Climate change is fuelling record temperatures and sweeping fires, but the progressive response is lacking.

David Powell, Head of Environment & Green Transition: The newspapers read like something from a dystopian sci-fi film about a world ravaged by climate breakdown. But it’s today, and it’s real.

Heat records are being smashed. Deadly wildfires are sweeping across Greece and far beyond; there are even some in the Arctic Circle — the Arctic, for heaven’s sake. We had our own taste, on Saddleworth Moor. The three hottest months of June ever have all come in the past four years. It’s a season in the sun for climate scientists, who are saying: this is what we expected, get used to it. A new report from Parliament’s green watchdog agrees. This stuff kills people.

We should be freaking out. But we’re not, are we? Not in our guts. Not properly. Not even, really, at all.

It’s easy enough to have pops at the Government’s increasingly Janus-faced cognitive dissonance – with ministers slipping between trying to badge the UK as world leaders on climate change while merrily giving the green light to fracking.

But where’s the UK left, right now, on climate change?

It’s not a question of knowledge. Progressives get it – intellectually speaking. You’d have to be a bit of a doofus not to. Climate change is clearly a problem. A great big, era-defining, ecology-changing, civilisation-disrupting Problem. And it makes logical sense for us as a matter of justice. We know it will make life tougher for people and places where life is already tough, and that those that who do the least to cause the problem are left on the sharp end: more likely to be displaced, or starved, or flooded, or dead.

But brains and hearts are different things. For some on the left, environmental justice remains as important to their DNA as any other type of justice: their heart always has been, and still is, firmly in it. But more generally, some things still feel a bit… lacking.

Things like this:

1. A modern, compelling narrative on why climate change really matters for the left in the year 2018.

An new progressive story on climate change in the UK is needed urgently. One that feels urgent, authentic and contemporary. One about how climate breakdown is intimately connected to the things that we worry about and the values that we hold. One about people, not systems; principles, not lines on graphs. Not a vague aspiration for jobs in clean energy, but one about work, and home, and international solidarity, and justice, and fairness.

It is, after all, fundamentally a story about the same old issues. How do economies work? Who holds power, and who doesn’t want to change? Who owns things and who doesn’t? Who lives? Who dies? Who decides?

2. Big ideas to bring climate action right into the heart of a radical policy platform. 

The fossil fuel age must end. We need to leave most oil, coal and gas undug and unburned. And we need to adapt to the climate change we’re already on the hook for, reshaping how our buildings, towns, cities and landscapes work so that the poorest don’t bear the brunt.

Too much has been left to markets for too long and this has played a huge role in getting us into this mess in the first place. So tinkering won’t do it. We need to see ambitious and responsible climate action as a fundamental purpose of economic policy. Massive changes are needed to the types of investment — in people, places and kit — we unleash. It means actively intervening in what we tax, spend, support, don’t support, and how major establishment institutions like the Treasury understand their role.

We need to see ambitious and responsible climate action as a fundamental purpose of economic policy.

And all of that has to be done in a way that closes the gap between rich and poor, and takes power and ownership out of the hands of polluters. It’s no small challenge: it will take not just big ideas but the verve to sell them as part of a bigger suite of transformative economic reform. NEF’s work on greening the Bank of England, major new taxes on polluters, and frequent flyer levies are just three such proposals.

3. Getting real about the ​‘just transition’.

There is far too much tiptoeing around the unpleasant reality that ending the fossil fuel age means many people will have to change jobs, and not necessarily on a timescale of their choosing. The increasing intensity of climate will ultimately force changes in policy; technology is already weakening the business case for fossil fuels.

There’s a right and a wrong way to transition industries. It mustn’t be a tale of desecration and abandonment, as it was with the coal mines in the 1980s. But it must happen, so let’s do it in a democratic and empowering way. Trade unions have an important leadership role here, as they grapple with how to respond ambitiously to climate change while representing members who have jobs (and often good jobs) in climate unfriendly industries.

Most importantly, those with the most to lose from the transition should be in the driving seat of designing, then demanding, a national plan for the skills, investment and opportunities they need. As a start, progressive politicians could establish a grassroots just transition commission in which those in, for example, oil jobs in Aberdeen or smelting steel in Port Talbot get to initiate a transition plan, working with businesses and local leaders.

NEF will focus on all three of these areas over the coming years, as part of our mission to help build an economy that works for people and the environment. There really are, after all, no jobs on a dead planet.

