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
powered by fossil fuels or perhaps
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