At first glance, these two concepts may seem almost identical, one word is singular, the other plural. Two words with basically the same meaning. Or so I thought. Until I read the excellent book “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here” by scientist Hope Jahren.

Some years ago, Jahren took the opposite journey to myself: she moved from the US to Norway; I left Norway for the US in the mid-1980s. For decades, we have both been concerned about the environment and the fate of the planet’s more than seven billion humans.

In her highly readable book, Jahren gives a dramatic window seat to the link between human consumption habits and our imperiled earth, especially the looming dangers of climate change.

In a conversational narrative, she weaves scientific observation and studies with personal experiences growing up in Iowa, the American heartland of large corn fields and small, conservative towns. She makes a compelling case for the need to solve climate change through global system change. One person at-a-time.

In page after page, Jahren summarizes the evolution of our technological advances—from electric power to industrial farming, from automobiles to international air travel—the all-important inventions that have helped us but also released dangerous greenhouse gases into the planet’s fragile atmosphere.

The glorious story of more is the story of increased life expectancy, a tripling in cereal and meat production since 1969, the year Jahren was born. But it is also the story of capitalist greed and all its dark shadow sides: global fossil fuel use has almost tripled; one trillion tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the sky from the burning of these non-renewable energy sources; more than half of all amphibian, bird and butterfly species has declined in population; and the production of plastic has increased tenfold.

So, what can we do? There is a lot one human being can do to create system change. The 17-year old climate strike activist Greta Thunberg has shown us that. Hence, Jahren concludes her book by suggesting five actions we each can take:

Examine our values
Gather information
Walk our talk
Shop for change
Advocate for change

These suggestions are all well and good. If each one of us took these steps to heart; we could make a big difference. But in reality, not enough of us will ever make those individual changes. And that is the problem with individual system change. With singular system change. It’s simply not enough to make a difference.

“We live in a time of overlapping crises and we need to connect the dots, because we don’t have time to solve each crisis sequentially. We need a movement that addresses all of them.” ~ Naomi Klein

Authors like Jahren and many environmental organizations have encouraged individuals to bring a cloth shopping bag to the supermarket for decades without significantly reducing the plastic trash in the oceans or on land.

Dramatic policy changes are needed for that. Today, plastic trash is everywhere; even as microfibers in the air and in our lungs. Thus, we simply need to ban plastic bags altogether. We need to invent and produce biodegradable bags. Shops must no longer be allowed to sell stuff wrapped in petrochemical garbage.

But to simply reduce plastics from the environment, that will require multiple changes. It will require cultural, scientific, political and economic systems change. Multilayered systems change. That is the kind of insight lacking in Jahren’s otherwise excellent book. And that is why we have opted to use the concept of systems change rather than singular system change.

Do We Want System Change or Systems Change?

Thus, we agree with author Naomi Klein: “We live in a time of overlapping crises,” she writes, “and we need to connect the dots, because we don’t have time to solve each crisis sequentially. We need a movement that addresses all of them.” Indeed, we do. That is why we started Systems Change Alliance.

What we need now is a movement advocating for integrated change, not simply a movement asking people to alter their behavior, to create superficial system change. That time has long gone. It’s time for a movement of people demanding deep systems change.

That’s the kind of movement Systems Change Alliance aspires to be.
Want to join us?

Photo by Bluehouse Skis

Do We Want System Change or Systems Change?

Report by the Systems Change Alliance Team

At COP29 in Azerbaijan, Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, emphasized to the New Hour at Democracy Now that climate finance remains a critical issue, with developing countries needing an estimated $5 trillion annually to address climate challenges. Singh stressed that without substantial financial commitments from wealthy nations, progress on climate action will be limited.

The negotiations for a new climate finance goal to replace the previous $100 billion target have been slow and unproductive. After 14 meetings, rich countries have yet to commit to a specific number.

While COP28 in Dubai made historic progress by including language on transitioning away from fossil fuels, implementation remains challenging. Developed countries, such as the United States and Norway, are expanding fossil fuel production at home while pushing for discussions about carbon reductions abroad.

Inadequate Financial Support for Developing Countries

Another serious problem, according to Singh, is that much of the current climate finance comes in the form of loans rather than grants, exacerbating debt issues for developing countries. Singh argued that at least $600 billion annually should be provided as grants, especially for adaptation and loss and damage.

The COP29 climate summit is facing criticism over its proposed financial commitments, which many view as inadequate. The presidency has set a target of $1.3 trillion in climate finance by 2035, but only requires wealthier nations to contribute $250 billion annually to poorer countries, who are disproportionately affected by climate change despite contributing the least to the problem. This proposal has been labeled an “absolute embarrassment” by Oil Change International, likening it to giving control of a fire truck to an arsonist.

Greenhouse Emissions and Greenwashing

Singh emphasized the United States' responsibility to provide climate finance, noting that the U.S. is historically responsible for about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the EU is responsible for another 25%.

Regarding local environmental issues, Singh drew parallels between Delhi's severe air pollution crisis and the broader need to transition away from fossil fuel-based development models globally. The problem in developing countries is that they are using the same failed economic growth model as in the rich nations. Hence, widespread systems change is needed.

As discussions continue past the summit's official end date, the future of international climate finance remains uncertain, with strong calls for more substantial commitments from developed nations to support vulnerable countries in their climate adaptation efforts.

The Worst Climate Summit So Far?

Some experts consider COP29 the worst climate summit in recent memory for several reasons. One is delayed action. The proposed financial target is set for 2035, which is seen as a delay tactic, especially considering that previous commitments for 2020 were not met. Another is reduction in real terms. When accounting for inflation, the proposed $250 billion actually represents a 30% reduction from the previous $100 billion commitment made 15 years ago.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, described this COP as potentially the worst in recent memory, emphasizing that developing countries have long sought substantial financial support to combat climate change impacts. He criticized the presidency for failing to facilitate meaningful negotiations and for allowing wealthier nations to evade their financial responsibilities.

Claudio Angelo from Brazil's Climate Observatory echoed these sentiments, stating that the current draft is unacceptable and may lead to a deadlock if not revised. He noted that while Brazil's President Lula is advocating for fossil fuel expansion domestically, Brazilian diplomats are engaging constructively in negotiations.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, summarized the situation by stating that the current proposal is "a slap in the face of developing countries" and does not meet the urgent needs of climate action.

COP29: Activists From Developing Countries are Demanding Economic Systems Change

Here, where I live, in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, the impending arrival of Hurricane Helene transformed the serene landscape of Asheville and surrounding areas into a battleground against nature’s fury. As heavy rains poured down, even days before the hurricane arrived, rivers swelled to dangerous levels. Then, as the catastrophic winds from Helene downed power lines, crashed trees into houses, and increased the downpour to disastrous flood levels, residents braced for the worst.

In the aftermath, we are all grappling with the realities of a climate that have made such extreme weather events increasingly common. This personal account delves into the chaos and uncertainty brought by Helene, offering reflections on resilience, community service, and human connection in a region caught in the throes of a climate disaster.

Wednesday, September 25

Heavy rain begins to fall in the Asheville/Marshall area of North Carolina, where I have lived for 17 years. A cold front, slowed by the high mountains, has brought a flood of precipitation ahead of Hurricane Helene's arrival.

The city of Asheville, situated along the French Broad River, is known for its many yoga studios, artists, and exotic restaurants. The small town of Marshall (population 796), in Madison County, is also located along the river. It is known for its Mermaid Festival, surrounding organic farms, Appalachian music, and the Civil War massacre in Shelton Laurel in1863.

I stock up on extra candles, a new flashlight, oil for the old-fashioned oil lamps, extra dry food, and fill up about 100 liters of drinking water in anticipation of life without electricity. At midnight, Asheville Airport reports over 4 inches (10 cm) of rain. I imagine that creeks and rivers have already reached record-high flood levels and sleep only a few hours at a time. We had flooding on an island in the middle of the river in 2021, but I know it has never rained so much in such a short time before. I anticipate the worst.

Thursday, September 26

Climate hurricane Helene rages up the mountains from the unusually warm waters off the Florida coast. Precipitation and winds intensify. The neighboring county of Yancey experiences over 8.5 inches (22 cm) of rainfall in just over a day. The rivers, especially the French Broad River, swell dangerously with water from rushing creeks and smaller rivers.

I talk on the phone with my 89-year-old mother in Norway. But suddenly we lose contact. A few minutes later, I go out on the porch and see that a large pine tree has fallen over the power lines. Without electricity, there's no Wi-Fi and no water from the well for drinking, cooking, showering, or flushing the toilet.

In the evening, after not being able to call or write to my wife on a study trip in India, I read the classic travel book To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron by the light of two candles. As I go to sleep, I worry about my mother worrying about me.

Friday, September 27

Helene crashes through the forest around the house with heavy rainfall and strong winds. In the afternoon, I nervously drive down to the French Broad River and see rooftops, car parts, and plastic pipes violently streaming by.

A few days later, I read that Asheville Regional Airport lost communication after recording 13.8 inches (35 cm) of rain in less than 72 hours. That resulted in major flooding in the lowest parts of Asheville and many surrounding villages.

I imagine a grotesque sight: The Swannanoa River flooding through the windows of Andaaz, my favorite Indian restaurant. The water is a mixed soup of mud, plastic bottles, and pieces of wood. I envision Marshall completely underwater, the frozen food section in Madison Natural Food store submerged in chocolate-colored water and industrial sludge.

I wake up after only an hour's sleep and listen to the strong wind and heavy rain drumming on the roof. I sleep restlessly for the rest of the night. Branches occasionally falling onto the roof. What if one of the large oak trees outside will come smashing through the bedroom ceiling?

Saturday, September 28

In the morning, the wind has calmed down somewhat. I make a primitive oven from flat stones and cook breakfast with pancakes and a compote of berries over the fire. The floodwater in the French Broad River has begun to recede, and the extent of the destruction becomes clearer.

From a friend, I hear that the muddy water reached the roofs of many buildings in downtown Marshall. Some wooden houses were smashed to pieces by the strong currents. I drive around the neighborhood and see that several metal structures from an asphalt company have been swept into the river along with a wooden house. Further downstream, a whole row of houses and trailers have been crushed or swept away by the violent river. Some people chose not to evacuate and disappeared downstream along with their houses. One woman was later found in the neighboring state of Tennessee.

In the afternoon, electricity and running water return to Prama Institute, the retreat center where I work, but not to my home or my neighbors'. (It would take nearly two weeks before power was restored.) Our neighborhood of about 30 adults and children gathers for a warm lunch, the first in several days. I can finally check email and occasionally make phone calls. I receive an email from my Norwegian friend Trond Øverland: "You must be experiencing both tragedy and great solidarity in your area right now." "Good summary of the situation," I write back.

Sunday, September 29

The radio reports that the death toll has risen to 30, but 600 are still missing. A neighbor tells me that our friend Tom has lost his house in Chimney Rock, a place known from scenes in the movie The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis. Like many of the other houses, it was swept into Lake Lure.

Over 70 roads are destroyed, and Asheville is only accessible by car from South Carolina. The damage to houses and roads is, according to a politician, "post-apocalyptic." Thousands of anxious, hungry, and thirsty people are without electricity, water, and mobile coverage. On the radio, I hear that tap water may not be available for several weeks, perhaps months in some areas.

I take my first shower in several days, and I feel the guilty pleasure of privilege. As tragic as it is everywhere around us, we are among the lucky ones. We, up here in the now quiet, sunny forest.

Monday, September 30

Governor Roy Cooper inspects the damage from the air and on the ground, calling it "unlike anything ever seen in western North Carolina." The government organization FEMA begins registering residents for assistance as the long rebuilding process starts.

Anthony, a friend from Shelton Laurel, stops by with his truck. Despite a large oak crushing the kitchen in his new house, and his parents' home in the mountain town of Hot Springs now floating down the French Broad River, he is willing to help. He knows of a place in Tennessee where we can buy food and gas.

Later that day, I try my luck locally. But the lines are long at Ingles supermarket, and you need cash. With no open banks, I drive home disappointed. In the afternoon, some neighbors go to Marshall with shovels and rubber boots. They shovel half-meter thick mud out of Madison Natural Food store and Zadie’s restaurant.

Tuesday, October 1

Anthony finally returns from Tennessee with his truck full of vegetables and fruit. We have plenty of rice and beans stored, so we start cooking and serving hot meals to people in need outside our neighborhood.

In the afternoon, I check the propane tank for the kitchen stove; it's only 35 percent full. With the amount of food, we're now cooking, this will only last just under a week. Then we learn that Southern State Gas Company, where we get our propane from, is closed due to flood damage.

We are tired from all the cooking, serving, and the thick mud. We are filled with tragic and despondent feelings from all the destruction. We wonder if we can handle such physical and mental pressure for another day. But what else can we do? We must just keep on keeping on.

Wednesday, October 2

We cook hot food at the retreat center and serve 150 people in an apartment block in Asheville. They are mostly low-income retirees and partially disabled. They are victims of an unevenly distributed economic system and a failed health care system. Now they are also climate victims.

I read the following on CNN’s website: “Asheville was touted as a climate haven, a place to escape the worst ravages of extreme weather. But Hurricane Helene’s deadly path of destruction reveals this North Carolina city, like any in America, was never safe — it’s just that memories are short, and the reach of the climate crisis is consistently underestimated.”

Rich or poor, we are all fast becoming climate victims.

Thursday, October 3

I listen to a NASA climate scientist, prerecorded from a few days ago and speaking on his own behalf on the news program Democracy Now. He says that none of the news reports have mentioned the connection between Helene and climate change. Well, that's because they've been too busy reporting on the destruction and human suffering. And rightly so.

But today I read the following on Salon.com: "The destruction after Hurricane Helene in Asheville confirms that we cannot hide from climate change. The city in North Carolina was meant to be a climate refuge."

That's true. Since the mid-1990s, hippies, artists, environmentalists, organic farmers, musicians, and yogis have arrived in the area to find Shangri-La. I was one of them. Over the last ten years, this liberal, progressive, and colorful cultural area was discovered by the more well-to-do from New York and California.

Now the area has become too expensive to live in for many. The restaurant, Airbnb, hotel, and tourism industry dominate the economy. Some talk about wanting to escape to another haven. But as we have painfully experienced in recent days, there are certain problems we cannot escape from. And certainly not from the effects of climate change.

Friday, October 4

Some last thoughts. You may still wonder why our area was so hard hit by what is termed Hurricane Helene. Because we were not just hit with Ms. Helene; we were hit by two weather systems. We had already had days with heavy rain before Helene hit us.

A “perfect storm” of circumstances led to this catastrophe. The ground was already waterlogged before Helene arrived. Thus, two storm system stalled over the area, unleashing an extraordinary combination of hurricane winds and rain in a relatively small geographic region.

Then the mountainous terrain funneled this massive volume of water into the valleys below. This combination of pre-existing saturation, extreme rainfall, challenging topography, and extreme winds toppling trees and powerlines created the “ideal” conditions for this devastating disaster.

But why were we not better prepared: you don't prepare for hurricanes in the mountains any more than you prepare for snowstorms in Miami. But that should not be an excuse for not preparing better, for not becoming less dependent on the electrical grid, for example.

During the climate change era—with severe droughts there and rainstorms over here—erratic and extreme weather patterns have become the new normal. According to climate scientists, never-before-seen weather patterns, or extreme ones experienced once every 100 years or so, may now take place every 10-20 years. Or even more frequently.

So, what can we do to combat climate change? Business as usual offer quick fix solutions through schemes such as carbon capture. But there are no quick fixes. From a larger systems perspective, we need to rapidly move away from economies designed like extractive machines focused on maximum profit and production. Instead, we need economies emerging from and supporting the ecosystems of people, nature, and cultures.

We need political systems supporting regenerative and cooperative communities and regions. While recognizing that humans have basic needs to be met, we must align our economies with nature's processes to support dynamic balance and biodiversity.

In our own, small systems community, we have learned that we should have installed that solar well pump we talked about long ago. It would have saved us from going without water for over a week. It has now been ordered, and it will be installed soon.

We also need more solar generators in our homes to produce electricity for fridges and computers. While some of us already have whole-house solar power, we need to expand that capacity as well.

In this time of crisis, we discovered our capacity to rise together, transforming challenges into opportunities for connection and service. As the storms of the outside world intensified, we turned inward, nurturing our resilience through daily meditation and yoga. These practices became our anchors, helping us avoid the pitfalls of burnout and despair while serving the community at large.

Change on a systemic level requires a holistic approach, one that embraces transformation both large and small, collective and individual. It is about fostering well-being not just for small, exclusive groups, but for the entire community, weaving individual growth into the fabric of collective change and resilience.

Roar Bjonnes is the cofounder of Systems Change Alliance. He lives with his wife and dog Juno in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.

Appalachian Apocalypse: Reflections on a Climate Catastrophe

As the climate crisis intensifies and global inequality deepens, thinkers and activists are increasingly calling for alternatives to capitalism. Three perspectives offering compelling visions for a post-capitalist world are the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout), Jason Hickel's degrowth eco-socialism, and Nick Estes' Indigenous resistance framework. While coming from different traditions, these approaches share striking similarities in their critiques of capitalism while proposing a more just and sustainable future.

Prout: A Vison for Economic Democracy and Spiritual Values

Developed by Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar, The Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout) offers a comprehensive model for a post-capitalist society rooted in spiritual values. Key elements of Prout include:

Economic democracy through localization and cooperatives
Guaranteeing basic necessities for all through full employment
Balancing individual and collective interests
Limits on wealth accumulation
Sustainable resource management
Progress is about fostering cultural and spiritual values

Prout envisions a cooperative economic system that transcends both capitalism and communism. It aims to provide meaningful work, meet everyone's basic needs, and foster both material and spiritual development.

Prout offers a restructuring of the economy into three structures—government control of key industries such as infrastructure for roads and energy, certain aspects of healthcare and education, corporations turned into worker-owned coops, while private enterprises will be kept small-scale and serving local needs.

This elegant reorganization of the economy offers a postcapitalist vison beyond the extreme wealth accumulation and environmental destruction by corporate capitalism and the economic ineffectiveness and rigidity of collectivist state control as under communism.

Degrowth: Reimagining Prosperity Without Growth

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel is a leading proponent of degrowth - intentionally scaling down resource and energy use in wealthy nations while improving human wellbeing. Hickel contends that his de-growth policies can lift the world out of poverty while staying within planetary boundaries. Several key degrowth policies align closely with Prout's vision:

Shortening the work week
Providing universal basic services
Redistributing income and wealth
Limiting energy demands of elites and corporations

Like Prout, degrowth seeks to create an economy focused on human flourishing rather than endless GDP growth. Hickel argues this approach can unite both the environmental and labor movement in creating sweeping global change.

Indigenous Resistance: Defending Land and Life

Indigenous scholar and activist Nick Estes situates environmental struggles within a long history of resistance to colonialism and capitalism. He emphasizes Indigenous values and practices as alternatives to capitalist exploitation of nature and people.

Estes highlights concepts like Mni Wiconi ("water is life") that reflect a fundamentally different relationship to land and resources than capitalism allows. This resonates with Prout's spiritual foundation and degrowth's critique of “extractivism”.

Converging Visions for a Post-Capitalist World

While coming from different traditions and having different priorities, Prout, degrowth, and Indigenous resistance frameworks share key themes in their visions for transcending capitalism:

1. Prioritizing human and ecological wellbeing over profit and growth

2. Decentralizing economic power and fostering local self-reliance

3. Guaranteeing basic needs and services for all

4. Limiting wealth concentration and inequality

5. Reimagining work, leisure, and the meaning of prosperity

6. Cultivating spiritual and ethical values beyond materialism

7. Harmonizing human activity with ecological limits

All three approaches see capitalism as fundamentally unsustainable and call for systemic change. They reject the notion that markets, and technology alone can solve our economic, ecological, and social crises.

Building Bridges Between Traditions

A unique synthesis could bring these different anti-capitalist currents together:

Like degrowth, Prout provides concrete economic policies and structures for a post-capitalist society.
Like Indigenous frameworks, Prout is grounded in spiritual values and a holistic worldview.
Prout's cooperative model could help actualize the kind of democratic, community-controlled economies both degrowth and Indigenous activists envision.

Prout's concept of "cosmic inheritance" - that the earth's resources belong to all - aligns closely with Indigenous views and degrowth's critique of extractivism. Its emphasis on economic democracy resonates with calls for local control and self-determination.

A Path Forward: Unity in Diversity

Realizing these post-capitalist visions will require bridging divides between different groups and movements. As Estes writes, "we are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of earth from capital. For the earth to live, capitalism must die."

This provocative statement encapsulates the shared conviction that incremental reforms are insufficient. We need a fundamental reimagining of our economic system and relationship to nature. By combining Prout's cooperative model, degrowth economics, and Indigenous wisdom, we may yet forge a path to a more just, sustainable, and fulfilling post-capitalist world.

The task ahead is immense, but these converging visions offer hope and direction for the vital work of building a life-affirming alternative to capitalism's inhumane and nature-destructive logic. As climate chaos accelerates, the need for such radical transformation has never been more urgent.

Roar Bjonnes is the cofounder of Systems Change Alliance and the author of Growing a New Economy.

Resources:

For more on Jason Hickel and degrowth:

jasonhickel.org

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x

For more on Nick Estes and indigenous activism:

About

https://rights.culturalsurvival.org

For more on the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout):

prout.info

Post-Capitalist Compatibility: Degrowth, Indigenous Wisdom, and Prout

An odd noise has settled upon the sovereign world, bringing many restless evenings. The droning in our homes is not that of appliances, TV’s or chatbots. It’s more like the rumble of tectonic plates letting us know that human actions have disrupted the very behavior of this planet. Or maybe the call of ancestors mourning the loss of Earth’s biomass and energy. And part of this sound is surely the mortal cry that stems from our misunderstanding of the difference between price and value.

According to the IMF, world production declined $1 trillion in 2022, while the price of food and energy rose 7.3% in wealthier and 9.9% in poorer countries. Inflation, combined with crippling interest rates, has sharply increased the rates of joblessness and inequality, particularly in the Global South. A shortage of currency is causing cuts in public spending in countries representing half a billion people.

More than 50% of the world’s low-income economies, staggering under the high cost of debt, are at risk of default. Central banks are uncertain about hiking interest rates further and triggering recession, while their favored tool of inflation-targeting has not been reliable for many years. Debt restructuring by the G20 has also been delayed, largely through its reluctance to acknowledge that the great wave of globalization has ebbed and the geopolitical terrain is bifurcating.