Photo by arbyreed

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Is this the end of civilisation? We could take a different path

George Monbiot: It’s a good question, but it seems too narrow: “Is western civilisation on the brink of collapse?” the lead article in this week’s New Scientist asks. The answer is, probably. But why just western? Yes, certain western governments are engaged in a frenzy of self-destruction. In an age of phenomenal complexity and interlocking crises, the Trump administration has embarked on a mass de-skilling and simplification of the state. Donald Trump may have sacked his strategist, Steve Bannon, but Bannon’s professed intention, “the deconstruction of the administrative state”, remains the central – perhaps the only – policy.

Defunding departments, disbanding the teams and dismissing the experts they rely on, shutting down research programmes, maligning the civil servants who remain in post, the self-hating state is ripping down the very apparatus of government. At the same time, it is destroying public protections that defend us from disaster.

A series of studies published in the past few months has started to explore the wider impact of pollutants. One, published in the British Medical Journal, suggests that the exposure of unborn children to air pollution in cities is causing “something approaching a public health catastrophe”. Pollution in the womb is now linked to low birth weight, disruption of the baby’s lung and brain development, and a series of debilitating and fatal diseases in later life.

Another report, published in the Lancet, suggests that three times as many deaths are caused by pollution as by Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Pollution, the authors note, now “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”. A collection of articles in the journal PLOS Biology reveals that there is no reliable safety data on most of the 85,000 synthetic chemicals to which we may be exposed. While hundreds of these chemicals “contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested”, and the volume of materials containing them rises every year, we have no idea what the likely impacts may be, either singly or in combination.

As if in response to such findings, the Trump government has systematically destroyed the integrity of the Environmental Protection Agency, ripped up the Clean Power Plan, vitiated environmental standards for motor vehicles, reversed the ban on chlorpyrifos (a pesticide now linked to the impairment of cognitive and behavioural function in children), and rescinded a remarkable list of similar public protections.

In the UK, successive governments have also curtailed their ability to respond to crises. One of David Cameron’s first acts was to shut down the government’s early warning systems: the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Sustainable Development Commission. He did not want to hear what they said. Sack the impartial advisers and replace them with toadies: this has preceded the fall of empires many times before. Now, as we detach ourselves from the European Union, we degrade our capacity to solve the problems that transcend our borders.

But these pathologies are not confined to “the west”. The rise of demagoguery (the pursuit of simplistic solutions to complex problems, accompanied by the dismantling of the protective state) is everywhere apparent. Environmental breakdown is accelerating worldwide. The annihilation of vertebrate populations, insectageddon, the erasure of rainforests, mangroves, soil and aquifers, and the degradation of entire Earth systems such as the atmosphere and oceans proceed at astonishing rates. These interlocking crises will affect everyone, but the poorer nations are hit first and worst.

The forces that threaten to destroy our wellbeing are also the same everywhere: primarily the lobbying power of big business and big money, which perceive the administrative state as an impediment to their immediate interests. Amplified by the persuasive power of campaign finance, covertly funded thinktanks, embedded journalists and tame academics, these forces threaten to overwhelm democracy. If you want to know how they work, read Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money.

Up to a certain point, connectivity increases resilience. For example, if local food supplies fail, regional or global markets allow us to draw on production elsewhere. But beyond a certain level, connectivity and complexity threaten to become unmanageable. The emergent properties of the system, combined with the inability of the human brain to encompass it, could spread crises rather than contain them. We are in danger of pulling each other down. New Scientist should have asked: “Is complex society on the brink of collapse?”

Complex societies have collapsed many times before. It has not always been a bad thing. As James C Scott points out in his fascinating book, Against the Grain, when centralised power began to collapse, through epidemics, crop failure, floods, soil erosion or the self-destructive perversities of government, its corralled subjects would take the chance to flee. In many cases they joined the “barbarians”. This so-called secondary primitivism, Scott notes, “may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot.” The dark ages that inexorably followed the glory and grandeur of the state may, in that era, have been the best times to be alive.

But today there is nowhere to turn. The wild lands and rich ecosystems that once supported hunter gatherers, nomads and the refugees from imploding early states who joined them now scarcely exist. Only a tiny fraction of the current population could survive a return to the barbarian life. (Consider that, according to one estimate, the maximum population of Britain during the Mesolithic, when people survived by hunting and gathering, was 5000). In the nominally democratic era, the complex state is now, for all its flaws, all that stands between us and disaster.

Photo by RDW. Photography

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Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society.

Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average o—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

It’s not only young voters who feel this way.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

Gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line. Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Millennials can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa.  He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, is available now.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Originally published at Fast Company

Lead Photo by Ignotus the Mage

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Combining nine of the blocks proposed by Ildefons Cerdà in the 1859 plan (very different from those realised) they are meant to reduce car traffic in the streets and squares inside the superblock’s perimeter, confining it to the perimetral streets, in order to create a solution for the serious problems deriving from pollution, the near absence of green areas, the minimal space for pedestrians caused by the omnipresence of cars.

The “supermanzanas” (superblocks, literally ‘superapples’) project aims at creating four squares in every superblock converting the inner part of the intersections in areas mostly dedicated to pedestrians. This is a proposal that —if completely fulfilled— will radically change the city.

The central part of the issue is the following: are we facing a change that is going to confirm the elements of the neo-liberal city, limiting to correcting them with the introduction of – essential and very helpful – measures for the reduction of air and acoustic pollution and for the creation of pedestrian areas? Or is it an opportunity to criticise the neo-liberal economy through urbanism, its production structure, its voracity, its unfamiliarity with ethics, its inequality and its destruction of the environment?

The international attention towards the project has been accompanied by the recent —and predictable— anger of a part of the residents of the site of the first superblock in Poble Nou, due to the concentration of traffic. This has remained unchanged in its quantity and quality because of the habits of people that use cars for travelling around the city, in the perimetral streets and due to the absence of areas dedicated to (for) the sacred rite of parking. These criticisms should make us slow down and reflect.

Here we are not going to analyse technical issues, flows of cars, directions, signalling, number of parking areas. On the contrary, we want firstly to focus on the resistance and on the criticism towards the superblocks made by the inhabitants, then we are going to analyse the elements that could turn the “supermanzanas” into a feature for a significant change.

The opposition towards the project can be explained through two elements. The first one, with deep roots, is the cultural educational problem: perhaps the blind rage caused by the offence to the sacred nature of car reveals an underlying problem in the (mis)educational system, whose main prerogative is teaching to accept the “status quo” of the neo-liberal society without asking, without knowing its bases, silencing any search for different horizons?

The still sacred element of our times —the automobile— despite its obvious destructive action towards the city life, is the main issue. This strange God continues to be venerated by the majority of people. Nevertheless, like every God, the automobile limits freedom —even more than the city does— increases air pollution, threatens our peace with its hypnotic noise, threatens our lives with accidents and with its support to the oil industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, to psychological treatments, to insurance companies, to the loans from banking institutions, among other things. It constrains freedom: as it has been known for decades —or as it should be known and taught during the compulsory education— the real speed of an automobile is 6 kilometres per hour.

«The typical American devotes more than 1600 hours per year to its automobile: sitting in it, in motion or stationary, working for paying it, for paying fuel, tyres, tolls, insurance, infringements and duties for federal highways and communal parking. They devote four hours per day in which they use it, look after or work for it […] But if we ask ourselves how these 1600 hours contribute to its circulation, the situation changes. These 1600 hours serve up to make a 10 000 kilometres ride, that is to say 6 kilometres in one hour. It is the same distance that people that live in countries without transport industry can reach . But, while North Americans dedicate to circulation one quarter of their available social time, in non-motorised societies time allocated for that purpose is between 3 and 8 percent of the social time. What distinguishes the circulation in a rich country and in a poor country is not a greater efficiency, but the obligation to consume in high dose energies related to the transport industry.»
Ivan Illich, Energy and equity [1974]

The substitution of the automobile with the bicycle in the city is an urgent need since decades.

The substitution of the automobile with the bicycle in the city is an urgent need since decades. The high energy efficiency of bicycle, its critical presence towards neo-liberal economy, its independence from fossil fuel —i.e. wars and environmental devastation— and from everything related to the automotive industry are fundamental elements for the boost of a radical change in the approach to the problems of our times. The issue of the veneration of the automobile could be solved with real educational action opposing the bombing from mass-medias in support of the automotive industry, insurance companies, etc. —who finance newspapers through advertising and content sponsored by brands— an educational action carried out in the streets, in parks, courts, social centres, truly independent and critical newspapers can help us understand the problems of our society, a process that requires time and effort. The disputed “supermanzana” could represent the beginning of the end of automobiles e in the city if it becomes the catalyst of profound cultural change.

