly reducing their consumption of material stuff.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, researchers say rich nations devour 28 tonnes of material per person per year – four times the amount ecologists say is sustainable. Due to the extraordinary amount of energy required to extract, produce and transport all that stuff, everything from animal products to forests, plastics and metals, we are putting enormous pressure on our planet.
By scaling down on all these things, an approach known as degrowth which is discussed later in the series, we can reduce our demand for energy and make it much easier to decarbonise the economy. This approach can also help us reverse other aspects of ecological collapse, particularly deforestation, soil depletion, biodiversity loss and insect die-off.
A large body of research has demonstrated that materialism does not lead to satisfaction anyway: “In the UK, the percentage reporting themselves ‘very happy’ declined from 52% in 1957 to 36% in 2005, despite real income doubling in that period.” The conversation needs to shift away from economics and towards greater prosperity.
TURNING GROWTH GREEN
The environmental impact of constant growth is often seen as something we can fix later using technocratic solutions. For instance, Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based clean energy company, is leading the commercialisation of Direct Air Capture technology that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the atmosphere: “This can help counteract today’s CO2 emissions, and remove the large quantities of CO2 emitted in the past that remains trapped in our atmosphere,” as described in their website.
The carbon removal advocacy group Carbon180, shares this vision, describing a world in which “climate change has been halted and economic prosperity is driven by innovative farmers, foresters, and businesses pulling carbon from the sky.”
They aim to build broad momentum for carbon removal, allowing the economy to grow without limits. They believe “human ingenuity and innovation can enable a prosperous, growing economy that captures and stores more carbon than it emits.”
Despite growing political acceptance, there have been multiple reports debunking the myth that decoupling economic growth from environmental pressures has any supporting scientific evidence. For example, Decoupling debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability outlines at least seven reasons to be sceptical about these technological fixes including; rising energy expenditures, rebound effects, problem shifting, the underestimated impact of services, limited recycling potential, insufficient and inappropriate technological change, and cost shifting. Additionally, the report Is Green Growth Possible? highlights relevant studies on historical trends and model-based projections, pointing towards green growth as a likely misguided objective.
Technological solutions alone will not save us – greater focus needs to be placed on social, political and economic systems which all require transformations of their own.
THE ISSUE WITH GDP
Author and economist Kate Raworth is a Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and a Senior Associate of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership. In 2017 she wrote a book called Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist in which she proposed seven new ways of thinking about economics, using a doughnut to creatively represent each idea.
She wrote that the economic system is “the root cause of the ecological crisis.” A large part of this due to a flawed metric system that fails to take into account natural limits, known as GDP.
“Measured as the market value of goods and services produced within a nation’s borders in a year, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) has long been used as the leading indicator of economic health,” she wrote. “But in the context of today’s social and ecological crises, how can this single, narrow metric still command such international attention?” This economic model did not have a plan for the world as it is today.
“For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as it was a primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.”
In his forthcoming book, Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, which will be published later on this year, Czech-Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil writes: “Believing that vigorous economic growth can proceed with ever-smaller amounts of energy materials is a serious categorical mistake because such a decoupling would contravene fundamental physical principles.”
He said to me, “while we may have set ourselves apart from other species thanks to our large brains,” he continues, “and while our innovative drive has liberated us from many natural constraints, we remain carbon-based organisms within the biosphere with all the limitations such reality implies.”
CAPITALISM VS THE CLIMATE
Some people wonder if the climate crisis can be tackled under capitalism, as one of its defining characteristics is perpetual growth. Ever-increasing production and consumption – inherent to capitalism – leads us inexorably towards disaster. That being said, capitalism has reaped wonderful benefits in the past, from improved health to travel. It has helped us overcome diseases and lifted billions from poverty.
The question is not simple: Can we transform the current economic system to harness the dynamism of the marketplace and solve today’s crisis, or must we abolish it completely to end the collapse of human civilisation?