It’s no secret that dozens of countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, which endured major defaults on foreign loans during the 1970s-90s, are now seeking independence from the non-convertibility of their currencies. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and a hundred other states known as BRICS+, are testing the West by working around its sanctions on Russia and teasing the possibility of forming their own monetary system.

This call for a new world order is taking place against the backdrop of global warming, land, water and air pollution, shrinking habitats, plunging biodiversity, soil degradation, species extinction and resource overconsumption. Is the clamor we’re hearing the lament of a planet failing to make the leap from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy and genuine incentives for sustainable equity?

Had the world paid attention fifty years ago, there may have been time to use fossil fuels to build a global infrastructure of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and other zero-carbon equipment, while edging away from dependence on fossil fuels. But the oil industry, governments and banks discouraged the idea of investing in the renewable energy industry and spurring it to produce enough power to grow and regenerate itself.

Now that the market can no longer rely on cheap and abundant supplies of fossil fuel, nations face the predicament of reducing their use of dirty energy while increasing clean energy production at the same time. Bottom line: either we get our signals straight or we default on the biophysical value of life.

It has long been known that the price of a commodity on an economic balance sheet does not express its intrinsic value as a resource. A century ago, Irving Fisher proposed an accounting system to connect economics with nature, and many technicians since the 1970s have been investigating such possibilities.

In January, three US agencies — the Office of Science and Technology, Office of Management and Budget, and Department of Commerce — announced a program for quantifying the value of ‘natural capital’. Their proposal, National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions, aims to replace the indicator of Gross Domestic Product by 2036 with a new standard arising from the interrelation of ecology and economy.

Perhaps a conflict-ridden world is still avoidable if the complex measures of nature can be orchestrated to end the noise within the economic system. As we hold our breath and dream, the growing crescendo for monetary de-dollarization and the drumbeat of war from high-powered militaries are scattering the world’s supply chains and compelling nations to increase their use of rapidly declining fossil fuels.

Then in the foreground appears a chorus of the Anthropocene, ancestors and analysts imploring: “How will natural capital end this dissonance when the value you add to the market is still removing value from nature without replenishing it?” For land’s sakes, could these be the voices keeping us up at night?

James Quilligan has been an analyst in the field of international economic development since 1975. From 1978-1984, he was a researcher and press secretary for the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, chaired by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. He is a founder and former Managing Director of Economic Democracy Advocates, which promotes equitable and sustainable resource management.

What happens when prices fail to include nature’s value?

By DANIEL CHRISTIAN WAHL AND MANY PEACES MAGAZINE 4. JUNE 2023

A fundamentally relational worldview as the basis for cultivating regenerative relationships between people, places, and planet.

This article is the result of a 1-hour virtual talk between our author Julia and Daniel Christian Wahl. After starting with a short general assessment of our most pressing societal issues in the following lines, Daniel speaks about how examining these from a relational perspective can provide new insights and help us move towards cultivating a more regenerative human presence on earth.

Where we are standing right now

What is the situation where we find ourselves in at the moment? Maybe we can fundamentally start from the point of saying: Things are clearly disintegrating around us. Cascading ecosystems collapse, failed states, and the global economy is hanging by a thin thread. All of this is part of a degenerative system we have built in the past and which, up to now, has pushed us to this point. Since the 1960s, we have consistently overstepped planetary boundaries and started to consume more than the bioproductivity of the living planet is able to regenerate every year. So we started to eat into the capital of our planet, rather than live off the interest, to give it an accurate economic analogy.

All our lifetime, we have been sawing on the branch we have been sitting on — and we have tried to ignore it. We have known about climate change, we have known about impeding resource depletion and scarcity, both in terms of energy, water, and food coming at us for many years, but we chose to keep partying on the Titanic. So now we are faced with two possible scenarios:

Do we want to keep pretending that we only need a new carpet on the Titanic, change the lights, or maybe consider powering the ship with a different renewable energy source? Do we want to continue engaging in processes of abstract problem solving and “solutioneering” that we see in the different COP1 processes, where we spend huge amounts of money and fly 50,000 people to Sharm-El-Sheikh to waste energy and human intelligence on coming up with one-size-fits-all solutions, which are then forcefully implemented in places where they don’t fit?

Or do we choose to acknowledge the amount of horror, collapse and calamity that we actually have coming towards us and look for real transformative actions? In this scenario, we need to ask ourselves: How can humanity operate locally and regionally while maintaining global solidarity and collaboration to build resilient infrastructures? How can we support each other in preparing for future crises while healing our communities and places by recognizing their commonalities as well as their unique qualities?

A fundamentally relational worldview as basis for change

As a human collective, we have lost terra firma. It has happened before, for example during the times of Reformation2 in Europe. At that time René Descartes3 tried to approach the present changes with the cogito ergo sum, the first distinction of I think (about the world out there), therefore I am. This first distinction led to an understanding that the world can be divided into different qualities, the measurable ones and the non-measurable ones, and it was said, “science isn’t bothered with the non-measurable ones”.

But it is exactly the qualitative, relational data that is essential. This understanding is coming back now, for example, with Nora Bateson’s4 work on warm data5, the so-called trans-contextual data, we actually need to pay attention to. It means the quality with which we bring forth this world together. We don’t need any more hard data points that AI (Artificial Intelligence) crunches for us and then tells us how to live appropriately. That’s just the perpetuation of the Cartesian split6and the separation of humanity from nature.

Carl Gustav Jung, inspired by different wisdom traditions, said that the thinking mind is powerful and useful, and that it is one of our ways of knowing — but intuiting, sensing and feeling are the other three. The very fact that we have got three ways of knowing qualitatively and one way of knowing analytically should make us pause for a moment. In many cases, the data tells one: “I know what the prediction is”, but it doesn’t feel right. So what is being asked for at this point of time is intuiting, sensing, and feeling what needs to be done. It is a gentle invitation to return to our innate capacity to go beyond being purely rational and analytical thinking, which is a massive opportunity, but requires a fundamental shift in being and not just in doing.

Remembering the regenerative power of life

As humans, we are regenerative by nature, with a heritage of being caretakers and emergent from place. Indigenous cultures worldwide view themselves as custodians, not owners, of their environment. Our ancestors’ ability to tend to ecosystems as gardeners and caretakers has resulted in our existence today. They sensed qualitative changes in ecosystem health and intervened to make them more abundant.

It is in our nature to be regenerative and deeply connected to the places we inhabit — the Native American prayer “to all my relations” embodies this idea. However, agriculture and city-building led to power structures built on domination, where nature became an “other” to be controlled instead of respected, admired, or even regarded as sacred. It is a paradox, of course: In opposition to our regenerative nature, the global system and processes we created are structurally dysfunctional — including neoclassical economics with its growth imperative and exploitation of the global South by the North. We are far from addressing the 500 years of trauma it caused and still causes, but to survive, humanity must remember and deal with past injustices and continuities.

The way to go further, fully be ourselves and share the gift that we came to share, is in service to the larger context we are in — whether it is our community or the Community of Life, the ecosystem, or the planet. All of it is fundamentally interconnected and nested and we need to find the higher ground that we all are actually relational expressions of life.

We cannot make peace with each other, if we don’t make peace with the larger family that brought us forth, which is life. Many wisdom traditions of the world have been trying to communicate this to us and we arrogantly ignored them. We are now going through a species level rite-of-passage to come home to the family of life and understand our role in bringing forth the world. If we, as human beings, understood ourselves as part of the Community of Life, we could see that everything we do, every word, every thought, every action does change the world. How we live matters and the only way to change the world is to live differently.

Coming home to place

To follow this thought further, we need to understand the link between planetary health and human health. However, the way to create planetary health is not by coming up with planetary solutions, but by people in place healing their places by regional work. What I propose is a planetary aware, cosmopolitan bioregionalism, which understands that all global problems like climate change, inequality, ecosystem collapse, as well as dangerously brittle and dysfunctional economic systems show up in every place. They are real for everyone, and at the same time, they can only be solved in the specific, by the people in place, where they show up.

We are usually taught to go into the abstract and then create and implement replicable and generic solutions. But by going into the specific and seeing the diversity of opinions and perspectives as literal expressions of life’s own diversity, we can approach these problems differently.

This could start with understanding that health is a community responsibility, that democracy means participatory engagement and commitment, and then figuring out with each other — for each community, for each place, for each region — what that might look like. We have the science to prove that the simple act of having a community garden — by sticking your hand in some compost every now and then and the simple act of being in relationship with soil, plants and other living beings — microbiologically and psychologically improves your own health. So health is not something that is trapped in what we perceive as individual bodies. Health is a dynamic process that links it all together: each individual cell, organ, person, family, community, ecosystem and the whole biosphere.

So in order to tap into the regenerative power of life with our own actions, we can use three questions, which I’ve found in my conversations with indigenous elders from different parts of the world. To take any significant decision, we need at least three good answers to all three of them:

Does it serve myself?
Does it serve my community?
Does it serve life?

To become mature members in the Community of Life we need to understand that it’s all about all my relations. Yes, there are many views of this “whole” that we are part of, but we don’t need to argue to be part of a larger context that has brought us forth. Let us be fascinated by how different the larger being that we are part of can express itself in another person. When you meet somebody very different from you, maybe you can even understand that their ignorance or even violence is a cry for help that has been created by not understanding how deeply related we actually all are.

References:

United Nations Climate Change Conference
16th century
French philosopher and scientist (1596–1650)
International researcher, writer, filmmaker and educator
Information about the interrelationships that connect elements of a complex system (more info: Warm data lab)
Separation between mind and body (consciousness of the mind — intelligence of the brain)

First published in MANY PEACES MAGAZINE 4. JUNE 2023

REMEMBERING THE REGENERATIVE POWER OF LIFE

Anna Halafoff, Deakin University and Rosie Clare Shorter, Deakin University

Spirituality is increasingly popular with young Australians: recent research shows 38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual.

It also reports 50% of them believe in karma, 29% in reincarnation and 20% in astrology. When it comes to activities equated with spirituality, 28% of Gen Z Australians practise meditation and 22% practise yoga.

In Australia, spirituality is strongly, enduringly central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and culturally and religiously diverse communities. Yet until recently, spirituality has received far less attention than religion.

Spirituality may be good for the environment too. The most recent trend in studies of religion – frequently associated with spirituality – is a reported close connection with nature. This was shared by 76% of Gen Z Australians.

In Australia, we believe spirituality is expressed as a down-to-earth “relational naturalism”. It’s particularly linked to Indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu and eco-spiritualities that acknowledge sacredness in and connection with the natural world, not just in heavenly heights.

Spiritual or not, nature-based connection is certainly on the rise. Young Australians also state that their affinity with nature informs their ethics – in terms of what they eat and consume, and their environmental activism.

So what is spirituality? How is it different from religion? And why is it so popular?

The most recent trend in studies of religion is a close connection with nature. Alessandra Montigne/Pexels

What is spirituality?

Spirituality is a connection with something greater than the self – which could be God, consciousness or nature – that results in a sense of responsibility to care for oneself and others. It often includes the natural world.

Spirituality has often been seen as the “individualised good-guy”, as a counterpart to the “institutional bad-guy” of religion. But this stereotypical binary is increasingly outdated.

Spirituality, like religion, is mostly practised in groups, or in communities. Often, it’s with a charismatic leader, and follows certain codes of practice, related to physical postures or activities, diet and lifestyle more generally.

According to Warraimaay historian Victoria Grieve-Williams, spirituality is deeply relational and ethical, honouring interconnections with human and more-than-human beings.

In his bestselling book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking can Save the World, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta also stresses complexity, relationality and connectedness as central principles of First People’s wisdom.

People can identify as spiritual but not religious, or as religious and spiritual. Both religion and spirituality can be social and inform how we live in the world.

In the Gen Z Australians survey, 22% self-identified as spiritual but not religious, with a further 16% identifying as both religious and spiritual.

How spiritual are Australians?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have rich and diverse spiritual traditions. “The Creator Spirit was with us long before the British invaded our lands, and our faith has been nurtured over thousands of years,” writes Bidjara theologian and professor, Aunty Anne Pattel-Gray.

Grieves-Williams notes that connection to and responsibility for land and waterways – learned and shared through story – are central to Aboriginal spirituality.

Trawloolway theologian Garry Deverell explains that First Nations spirituality “begins with the earth”.

Through colonisation and migration, Europeans brought Christian and Jewish religions, which also include spiritual dimensions, to Australia. And many immigrants, particularly from the Asia-Pacific region, first introduced their religious and spiritual traditions to Australia in the 19th century, before the introduction of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act.

Many of their spiritual frameworks also stress interdependency with and compassion for all lifeforms.

Spirituality is big business

So-called Western interest in spirituality had earlier iterations in theosophy, an esoteric philosophy based on older religions and myths, and spiritualism, a way of life combining philosophy, science and religion. Both were popular at the turn of the 20th century.

But spirituality boomed globally as part of the alternative 1960s counterculture. In Australia, it took off after the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin, Northern New South Wales.

In Australia, spirituality took off after the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin. Flickr/Harry Watson Smith, CC BY

Since then, interest in spirituality and the expanding $4.4 trillion wellness industry has grown exponentially.

This includes the mainstreaming of teachings through social media, and of practices such as meditation, yoga, retreats, conscious dance, plant medicine, astrology and tarot. Many of these derive from Indigenous, Buddhist or Hindu traditions.

Some spiritual and wellness influencers can problematically appropriate these traditions. However, others respectfully acknowledge the origins and lineages of their spiritual practices.

“True yoga is not just a workout,” says Indian-American yoga teacher and researcher Rina Deshpande, who urges people to learn the history of their practice. “Classically, it is an ancient Indian philosophy espousing an eight-limbed approach to conscious living.”

At the turn of the 21st century, some experts predicted spirituality would eclipse religion, given this thriving “spiritual marketplace”.

Spiritual movements and wellness influencers have gained prominence through critiquing the ills of modern capitalist consumerism, with a focus on personal and planetary wellbeing. Some high-profile examples include Jay Shetty, entrepreneur and host of the podcast On Purpose, and Australian Sarah Wilson, author of I Quit Sugar.

Many of these influencers focus on self-care and the need to slow down and be mindful – and to foster a more respectful and sustainable relationship with ourselves and the natural world. At the same time, some turn their goods and services into products to be marketed, increasingly through social media, to lift their profiles.

Spiritual risks and harms

While spirituality was previously associated with hippies and “peace, love and mung beans”, reports of spiritual harms – emotional, sexual and financial abuse – are increasingly being revealed in both religious and spiritual communities.

This includes many allegations of abuse by students of prominent gurus such as Tibetan Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche, famous for his teachings on death and dying, and Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram yoga. https://www.youtube.com/embed/AbsaUHdxGHg?wmode=transparent&start=0 Some spiritual leaders have been accused of abusing their followers, including the founder of Bikram yoga.

The uptake of conspiracy theories in spiritual communities – and vaccine resistance within them – have also been deeply troubling in recent years. This “conspirituality” is linked to spiritual exceptionalism and bypassing, where distrust of medical and state authority, combined with individual body sovereignty, led to denying the suffering the COVID pandemic caused society’s most vulnerable.

Not all ‘woo-Anon’

Conspirituality during COVID certainly made spirituality more public. It also seemed to draw more men into spiritual movements, with some Australian male conspiritual leaders mobilising “spiritual warriors” to “cosmic war”.

However, in a pilot study on Spirituality and Wellness in Australia conducted at the height of the pandemic, only a minority of self-identified “spiritual” people among the 202 participants had conspiritual views.

Just 2% of participants thought the virus was caused by global elites, pharmaceutical companies, aliens or demonic forces – and just 5% said they would not be vaccinated. By contrast, 88% supported lockdowns and 91% supported mask wearing.

This is significant, given that media coverage of conspirituality tends to overstate its prevalence within wellness communities.

It’s vital not to tar all spiritual people as “woo-Anon”, particularly as they represent an increasingly significant percentage of the Australian population.

Australian spiritual influencers, notably Sarah Wilson, also played a significant role in countering conspirituality at the peak of the pandemic, by drawing on spiritual narratives of relational and compassionate care.

The uptake of conspiracy theories among spiritual communities remains concerning. But research reveals relational spiritual narratives and practices can also play a significant role in both personal and planetary wellbeing. This includes countering vaccine resistance – in and beyond Australia.

Spirituality can be experienced in personal ways, but it is also complex and communal. It is important to be aware of spirituality’s potential benefits and risks.

This is the first article in the Religion and Spirituality series, arising from the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project on Australian Spirituality, led by scholars at Deakin University. This series considers the growing interest in spirituality in so-called Australia, and its relationship to wellbeing and risks.

Anna Halafoff, Associate Professor in Sociology, Deakin University and Rosie Clare Shorter, Research Fellow, Sociology of Religion, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual and half of them believe in karma. Why is spirituality so popular?

By SCA Staff Writers

The booming performance of large corporations in the United States, evidenced by the rise in the S&P 500 and a surge in dividends, has prompted significant scrutiny. While investors celebrate, concerns mount over wealth distribution, corporate conduct, and income inequality.

A report from Oxfam International spotlights a stark gap: while profits enrich shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends, only a fraction of companies publicly commit to ensuring a living wage for their employees. This disparity is compounded by a steep rise in CEO pay over recent years.

Critics argue that stock buybacks primarily benefit affluent executives and shareholders, diverting funds from potential investments in growth and fair wages. They advocate for restrictions on buybacks to ensure more equitable use of corporate profits.

Conversely, proponents contend that buybacks efficiently distribute surplus capital, potentially enhancing shareholder value by reducing available shares in the market, thus boosting earnings per share.

Moreover, Oxfam's findings illuminate how these corporate practices worsen gender and racial disparities in the workplace, notably in sectors like retail where executive representation and median salaries are unequal.

In response, President Joe Biden has proposed tax reforms targeting the wealthiest Americans, including a tax on individuals with over $100 million in wealth. Additionally, concerns about tax avoidance by corporations are escalating, with reports suggesting some large firms pay their executives more than their federal tax obligations.

The surge in corporate dividends and profits underscores the necessity for heightened scrutiny of corporate conduct and a reassessment of priorities to combat growing income inequality and ensure fair taxation. Efforts to champion equitable wealth distribution, support for workers, and measures to address tax avoidance are pivotal in forging a more just and sustainable economy.

In Europe, parallel concerns about corporate tax avoidance are burgeoning, with Statista highlighting instances where large companies allegedly pay executives more than their federal tax obligations. This transatlantic resonance underscores the urgency for concerted global action to tackle systemic inequities in corporate practices and taxation policies.

Corporate Prosperity Raises Concerns: Calls for Fair Taxation and Equity

By CHARLIE AMÁYÁ SCOTT

The scale of social media’s impact surprises me, especially considering that it sits in the palm of my hand. It is a thread connecting us to so many across the world. Over the past decade, there has been an expansion and evolution of social media that has changed the lives of people—both in how we build and maintain relationships and how we share and produce knowledge. It has created a culture all its own. One of the most significant impacts I have experienced is how Indigenous people have embraced the art of storytelling online.

I remember the first TikTok video I made that went viral, back in 2019. It was a tongue-in-cheek history of Thanksgiving and its significance today as a celebration of genocide. The video was removed from TikTok, supposedly for violating community guidelines, so I posted it on Instagram and Twitter, where it amassed more than a million views and thousands of likes. It was then I realized my own power and the power of social media as a tool for positive change.

I have seen it on a much larger scale as well, as Indigenous peoples have used social media to lift up and demand justice. I remember in 2016 how silent mainstream news media initially were about what was happening in Standing Rock between water protectors and the militarized police force. Social media enabled those on the ground to act as witnesses to the gathering of Native nations and the violence they faced, amplified by Indigenous activists and filmmakers such as the International Indigenous Youth Council, Myron Dewey (may he rest in peace and power), and Chad Charlie.

Storytelling is more than just recounting events. There is an inherent art and skill to one of the oldest and most widely practiced forms of communication and cultural preservation in human herstory. Indigenous storytellers are inspired by and pull from what I lovingly describe as the “sentient archive”—a living, breathing repository of memories, lessons, and knowledge built and shared from generation to generation.

There is an inheritance formed through the kinship of sharing a story, imparting strength, beauty, and wisdom that transcend temporal and spatial dimensions. Our storytelling enables us to define who we were, who we are, and who we will be as Indigenous peoples.

As an Indigenous trans femme, who I am, who I was, and who I will be exist because of my family, my community, and the people I choose to be in relationship with, as well as what I learn, embrace, and refuse in this life. My use of social media is informed and grounded by Diné ways of being and knowing, which I have inherited from and cultivated with my family and community.

Through online platforms, I have been able to reclaim what was long denied to me: my story. Social media enabled me to create new and complex representations of what it means to be Indigenous—along with fresh forms of queerness and transness that exist in alignment with my Indigeneity.

I have also studied the specific relationship between Indigenous peoples and social media while on my doctoral pathway at the University of Denver. This relationship is rooted in culture, community, and advocacy while celebrating all three. Bronwyn Carlson, an Aboriginal professor and head of the department of Indigenous studies at Macquarie University in Australia, highlights how social media has empowered Aboriginal peoples to redefine representation while challenging caricatures. Marisa Elena Duarte, an associate professor of justice and sociotechnical change in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, emphasizes that Indigenous peoples’ usage of social media is grounded in our tribal philosophies, spiritualities, and legacies, which destabilizes colonial power and supports decolonization.

Social media, too, exists in relation to settler colonialism. In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s book Control and Freedom, she highlights how early conceptions of the internet described it as an imagined electronic frontier: an unknown space to occupy and—dare I say?—colonize.

As with so many things, the internet enables both the good and the bad. I choose not to engage with the ignorance of trolls and the violence they create with their hateful comments and occasional death threats. Instead, I tackle misinformation about Indigenous peoples, our issues, and our rights. I breathe new narratives—inhaling what I know and exhaling something personal and new—rooted in supporting and celebrating the communities I cherish.

Over the course of four years, I have inspired thousands of people by sharing joyful educational videos around climate justice, representation, decolonization, settler colonialism, LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit experiences, and celebrating Indigenous brilliance. I have cultivated a community all my own by embracing the beauty and power of digital storytelling.

Charlie Amaya Scott is a Dine scholar born and raised within the Navajo Nation.

This article was first published in Yes! Magazine and is republished here under a Creative Commons License.

DIGITAL NATIVE STORYTELLING

Compiled by SCA Staff Writers

Alex Jensen of Local Futures, a Systems Change Alliance (SCA) member organization, reports that the World Social Forum Nepal 2024 brought together 50,000 individuals and 1,400 organizations from 98 countries in Kathmandu from February 15th to 19th.

