climate science – P2P Foundation

Is it time for a post-growth economy?

The Rules — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 09:00:00 +0000

The growth-driven economic model we have adopted is killing our planet.

Jason Hickel: The crowds of protesters that confronted US President Donald Trump during his visit to London last week have channelled the world’s outrage at all that he represents. But despite this opposition, Trump’s base is expanding. Even those who baulk at his regressive positions – his racism, misogyny, divisiveness – are willing to hold their noses and line up behind him. Why? Because of his promises to deliver growth.

Politicians rise and fall on their ability to grow the GDP. It doesn’t matter what it takes, whether it’s ripping up environmental protections, gutting labour laws, or fracking for cheap oil: If you achieve growth, you win.

This is only the beginning. As we bump up against the limits of growth – market saturation, resource depletion, climate change – politicians will become increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of it. People like Trump will proliferate because everyone knows that we need growth: if the economy doesn’t keep expanding by at least two percent or three percent a year in developed countries, it collapses into crisis. Debts can’t be repaid, firms go bust, people lose their jobs.

The global economy has been designed in such a way that it needs to grow just to stay afloat. We are all hostages to growth, and hostages to those who promise it.

This is a massive problem because growth is tightly linked to environmental degradation. Growth of three percent may not sound like much, but it means doubling the size of the economy every 20 years – doubling the number of cars, smartphones, air miles… i.e. doubling the waste. Scientists tell us that we have already exceeded key planetary boundaries, and we can see the consequences all around us: deforestation, biodiversity collapse, resource wars and climate change.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose to create an economy that doesn’t require endless growth and thus take the wind out of the sails of politicians like Trump. In fact, it’s already happening: scholars and activists around the world are building the foundations for post-growth economics.

The first step is to challenge the myth that growth is required by society. Economists and politicians tell us that we need growth in order to boost people out of poverty. But of all the new income generated by growth, only five percent goes to the poorest 60 percent of humanity. Growth is an extremely inefficient and ecologically insane way of improving people’s lives. We can end poverty much more quickly, without any growth at all, simply by distributing existing income more fairly.

This is the core principle of a post-growth economy: Equity is the antidote to growth. There are lots of ideas about how to get there. We could introduce a global minimum wage and strengthen international labour laws. We could put a maximum cap on income and wealth. We could encourage and even subsidise worker-owned cooperatives so wealth and power are distributed more equally.

But we also need to do something about our structural dependence on growth.

For example, capitalism has a built-in incentive to increase labour productivity – to squeeze more value out of workers’ time. But as productivity improves, workers get laid off and unemployment rises. To solve this crisis, governments have to find ways to generate more growth to create more jobs.

There are proven ways to escape this vicious cycle. We could introduce a shorter working week as Sweden has just done, sharing necessary labour so that everyone can have access to employment without the need for perpetual growth. Or we could ease off on the labour requirement altogether by rolling out a universal basic income,funded by progressive taxes on carbon, resource-extraction, and financial transactions.

Photo by Christopher Lane Photography

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Contemplating the More-than-Human Commons

P2P Foundation — Mon, 21 May 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Zack Walsh writing for The Arrow: The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change claims that reducing emissions by more than 1 percent annually would generate a severe economic crisis, and yet, climate analysts tell us we need to reduce carbon emissions by 5.3 percent annually to limit global warming to 2°C.¹ Moreover, there is no evidence that decoupling economic growth from environmental pressures is possible, and although politicians tout technical solutions to climate crisis, efficiency gains from technology usually increase the absolute amount of energy consumed.² The stark reality is that capitalist accumulation cannot continue—the global economy must shrink.

