‘We don’t think a sustainable society needs to be stagnant, boring, uniform or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing the quality of life rather than mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.
Donella H Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows. The Limits to Growth: The 30-year update.
This week the usual billionaires, business and political leaders descended into Davos, many in their private planes, for their annual jolly to discuss how to make a ‘better version of globalisation’. The mind boggles.
The theme for this year’s World Economic Forum meeting was ‘Stakeholders for a Sustainable World’ and amongst its delegates were the environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg and the arch climate change denier President Trump. Whilst the President railed in his speech against ‘prophets of doom’ (in clear reference to Greta), and following previous statements in which he rebutted the scientific consensus about climate change (calling it a hoax), he boasted about America’s huge oil and gas reserves, signalling his determination to continue exploiting them.
After Greta reminded people in her speech that the house was still on fire and called for fossil fuel divestment, Steven Mnuchin, US treasury secretary, rudely and patronisingly told her to ‘go to college and study economics’ and come back when she’d learned a thing or two about economic realities. Whilst Greta’s passion cannot be faulted and despite her youthful naivety, she should not be criticised for challenging once again the paltry action taken so far by the international community and raising once again the urgency for real action. In fact, if anyone needs to go and learn about economics it must be Mnuchin himself. Despite his degree in the subject, he doesn’t seem to have learned much. He is clearly steeped in economic orthodoxy, as he made clear in an interview in Davos when he said that the government could not sustain federal deficits and they would have to cut government spending.
He, like many others around the globe including our own politicians and the current government, are immersed in a discredited narrative which bears no relationship to the real world. Politicians have used the household budget argument to serve an ideological purpose by reducing state intervention, cutting funding for public and social infrastructure, creating the legal frameworks to serve corporate interests rather than those of people or the planet and pouring public money into private profit. At the same time, they have denied that the public purse has the power to create an economy that serves the wellbeing of citizens in an ecologically sustainable and equitable way.
Years of talking shops and global agreements have not really led to the sort of change that is desperately needed if we are to limit warming and protect the land and its natural resources, not to mention its biodiversity – all that we depend upon for our survival. In the 1970s, experts were already warning about the limits to growth and in a book of the same name Dennis and Donella Meadows posited that if the rates of economic growth, resource use and pollution continued without change, then not far down the line we would face environmental and economic collapse. As the planet continued to warm, we continued to consume – abusing nature and its resources with little thought beyond satisfying our wants and desires. We are now faced with the realities of our short-sightedness.
Not a week seems to go by without yet another disaster. Floods this week in East Africa after years of drought have caused massive human displacement, loss of food crops and destruction of infrastructure. And again, this week, scientists were warning that global warming was increasing the risk of wildfires in many parts of the world and, more worryingly, that the Australian bushfires will release ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said that ‘We are closer than we think to the point of no return’. A stark warning of what we face should we fail to act whilst we still have time.
And yet although there was an outward expression of concern by political and corporate leaders attending the forum, it was noted in an article by the New York Times that despite the ever-increasing risks, few companies and investors provided real detail about how they would transition rapidly away from an economy based on fossil fuels. It also noted that just a fraction of global businesses disclose the financial risks posed by climate change, and even fewer have set their own targets and timetables to do what the science demands. It is par for the course to note that these so-called commitments are couched in the ‘tangible risks to the bottom line,’ i.e. the monetary risks to their profits, instead of considering the tangible risks to the planet and human and other forms of life which depend on a healthy planet for their existence. It may be promising to tackle climate change but still has failed to say how or when. It has to go beyond simplistic pledges.
It is ironic in that respect that Mnuchin claimed that the US was showing leadership in confronting climate change but through its private sector rather than government; the realities do not seem to match the expectations. For example, Trump’s record on the environment is scarcely commendable, having repealed many environmental regulations with respect to air and water quality and carbon targets (despite the US already being one of the biggest carbon polluters in the world) and is giving free rein to business to do as it pleases. Only this week, he indicated his intention to scrap protections for America’s streams and wetlands which he says will be a victory for American farmers. Under the new regulations, landowners and property developers will be able to pour pesticides, fertilisers and other pollutants directly into the nation’s waterways.
In the same vein, although Boris Johnson has committed to ‘world-class’ environmental standards, he has already indicated that he sees environmental regulation as red tape which he believes makes the UK a less attractive place for industry. To that end, he has removed worker and environmental protections from the EU withdrawal bill. A presage of things to come?