The second element of the protests that we want to highlight is the inadequate feeling of appropriation of the project by the people who live in that area, due to the insufficient participation throughout its genesis and realisation. In order to feel comfortable in a place —public or private— it is necessary for this to be created, modified, lived, penetrated. The feeling of being subjected to the imposition of a project, or the insufficient participation in its creation and fulfillment, will always create direct or indirect opposition. Although there have been moments of conversation with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, apparently these have not been sufficient, in quantity or in quality.

In order to convert “supermanzanas” in an instrument for a deep change, disrupting the structure of the neo-liberal city, schooled and submissive towards those in power, and in order to contribute to the establishment of a city that is human, cooperative, supportive, equal and respectful towards the delicate natural equilibrium, we have to take into account a very important element: urban agriculture. We are not talking about organising urban gardens to enhance the image of the city, which would immediately become a sustainable model for other cities; we are not talking about gardens so that “elderly people” —considered to be a problem when it comes to production, instead of being respected and considered repositories of wisdom and memory— keep themselves busy after a life of subordinate employment. We are even less talking of creating a new empty and commodified fashion, sap of the neo-liberal economy which consumes everything. We are saying exactly the opposite.

Urban agriculture can catalyse a slow and deep transformation of the city overall

Urban agriculture can catalyse a slow and deep transformation of the city overall, on different grounds, from food sovereignty and environmental protection to the economy, from a proper education to the win-back of personal autonomy and mutual peer support, at one condition: that this would be proposed, organised, lived, and actively shared among the people who live the city.

Barcelona has 1076 hectares of parks and public gardens (without counting the Collserola), which means an average of 6,64 m² of green areas per inhabitant, much less than what other cities can offer. Prague, for example, has 2650 hectares of urban parks – without counting natural parks and woods – meaning an average of 21.34 m² per inhabitant). In the Eixample district numbers are noticeably lower: 1.85 m² per inhabitant, due to —among other factors— the distortion and denaturalisation —in its literal meaning— of the Plan Cerdà during its implementation —speculation, certainly, was its main cause. The lack of green areas in the Eixample district is serious and requires urgent and energetic action so that people can live in a fair and healthy way.

In a city like Barcelona, in which —despite the many and laudable initiatives adopted by the city council to address the problems of the city— the number of people living in serious difficulties is high, the growing of food in the city would, on the one hand, carry a high symbolic value and be an opportunity to overcome the passive acceptance of a devastating system; on the other hand, it would bring an incredible number of positive effects on the short term and would be an impulse for change on the long term.

Among others:

• It would offer free food to people – in the program of Barcelona en Comú the intention of “ensuring the right to basic feeding” is outlined.
• It would make the quality of air and microclimate better. The presence of thousands of fruit-bearing trees would clear the air —reducing the levels of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, particular matter PM10— and would bring important benefits for health, it would attenuate noise, provide areas of shade, enrich wildlife in the urban perimeter, it would reduce the levels of carbon dioxide contributing to the fight against climate change and would naturally regulate the temperature on the microclimate level, additionally bringing beauty in each season.
• It would push for cooperation, social relations, mutual support and peer dialogue in a society in which competition rules on every level, from the cradle to the grave —in school, work, relationships, politics, university, social activities, sport, etc. Using the words of Richard Sennet: “a city obliging people to tell each other what they think and realising from this form a condition of mutual compatibility.”
• It would enhance personal relationships through nature, its understanding, the culture of biodiversity as opposed to the logic of monoculture imposed by corporations and to the conquering and devastation of nature for profit-making.
• Together with the substitution of the car by the bicycle and the commitment to degrowth, urban agriculture would contribute to ease the energy problem, by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels to transport food between regions and countries —or even continents— as well as it would diminish traffic in the city due to the transportation of food.
• It would boost the vegetarian and vegan philosophy beyond fashion and commodification to reflect on the relationships between human beings and animals and the defense of the rights of the latter —who are not machines in the service of humanity, despite what Descartes thought; to reflect also on the ethical and environmental problems, contributing to the fight against climate change —being the production of meat and milk one of the main causes of global warming and of the processes of destruction of rainforests for the production of animal feed.
• It would contribute to boosting education in and through the city, outside of schools, transforming the city in a learning place. The observation of the process of food growing, from seed —defending biodiversity, using traditional patent-free local seeds, recovering traditional wisdom on harvesting— would change the perverse idea of food as a good coming from a conveyor, packed by unknown distant hands (often) with no rights, in a plastic bag with a barcode, sold by some speculator who harvests the fruits of the work of some other person. The city programme “Huertos escolares” (‘School gardens’), no doubts useful and positive, would be no longer necessary as it would have become part of the city life, without recourse to school. It is necessary to give to the city its educational role. The organisation of spaces for urban agriculture in the Eixample district would be a catalyst for the de-schooling of the city, for the collapse of a whole system of values that the so-called compulsory education teaches —dressed up as freedom of choice— through the acceptance of the neo-liberal society as it is.
• It would spread organic cultivation methods, the knowledge of the ecosystem, the understanding of the delicate natural balances, a new sensitivity towards life, nowadays unknown.