This gathering echoed the original WSF's core belief from 2001 in Porto Alegre – the possibility of creating 'another world'. Participants shared a rejection of neoliberal globalization, corporate power, and militarism, advocating for justice, solidarity, and sustainability.

Key themes included climate justice, debt cancellation, agroecology, and solidarity economy. Despite diverse perspectives, a common goal emerged: steering away from corporate control and inequality toward political and economic democracy.

“A brief glance through the 27 pages worth of offerings during the Forum,” according to Jensen, “gives a taste of the massive diversity of concerns, broadly focusing either on resistance to the status quo, or on alternatives to it, and sometimes a combination of both.”

Critical offerings included:

• ‘Resisting False Solution on Climate Change’
• ‘Impact of Privatization on Public Services’
• ‘Fighting against Ecocidal Multinationals’
• ‘Mobilizing Against International Financial Institutions’
• ‘Resisting Free Trade in South Asia’

There were also many constructive initiatives:

• ‘Agroecology as a Transformative Approach to Tackle Climatic, Food, and Eco-systemic Crises’
• ‘Let’s Create Our Own Money’
• ‘Staying Hopeful and Sustaining Ourselves as Activists and Organizers’
• ‘Agrobiodiversity and Community Seed Banks’
• ‘Revitalizing Rural Reconstruction Movements: Addressing Multiple Crises’
• ‘Decent Work and Care Economy’

Local Futures was involved in several sessions at the Forum. Among these were the following organizations:

• Digo Bikas Institute from Nepal, which helped organize the Forum. Digo Bikas has participated in past World Localization Day events, and translates Local Futures’ materials into Nepali;
• Kalpavriksh from India, which was instrumental in starting the Vikalp Sangam/Alternatives Confluence process that networks hundreds of organizations and thousands of social-ecological initiatives across India. Local Futures has been a participating member of this network since its launch a decade ago;
• Bilaterals.org – focusing on news and critical analysis of free trade agreements;
• Zambia Alliance for Agroecology and Biodiversity – part of the African Food Sovereignty Alliance;
• Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) – an international network which is resisting international debt from countries to financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF.

The Forum highlighted the urgent need for global collaboration in challenging the current system and exploring alternatives, marking a significant step in the ongoing struggle for change.

Local Futures reports from the World Social Forum, Nepal 2024

By Richard Heinberg and David Hughes

The numbers are in. Last year was the hottest on record by a wide margin. The planet is now 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the fossil fuel revolution. Global heating is accelerating. This year (2024) is likely to set another record because the latter half of last year featured an El Nino climate pattern that continues to influence global weather. The last colder-than-average year, according to NOAA, was 1976.

The United States experienced a record number of billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023. Canada’s wildfires in June resulted in an unprecedented flurry of air-quality alerts in the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., with New York temporarily suffering the worst air quality of any city in the world. Wildfires also devastated Maui.

Elsewhere in the world, Libya, Guam, Malawi, and Peru experienced horrific floods. According to the United Nations, drought now affects a quarter of humanity. Developing countries were stuck with proportionally higher recovery costs on a per-capita basis.

The solution to climate change is to reduce and reverse the decades-long trend of annually increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the planetary atmosphere. So, let’s see what the numbers tell us on that score. The carbon dioxide (CO2) level in Earth’s atmosphere is now over 420 parts per million, up from 315 ppm in 1958 when the first direct measurements commenced. The atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing at over 2 ppm per year for the past several years.

This added CO2 in the atmosphere comes from human activities that release carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the air. U.S. carbon emissions were down 3 percent in 2023 due mainly to an ongoing national switch from burning coal to burning natural gas for generating electricity. But worldwide carbon emissions were up 1.1 percent compared to 2022. Since climate change is a global problem, it is the global statistic that matters.

Most emissions are energy-related, so phasing out fossil fuels in favor of low-carbon energy alternatives is critical. While it’s too early to report final data for renewable energy additions in 2023, last June, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasted that global renewable energy generation capacity would increase by a record 440 GW for the year (total world renewable energy generation capacity, including hydropower, stands at about 4,500 GW).

However, confusion sometimes results from failure to distinguish production capacity from actual generation since solar and wind installations typically generate only 20 to 50 percent of their theoretical capacity due to variations in sunlight and wind.

So, let’s look at the actual generation numbers. Of the roughly 30,000 terawatt hours of electricity generated globally in 2022, 8,500 terawatt hours (29 percent) came from renewables—over half of that from hydropower.

We must be careful to distinguish between “electricity” and “energy”—another frequent source of confusion. Electricity’s share of all end-use energy usage remains stable at about 20 percent. After accounting for conversion factors, renewables (including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biofuels, and traditional biomass—i.e., burning wood for cooking and heating) provide about 16 percent of total world primary energy.

Nuclear energy also entails relatively low levels of carbon emissions, but its share of world energy fell to a multi-decade low in 2023, and nuclear projects are notoriously slow and expensive to bring online.

To reach net zero emissions by 2050 (which the IPCC considers necessary to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius) by providing 100 percent of total global energy from renewables, we would need a nearly ten-fold increase in renewable energy production, even assuming zero growth in overall global energy demand during that time.

Annual additions of solar and wind capacity would have to increase by well over an order of magnitude (10x) compared to the current record rate. Electrification of transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and other sectors would also need to accelerate dramatically.

In its Net-Zero Roadmap report published in September 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the extreme difficulty of achieving these increases in renewable energy and suggested instead that 19 percent of final energy will still come from fossil fuels in 2050 and that final-energy consumption will be reduced by 26 percent.

To remove the resultant emissions, the IEA estimated that one billion metric tons per year of carbon dioxide would need to be captured by 2030, rising to 6 billion tonnes by 2050. Mechanized technologies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) that would be required to do this have been criticized as being too expensive, too energy intensive, and underperforming in terms of their goal.

Currently, about 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is captured annually, nearly all by forests; only 49 million metric tons are being removed from the atmosphere by carbon removal technology projects across the world. About 80 percent of that captured carbon is used for “enhanced oil recovery.”

Meanwhile, over 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are being released by human activities, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.

We can conclude from these scorecard numbers that, as of the start of 2024, humanity is not on track to avoid catastrophic climate change. The likelihood of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (the goal stated in the Paris Accords of 2015) is now extremely remote. Indeed, that threshold may be exceeded within just the next few years.

If world leaders genuinely hope to change these trends, dramatic action that entails reevaluating current priorities will be required. Not just fossil fuel subsidies but also continued growth in global energy-tied economic activity must be questioned. Otherwise, we may be destined to fulfill the old adage: “If you do not change direction, you will end up where you are heading.”

This article was published with permission from resilience.org

Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels.

Climate Change and Energy Transition: The 2023 Scorecard

Compiled by SCA Staff Writers

A recent study published in the journal Science Advances has raised alarm bells about the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a vital system of ocean currents responsible for regulating global climate patterns. The study, conducted by a team of scientists using sophisticated climate models, suggests that the AMOC could be on a trajectory towards collapse, with profound implications for sea level rise and global weather patterns.

The AMOC, often referred to as the ocean's conveyor belt, plays a crucial role in redistributing heat around the planet. Warm waters from the tropics are carried northward towards the North Atlantic, where they cool, sink, and then flow back southward. This circulation pattern helps to moderate temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and influences weather systems across the globe.

For years, scientists have expressed concerns about the stability of the AMOC in the face of climate change. Rising temperatures and melting ice have disrupted the delicate balance of heat and salt that drives the currents, raising the specter of a potential collapse. While the AMOC has only been continuously monitored since 2004, evidence from sources like ice cores and ocean sediments indicates that it has shut down in the past due to rapid glacier melt.

The new study represents a significant breakthrough in understanding the potential collapse of the AMOC. By utilizing complex climate models and simulating the gradual increase of freshwater input into the system – representing factors like ice melt, rainfall, and river runoff – scientists were able to detect early warning signals for a collapse. The results suggest that the AMOC could weaken gradually before abruptly collapsing, a scenario with dire consequences for global climate stability.

One of the most alarming findings of the study is the potential for abrupt and extreme temperature changes in certain regions. Parts of Europe could see temperatures plummet by as much as 30 degrees Celsius over the course of a century, while countries in the Southern Hemisphere may experience increased warming. Additionally, disruptions to the AMOC could lead to sea level rise of approximately 1 meter (3.3 feet), further exacerbating coastal flooding and erosion.

While the study provides valuable insights into the potential collapse of the AMOC, uncertainties remain regarding the timing and extent of such an event. Scientists emphasize the need for further research, including models that account for additional climate change impacts such as rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite these uncertainties, the study serves as a stark reminder of the urgent need to address climate change and its impact on critical ocean circulation systems. Ignoring the risks associated with the potential collapse of the AMOC could have profound consequences for ecosystems, economies, and communities around the world.

References:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/09/climate/atlantic-circulation-collapse-weather-climate/index.html

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189

Scientists Warn of Potential Collapse of Crucial Ocean Current System

Compiled by SCA Staff Writers

Amidst the release of alarming federal data on the rise of factory farming in the United States, critics are sounding the alarm over the detrimental impacts on public health, the environment, and local agriculture. According to recent figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the number of large-scale factory farms has surged in recent years.

This trend is also increasing in other countries, particularly in Europe and China, with significant increases in the production of cattle, chickens, and hogs.

Environmental Working Group (EWG) Midwest director Anne Schechinger warned that without policy changes, the trend of factory farm expansion will continue, posing threats to various aspects of society. The data revealed a staggering growth in the number of mega factory farms, with cattle, chicken, and hog operations all seeing substantial increases.

Food & Water Watch (FWW) analysis echoed these concerns, highlighting a 6% increase in the number of animals raised on factory farms since 2017, reaching a staggering 1.7 billion annually. This expansion comes at the expense of small-scale, traditional farming operations, which have been dwindling rapidly.

FWW research director Amanda Starbuck emphasized the environmental toll of factory farming, noting that these operations produce immense amounts of waste, polluting water and air. Moreover, the concentration of animals in these facilities exacerbates public health risks, with toxins from animal waste posing dangers to both humans and wildlife.

Critics argue that urgent legislative action is needed to curb the growth of factory farming and protect local agriculture. The Farm System Reform Act, sponsored by Senator Cory Booker and Representative Ro Khanna, aims to address the monopolistic practices of meatpackers and corporate integrators while imposing a moratorium on large factory farms. Additionally, the bill seeks to reinstate mandatory country-of-origin labeling requirements, providing consumers with greater transparency, and supporting local farmers.

As calls for reform intensify, lawmakers are urged to prioritize the health of communities, the environment, and the future of sustainable, local agriculture.

Factory Farming Expansion Sparks Concerns Over Public Health, the Environment, and Local Agriculture

by Nick King

‘Degrowth’ and the ‘Steady State Economy’ describe a grouping of related concepts and ideas which are critical of economic growth being a central tenet and goal of modern societies. Proponents of degrowth seek to arrest and ultimately reverse the primary global trend of the last 200 years or so (relentlessly growing economies), whilst those seeking a Steady State Economy imagine an economic system which would be stable in magnitude (via balancing feedbacks e.g., tight loops of material recycling) in order to stay within ‘planetary boundaries’. The latter would likely be the ultimate destination of the former, and together they may be labelled as ‘non-growth economic models’ [[1], [2]].

Degrowth traces its origins to several 19^th century thinkers including John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau, and modern degrowth theory started to gain traction during the 1970s. This resulted from work undertaken by scientists, economists and philosophers such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and E. F. Schumacher, with pioneering work such as the ‘Limits to Growth’ (LTG) report also providing a significant tailwind at that time. For steady-state economics, one of the early proponents was (perhaps surprisingly) Adam Smith; although considered a founding hero of orthodox economic theory today, he concluded that economies of all nations would reach a final ‘stationary’ state, and these ideas were later built on by other famous economists such as Herman Daly, John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. Through most of their history, non-growth economic models have however been considered by the mainstream as fairly fringe ideas, existing mainly as unworkable theories in textbooks, and having little relevance to the supposed real world business of creating wealth and driving progress forward. However, in recent years that has started to change, and these models are starting to move much more towards the mainstream once again [[1], [3]].

This shift is being driven largely by increasingly wide recognition that the pursuit of endless economic growth is the driving force of virtually all aspects of the gathering global predicament, captured by the term ‘polycrisis’ (i.e., interlocking, interacting and worsening crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss, global toxification and financial system instability). The potential for growth to drive these phenomena was recognised 50 years ago in the groundbreaking LTG report, but despite these insights this growth has continued apace, and we now find ourselves collectively in a deteriorating situation. The renewed interest in non-growth economic models as means to ease us back from this precipice has to date focused on different key social, economic and infrastructure aspects. This includes concepts such as: ‘contraction-and-convergence’ (reducing growth in developed regions to give developing regions ‘room’ to alleviate poverty); ‘universal basic income & bullsh*t jobs’ (provision of an unconditional payment to all citizens to separate employment and survival, and elimination of unproductive and wasteful employment); and ‘doughnut economics’ (operating societies within the boundaries of upper ecological limits and minimum social metrics) [[4], [5], [6]].

Despite the increasing depth and granularity of non-growth economic model research, one aspect is currently relatively under-represented in these efforts, namely the nature of the energy paradigm that could underpin societies operating in this form. To address this question, there are two aspects to consider: the energy paradigm that would support the transition to a non-growth economic model (i.e., the implementation of degrowth), and that which would support a society into the longer term (i.e., ongoing operation of a steady state economy) [7]. The beginning of an answer to this question is explored in a book (‘Future Energy Options from a Systems Perspective’ [[8]]) which I co-authored with Professor Aled Jones at the Global Sustainability Institute (part of Anglia Ruskin University in the UK) during 2023.

This book considers the uniquely crucial role that energy plays in maintaining complex societies through an account of the ‘phases’ of human energy use through time, and the ‘energy bind’ we collectively find ourselves in (i.e., that we are wholly reliant on energy, but our current sources are proving harmful and depletable). The book presents three broad pathways (or ‘branches’) that global society could follow in future [9]; these trifurcating options are: the ‘Fossil-Seneca’ Branch (essentially fossil fuel business as usual, potentially leading to a climate change-induced collapse); the ‘Continued Growth’ Branch (hypothetical use of low carbon fusion or renewables systems to grow the global economy indefinitely, which may avoid climate collapse but would likely generate other severe negative consequences) and the ‘Stabilisation’ Branch (emulation of natural systems that achieve systemic equilibrium via a full renewables transition, combined with degrowth, giving the best chance of achieving societal stability and longevity). It is therefore this Stabilisation Branch scenario that is most directly relevant to this question.

Degrowth would likely be a necessary aspect of a transition to a fully renewables based energy system for several reasons. Such a system would have a lower overall ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) value (meaning that it would generate less ‘discretionary’ energy for non-essential but growth-supporting purposes such as consumption) and would generate intermittently as per environmental conditions. In these cases, the amount of renewables infrastructure could be made larger to offset these effects (e.g., through over-capacity and/or energy storage infrastructure to compensate for intermittency) but that would require more significant ‘re-materialisation’ (an increase in global mining activity, and energy and land demands), which could in itself generate destabilising dynamics for society. Therefore, the overall magnitude of an implementable and sustainable renewables system (even where materials recycling could be introduced) would likely be limited, and hence the scope of a society it could support would likely have to decrease to accommodate such a transition.

Once in place, a renewables-based system could be amenable to achieving an equilibrium output. This is because these systems extract energy from a fixed exogenous input (total solar energy), so once the extraction becomes aligned with a value at or below this total ‘flow’ limit, they could in theory continue without effective limit (assuming recycling loops for the required materials can be closed). This would emulate Earth’s biosphere, which has equilibrated around the solar input value (in terms of total biomass supported by global scale photosynthesis) and has thus achieved stability over geological time. This contrasts with the ‘stock’ based energy sources which global society currently uses, which will inevitably deplete in the long run. Detractors of non-growth economic models often cite concerns that societies operating under these conditions would become unstable, impoverished and/or stagnant, and would therefore not be practical or sustainable. The biosphere analogy may apply here again, in that although it has operated in a steady state over prolonged timescales, it has maintained rich and ever-changing diversity under a ‘hard’ and unchanging limit.

Non-growth economic models are still a far from accepted idea by the majority of economists, governments and business leaders, but the global predicament must urge us to consider them more seriously. Indeed, without action, degrowth may well occur in the form of uncontrolled economic contraction or collapse as a result of the growing feedbacks associated with the polycrisis. If degrowth were to happen to global society rather than it being a choice or strategy, there would likely be little chance of it settling into a controlled steady state in which hallmarks of modernity (e.g., power grids) would persist in a big way. In this scenario, human extinction may be unlikely, but organised societies and knowledge accumulation as we understand them could well be over. The Stabilisation Branch scenario described here indicates that a large scale renewables-based energy system may be an inherent feature and necessity of achieving degrowth, and that once in place, may be well suited to maintaining a steady-state economic system which may be much more stable than our current paradigm. Armed with this knowledge, perhaps it is time for the proponents of non-growth economic models to become more assertive in discussing them as a real possibility for the future.

[1]. Kerschner, C. (2010) Economic de-growth vs steady-state economy. Journal of Cleaner Production, 18, 6, 544-551.

[2]. Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (2023) Definition of a Steady State Economy. Available online: https://steadystate.org/discover/definition-of-steady-state-economy/

[3]. Degrowth (2024) A History of Degrowth. Available online: https://degrowth.info/about/history-of-degrowth

[4]. Cascade Institute (2024) Polycrisis. Available online: https://cascadeinstitute.org/polycrisis/

[5]. Hickel, J. et al. (2022) Degrowth can work – here’s how science can help. Nature, 612, 400-403.

[6]. Raworth, K. (2017) Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Random House Business.

[7] Another important consideration might be the scale of such as society (i.e., whether it would be global or regional in scope), but for the purposes of this discussion it is assumed that a non-growth economic model would be global and homogeneous in its extent.

[8]. King, N., Jones, A. (2023) Future Energy Options from a Systems Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan Cham.

[9] Note that the focus is primarily the systemic characteristics of different energy paradigms, rather than the details of policy, economic or other practicalities of implementation.

Nick King is an environmental scientist working in professional consulting and the energy industry. He is also affiliated with the Schumacher Institute’s think tank.

Published with permission from resilience.org

What Energy Paradigm Might Underpin Degrowth and Steady State Economies?

In the article The Future is Feral—And Climate Resilient in Yes! Magazine, Irene Lyla Lee suggests that it is time to change our attitude towards feral plants. They are not just weeds; they are an integral part of the environment we live in.

Lee’s article delves into the significance of feral plants, particularly focusing on brassica rapa, a once-utilized plant now labeled as a weed. Her narrative expands to encompass the broader implications of human intervention in plant genetics and the potential consequences, drawing parallels with historical instances like the devastation caused by the Gros Michel banana and the Irish potato famine. It underscores the vulnerability of modern crops to climate change and emphasizes the need for innovative farming practices.

Highlighting various initiatives worldwide, including efforts in Mexico to preserve brassica rapa and projects in Arkansas to diversify rice genetics, the article showcases how feral plants hold the key to resilience in agriculture. The article also explores hemp cultivation in the Midwestern United States, where feral strains demonstrate adaptability and resilience, providing valuable genetic diversity for future breeding efforts.

Researchers like Shelby Ellison and Zachary Stansell emphasize the importance of conserving genetic diversity in crops for climate change resilience. Lee’s article navigates through the complexities of genetic manipulation, cautioning against oversimplification and stressing the need to consider broader ecosystem impacts. Indigenous perspectives, represented by Linda Black Elk, emphasize the interconnectedness of plants and ecosystems, urging a holistic approach to cultivation.

Challenges inherent in working with feral plants, such as unpredictability and lower yields, are acknowledged. However, the potential benefits in terms of adaptability and genetic diversity outweigh these challenges. The article explores emerging technologies like CRISPR and their potential role in enhancing the resilience of feral crops, while acknowledging the importance of respecting the intrinsic value of each plant species.

Ultimately, the article encourages a paradigm shift in agriculture towards coexistence with feral plants, viewing them not as nuisances but as valuable contributors to food sovereignty and resilience. It calls for a deeper understanding of plant complexity and an appreciation for the intricate relationships between humans, plants, and ecosystems.

The article ends with an important point and a question: “Rather than looking at a species as having a single, human-centered function,” she writes, “to understand the feral is to see individual plants with the complexity that seeds entire ecosystems. What would our world look like if we, as humans, learn to adapt to plants instead of making plants adapt to us?”

Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance and the author of the book Growing a New Economy.

How “Weeds” Can Seed Ecosystems of Interspecies Activity

Why the potential of people, and the places that communities inhabit, is the key to addressing the climate crisis

Our times call for “stubborn optimism”, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac suggest in their 2020 book The Future We Choose. We all owe them gratitude for their very personal effort in making the 2015 Paris Agreement possible. Since then, they have continued to stimulate action towards a transformative response to climate change. Together with the outstanding strategic work of Nigel Topping as the UK’s High Level Climate Action Champion in the run up to COP26, there is a basis for hope that we will see bolder and more coordinated action within and across sectors after the Glasgow conference.

Pathways towards a regenerative future

The capacity building work that Bill Sharpe and the ‘Future Stewards’ coalition have undertaken with industry-specific climate champions around the world by training them in the use of the ‘Three Horizons’ pathways practice, will provide a shared mental framework to address and implement systemic transformations at local, regional and global scale. We urgently need to get better at discerning how our visions of the future and our problem-solving mindset affect our individual and collective agency in working with the future potential of the present moment.

To navigate this turbulent transition and steer our path towards a regenerative future requires the capacity to listen and learn from diverse perspectives. Without the need to agree on everything, we can nevertheless learn to disagree more intelligently as we build collective capacity for transformative innovation.

The Three Horizons pathways practice developed by Sharpe and colleagues in the International Futures Forum is distinct from the ‘Three Horizons of Growth’ used by McKinsey. It allows us to collectively explore sector — or location-specific — transformations through the managerial perspective of Horizon 1, the entrepreneurial mindset of Horizon 2, and the visionary call of Horizon 3 for profound systemic and world-view transformations that will enable a viable future. All three perspectives are necessary to contribute to a regenerative future.

The human potential for regeneration

A regenerative human impact on Earth is not only possible but has been the norm for most of our species’ deep history. Oral traditions of indigenous cultures that pre-date agricultural or fossil fuel-based societies describe how human beings used to nurture abundance and diversity while actively regenerating the health of local and regional ecosystems.

