By Joe Mancini
Published in March 2021
“Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences… We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”
– Winston Churchill, 1936
The decade of the 2020’s will be momentous for turning away from the endless growth economy by learning to walk more gently on the Earth. If we don’t, these coming decades will be characterized by attempts to hopelessly navigate around the climate and ecological barriers that are directly in our path.
Walking gently is a new priority. If we don’t start revising society’s relationship to the living world, the next generations will inherit a world that will not be recognizable – and eventually not habitable.
Already, the Guardian reports that “the climate crisis is pushing the planet’s tropical regions towards the limits of human livability, with rising heat and humidity threatening to plunge much of the world’s population into potentially lethal conditions… Should governments fail to curb global heating to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, areas in the tropical band that stretches either side of the equator are at extreme risk.”[1]
It is not just climate change; consider the over-extraction of raw materials which has consistently doubled from a world-wide tonnage of 14 billion tons/year in 1950, to 35 billion tons/year in 1980. By 2000 it was 50 billion tons/year and is now over 92 billion tons/year.[2]
This means that the industries of extraction and production like mining, forestry, trawler fishing, steel and concrete production, and chemical and plastic production produce 92 billion tons of raw materials per year. Every spurt of economic growth compounds and adds billions of tons of extracted material. On this trajectory, the next doubling could come as early as 2045, when the Earth will be forced to give up 184 billion tons of material. But the Earth is a fixed resource. We are at the point where doubling demand will stress the Earth’s living systems beyond recognition.[3]
It is clear that every new point of economic growth adds more material extraction even as the interconnected life systems of the Earth are being overwhelmed by machines that extract with ever greater efficiency. Where will this model of economic growth lead us? Deforestation has resulted in the loss of 50% of Earth’s tropical forest in the last 50 years. Species extinction is 1000 times faster than 200 years ago with the resulting 68% loss of plants and animals in the last 50 years.
If we listen, we can hear the Earth reacting to the over-extraction of its living and natural systems with stronger and more explicit language.
For example, it was just in December 2019 when 46 million acres of Australian outback was consumed by wildfires. This summer the US experienced wildfires and hurricanes like never before and all resulted in severe economic dislocation. This February’s Texas snowstorm left millions without power and water and effectively froze the state physically and economically for a week.
It makes no difference whether these events are climate related or the result of a growth-at-all-cost mentality. Either way both the natural world and all living things, including humans, are dangerously vulnerable.
The COVID-19 pandemic is another economic disaster which managed to singlehandedly close down the world economy. Its roots are linked to the rapid pace of the globalized movement of people, goods and services. Everyone now understands the fragility of our economy and our way of living. Yet, we can expect more climactic events. Continued overdevelopment suggests this past year is merely a dress rehearsal.
On March 1st, the UN secretary-general António Guterres pleaded that, “All planned coal projects around the world must be cancelled to end the “deadly addiction” to the most polluting fossil fuel.”[4] This must be our new mantra – how to find every way possible to put an end to the deadly addiction of fossil fuels.
Guterres knows that greenhouse gasses are rising and they are the leading edge of potential economic misery. The pattern is the same for raw material extraction. Every spurt of economic growth is matched by a rise in carbon in the atmosphere. In 1950, annual carbon emissions were estimated at 5 billion tons/year. By 2000 they had reached 25 billion tons per year. 17 years later, after the issue had been identified and solutions sought, annual emissions grew even more to 37 billion tons.[5]
Climate scientists fear what will happen as we increasingly totter closer to the edge, which “could fundamentally disrupt the planet and produce abrupt change in the climate. A mass methane release could put us on an irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters.”[6] This is why there is an immediate need to reduce the growing potential of a tipping point that will worsen the impact of global warming.
Even the World Economic Forum in Dovos has issued a dark, foreboding warning. “We need to act now on our climate. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfil our commitments to the Paris Agreement, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.”[7]
A recent study in Nature, Fossil CO2 in Post Covid-19 Era found that in order to sustain a decline in global greenhouse gas emissions, we will need to have a COVID-like shutdown every two years. The seven percent decline in emissions achieved because of COVID needs to be repeated every two years for a decade or more, to have a chance of getting ahead of Climate Change.[8]
This is the direction we are heading in.
It is now very clear that a small minority on our planet has benefitted from the false comforts of the growth economy. Underneath this model of development is a degrading foundation of natural living systems that have been put under tremendous stress.