Fortunately, there exist many experiments with non-capitalist modes of assessing and exchanging value, sharing goods and services, and making decisions that can help us transition to a more sustainable political economy based on principles of degrowth. One of the best ways to generate non-capitalist subjects, objects, and spaces comes from systems designed to manage common pool resources like the atmosphere, ocean, and forests. Commons-based systems depend upon self-governance and reciprocity. People rely on and take responsibility for each other, finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill their needs. This also allows communities to define the guidelines and incentives for guiding their own economic behavior, affording people more autonomy and greater opportunity for protecting and cultivating shared values. Commons-based systems cut across the private/public, market/state dichotomy and present alternative economic arrangements defined by communities.

According to David Bollier, “As the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”³ Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet.

From the perspective of researchers, there are several different ways to define the commons. In most cases, the commons are understood to be material objects. For example, the atmosphere and ocean are global commons, because they are resources we must all learn to regulate and share collectively. This notion of the commons as material resource goes hand-in-hand with another notion that the commons can be both material and immaterial, a product of either nature or culture. Using this second definition enhances our appreciation for what is often undervalued by traditional economic measures such as care work, shared knowledge production, and cultural preservation. Together, both these perspectives are helpful in devising political and economic strategies for managing the commons, which remains the dominant interest of most commons researchers and policymakers.

Nevertheless, whether material or immaterial, the commons are viewed as a given concept or thing, ignoring that more fundamentally they are generated by social practices. In other words, there are no commons without commoners to enact them. From an enactive perspective, commons are not objects, but actions generated by many different actors in relationship. Whereas the prior notions assume that individuals need to be regulated and punished to prevent overconsumption (an assumption known as the tragedy of the commons), an enactive perspective on commons conceives the individual in relation to everyone (and everything) involved in co-managing the more-than-human commons. It therefore diverges from the prior two notions in assuming a relational epistemology rather than being premised on a liberal epistemology based on the individual. From a Buddhist perspective, one could say that the commons emerges co-dependently with a field of objects, forces, and passions entangling the human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and machinic.

The more-than-human commons thus does not dualistically separate the material and immaterial commons, the commons (as object) from the commoners (as subjects), nor does it separate humans from nonhumans. Instead, the commons are always understood as a more-than-human achievement, neither wholly produced by nature or culture. Commoning becomes, as Bayo Akomolafe points out, a material-discursive doing shaped by practices and values that engage humans with their environments.⁴ In Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that all commons exceed conceptual distinctions, because they are not things; rather, they are another way of being, thinking about, and shaping the world.⁵ Commoning is about sharing the responsibility for stewardship with the intent to construct a fair, free, and sustainable world—a goal that is all the more important given the unequal distribution of risks posed by intensifying climate change.

Read the entire essay/issue at The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.

Zack Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Process Studies graduate program at Claremont School of Theology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring process-relational, contemplative, and engaged Buddhist approaches to political economy, sustainability, and China. His most recent writings provide critical and constructive reflection on mindfulness trends, while developing contemplative pedagogies and practices for addressing social and ecological issues. He is a research specialist at Toward Ecological Civilization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. He has also received lay precepts from Fo Guang Shan, an engaged Buddhist organization based in Taiwan, and attended numerous meditation and monastic retreats in Thailand, China, and Taiwan. For further information and publications, please connect: https://cst.academia.edu/ZackWalsh, https://www.facebook.com/walsh.zack, and https://www.snclab.ca/category/blog/contemplative-ecologies/.

Illustration by Alicia Brown

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Understand Basic Climate Science With These 5 Beautifully Simple Videos

Tegan Tallullah — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 11:00:00 +0000

Do you know what climate change is?

Sure. It’s the scary thing that’s happening to the planet because we burn too much carbon.

But do you actually understand the science of why it’s happening?

Whether you’re completely new to this or you just want a refresher, you’re in luck.

I’ve picked out 5 excellent videos for you which explain it in beautifully simple terms. They’re short, and they have animations. I know the subject matter is a little threatening so I’m making this as easy as I can. If you watch all these then I promise you will get the basics of climate science – even if you’re not the scientific type.