Our indigenous ancestors predominantly lived as bioregionally based regenerative cultures. Scientific evidence suggests that entire forest ecosystems From the rainforest of Colombia (ref.) to the old growth forests of the Pacific North West (ref.) and and the ‘lost forest gardens’ of Europe’ (ref.) we are learning that our distant ancestors nurtured these ecosystems into increased diversity, biological productivity and abundance. To this day 80% of the global biodiversity is found within the ‘biodiversity hot spots’ of indigenous territories around the world. To create a regenerative future we will have to value and humbly learn from the indigenous knowledge and practices that informed our regenerative past.

How do we become healing expressions — rather than owners — of place?

How do we participate appropriately in nested complexity as we aim to align with life’s evolutionary pattern of creating conditions conducive to life?

How can we better discern which modern technologies and innovations truly support us in co-creating diverse regenerative cultures everywhere?

Are we treating symptoms or root causes?

The recent IPCC report on the physical science basis for responding to climate change clearly states that “… limiting human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions” (IPCC, 2021, p.36). To do so is clearly an urgent prerequisite for a regenerative future. Yet we need to simultaneously address the deeper causes underlying the climate crises. We will fail if we structure our climate change response exclusively around carbon emissions.

At best, addressing climate change through the carbon lens will buy us time. At worst, techno-fix solutions and emissions trading will exacerbate an already wicked problem. How do we avoid carbon myopia and its unintended consequences? Precisely because of the urgency and the decreasing options if we get it wrong again, we should also ask ourselves:

What are we missing as we focus on carbon metrics and structure policy to stimulate emissions reduction?

Is ‘fighting climate change’ the appropriate framing?

Could it be that to ask ‘how do we get to net-zero emissions by 2050’ is a dangerously insufficient approach that predisposes us to potentially ignore root causes?

I feel uncomfortable calling out the elephant in the room, as I understand the urgency and know the deep commitment to making a positive difference of many people driving the ‘Race to Zero’ is not in question. Yet, it simply can’t be emphasized enough that our culturally dominant narrative of ‘separation from’, ‘power over’ and ‘ownership of’ nature creates the mistaken belief that we can manage, technologically innovate and (carbon) trade ourselves out of the evolutionary dead end we have been heading into for a couple of centuries.

As Camilla Moreno and colleagues warned in an essay entitled ‘Carbon Metrics: Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide’ published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation: “Carbon or GDP alone will not point us the way. We need to challenge our mental infrastructures, how we acquire the established foundations for our thinking. … the all-powerful carbon paradigm can entail profound injustices. Beyond carbon, we need a multi-dimensional perspective, one which is aware of the metabolic, life-maintaining processes of the planet, taking into account its natural limits, as well as the fundamental rights and needs of all human beings and the ground rules of participation and inclusion as we move on (ref., p.54).”

Regenerative development does not solve global problems through scaling-up universally applicable solutions. It is not aiming to deliver permanent solutions, rather, the focus is on improving our capacity to co-create and keep transforming in response to changing context. When we talk about co-creating ‘regenerative futures’ it is best to let go of the notion that we will ever arrive and live happily ever after. Co-creating regenerative cultures is an ongoing community and place based process of learning.

Participation and inclusion are not just social ideals to aim for but fundamental prerequisites for the emergence of diverse regenerative cultures everywhere. Co-creating a regenerative future is about supporting people, places and cultures to express their unique contribution to the health and vitality of the nested complexity in which we are embedded as expressions of life. To do so simultaneously serves ourselves, our communities and life as a whole.

The potential of people and place

Faced with the climate emergency humanity is now undergoing a species level rite of passage. We are challenged with nothing less than the redesign of the human impact on Earth. It is time to become mature members of the community of life and, as such, to learn how to create conditions conducive to life. Doing so appropriately invites us to pay attention to and learn from the bio-cultural uniqueness of place — community by community, ecosystem by ecosystem, bioregion by bioregion.

Paradoxically it seems that the path towards a globally regenerative human impact on Earth is one of local and regional regeneration everywhere. It is not a global problem-solving exercise, but rather an ongoing collective learning and capacity-building process of people in place. The American essayist and poet Gary Snyder called this process reinhabitation (ref.). We are coming home to place, rejoining the family of life.

Abstraction and generalisation, metrics and certification, control and prediction are central to a problem solving and solutioneering approach. This old way of working remains within the mental scaffolding of what Carol Sanford calls the ‘extract value’, ‘arrest disorder’ and ‘do good’ paradigms of modern living. To live regeneratively is to act from within a fourth paradigm: ‘evolve capacity/regenerate life’ (ref.). An approach aimed at building capacity and manifesting the potential of people and place focusses our attention on uniqueness and specificity, qualities and trust, participation and learning as we aim to regenerate life.

In a conversation I had with Bill Reed, principal at Regenesis Group he remarked “we can’t save the world, we can only save places.” For me this is an important reminder that what we do locally has regional and global effects. Just like the health of your body depends on healthy cells and healthy organs, planetary health depends on healthy communities, ecosystems, and bioregions.

To bring about the now urgently necessary transformations over the coming decades we have to reinhabit the places and ecosystems we live in as a regenerative and healing presence. Humans have the potential to be a keystone species that nurtures biodiversity and heals ecosystems. If we begin to think and work over ecological time scales, we can heal many of the ecosystems, communities and places damaged by centuries of exploitation of the planetary life support systems and suppression of the rights of the world’s indigenous people.

Responding to climate change is about much more than the ‘Race to Zero.’ An adequate response necessitates becoming conscious of our deeper relationship to life as a nested regenerative community. Life is a planetary process which has created the condition for more life to evolve and flourish over the long journey of 3.8 billion years. Our success and failure in co-creating regenerative futures will depend on our ability to realign with the syntropic evolutionary patterns of life itself — moving from competitive scarcity towards collaborative abundance.

The ReGeneration is rising!

I believe there is a basis for being stubbornly optimistic and confident that we can still choose a regenerative future. I base this optimism not on denying the real and present danger that cataclysmic climate change is imminent if we don’t change our current trajectory, but in people everywhere connecting with the regenerative impulse. Many of us are already nurturing the potential of a regenerative future and regenerative cultural impulses are connecting people and communities to their places and bioregions.

Here are some of my reasons for optimism: This year marks the launch of the ‘United Nations Decade on Ecosystems Restoration’ (ref.) and landscape scale regeneration projects are proliferating (ref.). Working with the Commonwealth Secretariat’s regenerative development programme (ref.) and Common Earth I had the opportunity to learn from regenerative practitioners in New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean and Africa about their place-sourced projects.

There are national initiatives in Costa Rica (ref.) and Australia (ref.). The ‘Regenerative Projects Map’ highlights many mature regeneration projects around the world (ref.). The Lush Spring Prize also offers a map of examples based on past winners and runner ups (ref.). The ‘Regenerosity’ platform is helping to resource regenerative projects around the world (ref.). Regenesis Institute is training regenerative practitioners which have formed regional networks. Carol Sanford is supporting people around the world through her change agents’ development groups.

Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm have deepened the conversation about regenerative leadership (ref.). John Elkington’s book Green Swans (ref.) and the ‘Green Swan Observatory’ have inspired boardrooms around the world.

Regeneration International (ref.) is connecting the rapidly growing regenerative agriculture movement. Extinction Rebellion has made ‘We need a regenerative culture’ one of its ten principles (ref.). The Capital Institute in New York has created the ‘Regenerative Communities Network’ (ref.) of bioregionally focused regenerative economy projects. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics Action Labs are taking regenerative economics to active citizens engaged in creating thriving places (ref.).

Many people are offering regenerative learning journeys and programmes to collectively live into the process of co-creating regenerative cultures. Paul Hawken’s very recent book Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation (ref.) highlights many of these reasons for stubborn optimism. I am under no doubt that the RSA’s Regenerative Futures Programme will inspire many more people to join the ReGeneration. I hope you are one of them!

[First published in the RSA Journal — link here — this is the pre-final draft without the edits by the journal editors.]

Daniel Christian Wahl is a consultant and educator in regenerative development whose 2016 book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ (Triarchy Press) quickly gained international acclaim.

Building a regenerative future

Compiled by SCA Staff Writers

The critique against continuous economic growth, a perspective gaining traction due to increasing environmental concerns, notably the climate crisis, is on the rise. The "degrowth" movement, once considered fringe, is now a significant player, calling for advanced countries to embrace zero or even negative GDP growth.

Influential figures such as Greta Thunberg and Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have highlighted the potential negative impacts of the relentless pursuit of GDP growth, including environmental damage and societal inequality. Suggestions made by the degrowth movement include dismantling global capitalism and promoting "post-growth economics."

These post-capitalist ideas were promoted by prominent degrowth writers Jason Hickel, Tim Jackson, and Georgios Kallis in a 2022 article in Nature. “Researchers in ecological economics,” they wrote, “call for a different approach — degrowth. Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.”

However, not all ecological economists support degrowth. Kate Raworth, well known for her book on Doughnut Economics, makes a point about being agnostic about growth: sometimes growth can be sustainable, such as with alternative energy use, other times it may not be, such as when using massive amounts of fossil fuel to produce luxury items nobody really needs.

The ecological critique of economic growth is gaining widespread attention. Even mainstream economists are challenging the growth orthodoxy, and the concept of "slow growth" is advocated by some economists like Dietrich Vollrath. Vollrath's analysis suggests that slower growth in advanced countries is a result of changing lifestyles, such as reduced labor force growth and a shift towards service-oriented economies.

Among economists and environmental activists, there is now an ongoing debate on whether "green growth" is a feasible alternative. Proponents argue for the possibility of absolute decoupling—economic growth without increased carbon emissions. However, recent data challenges this optimism, showing a rise in global carbon emissions over the past three years. As Systems Change Alliance co-founder Roar Bjonnes suggested in his book Growing a New Economy, green growth capitalism may be a contradiction in terms.

The challenges faced by proponents of degrowth include addressing distributional conflicts, poverty reduction, and the economic impact on developing countries heavily reliant on exporting goods and services. Some degrowth proponents suggest solutions like work-sharing, decentralized economics, income transfers, and even a universal basic income to manage the consequences of reduced growth.

No matter where ecological economists stand on the issue, all seem to agree on the importance of reevaluating the pursuit of endless economic growth, and to consider alternative strategies to balance environmental concerns, social equity, and global poverty reduction.

Ecological Economists Are Rethinking Endless Growth and Prosperity

Compiled by SCA Staff Writers

In a startling revelation, a joint investigation by The Intercept, The Nation, Drilled, and DeSmog has exposed seven major global news outlets for their role in producing and promoting misleading promotional content for the fossil fuel industry. The implicated media companies include Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and The Washington Post.

The investigation, spanning the period from October 2020 to October 2023, focused on advertorials or native advertising, sponsored content designed to mimic a publication's authentic editorial work. The report reveals that these outlets, often considered among the "most trusted" news sources, have been lending their journalistic credibility to the fossil fuel industry's key climate talking points.

The Deceptive Nature of Advertorials

The report highlights that major news outlets, such as Reuters, have been involved in creating misleading promotional content without transparently disclosing the sponsor's involvement. For instance, a podcast episode produced by Reuters Plus in partnership with Saudi Aramco features discussions on the energy transition without clearly stating the podcast's sponsorship by the fossil fuel giant.

The investigation, in collaboration with The Intercept and The Nation, analyzed hundreds of advertorials, events, and ad data, shedding light on the media's role in perpetuating the fossil fuel industry's deceptive messaging during a critical period of heightened public awareness about climate change.

Crisis of Credibility

All seven media companies under scrutiny have internal brand studios dedicated to creating advertising content for major oil and gas companies. This has raised concerns about the blurring of lines between journalism and advertising, with the potential to damage the reputation and credibility of these news outlets.

A 2016 Georgetown University study found that about two-thirds of people confuse advertorials for real content, contributing to the erosion of trust in news sources. Another study in 2018 by Boston University revealed that only one in 10 people recognized native advertising as distinct from reporting.

Impact on Climate Reporting

The investigation highlights the oil and gas industry's increased sponsorship of advertorials and events with media partners to portray itself as a climate leader. The conflict between independent climate reporting and sponsored content advocating industry-backed technologies has left readers confused about the actual impact of these solutions.

Historical Context and Financial Motivations

The fossil fuel industry's involvement in shaping media narratives dates back to 1970, with the creation of advertorials by Mobil Oil in collaboration with The New York Times. The advent of brand studios within media outlets has fueled the growth of such content programs, as fossil fuel companies willingly pay vast sums to bolster their social license and promote their agendas.

Recent data from MediaRadar revealed that The New York Times earned over $20 million in revenue from fossil fuel advertisers from October 2020 to October 2023, with Saudi Aramco contributing a significant portion. The financial reliance on such advertising further underscores the complex relationship between media outlets and the fossil fuel industry.

Consequences and Criticisms

Critics argue that the practice of producing advertorials and event sponsorships for fossil fuel companies undermines the integrity of climate journalism. Journalists, speaking anonymously, expressed concerns over the potential damage to their outlets' credibility and questioned the ethical implications of aligning with companies that have a history of casting doubt on climate science.

The investigation sheds light on the intricate connections between media outlets and the fossil fuel industry, raising important questions about transparency, credibility, and the responsibility of news organizations in the era of climate crisis awareness.

Leading Media Companies Accused of Greenwashing for Fossil Fuel Industry

A new study finds the island's ice sheet is retreating 20% more than previously thought.

Article by Julya Conley

New research on the rate at which Greenland's glaciers are melting shed new light on how the climate emergency is rapidly raising the chance that crucial ocean current systems could soon collapse, as scientists revealed Wednesday that the vast island has lost about 20% more ice than previously understood.

Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the study, published in Nature, which showed that Greenland's ice cap is losing an average of 33 million tons of ice per hour, including from glaciers that are already below sea level.

The researchers analyzed satellite photos showing the end positions of Greenland's glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022, examining a total of about 235,000 end positions.

Over the 38-year period, Greenland lost about 1,930 square miles of ice—equivalent to one trillion metric tons and roughly the size of Delaware.

An earlier study had estimated that 221 billion metric tons had been lost since 2003, but the researchers added another 43 billion metric tons to that assessment.

Previous research had not quantified the level of ice melt and breakage from the ends of glaciers around the perimeter of Greenland.

"Almost every glacier in Greenland is retreating. And that story is true no matter where you look," Chad Greene, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led study, toldThe New York Times. "This retreat is happening everywhere and all at once."

Because the glaciers examined in the study are already below sea level, their lost ice would have been replaced by sea water and would not have contributed to sea-level rise.

But as Greene toldThe Guardian, "It almost certainly has an indirect effect, by allowing glaciers to speed up."

"These narrow fjords are the bottleneck, so if you start carving away at the edges of the ice, it's like removing the plug in the drain," he said.

The previously unaccounted-for ice melt is also an additional source of freshwater that pours into the North Atlantic Ocean, which scientists warn places the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at risk of collapse.

AMOC carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic, allowing nutrients to rise from the bottom of the ocean and supporting phytoplankton production and the basis of the global food chain.

A collapse of the system would also disrupt weather patterns across the globe, likely leading to drier conditions and threatening food security in Asia, South America, and Africa, and increasing extreme weather events in other parts of the world.

One analysis found the collapse could take place as soon as 2025.

Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament representing the New Democratic Party, noted that the study was released as Canada's government continues to support fossil fuel production and what experts call false solutions to the planetary heating crisis—including a $12 billion carbon capture and storage project led by tar sands oil companies.

The Environmental Voter Project in the U.S. urged Americans to consider the latest statistics on melting glaciers when choosing the candidates and political parties they will support in 2024.

"Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice an hour," said the group. "So vote like it."

This article has been reprinted from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

‘Frightening’: Greenland Losing 33 Million Tons of Ice Per Hour Due to Climate Crisis

The contemporary corporation is primarily driven by the pursuit of short-term profits for its shareholders. In contrast, cooperative companies tend to adopt a more holistic perspective on business operations. Numerous studies have demonstrated that cooperative owners prioritize considerations such as long-term employment, working conditions, environmental impact, and the sustainability of their local communities. This heightened focus on broader societal aspects suggests that when ownership and power reside with the workforce, business decisions become more balanced and forward-thinking.

Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of capitalism, underscored a fundamental contradiction within capitalism. He noted that the interests of factory owners conflict with those of society, while the interests of laborers align with societal well-being. The cooperative movement contends that when workers assume ownership, this dichotomy diminishes, if not disappears.

Cooperative enterprises are more prevalent than commonly acknowledged, encompassing worker-owned industries, banks, farmers' markets, local work-exchange programs, agricultural processing plants, service projects, and health clinics worldwide. Approximately 15 percent of the global population, or around one billion people, are members of some form of cooperative. The turnover of cooperatives in the ten largest economies constitutes 5 percent of the GDP, slightly smaller than Italy's GDP, the world's seventh-largest economy.

In Europe, cooperatives directly employ 4.7 million individuals, with twenty countries boasting networks of cooperative banks that outperformed commercial banks during the last economic crisis. Notably, 1478 cooperative banks and businesses across forty-six countries reported turnovers exceeding $100 million each. The Mondragon cooperative, established in Spain's Basque region in 1959, stands out as one of the most successful, comprising 256 enterprises and employing nearly 74,000 workers. Economist Jaroslav Vanek asserts that these "democratic firms" outperform capitalist enterprises, particularly in economically underdeveloped regions.

Vanek advocates for the efficiency of coops as workplaces, emphasizing mutual supervision and increased capital productivity. Beyond efficiency, cooperatives foster solidarity and a sense of individual worth, contributing to a balanced use of resources and environmental benefits.

In Canada, cooperatively run hospitals are known to provide better and more cost-effective healthcare, showcasing the positive impact of the cooperative spirit on worker dedication and patient care. Contrary to concerns, cooperatives can coexist within a capitalist environment and often prove more efficient and flexible. Their ability to prioritize objectives beyond profit maximization allows for innovative responses to economic challenges, such as reducing working hours instead of layoffs.

However, challenges persist when operating cooperatives within a capitalist economy, particularly in competing globally. Cooperative economists, including Vanek, emphasize that coops are better suited to support decentralized or local economies.

Examining the Mondragon cooperative as a case study reveals both successes and challenges. Mondragon's success lies in its size and diversified interests, maintaining jobs through solidarity and equitable distribution of surplus. However, global expansion has presented challenges, including the bankruptcy of subsidiaries, raising questions about working conditions and cooperative principles.

In summary, the Mondragon cooperative serves as a valuable case study, offering insights into the complexities, successes, and challenges associated with worker-owned cooperatives. The examination sheds light on issues related to class, power dynamics, and the broader implications for social, environmental, and labor movements.

Cooperative Economics: Promises and Challenges

According to the Gini Index, in every major region of the world outside of Europe, extreme wealth is becoming concentrated in just a handful of people.

“In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065, less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations,” writes Fatema Z. Sumar from the Harvard Kennedy School. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively.

Globally, the richest 10% of people now possess nearly 76% of the world’s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% own just 2%, according to the 2022 World Inequality Report, which analyzes data and the work of more than 100 researchers and inequality experts.

Drivers of extreme income and wealth

Large increases in executive pay are contributing to higher levels of income inequality.

Take a typical corporate CEO. In 1965 the average CEO earned about 20 times the amount of an average worker at the company. In 2018, the typical CEO earned 278 times as much as their typical employees.

But the world’s roughly 2,700 billionaires make most of their money not through wages but through the speculative economy--investments in stocks and real estate.

Their assets also grow due to corporate and individual tax breaks, rather than salaried wages granted by shareholders. Often the rich pay little to no tax by exploiting various loop holes in the tax code.

This calculation does not even count the effects of tax breaks, which often slash the real-world capital gain tax to much lower levels.

Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk is currently the world’s richest man, with a fortune of $240 billion, according to a Bloomberg estimate.

The founders of several tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Amazon, have all earned billions of dollars in just a few years. The former Greek finance minister, Yanus Varoufakis calls them the new feudal capitalists, and we, the people in the streets, are the new serfs.

Reforming the Inequality Gap

Through economist Thomas Piketty’s books and other research, we have learned that 70 percent of all global wealth is owned by only 10 percent of the population (the top 1 percent holds 25-35 percent while the bottom 50 percent holds only around 2 percent).

Beyond the abstract numbers of inequality, there are millions of people struggling to meet basic needs such as clean water, food, education, and steady employment. In the US, one of the world’s richest countries, millions of people are living paycheck to paycheck, earning as little as $12,000 per year, the same as the average income in some of the poorest countries.

Piketty and other progressive economists suggest that to resolve the debt and inequality crisis, the wealthiest must foot the bill and thus ensure that the lower-income groups receive a bigger part of the pie.

In his latest book, A Brief History of Equality, Piketty is rather optimistic that this can be done and claims that over the great sweep of history we have moved towards more equality. And how can this be achieved: not through a smarter form of capitalism, but rather through better forms of democratic socialism.

Reform measures proposed by Piketty and other systems change economists:

A progressive tax on wealth.
Reintroduction of a progressive tax on income
Increase marginal income rates
Increase taxation on return on capital and reduce tax on work and productive economic activities
Differentiate between productive use of wealth, such as profits from manufacturing, and unproductive profits, such as capital gains and financial income from interest.
Tax unproductive profits higher than salaried work
Take steps to protect and preserve the real economy

Progressive Tax on Income

Taxes on the rich, especially in the US, have steadily decreased since the time of Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher, with the expectations that this would free up more capital for productive investments. This near-religious promise has not materialized as expected, however.

While investments shrunk, what grew was the level of speculation and the vast amounts of debt accumulated by governments and individuals.

By reversing the trend and returning to higher taxes on the rich, we can reduce the number of resources wasted on speculation, reduce debt levels, and put more resources into the productive sectors of the economy.

Therefore, in addition to the introduction of a wealth tax, governments should also reintroduce a progressive income tax. In the past, the top tax rate on income was nearly 80 percent, while in most industrialized countries today it has been reduced to around 35 percent. This trend must be reversed through progressive taxation.

Reducing Inequality Long Term

The tendency to concentrate wealth is inherent in a market economy, and as long as we have a market economy, this fact cannot be changed. Because extreme concentration of wealth destroys the necessary conditions of a market economy, the whole system eventually self-destructs.

In order to prevent this and maintain a level of equality that will create sufficient demand to allow the markets to function, outside intervention in the economy by the state and trade unions has always been required.

An interesting situation thus arises: the forces that oppose free-market policies become the forces that maintain the conditions that make free markets possible. A prime example of redistributive policies within the framework of a market economy is the Scandinavian model.