TO ABOLISH, OR NOT TO ABOLISH
On January 01 2020, I attended a sold-out event where this exact topic was debated in front of a large crowd of undecided listeners.
Speakers for the motion to end capitalism were George Monbiot, Guardian Journalist, polemicist and bestselling author, and Farhana Yamin, Extinction Rebellion activist, an international environmental lawyer and expert on climate change policy. They argued that capitalism cannot be sustained alongside a habitable planet, reiterating my earlier point that growth is an essential feature of capitalism. They believe we need an alternative system based on different principles: “There’s enough for everyone as long as we share it,” said Monbiot.
The speakers against the motion, Lord Adair Turner and Tony Juniper, were not in disagreement with Monbiot and Yamin. They admitted the climate situation has worsened under capitalist structures and that something needs to change. However, they don’t see a reason to abolish capitalism, but instead believe we can implement “strong policies to force capitalism to do what we want it to do,” as Turner said.
Turner who is Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, the UK Financial Services Authority, formerly the UK Climate Change Committee, and Director-General of the CBI, recently spent three days discussing with the Indian government how to decarbonise their economy. In India, there are 1.35 billion people currently using about one-third of the energy per capita we use in developed nations and the majority want, in future, to enjoy the same standard of living as us, something that will ultimately require more energy.
He looked at Monbiot and said: “If I had turned up on Monday and told the Indian people I was dealing with that the answer was that they are not going to have the standard of living that everybody in this room has, the conversation would have ended at that point.” He believes the main solution to radically reduce emission is to use energy more efficiently and only use zero-carbon forms – “once we fix the technology there’s no limit to the amount of clean energy that we can capture and enjoy.”
Juniper, sustainability adviser, author and former executive director of Friends of the Earth, believes solving the climate crisis will most likely be done through “some form of capitalist transformation, changing the system that we have rather than pushing it off a cliff.”
Pro-capitalists like Turner and Juniper believe there’s no reason the dynamism of the marketplace cannot be harnessed to bring our emissions down to zero. They see our system of competitive, open markets as something that can give strong incentives for the world’s brightest minds to find creative solutions to combat climate change.
“So let’s be clear, we can build a zero-carbon economy while supporting growth in still poor countries and the costs are surprisingly small. The best way to do that is not to reject capitalism but to regulate tax and direct capitalist activity, while still using private enterprise incentives and market competition, to help get there at least cost,” Turner said. “I think we must embrace the innovative potential of capitalism even while constraining it, taxing it, regulating it and pointing it in the right direction.”
DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM
Yamin has worked on several landmark treaties over the past three decades, including the Paris climate agreement. In her speech, she pointed out how, “since the signing of the Paris agreement in 2016, 1 billion dollars had been spent by the top five oil companies in the world on lobbying, marketing and greenwashing. “We’ve been trying for 30 years to have legally binding targets and caps and they haven’t happened. It’s not like we haven’t thought about these things,” she said.
One thing is for certain – any effective moves towards decarbonisation will inevitably conflict with structures of power and wealth. Lobbying and the power of money have prevented tight enough rules and regulations previously. For this reason, Yamin has little hope in the new technologies and ideas Turner proposed. Despite being around for a very long time now, they haven’t worked and won’t: “The largest share of government handouts, what we call fossil fuel subsidies […] are being paid to fossil fuel companies because they have political power and control,” she reminded the crowd. These fossil fuel companies are worth trillions of dollars and transitioning the economy will inevitably reduce the income of all the world’s oil, coal and gas companies, something that will surely not sit well with them.
I am still undecided. Although I believe some progress can be made, I have doubts that such dramatic changes can take place within the structures of a capitalist society, especially given that its defining characteristic is what’s leading to our current demise. Perhaps we need to transition to a different kind of economy altogether – one that doesn’t require growth in the first place.