Where is the political leadership to lead us away from planetary destruction to ensure a future for future generations? For the time being there is none. Corporations indulge in greenwash and politicians continue to serve their interests. Without action, this is tantamount to signing the planet’s death warrant.
The common cause which pervades government policies across the globe from the US to the UK, Europe and elsewhere is a toxic, destructive globalised economic system.
The last forty years of market-led, ideologically driven government policies have dominated the discourse. Aside from the devastating consequences on the environment of unchecked growth and exploitation of planetary resources, it has also led to huge disparities in wealth and equity. The consequences are visible everywhere. Public and social infrastructure in decay, increasing poverty, precarious employment and low wages and working people have suffered the consequences around the world. Oxfam, which published its report ‘Time to Care’ earlier this week said that economic inequality was out of control. It noted that in 2019 the world’s billionaires, only 2,153 people, had more wealth than 4.6 billion people. It focused on the huge divide created by a flawed and sexist economic system that valued the wealth of the privileged few, mostly men, more than the billions of hours of work carried out by unpaid and underpaid care work primarily done by women and girls around the world. It challenged governments to build a human economy that is feminist and values what truly matters to society rather than fuelling an endless pursuit of profit and wealth.
When President Trump strips food aid from low-income people and wants to cut entitlement to Medicare and other social programmes whilst giving tax cuts to the rich, US citizens should be asking questions. When our own Conservative government implements a decade long programme of austerity and public spending cuts which have added to the difficulties faced by many working people who daily struggle to heat their homes, put food on the table and clothe their children and who live in decaying communities with increasingly poor public services, UK citizens should be challenging what has become a decades’ long norm of increasing intensity. When EU citizens face the consequences of austerity in increased poverty and inequality and cuts to public services and social security as a result of a dysfunctional currency system it is time to say enough is enough and indeed many already are.
Global citizens should be querying the validity of an economic narrative that places blame on individuals and claims there is no alternative to harsh cuts to public spending whilst they see the rich just keep on getting richer as if somehow their ‘hard work’ entitled them to it.
These actions by a state which is supposed to serve the interests of its citizens are cruel and unnecessary. The lives of the entitled rich versus the lives of the expendable poor. Whether in the US or the UK people are dying for the lie of austerity and people go along with it because they have been convinced by years of propaganda that there was no alternative to fiscal starvation by the state in order to save the public finances.
And worryingly, but not surprisingly, the consequences of this market-led phenomenon in which politicians have ceded power to corporations is no longer confined to working people living on decaying estates in precarious low paid employment. It is now also occurring in middle class families.
An international report ‘Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class’ published by the OECD in 2019 said that middle class families are now seeing their incomes stagnate and are facing growing fears about job insecurity whilst higher income groups have continued to accumulate income and wealth. The report warned of the social consequences if the middle classes were to lose trust in the system; a trust that has already been broken amongst working class people. It noted also that worsening income inequality could threaten trust in democratic institutions and was causing ‘growing discontent’.
Indeed, only this week a report by the University and College Union highlighted the ‘alarming rise of mass casualised labour’ in British universities showing that precarious employment was not just an issue for those working in the gig economy. Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP for Newcastle Central said ‘Reliance on precarious low paid staff has become a business model’.
This forty-year-old system has proved pernicious and serves corporate interests rather than human or planetary interests. Chasing surplus value at whatever cost to serve the global lords of profit.
More than ever, we need solutions to address climate change and increasing social inequality. Bernie Sanders, the US democratic Presidential hopeful commented in response to the report from Oxfam that: ‘….as a result of extreme drought and a rise in sea levels exacerbated by climate change as many as 2.4 billion people throughout the world will be living in areas without enough clean drinking water just five years from today… now more than ever, our job is to bring people around the world together to develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class and leads us to a world of economic, social, political and environmental justice’.
Not only do we need to embrace a new paradigm in the shape of a just green transition towards a fairer, more sustainable world, but also to develop effective frameworks for delivering it in terms of resource distribution. We have to ask ourselves difficult questions about what the economic and political priorities will have to be in order to achieve that goal? We need political leadership, not prevarication. We need to challenge the narrative of ‘there is no money’, show that it is never a question of monetary affordability and emphasise the consequences for the planet and our children’s children of not spending the cash.
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