Scandinavia has in the past had comparatively low inequality, a robust economy, and the highest living standard in the world. In recent years, Scandinavia has followed the trend to deregulate the economy. Not surprisingly, economic inequality is now on the rise.

Below are some long-term solutions for avoiding extreme inequality:

Bailout people rather than banks
Ensure wages increase on a par with productivity gains
Reintroduce progressive taxation and welfare payments to reduce the gap between rich and poor
Tax unearned income at a higher rate than income from work
People’s incentives should be realigned with their contribution to society and the environment
Make bonuses for loss-making companies illegal
Place a much lower cap on salaries for top executives
Use the money saved to increase the minimum wage
Give incentives to cooperatives, since they ensure higher wages and worker involvement in the local economy
Ensure low unemployment through government infrastructure projects

What we need in the long term is a form of democratic economy that is high on distribution and low on concentration of wealth. A new economy that is also rooted in ecology, since without nature, there would be no economy at all.

Real sustainable wealth is produced by nature, not the stock market, not by the super-wealthy billionaires. At stake is the quality of life for millions of people. At stake is the quality of life for the entire planet.

Economic Inequality: What Can We Do About It?

In today’s economy, if an industrial plant upriver creates water pollution, and a community downriver is forced to cover the cost of the cleanup, it is considered an externality for the company causing the pollution. These types of externalities are a very common source of pollution: the local community, the nation, and the world bears the cost of industrial pollution while the corporation pockets the extra profit or increased market share by lowering the cost of its products.

The myth of a perfect market without externalities makes up a large part of the neo-liberal economy and is a leading cause behind the climate crisis. The actual cost of oil, if we include the military operations to protect the oil fields, the environmental impact of pollution, and the effect of greenhouse gases produced when burning the oil, would be many times higher than it is at present.

The same holds for nuclear energy. Recent studies have shown that the cost of dismantling old nuclear stations is far higher than anyone had previously thought. For example, it is estimated that it will cost more than $900 million to dismantle the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear power plant, which was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history.

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima and the subsequent leaks into the ocean have not been factored into the cost of electricity for Japanese consumers. The cost of processing and storing the final waste has also become much higher than initially anticipated. Including these costs in the price of electricity generated by nuclear power plants would make nuclear energy much more expensive.

Neo-liberal economists today recognize that externalities exist but believe that they can and should be dealt with by the market rather than by government regulations. Theoretically, they assume that externalities are internalized into costs and, therefore, are technically not externalities. On the practical level, economic policies find a way to internalize the externality, for example, by inventing carbon credits.

A business generally buys a carbon credit to justify or compensate for putting emissions into the atmosphere. It is essentially an accounting trick, which makes it possible for Business A to reduce or avoid creating a ton of CO₂ so that Business B can buy the credit represented by the reduction and use it to ‘offset’ its emissions.

According to the Australia Institute, “Carbon credits may result in emissions reductions at a project level. But even if you assume all carbon credits are perfect, when they’re used as offsets, they, at best, only maintain the status quo. Carbon credits thus mean emissions are being moved from one sector to another, from the fossil fuel industry, for example, to the land sector (which is where most carbon credits come from).” In other words, when carbon credits are used to offset emissions, the overall result is an increase in emissions and a worsening of the climate crisis.

Another externality that neo-liberal economists do not account for is the free work provided by nature. Nature provides free services to us on a scale dwarfing the entire global economic output. Since nature’s total contribution is more significant than all business activities on earth, it is a far stretch to consider its contribution unimportant.

We are dependent on nature for our daily survival, even if we do not consider natural resources as adding economic value. Neither does the current system take note when our economic activities destroy the “free” resources that nature provides us.

Whatever economists today may assume, there are an overwhelming number of externalities in the real world that are not internalized or dealt with by the market. A self-regulating market creates externalities, and far from eliminating the need for government intervention, it makes such intervention necessary to avoid the destruction of the planet.

Hence, we cannot just theorize about externalities any longer or use carbon credits to whisk them away magically. If we continue, the trees will soon be gone, and the oceans will have more plastic containers than fish. The topsoil will be destroyed, and there will be no clean water to drink. We can no longer afford to internalize externalities on a massive scale. Because soon, the wheels of production will grind to a halt. Not for lack of technological ingenuity or financial smarts—no, due to a lack of our most precious economic resource: nature’s ecosystem services.

Photo of a calm river landscape with an industrial plant in the distance releasing pollutants into the air, capturing the juxtaposition between nature

The Myth of Externalities and Carbon Credits

^{A farmer spreads fertilizer in a wheat field outside Amritsar, India. Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images}

Glenn Davis Stone, Sweet Briar College

Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.

The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have surged because of trade sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading fertilizer exporter.

Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold. https://www.youtube.com/embed/MbBzzMh2CTk?wmode=transparent&start=0 In this Oct. 25, 2000, episode of the television drama ‘The West Wing,’ president Josiah Bartlet invokes the standard account of Green Revolution seeds saving millions from starvation.

But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.

As I explain in my book, “The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World,” the Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today – but not the ones that are commonly heard. Events in India show why.

A triumphal narrative

There was a consensus in the 1960s among development officials and the public that an overpopulated Earth was heading toward catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.

India was the global poster child for this looming Malthusian disaster: Its population was booming, drought was ravaging its countryside and its imports of American wheat were climbing to levels that alarmed government officials in India and the U.S.

Then, in 1967, India began distributing new wheat varieties bred by Rockefeller Foundation plant biologist Norman Borlaug, along with high doses of chemical fertilizer. After famine failed to materialize, observers credited the new farming strategy with enabling India to feed itself.

Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is still widely credited with “saving a billion lives.” Indian agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan, who worked with Borlaug to promote the Green Revolution, received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987. Tributes to Swaminathan, who died on Sept. 28, 2023, at age 98, have reiterated the claim that his efforts brought India “self-sufficiency in food production” and independence from Western powers.

A man in a suit at a podium, speaking and gesturing. — Plant scientist M.S. Swaminathan, often called the father of India’s Green Revolution, speaks at a world summit on food security in Rome on Sept. 10, 2009. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images

Debunking the legend

The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions. First, India faced a food crisis, with farms mired in tradition and unable to feed an exploding population; and second, Borlaug’s wheat seeds led to record harvests from 1968 on, replacing import dependence with food self-sufficiency.

Recent research shows that both claims are false.

India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation. After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry. U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.

Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.

Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.

India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.

Once India’s 1965-67 drought ended and the Green Revolution began, wheat production sped up, while production trends in other crops like rice, maize and pulses slowed down. Net food grain production, which was much more crucial than wheat production alone, actually resumed at the same growth rate as before.

But grain production became more erratic, forcing India to resume importing food by the mid-1970s. India also became dramatically more dependent on chemical fertilizer.

Graph showing grain production in India from 1952-1982 and intensifying fertilizer use. — India’s Green Revolution wheat boom came at the expense of other crops; the growth rate of overall food grain production did not increase at all. It is doubtful that the ‘revolution’ produced any more food than would have been produced anyway. What increased dramatically was dependence on imported fertilizer. Glenn Davis Stone; data from India Directorate of Economics and Statistics and Fertiliser Association of India, CC BY-ND

According to data from Indian economic and agricultural organizations, on the eve of the Green Revolution in 1965, Indian farmers needed 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of fertilizer to grow an average ton of food. By 1980, it took 96 pounds (44 kilograms). So, India replaced imports of wheat, which were virtually free food aid, with imports of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, paid for with precious international currency.

Today, India remains the world’s second-highest fertilizer importer, spending US$17.3 billion in 2022. Perversely, Green Revolution boosters call this extreme and expensive dependence “self-sufficiency.”

The toll of ‘green’ pollution

Recent research shows that the environmental costs of the Green Revolution are as severe as its economic impacts. One reason is that fertilizer use is astonishingly wasteful. Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food. Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life. Producing and using fertilizer also generates copious greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. https://www.youtube.com/embed/mZ7ErNcQbuo?wmode=transparent&start=0 Excess nutrients are creating dead zones in water bodies worldwide. Synthetic fertilizer is a major source.

In Punjab, India’s top Green Revolution state, heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides has contaminated water, soil and food and endangered human health.

In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky. Ethiopia offers a cautionary case. In recent years, the Ethiopian government has forced farmers to plant increasing amounts of fertilizer-intensive wheat, claiming this will achieve “self-sufficiency” and even allow it to export wheat worth $105 million this year. Some African officials hail this strategy as an example for the continent.

But Ethiopia has no fertilizer factories, so it has to import it – at a cost of $1 billion just in the past year. Even so, many farmers face severe fertilizer shortages.

The Green Revolution still has many boosters today, especially among biotech companies that are eager to draw parallels between genetically engineered crops and Borlaug’s seeds. I agree that it offers important lessons about how to move forward with food production, but actual data tells a distinctly different story from the standard narrative. In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.

Glenn Davis Stone, Research Professor of Environmental Science, Sweet Briar College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Green Revolution is a warning, not a blueprint for feeding a hungry planet

_{People hold umbrellas as they walk in the rain in Tokyo on September 15, 2023. (Photo: Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images)}

A Common Dreams article

By: Brett Wilkins

They're in the world's water, air, food, and even in our blood—and now researchers in Japan have discovered microplastics in clouds, raising the specter of super-contaminating "plastic rainfall" and possibly affecting the Earth's climate.

Analyzing cloud water samples from high-altitude mountains in Japan including Mt. Fuji, researchers from Waseda University in Tokyo found nine different types of polymers and one type of rubber in the airborne microplastics (AMPs) they detected.

"Research shows that large amounts of microplastics are ingested or inhaled by humans and animals alike and have been detected in multiple organs such as lung, heart, blood, placenta, and feces," notes a summary of the study, which was originally published in the journal Environmental Chemistry Letters.

"Ten million tons of these plastic bits end up in the ocean, released with the ocean spray, and find their way into the atmosphere," the summary continues. "This implies that microplastics may have become an essential component of clouds, contaminating nearly everything we eat and drink via 'plastic rainfall.'

Here's a sentence one could only read in the capitalocene:

"This implies that microplastics may have become an essential component of clouds, contaminating nearly everything we eat and drink via ‘plastic rainfall’”

https://t.co/9G1ojKg4F0
— Kai Heron (@KaiHeron) September 28, 2023

Earlier this year, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Patna discovered AMPs in the city of Patna's rainwater, with polyethylene, terephthalate, and polypropylene being the most common polymers found.

In the Japanese study, the researchers found that "the presence of hydrophilic (water-loving) polymers in the cloud water was abundant, suggesting that they were removed as 'cloud condensation nuclei.'"

"These findings confirm that AMPs play a key role in rapid cloud formation, which may eventually affect the overall climate," they added.

Accumulation of AMPs in the atmosphere—especially around the Earth's poles—could also upset the planet's ecological balance, with devastating effects on biodiversity.

"AMPs are degraded much faster in the upper atmosphere than on the ground due to strong ultraviolet radiation, and this degradation releases greenhouse gases and contributes to global warming," Waseda University professor Hiroshi Okochi, who led the study, said in a statement. "As a result, the findings of this study can be used to account for the effects of AMPs in future global warming projections."

"If the issue of 'plastic air pollution' is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future," Okochi added.

Microplastics in Clouds Could Be ‘Contaminating Nearly Everything We Eat and Drink’: Study

A Common Dreams article

By: Julia Conley

Calling on Norway to "live up to the responsibilities" it has as co-chair of an international panel on sustainable oceans, more than 30 climate and conservation organizations on Monday delivered a letter to nearly two dozen Norwegian embassies on all continents, intensifying global outcry over plans for deep-seabed mining in the Arctic.

The groups, including Greenpeace, Sustainable Ocean Alliance, and the Blue Climate Initiative, called on officials to abandon plans to open 281,000 square kilometers—an area nearly the size of the United Kingdom—to deep-sea mining, saying the world currently lacks "the robust, comprehensive, and credible scientific knowledge to allow for reliable assessment of impacts of deep-sea minerals extraction, including impacts on the planet's life-support systems and human rights."

Therefore, they said, the plan violates Norway's "ambition to act according to a knowledge-based and precautionary approach."

"By embarking on mining in the deep sea without sufficient knowledge, we risk destroying unique nature, eradicating vulnerable species, and disrupting the world's largest carbon sink," said Sofia Tsenikli, global campaign lead for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. "At a time when humanity is racing against the clock to tackle both the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, we should protect nature—not destroy it."

Mining companies have lobbied for deep-sea mining, claiming it is necessary to source cobalt and copper, but advocates have noted that the minerals are already found elsewhere on the planet and have warned that the mining process could disturb the habitat of thousands of marine species.

The advocates behind Monday's letter, which was delivered on the day Norway's parliament began its autumn session, noted that the country's co-chair on the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy—Palau—is among a growing number of governments that have urged caution regarding deep-sea mining.

"European countries like France, Germany and Spain have taken a precautionary position, advocating a precautionary pause, a moratorium or a ban on deep-sea mining," wrote the groups. "Scientists, Indigenous groups, fisheries and seafood organizations, civil society organizations, and major businesses including Storebrand, BMW, and Google are all calling for a stop to deep-sea mining. The European Investment Bank has excluded deep-sea mining from its investments as it is deemed 'unacceptable in climate and environmental terms,' and the European Parliament has called for a moratorium multiple times."

The international coalition further called on Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre to "step back from the brink of introducing this destructive industry and to support a global moratorium on deep sea mining."

The letter was sent a week after Greenpeace activists confronted Støre and other Norwegian Labour Party politicians with a 45-foot long octopus model that displayed a banner reading, "Don't destroy my home."

Greenpeace campaigners in Denmark shared on social media that on Monday, the letter was delivered by an activist dressed as a jellyfish.

It’s the opening of Norway’s Parliament, and together with the jellyfish we bring a message to the government, @regjeringen, and @jonasgahrstore: Stop the reckless plans of deep sea mining in the Arctic #stopdeepseamining #norway #lookdown pic.twitter.com/fQ2AEUA5is
— Greenpeace i Danmark (@greenpeacedk) October 2, 2023

"Norway opening for deep-sea mining while chairing the international Ocean panel, and committing to 100% sustainable use of its waters, is hypocrisy and risks destroying both ecosystems in the vulnerable Arctic and Norway's reputation internationally," said Louisa Casson, senior campaigner for the group's Stop Deep-Sea Mining campaign. "If Norway decides to proceed with their plans, they must give up their seat in the Ocean panel to a state that delivers on ocean protection."

Global Campaigners Call On Norway to Ditch Deep-Sea Mining Plan

Specially written for SYSTEMSCHANGEALLIANCE.org

By: Rennifer Jayleen

With adverse weather conditions and hard-hitting calamities ravaging all parts of the world, corporations need to start addressing their contributions to climate change now more than ever. It is estimated that global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of 36.6 billion tons in 2022. Preventing or stopping rising temperatures will require a significant decline in these emissions. Another concern is the depletion of oil, which is high in demand but is also responsible for adverse environmental impacts. Advancements in renewable energy technology will need to be made to take oil's place and keep most of it in the ground.

The good news is that more and more efforts have emerged to address this challenge. Various fields are making changes in order to fight climate change. Sciences, business, fashion design, and more have made a focus on environmental studies and sustainability a major consideration. Even better, climate change is being seen as a vital part of a student's education. Case in point, climate change is being introduced to mathematics classes at every level of education. This is important as mathematics plays an important role in predicting the effects of climate change. Modern mathematics courses provide specializations in data science, coding, machine learning, statistics, and predictive modeling, which professionals can use to help address pressing climate change issues. From calculating the rate at which ice in the arctic thins to creating carbon calculators to cut down personal emissions, it's clear that these fields are of great importance now more than ever. As the world becomes more environmentally aware, companies need to focus on reducing their carbon emissions to save the planet.

Why carbon emission tracking is vital

A lot of climate change action has been put forward as the responsibility of individuals. Still, a considerable part of the problem lies in large corporations — many of whom do little to remedy their footprint. It has been found that a fifth of carbon emissions come from the supply chains of a small number of multinational companies, and their footprints are sometimes larger than that of some countries. Using technology to keep track of emissions can help businesses spot problem areas in their processes and find ways to incorporate sustainable solutions in their place.

This awareness and change are also linked to better business, as consumers are more likely to purchase from companies that practice sustainability. Ethical consumerism is also helpful in tapping into more potential customers, especially the youth, who are becoming increasingly concerned about emissions and the environment.

How companies are tracking emissions

From an environmental and business standpoint, it is clear that action regarding emissions is becoming a necessity for corporations, and many have been starting to make changes. For example, clothing company Patagonia has built repair shops around the world to increase the longevity of their products and reduce the carbon footprint of creating new items.

Despite these good moves, a significant problem the US faces is that the reporting of corporate sustainability is mainly voluntary and often wildly inaccurate. For instance, data regarding methane levels in the Arctic permafrost was found to be five times higher than what was reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Data and sustainability reports are currently being relied on to keep track of emissions, which is insufficient.

As technology advances, more ways to foster carbon awareness will likely appear soon. Software and apps are being developed to monitor and report on a company’s carbon emissions. For example, Emitwise is developing a platform that allows companies to automatically measure the electricity used by suppliers, the airplane flights taken by employees, and the hundreds of other energy uses that happen on any day of operations. This will help make reports much more frequent and regular, giving more numbers and data to work with. Advancements in satellites and cameras that detect these emissions as they pass through the atmosphere can also help point out patterns and allow businesses to address key problems.

There is still much to be done in emissions tracking, but with more growth in technology and well-trained professionals, change can be made to address these issues.

Why Companies Are Reducing Carbon Emissions and How They Can Track Their Progress

The Urgent Need for Planetary Systems Change

In February, 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued “a stark warning about the impact of climate change on people and the planet, saying that ecosystem collapse, species extinction, deadly heatwaves and floods are among ‘the dangerous and widespread disruptions’ the world will face over the next two decades due to global warming.”

The UN News wrote that the IPCC adaptation report is “a damning indictment of failed global leadership on climate.” In an op-ed article penned for the Washington Post, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, described the latest IPCC report as "a litany of broken climate promises", which revealed a "yawning gap between climate pledges, and reality."

Scientists have warned that we are perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate effects. The current models of change have failed us. There is an urgent need for systems change. But what is systems thinking and what is systems change?

Systems Thinking

According to systems thinking, there are parts and wholes, as well as whole/parts. Each connection is part of a hierarchy, or rather a holarchy, of parts and wholes and whole/parts. Simply put, a cell is part of an organ, which is part of an organism, which is part of an ecosystem, a culture, an economy.

Too often individual actors in a system are unable to see or experience the whole of which they are a part, and this limited worldview will then affect their vision and decision making.

In the last three decades, systems thinking has evolved as a new, unified concept at the forefront of science. In the words of one of the pioneers in the field, Fritjof Capra, this new outlook is “a unified view that integrates life’s biological, cognitive, social and ecological dimensions. At the very core of this new understanding of life we find a profound change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.”

Systems theory advises us to discover the web of interactions between nature and economy, between science and culture, between personal habits and political policies. Systems theory also advises us to find “a new web of meaning,” as the great systems philosopher Jeremy Lent puts it. Because without a web of meaning replacing nature as machine and human beings as “homo economicus”—that irrational and outdated idea that an economy is mainly profit and growth-oriented—we will continue to seek false ideals, create fractured societies, and perhaps destroy civilization.

As regenerative thinker and activist Daniel Christian Wahl says, “whole-systems thinking is living systems thinking.” Therefore, we need “a systemic understanding of processes by which life continuously regenerates conditions conducive to life and offers a pathway to creating regenerative businesses and organizations within a regenerative economy as enabling factors of a regenerative culture.”

What are Systems?

Systems are complex and of many different types. There are ecosystems—the interaction of various organisms with their physical environment. There are political systems—the interaction between politicians, government institutions, lawyers, economists, bureaucrats, and voters. There are also social, cultural, educational, and technological systems.

There are also different types of systems thinkers. Hard systems thinkers look for concrete problems and solutions for definable systems. Soft systems thinkers, on the other hand, focus more on people and their perspectives of a given system, and how these could be reconciled to make improvements. Therefore, it is not easy to find a singular definition of what a system is. Moreover, we must also account for scientific definitions as well as public, political and government opinions, and policies about the same systems. Systems are complex, and they often require complex, integrated solutions.
There are different schools of thought, depending on the discipline and the context, of how people define systems. Here is a definition from John H. Holland, often called “the father of genetic algorithms” and the dean of complexity studies: “A system is a configuration of interaction, interdependent parts that are connected through a web of relationships, forming a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.” Donella Meadows, another well-known systems theorist defines a system as “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own patterns of behavior over time.”

Systems are in Flux

An important insight of systems theory is that ecosystems, societies, economies, and cultures are always changing and in dynamic flux. Therefore, a theory of change needs to be a living conversation, a dynamic adaptation. We need to test our assumptions about how change happens. This requires an adaptive learning approach as we gain feedback from the work undertaken. We must try to avoid failure, but when we do fail, we engage feedback loops into the different stages, and we allocate time to revisit and improve through course-correction.

Today, we are in an unmistakable, planetary flux. This global instability—in the form of climate change, species extinction, economic inequality, food shortages, political autocracy, and the fear of nuclear war—poses a real and present danger to human civilization. In short, we are failing to create a sustainable planet. Without further delay, we must engage scientific, political, environmental, and economic feedback loops so that we may save the one and only planet we have.

What is Systems Change?

Systems change is the emergence of a new pattern of organization or systems structure. It is both a process and an outcome. Today, we are facing unprecedented economic, social, and environmental crises, and most reforms have offered ineffective and shallow solutions. It is time for systems change. This is the moment for a new culture and economy to emerge from the principles of systems thinking.

We need to “connect the dots” between economics and nature, between science and culture, between politics and wellbeing. We need to address the root causes of all current crises facing people and the planet from a systems perspective.

Economies are not just machines and assembly lines created to pump out products for profit. New economies are emerging from the ecosystems of people, nature, and cultures. New economies are emerging that recognize both that humans have basic needs that must be met and that these needs are remarkably similar. Whether you live on a farm in Africa or a city in Europe, we all need food, medical care, housing, employment, clothing, and education.

At Systems Change Alliance, we connect the dots between individuals, groups and organizations working in different fields to collaborate, educate, advocate, and implement positive systemic change.

Regenerative and Whole Systems

We may define a ‘system’ as a set of interconnected elements forming a coherent pattern we may term a ‘whole’. This wholistic system exhibits properties emerging out of the interactions and relationships of the individual elements within it. This definition can refer to a molecule, a cell, a human being, a community, or the planet itself.