1. Climate Science: What You Need To Know via It’s Okay To Be Smart

6.20 minutes

This one starts off pointing out how well established and consensus-filled the science is, despite some haters still doubting it. The presenter of this cute science channel then goes on to explain the basics in 24 easy steps. They want you to be prepared for that day you end up chatting to an enraged climate denier at a party who’s furious about the “polar bear lobby”, so they debunk a couple of stubborn myths, too.

2. CLIMATE 101 with BILL NYE via Climate Reality

4.33 minutes

This one starts off with a scientist in a lab coat using plants, a globe and a bunch of chemical bottles to act out the greenhouse effect, which later turns into animation – all narrated by Bill Nye. He gets interrupted a few times by a TV showing climate deniers talking crap, and clearly explains the basics of the science, which as he points out, has been understood for decades. If you fancy it, Bill even shows you how to recreate the greenhouse effect with a simple DIY science experiment!

3. Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Simple Explanation of Climate Change via Guy Science

3.59 minutes

Famous for bringing astrophysics to the masses, Neil DeGrasse Tyson heads up this one. He explains the greenhouse effect and how it’s just very basic physics and isn’t scientifically controversial at all. In fact Carl Sagan wrote about the greenhouse effect on Venus back in the 1960s, and in the 1980s warned that the same could happen to Earth, “turning our only heaven into a kind of hell”. Neil tells us why we know the extra carbon isn’t coming from volcanoes. He also makes a good final point: it’s such a shame that carbon dioxide is an invisible gas – we would be so much better at dealing with it if we could all see it.

4. Climate Change Is Simple – David Roberts Remix via Ryan Cooper

15.01 minutes

This video is a remix, mostly of a talk by David Roberts of established environmental news site Grist, and also includes visuals of the earth to explain the greenhouse effect, much like the others. The difference? This one is pretty hard hitting. Not gunna lie, it’s pretty scary. He thinks we’re going to shoot way past the 2 degrees safety limit and that at current levels we’re heading towards something as high as 6 degrees (we don’t know for sure – scientists are uncertain about that). Which is pretty terrifying. But I think it’s important to watch it, because to really get climate change, you do need to get the seriousness of the crisis, before moving on to being proactive. He ends with the bold call to action: “Your job now is to make the impossible possible”.

5. The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Science via The New Internationalist

4.18 minutes

In this one, Danny Chivers, author of the No Nonsense Guide to Climate Science pocket book, runs through why the planet is heating up (the greenhouse effect again) what the current impacts are, and what the future impacts are likely to be. He tells us all this while wandering about the streets of Oxford, supported by on-screen text and special effects. A key point: the basics of the greenhouse effect has been understood since 1896. That’s eighteen ninety six, not nineteen.

To sum up…

The greenhouse effect is the process where greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) in the earth’s atmosphere trap some of the sun’s heat and stop it radiating back out to space. That’s normal, but releasing extra carbon into the mix accelerates the process and makes Earth hotter.

Carbon is like salt. A little is essential for life, but too much is dangerous. And modern life makes it very easy to have too much.

The greenhouse effect has been well understood for a long time and is based on very basic physics. There is lots of uncertainty about the details of climate change, but the core equation of fossil fuels > carbon > greenhouse effect > global warming is really not debatable. It’s the political implications that are controversial. And it’s how we respond that’s debatable.

What now?

Assuming you’re not a denier (if so please rewatch those videos and pull your head out of the god damn sand) then you’re probably feeling pretty bad right now.

Here’s the thing: while getting to grips with the science is crucial to climate action, I don’t think it helps to dwell on the science too much. Once you get the core facts, it’s better to focus on the political and practical sides of climate action. I suggest starting with my post on The 3 Simplest Things You Can Do To Fight Climate Change. One of them is extremely helpful and only takes 10 minutes. Action time!

Featured image: The greenhouse effect works a lot like an actual greenhouse. (Out.of.Focus / Flickr, Creative Commons).

Reposted from The Climate Lemon

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