The city council would have the only role of presenting, through an honest, deep and detailed information the problems, not only on the urban level, but also on a larger scale, to discuss, propose and coordinate the actions of people in a real participatory democracy.

In the context of a weakening of democracy, that we have been living over the past decades —we are de facto living in an oligarchy— the role of urbanism is to contribute to breaking the ties between the city and the markets and to act in order to destabilise the current oppressive system towards the weakest by offering individual and collective tools to realise a participatory democracy, without excluding anyone. The only work that the city council would need to put in place, with a high symbolic value, would be to draw a circle in the middle of each crossroad in the Eixample district and remove the asphalt layer. Before an empty space, in the middle of each crossroad, a place in which market and power are not present, a space that nobody can sell, buy, exploit, rent or use as a parking, around this space we should think how to organise the city all together, without exclusions. It would mean taking away the asphalt layer , that for decades kept us apart from the land, waterproofing the entire city, waterproofing our sensitivity, and putting at the centre a source of public free quality water, a common good outside of the market, and around the source to grow vegetables and fruits for those who need them, apples that feed without calculating. The apple is here, hanging on a tree, a possibility to change into a new era. An apple that is a fruit of the social economy, with no barcode, each apple with a different taste. The apple, fruit of the land, redeemer of the metropolis, feeds people regardless of their passports and bank accounts. This would be the starting point to overcome the commodification of life and to go back to having a relationship with these natural elements in the urban context of the XXI century. Food and beauty for everyone, with no mediation, to take on a substantial slow and deep change.

It is necessary to stop any relationship between the city and the banks

In the symbolic space where the power cannot enter —in the website of the city one can read that the urban gardens of the city are organised by the city council in collaboration with the Fundació La Caixa, a foundation managed by one of the best-known Spanish banks. Having seen the collusion between banks and political powers, it is necessary to stop any relationship between the city and the banks. Until the “cooperation with the La Caixa Foundation” is on, whatever change will automatically convert itself into a simulacrum that will not really impact the organisation of the city— in this space for the democratic life, the act of taking away the asphalt and presenting soil and water as a common good represents another possibility for a radically different city, and gives both a symbolic meaning and crucial practical effect.

Far from being a step backwards —as if history was a linear process and what comes after is unquestionably called progress— introducing urban agriculture and putting at its centre water as a common good, means considering the past as a tool to change the present. From the errors and horrors of the vast majority of urban planning in the XX century that forgot life, we should quickly learn how to change the fundamentals of the way to live the city, facing economic, feeding, climate, social, environmental, cultural, aesthetic problems in the context of participatory democracy among peers based on social and environmental justice, non-commodified health, food production outside corporations, commons, popular culture, memory, independent thinking, education as a libertarian process of liberation.

The shopping mall Illa Diagonal, designed by Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Solà-Morales in 1993, is located in the Eixample district. The first stone that was placed —as it is said on the website of the mall— contains an insurance policy and a certificate of deposit. The symbols of our era. Real progress, a slow and deep change, would start by taking away the asphalt layer, going back to the soil and substituting, as symbolic elements of a new era, the insurance policy and the certificate of deposit with a seeds and a source of public water.

This substitution of elements would benefit the majority of people, except speculators. As Orwell said, “Journalism consists of printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” In the context of the neo-liberal city one can say: “Urbanism consists in doing together things someone does not want you to do: everything else is speculation.”

Massimo Paolini is an architecture theorist and author of the Blog Perspectivas anómalas around the issues of relationships between city, architecture, ideas (and freedom). He contributes to journals in the field of critical thinking and he is advisor of Art in Translation | University of Edinburgh for what concerns arts and architecture.

Photo by Ibán

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But further analysis has revealed this isn’t the only reason Titanic sank. It turned out the ship’s hull plates were brittle due to high sulfur content in the steel, especially at cold temperatures (the water was near freezing at the time of the wreck).