In many ways a system is less a ‘thing’ than a pattern of relationships and interactions — an organized web of constituent elements. The Greek root of the word system is ‘synhistanai’ and literally means ‘to place together’.

Whole systems thinking is a theory and a map, but it is not the same as the territory. In the words of Daniel Christian Wahl: “We can reduce the world to a whole just as easily as we can reduce it to a collection of parts. Neither the whole nor parts are primary; they come into being through the dynamic processes that define their identity through relationships and networks of interactions.

In a society based on reductionist rather than wholistic thinking, ecological, economic, political, and cultural constraints often become irreconcilable challenges. We must remember that the part and the whole are dualistic. When we say that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts, we are actually referring to a third dimension of the system (its evolution) which is not accounted for in this dualism.

This is the progressive nature of evolution in system change. In a society based on dynamic systems thinking, these spheres of life become regenerative support systems, breathing new life into dynamic cycles of collaboration and change.”

Systems of Competition and Cooperation

Both competition and cooperation have played an essential role in bringing forth thriving and diverse ecosystems. The spectacularly colorful coral reefs we see today exist thanks to an early mutualism between a coral and a photosynthetic algae. Likewise, in an economy, there is both competition and cooperation.

Our current economic system, however, has been primarily based on the idea that evolution is all about the survival of the fittest. Thus, the capitalist market places too much emphasis on competition over cooperation, to the detriment of both people and the environment.

A systemic understanding of nature’s processes in which life continuously regenerates conditions conducive to dynamic balance and biodiversity can teach us a pathway for creating a more regenerative and cooperative economy. In this new eco-economy, healthy competition and cooperation may become mirrors of the mutualism evolved in the liquid world of coral reefs.

Likewise, as we embark upon systems change to save people and planet from potential climate collapse, we need to embrace both competition and cooperation while striving to create a more regenerative economy, a more sustainable application of science, and the blossoming of a more united human society.

Systems Change Booklet

This article is a summary of a booklet we are working on, titled "Understanding the Systems to Change the World". We have a draft being reviewed by major systems thinkers, and will publish it in the future as an illustrated booklet.
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Understanding Systems to Change the World

By Richard Heinberg

The world teeters on the brink of economic disaster due to energy shortages caused by war. The main oil-producing nations are unable and unwilling to increase output, even though prices are high and threatening to go much higher. The solutions being proposed—electric cars and renewable energy technologies—are coming on line, but not fast enough. Building them to the scale required to maintain current levels of economic activity and societal complexity would require enormous amounts of minerals and metals that are also becoming scarce. We appear to be hurtling toward geopolitical and economic turmoil.

Does anything about this scenario sound familiar? It might. It happens to be almost exactly what I discussed in my book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, published in 2003. I have no interest in rubbing salt in society’s worsening wounds by saying “I told you so,” but it would be a dereliction of duty for me not to point out the facts.

My book was one of the first to discuss peak oil—the point when supplies of the world’s most economically pivotal resource start to dwindle. Of course, the most pessimistic predictions for the timing of the peak were wrong. Many analysts thought that petroleum production would start to decline in the years between 2005 and 2010. Instead, the rate of global conventional oil extraction flatlined during that period, and is just now beginning to descend from its long plateau. Meanwhile, unconventional oil (tar sands and tight oil produced by fracking and horizontal drilling) enabled new heights of production starting around 2010. The general consensus thereafter was that oil supplies can easily continue to increase for the foreseeable future; all it takes is more investment.

My organization, Post Carbon Institute, documented in great technical detail that the new unconventional oil sources were a flash-in-the-pan, and that world oil production was still set to enter its inevitable long-term decline phase quite soon. But very few listened. Where peak oil was still mentioned, it was framed in terms of peak demand resulting from the universal electrification of transport modes.

Today oil supplies are tight once again, as they were in 2008, before the fracking boom. But now there is no fracking cavalry waiting on the horizon to swoop down and rescue the global economy. Indeed, the only factors keeping oil prices from going stratospheric today are depressed Chinese demand (due to Covid restrictions) and fears of a global recession (triggered by high energy prices).

In July, President Biden went hat-in-hand to the Saudis, begging for more oil output. Instead, as of mid-October, OPEC+ (a loose affiliation of the 13 OPEC members and 10 of the world’s major non-OPEC oil-exporting nations) is planning to cut its production by two million barrels per day. Political elites in Washington read this as the Saudis trying to interfere in the upcoming US midterm elections by causing gasoline prices to rise, thus nudging voters toward Republican candidates. While that interpretation may ring true, the fact is that OPEC and Russia cannot produce much more oil in any case. If their tired old oilfields were forced to yield more oil over the short term, the result would be less production potential over the longer term.

On October 11, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser told a conference in London, “Today there is spare capacity that is extremely low. If China opens up, [the] economy starts improving or the aviation industry starts asking for more jet fuel, you will erode this spare capacity.”

Is Nasser exaggerating for political effect? If anything, the Saudis have been hiding their production capacity constraints for years in order to garner more investment cash and world influence by maintaining the common belief that they are sitting on limitless oceans of oil.

Production prospects are not much better in US, even though fracking has propelled the nation back to the forefront of petroleum producers. The Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, where tight oil resources are most plentiful, can still grow its production somewhat, but other fracking plays (the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Niobrara) are all past peak. Growth potential in the Permian is now struggling to overcome declines everywhere else in the US—from Alaska to California to North Dakota.

World oil production stopped growing in 2019, just before the Covid pandemic. Even if a new peak of production occurs before 2030, it will likely exceed the 2019 level by only a tiny fraction, and only for a short time. There is simply no breathing room left for petroleum-powered world economic growth.

Printed with permission by the Post Carbon Institute.

Photo by Photo by Maria Lupan

Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies

By Roar Bjonnes

Green economics is supposed to save us from climate change and environmental catastrophe. There are, however, competing ideas about how to best proceed.

Degrowth advocates claim that it is unregulated growth that drove us into this predicament in the first place, therefore we need to reduce our GDP, and production in general, to become more sustainable.

Green growth advocates, on the other hand, point to great improvements in air quality in the Western world as a great example that green growth is the most efficient way to save the planet. We can grow the economy while at the same time regulate our way to sustainability.

So, which way is the best?

Green Growth vs Degrowth

Is economic growth incompatible with environmental sustainability? Green growth and degrowth proponents have vastly different economic philosophies. They do agree on one thing: the current economic growth model is unable to effectively change the catastrophic course we are on.

We are in the middle of an escalating climate change crisis and moving rapidly toward a global, ecological disaster. The disagreement between the two camps—growth or degrowth—lies in how to proceed with the necessary changes.

Political economist Jason Hickel is one of the most prominent and eloquent advocates of degrowth. In a recent debate between him and green growth advocate Samuel Fankhauser, he passionately articulated the case for global degrowth as the only way to save the planet.

Hickel argued that GDP growth forever is neither good nor necessary. Fankhauser claimed the opposite is possible: increased GDP as well as sustainability through green growth.

In his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will save The World (Penguin), with a foreword by leaders of The Extinction Rebellion, the political economist argues that it is capitalism’s inherent demand for perpetual expansion that is the problem. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. This is of course a compelling argument.

Here are Hickel’s two main reasons for why we need degrowth:

(1) Because growing the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] means growing energy demand, and this makes the task of switching to renewables significantly more difficult (nearly three times more difficult between now and 2050, which virtually rules out success).

(2) Because our preoccupation with growth makes it extremely difficult to get the regulations we need to avert ecological breakdown. Politicians resist such measures precisely because of the risks they pose to growth.

GDP is a measure of total economic output. Planting trees increases the GDP, but so does drilling for and using more oil, so does cutting down the rainforest. Growing GDP can mean both bad growth as well as positive degrowth.

Cutting down the rainforest to grow soybeans and graze cattle is bad GDP growth, while an increased number of organic farms growing more vegetables is positive GDP growth. In other words, not all increase in GDP is good for the planet, thus it is not an accurate measure of progress.

However, the degrowth proponents have a point: we need to reduce growth in those areas of the economy that is bad for people and planet. So, part of the challenge for the degrowth movement, and for the rest of us, is to better define what is meant by green growth and unsustainable growth.

The other challenge is that degrowth is a tough political sell. To win over policy makers, they need to be able to sell it to voters. And voters generally vote with their pocketbooks. They do not like to sacrifice their own wealth to save the planet. To that argument, Hickel says there is no other choice. We need to reduce the wealth of the wealthy as well as those of us who live in rich countries. That is indeed a tough political sell. But it must be made. Besides, maybe there are ways to make it easier?

Degrowth and Green Growth

The challenge for the degrowth movement is to spell out where the economy needs to grow sustainably and where unsustainable growth needs to be dramatically curtailed. Here are some areas where we need degrowth: Reduction in the use of fossil fuels for heating and production; reduction in emissions from cars and airplanes; reduction in our consumption of meat and milk since fossil fuels are nonrenewable resources and because all these human activities have a very high carbon footprint.

These examples show that degrowth in some areas will lead to green growth in other areas—in alternative energy production, in new technological innovation, production of new airplanes and cars, and in a dramatic increase in organic plant-based farming, In other words, degrowth and green growth need not be mutually exclusive.

Green Growth vs GDP Growth

The degrowth advocates are not against green growth in certain areas of the economy. Their point is rather fundamental: that we cannot have GDP growth forever, we cannot, in economic terms, have aggregate expansion of the total economy forever.

So how do we grow? We can grow more in quality, less in quantity. We can grow by increased sharing of the wealth, and in more sustainable use of the planet’s resources.

An Economy Beyond GDP

GDP only measures the speed at which the total economy grows, and that is a very limited measurement. Her are six ways, commonly referenced in the New Economy Movement, to measure growth beyond GDP.

We need to measure if the economy meets the basic needs of its people.
We need to measure the wellbeing of the people.
We need to measure the sustainability and the carbon footprint of the economy.
We need to measure the health of the commons, the source of all our natural resources.
We need to have a reasonable standard for economic equality.
We need to measure if physical and mental health is improving.

All these indicators will improve the social economy and the wellbeing economy, but not so much the profit economy and the GDP growth economy.

We need to shift our understanding of economics—from a system of profit and growth to a social system governed by ecological laws and social values.

Scientifically, we need to employ Buckminster Fuller’s vision: to do more with less. To make goods that last. To make goods that can be reused, recycled, and become “nutrients” in other forms of production. We need to create an industrial ecology that mirrors nature in operation.

A different economy beyond GDP can grow in leisure time through reduced working hours. It can grow in shared wealth and more economic equality. It can grow in more energy efficient houses. By producing healthier foods in more sustainable ways.

Most importantly, the social, well-being part of the economy can grow in virtual space, in inner space—through literature, poetry, art, science, music, and spirituality. The human potential for growth is virtually endless, and it is most certainly growth that is both green and sustainable. In other words, degrowth and green growth need not be mutually exclusive concepts.

Photo by Brandon Green

Saving the Planet: Degrowth or Green Growth?

By Roar Bjonnes

Sure, trees are renewable sources of building materials and even energy. After cutting, they will eventually grow back. But trees are also one of the main ways that nature absorbs harmful CO2 gasses. Therefore, given the climate crisis, cutting trees makes no sense in curbing green house emissions.

The New York Times report that the EU “began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power.”

This policy has created a booming market, and wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source. But in the long run, this energy source is not green.

Forest is Finland and Estonia were once considered important sources to reduce carbon emissions but are today harvested so intensely that government scientists consider them to be carbon emitters.

The campaign to use wood pellets as fuel has made people think they are making sustainable choices. However, according to David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency in London, these practices are driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests.

With the halting of the supply of Russian gas to the European continent, there is growing pressure from the public that energy prices will increase. This has resulted in street protests and governments, such as in France, of announcing the potential for regular blackouts this coming winter.

These pressures have led both Central European and Nordic countries to keep wood subsidies and the wood chip industry alive and well.

The New York Times report that “in 2018, the last time the subsidies came up for a vote, nearly 800 scientists signed a letter urging lawmakers to stop treating logged trees as a green source of energy. While trees can be replanted, it can take generations for a growing forest to reabsorb the carbon dioxide from burned wood.

“Using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries,” the scientists wrote.

Prof Gert-Jan Nabuurs, who researches forestry at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, told the BBC that he acknowledges that wood does not burn as efficiently as natural gas or coal "and that is why for the same amount of energy, you are emitting more".

He also argues that "this biomass for bioenergy is a short cycle" as the trees are replanted.

But this runs contrary to one of the main climate change problems we face today: the lack of bio-diverse forest covers to absorb carbon. Diverse forests are replaced with plantations of a single tree species, and this makes them more vulnerable to disease and much less efficient at sequestering carbon.

The current EU policy of encouraging the cutting of trees to produce wood pellets appears to be not only shortsighted economic policy—as the economy needs to shift toward non-polluting sources of energy—but it is also a direct contributor to global warming.

Photo by Krista Joy Montgomery

Failed EU Policy: Cutting trees for “green energy”

By Daniel Christian Wahl

First published in July 2021 by Sustainable Brands (see link)

In the autumn of 2018, Walter J. Thompson published a report entitled The New Sustainability: Regeneration. Interest in regenerative development had been building for years and the publication of Designing Regenerative Cultures and Regenerative Development in 2016, The Regenerative Business in 2017 and Regenerative Leadershipin 2019 all contributed to broadening the dialogue about its important contribution. However, it was the W.J. Thompson report and John Elkington’s Green Swans that indicated to me that the regenerative (r)evolution was now rapidly gaining momentum.

Already, the legions of consultants who are running the pattern of ‘selling the new’ are archiving their folders on ‘integral,’ ‘lean,’ ‘smart,’ ‘circular’ and ‘sustainable,’ while busily studying up on how to sell the new trend: regenerative. In the process, the danger is that novices pretend to be seasoned practitioners and the deeper transformative agency of the work gets lost. Also, in ‘selling the new’ much useful and necessary work is in danger of being devalued. In over 20 years as a professional in the field of sustainability, I have met many practitioners who were working on sustainability in a regenerative way.

Sustainability is an important bridge we have not yet crossed. Working regeneratively will help us cross that bridge faster and move beyond avoiding negative impacts to healing the damage done and building capacity for place-sourced regeneration. Framed appropriately, the SDGs can serve as a platform of conversation to introduce working regeneratively to more and more people. So, let us not dismiss ‘sustainable’ — nor let us continue the old pattern and just change the label to ‘regenerative!’

After decades of pioneering work by people such as Carol Sanford, Pamela Mang, Ben Haggard, Joel Glanzberg, Bill Reed and others, the genie is now out of the bottle of carefully curated communities of practice. The deep practice of regeneration operating from a profoundly different and at the same time ancient worldview is meeting the current mainstream accustomed to dumbed-down soundbytes and demanding instant gratification and ‘sexy’ sales pitches. It is our responsibility not to lose its essence and hence the unique contribution in the process.

I celebrate that organizations such as Sustainable Brands™ or the Spanish sustainability platform Quiero are helping to take the dialogue about regenerative practice to many more companies. And I enjoyed contributing to the curation of the Regenerative Pathways platform developed by Future Stewards “to accelerate a regenerative future.”

During a fascinating conversation with Lachlan Feggans — Asia Pacific director of sustainability at Brambles — on “The Regenerative Revolution” podcast, we explored how to find a nuanced, ‘glocal’ approach to re-regionalising production and consumption; and hence, decentralising supply chains. These are important questions; and how we work with them depends on how we understand our participatory agency within nested living systems.

At the heart of regeneration is realignment with the developmental and evolutionary impulse that has not just sustained life as a planetary process for 3.8 billion years, but has revealed life itself as a regenerative community across scales generating and regenerating the abundance, diversity, and vitality of a magnificent variety of places, bioregions and the planet as a whole.

Regenerative practice starts and continues with personal development. It is not a tool but a practice of conscious participation and co-creation. Living in right relationship and practicing the art of transformation, we are realigning with life itself. Working regeneratively is working in an evolutionary way. In a problem-solving and solution-scaling-oriented culture, it is revolutionary to invite a more humble approach by catalysing and revealing the potential of people as regenerative expressions of place.

Working regeneratively fore-grounds our collaborative journey of learning and capacity building. Our projects, products, solutions and answers are stage posts of a continuous apprenticeship, as we are practicing to manifest the inherent potential in ourselves and in teams, businesses, communities and places. Working regeneratively is about revealing potential, rather than disappearing down the rabbit holes of solving problems in isolation.

The systemic and participatory worldview that informs regenerative practice carries a central lesson: Helping to manifest the unique contribution of an individual, team, community, business, bioregion or of humanity not only becomes more possible but actually requires being in service to the ‘adjacent whole’ — the industry, community, bioregion, ecosystem, and ultimately to humanity and all life.

From this perspective, success is not measured in corporate internal ecological balance and loss accounting, or scored against a regenerative certification scheme; it is subtly reflected in the health and vitality of the communities, ecosystems and bioregions the business operates in. Ultimately, the measure of success is the improvement of local and regional capacity to face an uncertain future creatively and be of healing influence in the nested contexts in which we operate.

Maybe a good way to start the journey is by letting go off the habit of asking ‘what can regenerative do for my company’ and inviting a wider inquiry into how can we as human beings orient this company towards a thriving future in service to community and place?

Another useful way of describing what working in a regenerative way means is to start with articulating first principles. Carol Sanford suggested seven foundational principles of a regenerative approach: i) wholes, ii) potential, iii) essence, iv) development, v) nested, vi) nodes, and vii) fields. I like the way Bill Reed presents these in relationship and condenses them to four ways of working, which I built on here:

1. Working with whole systems as conscious participants in and expressions of those systems-created, co-evolutionary pathways into the future

2. Manifesting inherent potential invites place-sourced approaches informed by the bio-cultural uniqueness of particular localities and their inhabitants,

3. Developing capability of people in place to become regenerative expressions of that place enables long-term response-ability in the face of complexity and uncertainty,

4. Building a field of collaboration through embracing diversity while sharing meaning, purpose and practice enables individuals and the collective to express their unique contribution in service to self and community, as well as, place and planet.

So, if you really want to embark on the journey of working regeneratively, you better be prepared that the learning never stops and both the practice and you yourself will transform over time. Then again that is precisely the point. As my friend Bill Reed once pointed out to me: “The delivery is capability.”

Beyond serving the project, the company, the industry, or the nation state is being in right relationship with the dynamic living planet upon which all of them depend. Being in right relationship is primarily about nurturing the dynamic health and resilience (including the capacity to transform and the capacity of anticipation) of the nested systems (or dynamic wholeness) in which we participate. Working in a regenerative way is about appropriate participation!

To me, this ‘capability’ Bill calls the deliverable is about the capacity and lifelong practice to consciously participate in one of life’s core patterns: regeneration. As Janine Benyus summed up the core lesson of biomimicry so expertly: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” The delivery is in living in right relationships. Such relationships create shared abundance rather than competitive scarcity, and improve the health and vitality of the whole.

Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.

Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures

Why Working Regeneratively Is (R)evolutionary

By Roar Bjonnes

When editor-in-chief of multinational business magazine Fortune, Alyson Shontell, asked in its June/July 2022 issue if it’s time for a maximum wage, she got my attention. Back in the early 90’s, when I was an editor I published an article by Sam Pizzigati, co-editor of Inequality.org, which emphatically proclaimed that it was indeed time for a maximum wage. Does this now mean that Fortune, the glossy voice of corporate capitalism, and progressive activists like Pizzigati, finally agree that it’s time to curb the wealth of the Uber-rich? If so, how can this be done?

Growing Corporate Inequality

This is not the first time Fortune magazine has aired the sentiment, however, that corporate CEOs get paid way too much. In 1982, a Fortune cover story called the payment to corporate leaders at the time “madness.” And in 2003, the magazine said that “CEOs got paid more than ever.”

Since the late 1970s through 2020, writes Shontel, “compensation for chief executives rose 1,322 percent.” During that same period, however, annual worker compensation only rose by a paltry 18 percent. At the end of her editorial, Shontel asks: “Is [this] capitalism at its best? Or a bubble that’s finally ready to burst?”

When Fortune posed that question to its 1.8 million LinkedIn followers, they received over 10,000 responses and 65 percent of those said--yes, it’s time for a maximum wage. So, why this disconnect? Why is there no political change, when even conservative voices think the gap between the highest paid chief executives and the assembly line workers is so enormous? More importantly, what would that change look like?

The Political Power of Lobbyists

A study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University? and Benjamin Page of Northwestern concluded that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. As they put it, "economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence." In other words, there is no policy change regarding a maximum income because the rich and other special interest groups do not want to rock the boat by reducing their own wealth.

This is not just a US problem. According to Lobby Planet, a report by the Corporate Europe Conservatory, there are over 25,000 EU lobbyists in Brussel, most of them representing corporations. The report “takes you on a tour of the EU Quarter to explain the many – and often shady – methods of corporate lobbying used to influence decision making in the European Union.” Hard core capitalism and wealth concentration has also become a European past-time.

Increased Wealth Inequality Within Nations

My research suggests that globalization has reduced global wealth inequality between nations but has increased wealth inequality within nations. Typically, poorer countries are characterized by greater inequality than richer countries. However, there are exceptions to this rule: in some industrially developed countries, such as the United States and Russia, inequality is very high. In others, such as Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, economic disparity is relatively low.

According to French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the 2013 international bestseller Capital in the 21^st Century, growth in inequality is largely due to the massive wealth gained by the extremely rich: the top one percent. Many wealthy people increase their fortunes due to old wealth, or inheritance, but at present, inequality is mostly the result of increased wages. And Piketty assumes that the rich will keep fighting to not only keep this wealth but to make even more. History seems to support Piketty’s theory. So how can the increasing wealth inequality and wage gap be reduced?

In the above-mentioned social democracies of the Nordic countries, the economic inequality gap is relatively low due to two main reasons: a comparatively high and progressive tax rate—the more you earn, the more taxes you’ll pay—and because each year, the labor unions will sit down with management to negotiate salaries, paid holidays (generally five to six weeks), paid maternity leave, and other benefits. If labor demands are not met, then the workers will often go on strike until a negotiated settlement is reached. These negotiations have over the past many decades shaped the economic equality and socially humane conditions of the social democracies of Scandinavia.

Taxing the Rich

Piketty’s answer to the global increase in inequality is a progressive tax rather than a fixed maximum wage. Historically, such a progressive tax is not unheard of, not even in the US. President Roosevelt and his New Dealers during WWII, right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, needed revenue to boost and win the war, so they proposed a 100 percent top tax rate. FDR settled for a marginal tax rate of 94 percent. In the next three decades, progressive taxes became the norm in most Western countries. However, that trend ended, especially in the US, with globalization’s neo-liberal free trade policies and Reaganomics in the early 1980s.