The countries of the global North are responsible for the largest legacy of carbon greenhouse gases and for the over extraction and consumption of raw materials. Even though the rich North represents only 19% of the global population, they have generated 92% of overshoot emissions. This means most countries of the South live within a worldwide carbon budget, while Canada, United States, the European Union, the rest of Europe, Russian, Japan and Australia are responsible for using up not only their own allocation but that of the rest of the planet too. This is another reason why the Global North needs to immediately implement policies to reduce energy and consumption use. When it comes right down to it, the reality is that the big houses, big cars, big travel, big consumer purchases of the North are all one big on-going splurge and for the sake of the living systems of the planet we need a plan of reduction.
Transitioning to Regeneration of Community and Soil
The upside down world of COVID has given us an example of what it means to substantially cut back our economy while focusing on important human supports. As more of the economy opens up, it is imperative to rethink the economy. We need to transition to regeneration of community and soil in an effort to heal our overdeveloped world.
The Working Centre has staked its ground for almost 40 years, creating examples and projects that critique the overdevelopment of institutions and the resulting effects on community. Ivan Illich’s books were important guideposts for this thinking. Pen State University Press has just published David Cayley’s long awaited intellectual journey of Ivan Illich. In the introduction, Cayley notes that Illich’s critique of endless growth forewarned “the consequences of an increasingly “uninhabitable” social and natural environment in which personal initiative would shrink, polarization would grow, (and) all bridges to a normative past would be broken.”[9] Cayley notes how the institutional and media environment is saturated and it is hard to keep one’s footing in a flood. “But what cannot be changed can be withstood.”[10] This is where we find ourselves at the edge of change, looking for new ways of living, not in the abstract, but in actions that generate healing and community.
Deintensifying Economics
One step is to help a cultural shift to grow at the neighbourhood level. It is about lessening our economic activity. These are the steps to regeneration. It is the collective ability to produce things for ourselves. Activities of home production supported by family and friends is the key to deintensifying economics. There is so much work to create the infrastructure for urban gardening in thousands of backyards, planting more forests, learning the importance of composting, and expanding community gardens with full amenities. It also means decommodifying public goods. This is a central idea of The Working Centre’s Community Tools where public tools and spaces are made available to serve the common good. These are projects that model reciprocity, give energy to the commons, and teach us the possibilities of spaces dedicated to the public good.
Reducing Wastefulness
Reducing wastefulness is another response to enable ecological rebirth. This requires a new consciousness about the use of precious resources. A starting point is to identify the 20-30% of excess waste in all parts of our economy. A lesson from COVID is that we were over-commuting. Clearly it is possible to reduce commuting by more than 30%. What about other parts of our economy? How much of consumerist spending is wrapped up in not-exactly important goods? It is not hard to analyze one’s consumer spending and to find how much is wasteful. Humans societies are not dependent on ever-growing consumer spending. We are dependent on finding ways of walking gently on the Earth.
Reducing Work Hours
Juliet Schor has been advocating since the 1990’s for reducing work hours which would effectively change patterns of consumption. Another lesson from the COVID shutdown is that decarbonization is possible when working hours are reduced. This leaves more time for being at home where the art of living can be practiced through cooking, growing gardens, becoming more attentive to nature, and having more time to strengthen relationships. The gift of time provides the opportunity to shield yourself and your family from the imperative of the market. The goal of achieving reduced working hours is to break the connection between work and spending. Satisfaction can replace the need for more money when there is time to foster community amenities and engage in voluntary work to meet local needs. These are social connections that money can’t buy. The time is now for citizens to engage government policy to advocate for the integration of a soft social income policy that includes job guarantees and continued development of elements of a Basic Income. More on this to come.
Ending Planned Obsolescence
The above ideas question the need to grow our GDP and instead focus on increasing wellbeing. Then there are policy ideas that would quickly change the energy and material waste embedded in our growth-at-all-cost economy. The first policy is to end planned obsolesce. Consider the tremendous waste just from electronics, packaging, glass, steel and plastic containers, furniture, appliances, and cars. With the stroke of the law, companies can be forced to either take back and recycle the waste they produce or create products that last significantly longer and do not create waste. This should be the top of any political agenda.[11]
Reducing Advertising
Another policy is to cut advertising. The marketing of consumer society should no longer have priority. The goal is to use less material, not to persuade the purchase of more. Yes, this turns upside down the growth economy and that is exactly what is needed.[12]
Community Tools
In 2003, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The Age of Access advocating for reduction in the actual ownership of goods and services. Instead the goal should be public or private affordable access to things that people need. This substantially reduces the material load – after all, everyone does not need to own their own bus! The Recycle Cycles Community Bike Shop and Computer Recycling are examples of making affordable tools and services available to the public. These are the kinds of projects that need to be supported.