As the construction itself is affected and becoming more and more brittle from entropy, reinforced by sulfur in the case of Titanic, it doesn’t help much to change the procedures or add more lifeboats. No, an other ship needs to be constructed. Or maybe several smaller ships?

The following is extracted from Tverberg’s essay “Our economic growth system is reaching limits in a strange way“:

1. Rising debt is an issue because fossil fuels give us things that would never have been possible, in the absence of fossil fuels. For example, thanks to fossil fuels, farmers can have such things as metal plows instead of wooden ones and barbed wire to separate their property from the property of others. Fossil fuels provide many more advanced capabilities as well, including tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, GPS systems to guide tractors, trucks to take food to market, modern roads, and refrigeration.

The benefits of fossil fuels are immense, but can only be experienced once fossil fuels are in use. Because of this, we have adapted our debt system to be a much greater part of the economy than it ever needed to be, prior to the use of fossil fuels. As the cost of fossil fuel extraction rises, ever more debt is required to place these fossil fuels in use. The Bank for International Settlements tells us that worldwide, between 2006 and 2014, the amount of oil and gas company bonds outstanding increased by an average of 15% per year, while syndicated bank loans to oil and gas companies increased by an average of 13% per year. Taken together, about $3 trillion of these types of loans to the oil and gas companies were outstanding at the end of 2014.

As the cost of fossil fuels rises, the cost of everything made using fossil fuels tends to rise as well. Cars, trucks, and homes become more expensive to build, especially if they are intended to be energy efficient. The cost of capital goods purchased by businesses rises as well, since these too are made with fossil fuels. Needless to say, the amount of debt to purchase all of these goods rises as well. Part of the reason for the increased debt is simply because it becomes more difficult for businesses and individuals to purchase needed goods out of cash flow.

As long as fossil fuel prices are rising (not just the cost of extraction), this rising debt doesn’t look like a huge problem. The rising fossil fuel prices push the general inflation rate higher. But once prices stop rising, and in fact start falling, the amount of debt outstanding suddenly seems much more onerous.

2. Rising pollution from fossil fuels is another issue as we use an increasing amount of fossil fuels. If only a tiny amount of fossil fuels is used, pollution tends not to be much of an issue. Air can remain safe for breathing and water can remain safe for drinking. Increasing CO2 pollution is not a significant issue.

Once we start using increasing amounts, pollution becomes a greater issue. Partly this is the case because natural sinks reach their saturation point. Another is the changing nature of technology as we move to more advanced techniques. Techniques such as deep sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and arctic drilling have pollution risks that less advanced techniques did not have.

3. A more complex economy is a less obvious co-product of the increasing use of fossil fuels. In a very simple economy, there is little need for big government and big business. If there are businesses, they can be run by a small number of individuals, with little investment in capital goods. A king, together with a handful of appointees, can operate the government if it does not provide much in the way of services such as paved roads, armies, and schools. International trade is not a huge necessity because workers can provide nearly all necessary goods and services with local materials.

The use of increasing amounts of fossil fuels changes the situation materially. Fossil fuels are what allow us to have metals in quantity–without fossil fuels, we need to cut down forests, use the trees to make charcoal, and use the charcoal to make small quantities of metals.

Once fossil fuels are available in quantity, they allow the economy to make modern capital goods, such as machines, oil drilling equipment, hydraulic dump trucks, farming equipment, and airplanes. Businesses need to be much larger to produce and own such equipment. International trade becomes much more important, because a much broader array of materials is needed to make and operate these devices. Education becomes ever more important, as devices become increasingly complex. Governments become larger, to deal with the additional services they now need to provide.

Increasing complexity has a downside. If an increasing share of the output of the economy is funneled into management pay, expenditures for capital goods, and other expenditures associated with an increasingly complex economy (including higher taxes, and more dividend and interest payments), less of the output of the economy is available for “ordinary” laborers–including those without advanced training or supervisory responsibilities.

As a result, pay for these workers is likely to fall relative to the rising cost of living. Some would-be workers may drop out of the labor force, because the benefits of working are too low compared to other costs, such as childcare and transportation costs. Ultimately, the low wages of these workers can be expected to start causing problems for the economic system as a whole, because these workers can no longer afford the output of the system. These workers reduce their purchases of houses and cars, both of which are produced using fossil fuels and other commodities.

Ultimately, the prices of commodities fall below their cost of production. This happens because there are so many of these ordinary laborers, and the lack of good wages for these workers tends to slow the “demand” side of the economic growth loop. This is the problem that we are now experiencing.

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