Pizzigati points to one important weakness of taxing the rich: they will cheat! But this does not need to be the norm, he writes in an article for Common Dreams. “Legislative decisions created a tax system that winks at tax evasion. Legislative decisions could, by the same token, fashion a tax system that clamps down on wealthy tax cheaters. That refashioning now appears to have some real momentum,” he writes.

“In the House of Representatives,” Pizzigati continues, “members of Congress belonging to the Progressive Caucus have introduced legislation that would, for starters, require the IRS to audit at least 20 percent of returns reporting at least $1 million in income and give the IRS the funding necessary to reach that goal.”

Pizzigati also points to Elizabeth Warren’s “legislative lead on a “wealth tax” that would raise an estimated $3 trillion over the next decade from the nation’s 100,000 richest households,” as well as a bill by the Nordic Economic Model advocate and senator Bernie Sanders. The bill “would hike the federal estate tax rate to 65 percent on bequests over $1 billion and plug decades-old estate tax loopholes along the way. The legislation figures to raise $430 billion over the next 10 years.” However, as optimistic as these bills sound, none of them have passed through Congress yet, so the US remains as unequal as ever.

Taxing the Rich is Challenging

Recent studies by The Brookings Institution were contradictory in determining whether taxing the rich would have a significant effect on income inequality. Other studies have shown that tax evasion is and would continue to be a significant challenge to dramatically reduce economic inequality. Meanwhile, the Nordic economic model of social democracy has shown that a capitalist system with strong government regulation and ownership stakes in key industries such as energy, a strong union movement, and a progressive tax system can significantly lower income inequality.

According to an article by Beth Daley in The Conversation, “The Nordic countries are among the most equal in terms of distribution of income. Using the Gini coefficient measure of income inequality (where 1 represents complete inequality and 0 represents complete equality) OECD data gives the US a score of 0.39 and the UK a slightly more equal score of 0.35 – both above the OECD average of 0.31. The five Nordic countries, meanwhile, ranged from 0.25 (Iceland – the most equal) to 0.28 (Sweden).”

Outside of the Nordic countries, however, the law of the economic jungle increasingly reigns. According to an article in Forbes magazine, The Pandora Papers, an investigation conducted by over 600 journalists uncovered the ways “powerful politicians, billionaires and celebrities utilized offshore accounts and other measures to hide trillions of dollars over the last 25 years. Many have done this legally through well-connected tax accountants, lawyers, offshore tax havens, and by exploiting loopholes.”

“In addition to politicians and celebrities,” The Pandora Papers “found that religious leaders, drug dealers, successful business owners, doctors and affluent people have been hiding their investments in large yachts, mega-mansions, high-end beachfront property and other hard to trace assets.”

Thomas Piketty and the Long Road to Equality

Piketty’s monumental book Capital in the Twenty-First Century offered perhaps one of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics ever published. Piketty’s voluminous tome provided searing insights into capitalism’s strengths and failings. He presented a well-documented case for how to solve the gap between the rich and the poor—both within nations and between nations.

Since then, Piketty has published two more books. In a review of the most recent one, history Professor Gary Gerstle writes in the Washington Post that “Piketty’s latest work, ‘A Brief History of Equality’, neatly summarizes the findings of his two original volumes in a ‘mere’ 250 pages of text. Readers will find this work attractive for its brevity alone. But ‘A Brief History of Equality’ is also a very different kind of book from the first two.”

The core message of Piketty’s last book is his confidence in the progress toward more equality made by European social democracies in the past 80 years. The social democratic evolution, combining the best of socialism with a capitalism reined in by taxes and labor unions, has laid the groundwork for the emergence of a more equal world, Piketty proclaims.

So, what are Piketty’s main proposals for a more equal economy? 1. Public financing of elections. 2. Transnational assemblies to complement national legislatures. 3. A two percent global tax on all individual fortunes that exceed 10 million euros (about $10.4 million). 4. Worker engagement in the management of large corporations to promote a move towards cooperative enterprises. 5. New global treaties to enhance rather than hamper the reduction of greenhouse gases and easing economic inequality between the Global North and the Global South.

Piketty’s wealth tax of two percent is rather timid. Many of his other proposals are practical and doable, though challenging to implement. That is, unless there is a growing global uprising putting pressure on political legislatures and corporations to create reforms. But the deeper questions we need to ask are: are such reforms enough and could there be a more effective way to reduce inequality?

Reducing the Wealth Gap Through Taxes or Cooperatives?

As mentioned above, implementing taxes to curb the growing wealth of the one percent will be challenging. Add to that the massive amount of wealth hidden in tangible assets and tax shelters which is unavailable for taxation and the increasing levels of higher incomes, and we start to see the enormity of the problem. Additionally, in the US, the CEO-to-worker income ratio is now on average 339 to 1, with the upper end of the spectrum surpassing more than 2000 to 1. Strangely, according to a 2016 Stanford University survey, most Americans think a fair executive-to-worker pay ratio should be considerably smaller—a stunning 6 to 1. Still, US inequality keeps growing.

Hence, Piketty might be onto something fundamentally important when suggesting a movement towards cooperatives as a major solution for inequality. According to The Financial Times Stock Exchange index (FTSE), the average CEO salary in European companies is $7 million a year. This yields a CEO-to-line-worker pay ratio of 129-to-1. In contrast, the co-ops in Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain, which employs around 80,000 workers, have decided on a ratio that runs from 6-to-1 to 9-to-1. No CEO of a Mondragon co-operative makes more than $1 million a year.

Roberto Lovato writes in the Craftsmanship Quarterly that “estimates vary wildly on how many people work in co-ops (perhaps because people differ on how a co-op is defined).” A 2014 report for the U.N., for example, puts the figure, worldwide, at 12.6 million. However, the Harvard Business Review counts more than 17 million (or 12% of the U.S. workforce) who are employed in ESOPs [Employee Stock Ownership Programs], credit unions, consumer and purchasing co-operatives and other worker-owned enterprises.”

“Whatever the figure,” he writes, “nowhere is the co-operative advantage as obvious as in the struggle to close today’s gargantuan, ever-widening income gap, both in the U.S. and across the world. Defeating the dragon of income inequality, may, in fact, be one of the most appealing social benefits of the continued interest in cooperativism.”

Beyond Taxes: Toward Economic Democracy

While Piketty has received growing support for his soft version of socialism--even from billionaires like Bill Gates--there is also another progressive economy movement afoot today. As with Piketty’s way of thinking, this movement also seeks to create a new and more equal economy. However instead of using tax reforms to do so, it focuses on structural changes through the concept of economic democracy.

In theory, democracy distributes power equally to all people, but it is often a small, powerful elite that runs for office, forms parties, owns the media, and frames political policy. Those with money and power are the ones who control the flow of news and opinion, and often politicians are more beholden to the corporations than to the people they represent. Hence, political democracy today also concentrates power in the hands of the few. Therefore, many new economy thinkers believe that the long-term solution to reducing inequality and creating more sustainability is to move away from this concentration of power and initiate more democracy in the economy as well.

Economic democracy means, in part, to change the distribution of income and wealth. It means a powershift in economic decision making—from the corporation and the wealthy elite to the people, just like in the Mondragon coops. Presently, the production of wealth is socialized—everyone contributes—but most of the benefits of the production is privatized. A small minority reap most of the economic and political benefits from everyone else’s hard work, hence the growing economic inequality.

A restructured economy through economic democracy avoids much of the bureaucracy needed to implement an effective tax-the-rich economy. Moreover, a more cooperative economy has many other benefits, as it creates stronger social bonds and pride in one’s community. It also gives people the opportunity to exercise their decision-making powers locally every day, not just once every two to four years on election day.

Mathematician and philosopher David Schweickart defines economic democracy through these four distinct features:

Worker self-management: each productive enterprise is controlled democratically by its workers.
Social control of investment: funds for new investment are returned to the economy through a network of public investment banks.
The market: enterprises interact with one another and with consumers in an environment largely free of governmental price controls.
Protectionism to enforce trade equality between nations

Trade unionist and social activist Alan Engler defines economic democracy as an alternative structure to corporate capitalism. Economic democracy is “a world of human equality, democracy and cooperation,” he writes. It is the alternative to capitalism and “the goal will be to transform capitalism into economic democracy through gains and reforms that improve living conditions while methodically replacing wealth-holders' entitlement with human entitlement, capitalist ownership with community ownership and master-servant relations with workplace democracy.”

Economic democracy has become a rallying call within the growing new economy movement, and it generally means to have more worker and local control of the economy and by that to achieve reduced economic inequality. The Indian social reformer and economist, P. R. Sarkar, was, like the influential political economist and social philosopher Karl Polanyi, highly skeptical of a market without it being an extension of environmental and societal laws and values. Sarkar thus expands on the features above by suggesting the following steps to achieve economic democracy and to avoid concentration of wealth in the hands of the one percent:

Economic democracy is essential, he claims, “not only for the economic liberation of human beings, but for the wellbeing of all—including animals and plants.” In other words, economic democracy needs to be grounded in a deep ecological ethic to be truly sustainable.
Guarantee the basic minimum necessities, such as education, food, housing, employment, and medical care to all people. This can be fulfilled through a universal basic income scheme, but Sarkar suggests that a constitutional guarantee of employment is a more progressive way to fulfill this guarantee. For those who are temporarily unable to find work, a universal basic income can step in to cover basic needs.
A three-tiered restructuring of the economy through a) government-owned large-scale industries such as for energy, water, road, and bridge infrastructure, b) privately owned corporations to become cooperatively owned enterprises much like in Mondragon, and c) small-scale privately-owned enterprises, such as shops, restaurants, small farms etc.
Limits on how much wealth an individual can accumulate.
Increase development in rural areas through decentralized planning, so that local economies can thrive and be more sustainable.
A more balanced overall economy with a sustainable combination of agriculture, manufacture, and services.
Protectionism by not allowing trade of local raw materials from one area to another, only finished goods.

According to economic democracy advocates, we cannot assume that limits on wages and wealth accumulation through higher taxes or caps on wealth would be enough to stem economic inequality. As in the Mondragon coops, the difference in income between the lowest and the highest paid person in society must be an inherent part of the economic structure itself, not an afterthought implemented and enforced through taxation, as that opens for loopholes such as tax evasion and the hiding of wealth in additional properties or offshore bank accounts.

Moreover, capitalism as a system is inherently based on maximizing profits, and the best way to balance the inevitable impulses for greed in an economy may, in the long run, be to restructure the economy itself through economic democracy. Systems change through the new economy movement, on the other hand, is not solely profit-driven but rather welfare and democracy driven by making sure basic needs are met and that the economy is environmentally regenerative.

In the Nordic countries, economic democracy is established through high wages for workers relative to the management, a high tax rate which gives back to the population through welfare services, such as free health care and education, and a relatively high retirement income. Partly due to changes in and pressures from the global market economy, however, economic inequality is now also increasing in the Nordic countries.

It is unlikely that Fortune magazine and the wealthy class that it supports will start advocating for radical changes like economic democracy any time soon. The proposals advocated by the new economy movement are therefore more important than ever, as they do seem to hold the promise of a brighter future of reduced economic inequality. Perhaps more importantly, economic democracy may also increase worker satisfaction and engagement in the local economy through increased cooperation and service to people and planet. And if Sarkar’s promise of economic democracy having as its foundation a deep environmental ethic, then economic democracy may not only solve the widening inequality gap but also the widening environmental sustainability gap.

Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance, an international platform for organizations and individuals advocating for environmental, social, and economic systems change. He is also the co-author of the book Growing a New Economy, which environmental activist and author Bill McKibben called a “hopeful account of the possibilities contained in our current crisis.”

References:

Thomas Piketty, Capital In the Twenty-first Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017

Ibid, A Brief History of Equality, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022

Alyson Shontell, Is it Time for a Maximum Wage?, Fortune Magazine, June/July, 2022

UN Report on Coops: https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/2014/coopsegm/grace.pdf

Roberto Lovato, Could Coops Solve the Inequality Crisis?, Craftmanship Quarterly, Summer, 2020Martin Gilens, Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Allan Engler, Economic Democracy: The Working-Class Alternative to Capitalism. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, Engler, 2010

David Schweickart, After Capitalism, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002

Gary Gerstle, Thomas Piketty’s optimistic blueprint for easing global inequality, The Washington Post, June 19, 2022

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Amereon Limited, 2021

Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction, Innerworld, 2016

P. R. Sarkar, Proutist Economics: Discourses on Economic Liberation, Ananda Marga Pracaraka Samgha, 1992

Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash

Solving the Inequality Gap: Progressive Taxation or Economic Democracy?

By Roar Bjonnes

More electric cars are needed to save us from using fossil fuels to save us from global warming. These electric cars need cobalt, a naturally occurring metal and an essential ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries powering everything from cell phones and laptops to Elon’s Tesla.

In the race for climate sustainability, the current cobalt market feature prices soaring up to $60,000 per metric ton. Experts have predicted no less than a 14,900% increase in demand for cobalt by 2030. But with dwindling cobalt resources in copper and nickel mines, there is, from a purely profit and production standpoint, a dire need for more cobalt.

Today, 60% of the global supply of cobalt comes from copper mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with calamitous consequences to the local environment. The pollution from copper and cobalt operations has poisoned and ended fishing in the Katapula tributary of the Congo River.

The same pollution is threatening to engulf the entire city of Lubumbashi in toxic acidity. High concentrations of toxic metals in the air are causing respiratory illnesses and birth defects.

Not only is the precarious ecology of the country threatened, so is the health and wellbeing of more than 40,000 boys and girls who work the mines, according to an investigative report by the Washington Post. The demand for more sustainable production of electric luxury cars and the race for a cleaner environment is ironically wreaking havoc on both people and nature.

As the push for producing more electric vehicles is accelerating, mining companies are searching for new areas to extract cobalt. Ocean minerals are thus becoming increasingly valuable in the current market. With increasing commodity prices, mineral resources such as cobalt, copper or zinc are now sought after in an even more precarious environment: the deep blue sea.

Cobalt is found on the seabed at depths between 800 to 2400 meters and are therefore impossible to extract without sophisticated robots and AI to vacuum the mineral rocks off the ocean floor, loading them on ships to be shipped to factories for processing.

A quick Google search on deep sea mining resulted in this statement: new cobalt ventures are needed to create “a more sustainable production of our future resources - for the benefit of mankind.” To the environmental activists in Greenpeace, however, such mining ventures would come at a great environmental cost, potentially destroying the delicate ocean ecology for good.

And time is of the essence. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is set to decide the fate of the world's oceans behind closed doors by fast-tracking regulations for the launch of the deep-sea mining industry by July 2023 at a meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, from July 18-29.

In notes sent to the Jamaica Observer, the organization stated, "Civil society and frontline communities are protesting this destructive industry, which threatens one of the world's largest carbon sinks as well as the lives and livelihoods of billions of people living in coastal communities. Greenpeace is calling on the car companies — the supposed customers of this industry — to support a moratorium."

Greenpeace also noted, "The ISA is charged with protecting the oceans as the 'common heritage of mankind'. However, it is now trying to open a vast new frontier of the global ocean commons to large-scale industrial resource extraction and has implemented severe restrictions on the participation of civil society that diminishes our engagement in one of the most critical discussions about the future of our oceans."

Countering Greenpeace’s warnings, the ISA is claiming that deep sea mining offers a “greener more socially just” alternative to land based mining. Many scientists, according to Greenpeace, are warning that deep sea mining is not only threatening the ecological balance of the deep seas, our most effective sink hole for carbon, but also the livelihoods of millions of coastal people at risk.

The activist organization said that calls for a moratorium have grown as more countries, civil society, scientists, automobile and technology companies, financial institutions, and the fishing industry have stated that deep sea mining is not worth the environmental risk.

Indeed, several technology and electric vehicle industry heavyweights are now calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, including Rivian, Renault, BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo Group, Scandia, Google, and Samsung SDI.

Moreover, Greenpeace are “calling on US automakers Ford, GM, and Tesla to come forward and take a stand to protect our oceans."

While we are racing to halt the heating of our planet by searching for green alternatives to fossil fuels, we are in the danger of simplifying our complex challenges with technological fixes driven by greed and a one-shoe-fits-all solution to our energy problem.

Deep-sea mining to fuel our electric vehicles is wrought with ecological, cultural, political, and economic complications. Here are a few important considerations before we take the robotic plunge toward the bottom of the sea:

First, we cannot fix our energy problem, nor climate change, if profit-making in the name of sustainability is the sole driver of progress. Second, green growth is often a double-edged sword, and thus we need to become comfortable with letting some sources of energy stay in the ground.

Third, as Buckminster Fuller said, we need to look for less-is-more solution—ways to decrease the use of energy through more public transportation, walkable cities, bicycles, reduced consumerism and meat consumption, and a dramatic increase in cultural and leisure activities. All activities that are very high on the human wellbeing scale but very low on the energy scale.

After all, a low-growth economy—where economic sufficiency and wellbeing, not GNP, are the best measures of progress—is more likely our best hope in outgrowing our energy predicament without destroying the environment in the process.

Deeper systems changes are required while we search for new sources of renewable energy and other ways to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. This will require political, economic, and cultural innovations—solutions that go way beyond mining our seabed to fuel technological fixes and electric vehicles alone.

Photo by Marcin Jozwiak

Deep Sea Mining: Electric Car Batteries May Upset the Ocean Ecology

We're going to have to start coming to terms with nature's limits.

Will civilization collapse because it's running out of oil? That question was debated hotly almost 20 years ago; today, not so much. Judging by Google searches, interest in "peak oil" surged around 2003 (the year my book The Party's Over was published), peaked around 2005, and drifted until around 2010 before dropping off dramatically.

Well, civilization hasn't imploded for lack of fuel—not yet, at least. Instead, oil has gotten more expensive and economic growth has slowed. "Tight oil" produced in the US with fracking technology came to the rescue, sort of. For a little while. This oil was costlier to extract than conventional oil, and production from individual wells declined rapidly, thus entailing one hell of a lot of drilling. During the past decade, frackers went deeply into debt as they poked tens of thousands of holes into Texas, North Dakota, and a few other states, sending US oil production soaring. Central banks helped out by keeping interest rates ultra-low and by injecting trillions of dollars into the economy. National petroleum output went up farther and faster than had ever happened anywhere before in the history of the oil industry.

Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy.

Most environmentalists therefore tossed peak oil into their mental bin of "things we don't need to worry about" as they focused laser-like on climate change. Mainstream energy analysts then and now assume that technology will continue to overcome resource limits in the immediate future, which is all that really seems to matter. Much of what is left of the peak oil discussion focuses on "peak demand"—i.e., the question of when electric cars will become so plentiful that we'll no longer need so much gasoline.

Nevertheless, those who've engaged with the oil depletion literature have tended to come away with a few useful insights:

Energy is the basis of all aspects of human society.
Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption.
It takes energy to get energy, and the ratio of energy returned versus energy spent (energy return on investment, or EROI) has historically been extremely high for fossil fuels, as compared to previous energy sources.
Similar EROI values will be necessary for energy alternatives if we wish to maintain our complex, industrial way of life.
Depletion is as important a factor as pollution in assessing the sustainability of society.

Now a new research paper has arrived on the scene, authored by Jean Laherrère, Charles Hall, and Roger Bentley—all veterans of the peak oil debate, and all experts with many papers and books to their credit. As its title suggests ("How Much Oil Remains for the World to Produce? Comparing Assessment Methods, and Separating Fact from Fiction"), the paper mainly addresses the question of future oil production. But to get there, it explains why this is a difficult question to answer, and what are the best ways of approaching it. There are plenty of technical issues to geek out on, if that's your thing. For example, energy analytics firm Rystad recently downgraded world oil reserves by about 9 percent (from 1,903 to 1,725 billion barrels), but the authors of the new research paper suggest that reserves estimates should be cut by a further 300 billion barrels due to long-standing over-reporting by OPEC countries. That's a matter for debate, and readers will have to make up their own minds whether the authors make a convincing case.

For readers who just want the bottom line, here goes. The most sensible figure for the aggregate amount of producible "conventional oil" originally in place (what we've already burned, plus what could be burned in the future) is about 2,500 billion barrels. We've already extracted about half that amount. When this total quantity is plotted as a logistical curve over time, the peak of production occurs essentially now, give or take a very few years. Indeed, conventional oil started a production plateau in 2005 and is now declining. Conventional oil is essentially oil that can be extracted using traditional drilling methods and that can flow at surface temperature and pressure conditions naturally. If oil is defined more broadly to include unconventional sources like tight oil, tar sands, and extra-heavy oil, then possible future production volumes increase, but the likely peak doesn't move very far forward in time. Production of tight oil can still grow in the Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, but will likely be falling by the end of the decade. Extra-heavy oil from Venezuela and tar sands from Canada won't make much difference because they require a lot of energy for processing (i.e., their EROI is low); indeed, it's unclear whether much of Venezuela's enormous claimed Orinoco reserves will ever be extracted.

Of course, logistical curves are just ways of using math to describe trends, and trends can change. Will the decline of global oil production be gradual and smooth, like the mathematically generated curves in these experts' charts? That depends partly on whether countries dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. If the world gets serious about limiting global warming, then the downside of the curve can be made steeper through policies like carbon taxes. Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy. We'll need energy for the energy transition (to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, heat pumps, electric cars, mass transit, etc.), and most of that energy, at least in the early stages of the transition, will have to come from fossil fuels. If oil, the most important of those fuels, will be supply-constrained, that adds to the complexity of managing investment and policy so as to minimize economic pain while pursuing long-range climate goals.

As a side issue, the authors note (as have others) that IPCC estimates of future carbon emissions under its business-as-usual scenario are unrealistic. We just don't have enough economically extractable fossil fuels to make that worst-case scenario come true. However, even assuming a significant downgrade of reserves (and thus of projected emissions), burning all of the oil we have would greatly exceed emissions targets for averting climate catastrophe.

One factor potentially limiting future oil production not discussed in the new paper has to do with debt. Many observers of the past 15 years of fracking frenzy have pointed out that the industry's ability to increase levels of oil production has depended on low interest rates, which enabled companies to produce oil now and pay the bills later. Now central banks are raising interest rates in an effort to fight inflation, which is largely the result of higher oil and gas prices. But hiking interest rates will only discourage oil companies from drilling. This could potentially trigger a self-reinforcing feedback loop of crashing production, soaring energy prices, higher interest rates, and debt defaults, which would likely cease only with a major economic crash. So, instead of a gentle energy descent, we might get what Ugo Bardi calls a "Seneca Cliff."