THE GREAT TRANSITION
There is no shortage of ideas. The solutions exist and some have already been tested and put in motion. The Transition Towns that exists all over Europe are one example – a movement of communities bound together by the simple purpose of living more sustainably. These towns have successfully launched community allotments, local currencies, repair workshops and other more ambitious projects. Other ideas focus on community-led action and transitioning our economy as explored later in this series.
CONFRONTING THE POWERFUL FORCES IN SOCIETY
Activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, the Youth Climate Strikers and others around the world have called for mass civil disobedience, demanding the world’s politicians to take the climate crisis seriously and to respond to their demands. Their actions have not fallen on deaf ears, with multiple countries around the world declaring climate emergencies and countless others waking up to the severity of the situation.
Other methods have focused on the need to radically shift school and university curriculums, offering courses geared towards urgent issues like climate change. People like Ria Dunkley, a lecturer in Geography, Environment and Sustainability at the University of Glasgow is calling for a radical reform of the current university curriculum. At the moment, she says, “there aren’t many universities in the UK that are willing to think about the radical reformation of curriculum space based on the current crisis.”
Some universities are, however, trying to push this kind learning forward, like the University of Bath where Caroline Hickman, a climate psychologist and psychotherapist, carries out research. She often gives workshops for engineering students on eco-anxiety, teaching them how to have those difficult conversations with the wider community in an attempt to develop emotionally intelligent engineers for the future. The aim is to develop “holistically educated students who will be well prepared to deal with the world that they’re inheriting.”
“We’re trying to look forward ten years down the line and think what the world is going to be like. What sort of engineers are we going to need in ten years time? We’re going to need engineers who can think this way and deal with their own feelings, as well as the feelings of the population that they’re working with.”
SPACES
There is also no shortage of solutions that focus on the design and engineering of cities. In a feature published in Architectural Design, Janine Benyus, an American natural sciences writer, innovation consultant and author, shares her vision of ‘generous cities’: “human settlements that nestle within the living world.” This starts by “observing a city’s local native ecosystem” – examining the nearby forest, wetland or savannah and recording the rate at which it harvests solar energy, sequesters carbon, stores rainwater, fertilises the soil, purifies the air, and more. Step two consists of adopting these metrics as the new city standard, “challenging and inspiring its architects and planners to create buildings and landscapes that are as generous as the woodland next door.” Some of these initiatives include rooftops that grow food, gather the sun’s energy and welcome wildlife; pavements that absorb stormwater then slowly release it into acquirers; buildings that sequester carbon dioxide, cleanse the air, treat their wastewater, and turn sewage back into rich soil nutrients; and finally, all are connected in an infrastructural web that is woven through with wildlife corridors and urban agriculture.
As Kate Raworth wrote in her book Doughnut Economics about Benyus’ vision: “Renewable energy micrograms would turn every household into an energy provider. Affordable housing connected by dedicated transport routes would make the cheapest form of travel the fastest. Neighbourhood enterprise hubs would allow parents to be parents again by bringing the workplace and home closer together for women and men alike. And given that its life-regenerating infrastructure […] it would need people to continually tend, steward and maintain its regenerative capacity, so creating purposeful, skilful jobs in the process.”
SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS
The IPCC in its 2018 special report also laid out its requirements for urgent action focusing on economic growth, technology developments and lifestyle changes. The mitigation pathways were characterised by energy-demand reductions, decarbonisation of electricity and other fuels, electrification of energy end-use, deep reductions in agricultural emissions, and some form of CDR with carbon storage on land or sequestration in geological reservoirs.
Deep changes to technological and economic systems will inevitably involve sharp confrontations with the powerful forces in society – those who benefit from things as they are. These systems have to be largely dismantled, specifically those that produce oil, gas and coal. Only giant leaps towards total decarbonisation will save the planet’s support systems. As you have read in this article, such transformative changes, with social and economic benefits for all, promise far greater prosperity for humans everywhere.
A great transition is possible.