The electric vehicle world is all abuzz over the potential for autonomous robotaxis. The reality is that personal cars are only used about 4% of the time. Robotaxis will be 100% more efficient and will be able to move people at a cost of about 15 cents per kilometer while decreasing the surplus car population by as much as fifty percent. This is a bold direction that creates access, is more affordable and reduces the waste and cost of personal vehicle ownership.
Recreating Our Food Economy
Why is over 50% of all food that is produced wasted? There are many answers but at one level it is an economic system that prizes waste over efficiency, dumping thousands of tons of food, even while poverty leaves many hungry. And then our economy organizes work so that those who can afford to purchase food, do not have the time necessary to prepare it. Food spoiling in refrigerators represents 30% of food waste. This is a poverty of time. Our economy needs to place the highest priority on rationalizing and reducing a food system that is wasteful at the core.
One area of food production that has gigantic potential to reduce our carbon footprint is the adoption of plant-based diets. This world-wide phenomenon has been described in the food industry as an “inexorable” trend. The wide spread substituting of plant-based meat alternatives, 2 or 3 times a week, will dramatically change the carbon footprint of the agriculture industry.
Solar, Wind and Batteries: Decentralized Electrification
Divesting, reducing subsidies and scaling down fossil fuel production is essential. In its place, all effort and resources are needed to install renewable green energy, especially the combination of solar, wind and batteries. Fossil fuel production should be incrementally sunset as new green renewable energy production is deployed. However, this is not presently happening. New green energy is being added to the total energy, which is not decreasing the carbon or material load.
If you look around, you can see the beginnings of a bottom up disruption of centralized energy distribution. The old spoke and hub model will wither away as every home, condo, factory, and office installs solar panels that will soon be on windows and building facades, combined with new heating and cooling systems which will allow all buildings to potentially generate more electricity than they use. Production of electricity will be closer to the point of consumption. Electric car batteries are already being used as mobile energy storage. New AI energy software like Tesla’s Autobidder moves electricity from the homeowner to batteries to where it is needed. This distributed energy will earn household’s income and reduce their energy bills.
Alectra Utilities, which serves a million homes between Guelph, Barrie and Vaughan is developing a distributed energy structure. One project models a microgrid. Another offers residential customers integrated solar panels with batteries for storage and energy software that protects their home against power outages and allows customers to participate in secure, real-time energy exchanges.
In Kerala, India, a solar rooftop program will install solar panels on 75,000 homes with the goal of covering a quarter of Kerala’s electricity needs from the sun by 2022. The goal of the project is to help families become more self-reliant, reduce CO2 emissions and to use government subsidies to ensure lower income families can participate.[13]
Building an Economy that is Regenerative, Reciprocal and Distributive
Post COVID is an opportunity not to jump back into consumerist culture. Meaningful change means learning how an economy can be regenerative, how reciprocity can create fairer and quality exchanges and how models of distributism can support a stronger grassroots economy. If we want, it can happen faster than we think. Cultures can sometimes change intensely in a short period of time. Consider what we call 60’s culture, when in a short few years between 1963 and 1969, there were dramatic changes of clothes, hair, sound, language and feelings.[14] All the seeds have been sown for building a culture focused on healing the Earth. The reality is that we need to start tomorrow!
From The Working Centre’s perspective, we want to focus on all these areas described above. We want to deintensify economics, reduce wastefulness, investigate reduced working hours, change planned obsolescence, challenge advertising, help make goods and services publicly available, recreate our food economy, promote the transition to soft, renewable energy. There is so much work to do. This is barely a starting list. There is much work to be done for our culture to catch up to the cries of the Earth.
[1] www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heating-tropical-regions-human-livability]
[2] Jason Hickel, Less is More, How Degrowth Will Save the World, (London: Penguin, 2020), 99.
[3] Hickel, Less is More, 87.
[4] www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/02/cancel-all-planned-coal-projects-globally-to-end-deadly-addiction-says-un-chief]
[5] Hickel, Less is More, 103.
[6] arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/
[7] www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/climate-change-sudden-cataclysmic-need-act-fast/]
[8] www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01001-0] This is the direction we are heading in.
[9] David Cayley, Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey (Pennsylvania, Pen State University Press, 2021), 21.
[10] Cayley, Ivan Illich, 24.
[11] Hickel, Less is More, 207.
[12] Hickel, Less is More, 211.
[13] www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/india-kerala-benefit-new-solar-power-scheme/
[14] Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, (New York, Random House, 2020) 23.
