Building back better after the pandemic green just economic recovery

do you want to live in a society with

high levels of precarious

unemployment growing levels of

socioeconomic inequality and people

using food banks

but it’s powered by clean green energy

or do you want to live in a society

which has all of those things

you’re somebody like me

who wants both and while certainly the

pandemic has given us an indication of

why we have to learn some of the lessons

now being taught to us in terms of

certainly going beyond carbon as we

build back better

we also need to move beyond capitalism

and in my view beyond

growth the pandemic has cancelled the

future

but that’s okay it was a pretty bad one

anyway

why on earth would we want to go back to

normal

normal was ecocidal normal

was an economic growth system that has

come out of bounds with the planetary

systems that we depend upon the last

time i looked the planet wasn’t growing

yet the human economy whether it’s

capitalist or other is a wholly owned

subsidiary

of the planetary system so how can a

subsystem

the human economy grow beyond the bounds

of the sustainable limits

set by the larger system indeed why

is our economic imaginaries of how the

future can be

thoroughly colonized by capitalism

we can only think in terms of things

like green growth

smart growth circular economy growth

always growth but surely we have to

consider

there’s a threshold beyond which growth

is actually no longer

good for us or the planet

there’s a point beyond which growth as

in organic

materials becomes a form of cancer

cancerous growth why is it indeed

that we can give serious attention to

the ideas of elon musk and colonizing

mars

he’s seen as a visionary as an

entrepreneur with a plan

where people like me who dare to

question capitalism

are viewed as utopian naive

unrealistic or a new one on me painfully

woke when did we seed what is possible

to the parameters of what we currently

have

one would like to think that as we build

back better out of this

pandemic we have to build back

differently

we don’t want to bounce back in some

naive sense of

resilience we want to bounce forward

and my own proposition is that we need

to use the opportunities now

of a crisis being a chance to do things

differently

to put in place the infrastructure not

just for a green

low-carbon economy i’m absolutely

convinced

that the transition to a low-carbon

green economy is now inevitable

but whether it is just or not is not

inevitable and that is a political issue

that we have to contend with why indeed

do we see a lot of discussions

around addressing the planetary

emergency

couched in technological terms

we have serious attention being given to

geo engineering solutions like solar

radiation management

or carbon capture and sequestration

when actually well if i could tell you

we have all the technologies we need

now right here right now

to create a low-carbon economy

it would just require a more equal

distribution

of wealth perhaps a consideration of a

three-day

working week perhaps considering the

democratization

of work and the sphere of production

not easy certainly but these all require

non-technological solutions

so we have to ask ourselves once again

why as we consider

post-pandemic futures do we allow our

economic

imaginaries and the possibilities for

the future

to be constrained by a sense that it has

to be some form

of capitalism capitalism in my own view

is simply biophysically impossible to

sustain

into the future one reason for this

is that for a normal capitalist economy

to remain stable

it needs three percent growth or

thereabouts of gdp

each year that’s a doubling of the

economy

every 25 years or so the reality is

the capitalist economy is like a bicycle

it either goes or grows

or collapses we need to move beyond

this simple system that’s unsustainable

we need to stay within the regenerative

capacities

of the earth and that will require

building

back differently what about greater

focus on collaborative consumption

or socialized consumption like libraries

as opposed to people buying individual

goods and services

greater attention to public

transportation as opposed to private car

automobiles in my own view we need to

seriously consider

the socialization of consumption and

the democratization of production

but these are going to be political

struggles

they will not come about because there’s

an app

for that the reality is as the great

frederick douglass freed

african-american slave

and anti-slavery advocate put it in 1850

power concedes nothing without a

struggle

it never has and it never will

so if we want to build back better and

building back differently

we need this not just signpost where

we’re going

but to see that our future should be one

of posts

post carbon absolutely post growth

because we’ve now passed the stage where

growth is beneficial

to our communities it tells us nothing

about inequality

and certainly post-capitalist because

it’s simply an oxymoron to think

that we can have a growth based

capitalist system

and capitalism is dependent upon annual

increases in growth

and a sustainable world so we need to

build back differently

but we need to build back better

you