So far, we are merely seeing crude and natural gas shortages, high energy prices, broken supply chains, and political upheaval. Energy challenges are now top of mind for policymakers and the public in a way that we haven't seen since oil prices hit a record $147 barrel in 2008, when peak oil received some semblance of attention. But now we run the risk of underlying, irreversible supply constraints being lost in the noise of other, more immediate contributors to the supply and price shocks the world is experiencing—namely lingering effects from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas, and far stricter demands for returns from domestic investors. Keeping the situation from devolving further will take more than just another fracking revolution, which bought us an extra decade of business-as-usual. This time, we're going to have to start coming to terms with nature's limits. That means shared sacrifice, cooperation, and belt tightening. It also means reckoning with our definitions of prosperity and progress, and getting down to the work of re-configuring an economy that has become accustomed to (and all too comfortable with) fossil-fueled growth.

Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of fourteen books, including his most recent: "Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival" (2021). Previous books include: "Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy" (2016), "Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels" (2015), and "Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines" (2010).

Photo by John Cameron

Will Civilization Collapse Because It’s Running Out of Oil?

By Daniel Christian Wahl

Our current economic and monetary systems are structurally dysfunctional and at best serve a few (for a while) while more and more people share less and less. Under no circumstances will they deliver a healthy, meaningful and happy life for all. On a crowded planet with failing ecosystems we have to learn that out-competing others while destroying the planetary life-support systems is not an evolutionary success strategy. Win-lose games in the long run turn into lose-lose games. Yet there is another way! We can transform our global economy to play a subsidiary and collaborative function as we embark on strengthening resilient regional and local economies as the foundations of thriving, diverse, regenerative cultures.

We need to urgently break out of the vicious circle of bad economic design decisions — they reinforce a perspective of scarcity, separation and competition that drives ecological and social degradation. Human beings designed this system and human beings can redesign it to serve people and planet. Nothing about our current economic system — apart from the biophysical reality that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet — is inevitable or unchangeable. Neo-liberal economics is a dangerous ideology that seems to produce mass delusion and collective suicidal tendencies oblivious to the biophysical reality and socio-ecological context.

Unlike biology and ecology, economics is not a science. We created our current economic system and we can redesign it, based on ecological insights, biophysical limits, and social values. A thriving economy will serve our common purpose: promoting the health and wellbeing of humanity and the community of life. To redesign economics from the ground up challenges us to design new monetary systems, trade policies and financial institutions, as well as scale-linked local living economies and regionally focused circular biomaterials economies. The role of the global economy should be subsidiary supporting global collaboration and resource- and information- sharing.

The regenerative processes that enable living systems to thrive must also characterise the economic systems designed to create conditions conducive to life. Local and global collaboration in the co-creation of regenerative enterprises and diverse bioregional economies that serve the thriving of regenerative communities and cultures can potentially unlock a very different future for humanity.

Healthy ecosystems functions form the basis for all agricultural productivity and all bio-productivity. This ‘primary production’ is the basis of all value creation. Without this biological basis we cannot maintain communities and societies — let alone civilisations. Regenerating and maintaining the biospheric health of the planetary ‘household’ that all life depends upon is a precondition for human thriving.

“Ecosystems form the basis of all wealth creation. […] Ecosystems provide societies with soil fertility, food, water, shelter, goods and services, medicines, stability, pleasure, knowledge and leisure. […] Today 60 per cent of the services provided by ecosystems are threatened. Economic activities aimed at achieving short-term wealth are destroying ecosystems worldwide and thus economies’ primary asset. Restoring damaged ecosystems is essential if we are to secure the livelihoods of future generations.”
- Willem Ferwerda 2012: 13

Here is a recording of an online talk I gave last April on the theme of ‘Regenerative Economies for Regenerative Cultures’. The talk had to be delivered online rather than in Lisbon as planned because of the lockdown.

https://youtu.be/1Ro7WAykDdI

Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures

Regenerative Economies for Regenerative Cultures

Growing Corporate Inequality

The Political Power of Lobbyists

Increased Wealth Inequality Within Nations

Taxing the Rich

Taxing the Rich is Challenging

Thomas Piketty and the Long Road to Equality

Reducing the Wealth Gap Through Taxes or Cooperatives?

Mathematician and philosopher David Schweickart defines economic democracy through these four distinct features:

Worker self-management: each productive enterprise is controlled democratically by its workers.
Social control of investment: funds for new investment are returned to the economy through a network of public investment banks.
The market: enterprises interact with one another and with consumers in an environment largely free of governmental price controls.
Protectionism to enforce trade equality between nations

Economic democracy is essential, he claims, “not only for the economic liberation of human beings, but for the wellbeing of all—including animals and plants.” In other words, economic democracy needs to be grounded in a deep ecological ethic to be truly sustainable.
Guarantee the basic minimum necessities, such as education, food, housing, employment, and medical care to all people. This can be fulfilled through a universal basic income scheme, but Sarkar suggests that a constitutional guarantee of employment is a more progressive way to fulfill this guarantee. For those who are temporarily unable to find work, a universal basic income can step in to cover basic needs.
A three-tiered restructuring of the economy through a) government-owned large-scale industries such as for energy, water, road, and bridge infrastructure, b) privately owned corporations to become cooperatively owned enterprises much like in Mondragon, and c) small-scale privately-owned enterprises, such as shops, restaurants, small farms etc.
Limits on how much wealth an individual can accumulate.
Increase development in rural areas through decentralized planning, so that local economies can thrive and be more sustainable.
A more balanced overall economy with a sustainable combination of agriculture, manufacture, and services.
Protectionism by not allowing trade of local raw materials from one area to another, only finished goods.

References:

Thomas Piketty, Capital In the Twenty-first Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017

Ibid, A Brief History of Equality, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022

Alyson Shontell, Is it Time for a Maximum Wage?, Fortune Magazine, June/July, 2022

UN Report on Coops: https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/2014/coopsegm/grace.pdf

Roberto Lovato, Could Coops Solve the Inequality Crisis?, Craftmanship Quarterly, Summer, 2020

Martin Gilens, Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Allan Engler, Economic Democracy: The Working-Class Alternative to Capitalism. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, Engler, 2010

David Schweickart, After Capitalism, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002

Gary Gerstle, Thomas Piketty’s optimistic blueprint for easing global inequality, The Washington Post, June 19, 2022

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Amereon Limited, 2021

Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction, Innerworld, 2016

P. R. Sarkar, Proutist Economics: Discourses on Economic Liberation, Ananda Marga Pracaraka Samgha, 1992

Solving the Inequality Gap: Progressive Taxation or Economic Democracy?

At 66, I am old enough to remember when the local economy was still thriving. I grew up in an extended family on a small island in Norway. All the apples, berries, pears, and cherries we ate, especially during fall and winter, had been cultivated in our own garden. In the fall, the whole family—including my grandmother and grandfather—picked mushrooms, blue berries, and cranberries in the forest. Indeed, all our neighbors lived like that—in a largely self-sufficient and local economy.

A few years later, when I had moved to the US, and I came home to visit, I discovered that the fruit trees and berry bushes had been cut down. The whole garden had been turned into a large lawn, empty of life. “Why had they done that?” I asked. “Well, because it was too much work and these apples from the supermarket are so much shinier,” my sister replied.

I remember that as a very dark and depressing day. I remember it as the day our organic, homegrown apples had become shiny and full of pesticides. I remember it as the day the local economy and culture was destroyed by globalization and its neo-liberal, corporate agenda.

Today, I live in a small eco-village in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. My neighbors, Kevin and Kate Lane are organic dairy farmers. They operate Lane in the Woods Farm and Creamery, and they make blue and white cheeses which they sell at several local farmers markets. In a radius of about 100 miles from our doorsteps, there are more than 100 local farmers markets.

I have always prided myself on being an environmentalist. My wife and I grow vegetables and berries for enjoyment and to help lower our carbon footprint. But in these mountains, there are small farmers, deeply conservative, who put me to shame. They do not call themselves environmentalists, still their carbon footprint is much smaller than those of us who shop organic at Whole Foods and vote for the Green Party. We have a lot to learn from these old timers about sustainability and community values.

Many of these local farmers, as well as the influx of young neo-hippies who have turned hundreds of old tobacco farms into thriving fruit, bee, berry, vegetable, and dairy farms, are members of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), an organization representing these farmers’ interests. The motto of the organization speaks for itself: “Local Food, Strong Farms, Healthy Communities.”

There are currently more than 12,000 farms in Western North Carolina where I live. In many ways, the local farm economy is thriving, and the farmers markets are bustling economic and cultural ventures where people meet, greet, purchase, and celebrate local food.

When we look at the overall economic and environmental trends, however, the global economy is still dominating the local economy. Its centralized machinery, fueled by a fossil-energy-driven economy is still hell-bent on crushing these local efforts. But here in Appalachia, we are fighting back, one small farm, one small farmers market, one local restaurant at-a-time.

Here in our mountains, the progress of that wholesome struggle for a more thriving local economy speaks for itself. “Twenty years ago,” according to ASAP, “we listed 58 farms, 32 farmers markets, and 19 restaurants in our Local Food Guide. Today, we list over 800 farms, more than hundred markets, and more than 200 restaurants.”

And, thankfully, in Norway, too, there is a similar trend going on. More and more local products, from smoked meat to various new cheeses, breads, and jams, are sold at local farmers markets all over the country. The growth of the slow food economy is speeding up, it is most certainly experiencing a new renaissance.

P.S. This article was written by request for Local Futures and their annual event World Localization Day. For more information: https://www.localfutures.org/world-localization-day/

Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance. He studied agronomy in Norway where he helped organize an agricultural school to become fully organic. He is the author of five books, including Growing a New Economy.

References:

appalachiagrown.org

laneinthewoods.com

slowfood.com

Photo by Alex Hudson

A New Renaissance of Local Farms, Local Food, and Local Economies

Whenever there's an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.

Everyone who owns a gasoline-burning car has noticed that fuel prices have shot up in recent weeks. And most of us have read headlines about high energy prices driving inflation. But very few Americans have any inkling just how profound the current energy crisis already is, and is about to become.

"'Humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished'—mostly by deforestation and the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas."

This lack of awareness is partly due to economists, and those who depend on economists' readings of the tea leaves of daily data (a group that, sadly, includes nearly all politicians and news purveyors). Recently I heard an NPR staff commentator confidently state: "The only way to get gasoline prices under control is to get inflation under control." Anyone who understands recent events and how economies work will immediately realize that the statement is ass backwards. Energy prices are rising for specific physical reasons, most of which are widely reported. Those higher prices show up in economic statistics as inflation, a phenomenon that economists equate to a malevolent miasma that occasionally drifts into the economy from a mysterious alternate dimension. "Ah," say the economists, "but we have a magic spell to drive the miasma away—higher interest rates!" The Fed's assumption that raising interest rates will somehow reduce current high energy costs is comparable to medieval physicians' belief that leech bloodletting would cure diseases like tuberculosis.

Of course, the goal of raising interest rates is to cool demand, which theoretically should help lower prices. But if prices for a particular commodity are rising due to physical shortage caused by novel circumstances or events rather than increasing demand, then higher interest rates may offer little relief while bringing serious unintended consequences of their own (see 1970s, "stagflation"). The comparison with leeches still stands.

There's already enough bloodletting going on in the world. What we need now is sound thinking based in physical reality. Let's start with symptoms and identify clear, understandable causes. Then we'll explore the current extent of the energy crisis and its deeper societal implications, especially with regard to food. Finally, we'll look at the energy crisis in the context of a broader, longer-term view of our economic system and see what things our leaders could do that might actually improve the prospects of ordinary citizens and future generations.

Why Prices Are Up

What's making energy more expensive? Simple: physical scarcity resulting from pandemic, war, and depletion. Let's unpack each of these causes.

The economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are old news, but they keep reverberating. A persistent worker shortage, which you may have noticed at local restaurants, is also impacting energy companies and shipping firms. Further, the crash in oil demand early in the pandemic (when few people were driving to work) led to production cutbacks in the petroleum industry, notably in the US—where fracking companies had been giddily burning through investor cash for years. Now demand has recovered but investors are wary, and so companies are slow to drill wells likely to prove unprofitable. Raising interest rates—which will make it more expensive for oil companies to borrow money to fund operations—certainly won't increase the flow of oil and gas.

The energy impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are likewise straightforward and widely reported. Western oil companies have pulled out of Russia, making an ongoing decline in future Russian crude production virtually certain. The European Union has proposed a ban on oil imports from Russia, though time will tell if it can reach the consensus needed from members states, many of which are heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas. Russian production is already down by nearly 1 million barrels per day, and exports have reportedly fallen by about 4 million barrels per day. This is a substantial chunk of the world's 100-million-barrel-per-day liquid fuel demand.

Looming back of every other aspect of the oil supply story is depletion. If there's a shortage of oil, why not just open the spigots in other nations to make up the shortfall? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. OPEC's tired old wells are about half depleted following decades of continuous extraction. Increasing the rate of pumping at this point would damage reservoirs, reducing the amount ultimately recoverable. The owners and managers of those oilfields are understandably reluctant to jeopardize their patrimony—and they're relishing the higher prices their product is selling for. So, OPEC has barely nudged its output in response to shortages brought on by the war.

The other potential source of increased supply is the US, whose tight oil extraction rates have soared in recent years. But most of the geological formations that have been the source of this bonanza (such as the Bakken in North Dakota) are already in irreversible decline due to depletion. The world as a whole saw its peak output of conventional petroleum in 2016, following a long plateau that began in 2005. Oil importers, therefore, are largely out of options for replacing those lost Russian barrels.

There are some other factors complicating the current fuel supply system. I've focused on oil, simply because it's the most globally traded of fuels and delivers the most energy to society. But supplies of natural gas are also being hammered as a result of the war, with prices already at record levels and poised to soar even higher. The "normal" price for natural gas in the US is about $2.50 per million BTUs; today gas is selling at three times that level, with other nations seeing gas trade at over $15. I'll discuss some consequences of that below.

Further wrinkles have to do with diesel fuel, which is essential for trucking and hence global supply chains; and jet fuel (kerosene), which powers global aviation. Diesel and kerosene are made up of relatively long molecular hydrocarbon chains, but the light tight oil that the US has brought to market in recent years from fracking contains mostly short-chain molecules. Gradually, as world conventional oil production has plateaued and started to decline, with US light tight oil providing the main source of growth, diesel and kerosene output have stalled and sputtered. Diesel and kerosene prices have risen to unprecedented levels, and there are clear and persistent signs of worldwide shortage.

How Bad Is It?

Energy is essential for everything we do. It's not just a part of the economy; in a real, physical sense it is the economy. Therefore, whenever there's an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.

The links between energy and the economy are perhaps at their most transparent when it comes to diesel fuel. Trucks, freight trains, and tractors burn diesel. Therefore, when diesel gets scarce, supply chains start to seize up and food prices climb.

Shipping costs were already soaring before the Russia-Ukraine war. Now, diesel shortages are erupting in South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Europe. Passenger trains in India have been idled. Thousands of buses, trucks, and cars in Cameroon have been stranded for weeks without fuel. In Sri Lanka, high energy and food prices have just helped bring down a government.

At the start of May, inventories of diesel on the US east coast plunged to the lowest seasonal level since government records began more three decades ago. Wholesale and retail diesel prices hit all-time highs.

Among the millions of trucks that run on diesel are Amazon.com's roughly 70,000 delivery vans and semi-trucks. That company just announced a disappointing quarter and outlook due largely to higher costs for trucking packages to customers.

Most of us don't really care much whether Amazon turns a profit. But Jeff Bezos's current woes are echoed throughout industry after industry. Even companies whose business model doesn't include physical delivery of goods still depend on other companies that burn diesel. That's partly why global stock markets have recently seen massive sell-offs. But the market has yet to fully internalize the nearly existential risk posed by declining energy.

The signs of energy crisis are everywhere. In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, airlines recently threatened to cancel virtually all flights in response to surging kerosene prices. US retail gasoline prices just hit a new record. And Europe is preparing for the likelihood of severe natural gas shortages next winter.

Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, speaking at the World Utilities Congress in Abu Dhabi in early May, said, "The world needs to wake up. The world is running out of energy capacity at all levels. It is a reality." One may question the motives of the Saudi minister: a so-called "NOPEC" bill making its way through the US Congress would make it possible to sue the OPEC cartel for price fixing, so the Saudis might like to heighten the perception that they are providing the world with an increasingly scarce good. Nevertheless, the prince's statement is clear, direct, and supported by abundant evidence.

How Bad Is It?

Why the Big Picture Is Essential

Most news articles treat diesel, gasoline, and food price hikes as transitory phenomena. After all, historically whenever prices have gone up, they've later settled back down. Temporary shortages inspire innovation and trigger investment. It's the magic of the market. So, once the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war are in our rear-view mirror, we can all surely get back to normal.

Missing from those articles is a systemic understanding of our current crisis. The big picture of our energy situation is perhaps best captured by a study published seven years ago, "Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind." Lead author John Schramski, an associate professor in the University of Georgia's College of Engineering, likened Earth to a battery that has been charged slowly over billions of years. "The sun's energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels," says Schramski, "but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished"—mostly by deforestation and the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. Once that battery is discharged, there is nothing humans can do within a relevant timescale to maintain the energy flows that currently support complex industrial civilization and a population measured in billions.

No doubt there will be some temporary work-arounds. Solar and wind energy sources could substitute for fossil fuels in some applications, though material limits would prevent a full-scale replacement. But there really is no solution to our energy crisis, if by "solution" we mean a return to how energy markets have functioned during the past few decades. We are victims of systemic dependency on depleting fuels and minerals, and an economic model founded on unsustainable growth.

Once we understand that, then it's possible to chart a course of adaptation that minimizes suffering and destruction. Instead of prioritizing growth, we must aim for rapid reduction in overall energy usage, with an emphasis on equity—both equity between the rich and poor within nations and globally. As I've written elsewhere, efforts should center on rationing increasingly scarce resources and developing local cooperative organizations of all kinds. Learn to work with nature and heal ecosystems.

Crises make incumbent politicians look bad. But denying or politicizing problems that result from our own prior mistakes just makes those problems worse. Here's some free advice for policy makers and members of the Fourth Estate: take the long view, even if it's scary. And tell the truth, even if it means losing an election or Twitter followers.

This article was first published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) by Common Dreams at commondreams.org

Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of fourteen books, including his most recent: "Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival" (2021).

The Energy and Food Crisis Is Far Worse Than Most People Realize

By Michael Towsey May 2022

The publication of Growing a New Economy by Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves[1] was a milestone in the history of Proutist literature because it was the first comprehensive introduction to Prout economics that firmly situated the Proutist agenda within the emerging New Economy Movement. The term New Economy Movement (NEM) is a rather loose description of a growing literature that rejects not just neo-liberalism but also its neoclassical foundations. Neoclassical economics is the orthodox economics taught in virtually all universities since the 1950s and informs most social and economic policy around the world. The NEM, by contrast, reconstructs the very foundations of economic theory, drawing on ecological, feminist and humanist principles, and incorporating proposals such as the guaranteed minimum requirements of life, alternative production models (for example, cooperatives), complementary currencies and a radical overhaul of global trade and finance.

Before publication of Growing a New Economy, Proutists, including myself, were inclined to accept the absolute foundations of economics to be the intersecting supply and demand curves in microeconomics and the circular-flow-of-income model in macroeconomics. Afterall, the diagrams of these in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook have been the basis of Economics 101 since the second world war. They were, and continue to be, deeply ingrained in the mindset of generations of economists and even Proutists have been constrained by them when attempting to illustrate what a Prout economy might look like.

Growing a New Economy instead embraced the image of three concentric circles, the economy ensconced inside a society, which is in turn ensconced inside the biosphere of planet Earth. Variants of this iconic image are to be found in much of the NEM literature, and it also graces the landing page of Prout’s website (https:\\prout.info). Bjonnes and Hargreaves not only rejected the tenets of neoliberalism (free markets, free trade, privatization, small government, and the primacy of finance), they also demonstrated how Prout principles mesh with those of the NEM.

In the last four years, three additional groundbreaking books have been published which, I believe, clearly demonstrate that the New Economics has finally grown into a mature, principled synthesis of theory and practice based on humanist ethics and sound science. They are Doughnut Economics – Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth (2018),[2] Mission Economy – A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato (2021),[3] and The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy by Stephanie Kelton (2021).[4] The books form a natural sequence and are best read in the above order. Doughnut Economics paints the big picture. It integrates all the strands of the NEM into a coherent whole. In particular, it lays out the ethical and ecological foundations of the New Economy. A Moonshot Guide on the other hand demonstrates how, once a set of ethical and ecological principles have been accepted, governments can galvanize a society to, for example, abolish poverty or work towards a net-zero carbon economy. The book’s title comes from the commitment that President Kennedy made to land a person on the moon and how all stops were pulled out to achieve that goal. And finally, The Deficit Myth explains why poverty and unemployment are the result of deliberate policy choices made by politicians and are not some unavoidable (if unfortunate) byproduct of governments having to balance budgets under severe financial constraints.

Kate Raworth begins her book by reminding us of the “power of pictures”. She believes that generations of economists have been unable to escape the grip of neoclassical economics (despite its obvious failings) partly because they have been imprinted with the images in Paul Samuelson’s texts. Her solution is to imprint a new set of images that better correspond to the real world. Her first image is a “doughnut”, consisting of two concentric circles. The space in between them is the doughnut. The outer circle represents the ecological constraints within which any economy must operate if it is to be sustainable. The inner circle represents the minimum wealth that an economy must generate if its people are to enjoy an acceptable and equitable standard of living. A sustainable economy must sit within these constraints, hence doughnut economics. Outside the doughnut leads to ecological collapse – the hole in the centre leads to social collapse. Raworth identifies nine key ecological indicators (proposed by an international group of earth-system scientists) and 12 key social indicators (derived from the United Nations 2015 Sustainable Development Goals) to identify the bounds of the doughnut. In this sense, doughnut economics is based on science and on real-world data (as opposed to mathematics and unreal assumptions).

Another powerful image is Raworth’s more detailed presentation of the three concentric circles representing Earth, society and economy. Ecologists identify four fundamental ecosystem processes, water cycling, nutrient cycling, energy flows and species relationships. Raworth shows these processes entwining and penetrating the social and economic spheres. Note also that she identifies four “provisioning sectors” within an economy, the unpaid household sector (including for example, child-rearing – what use is a politician if he has not been toilet trained – but you can be sure his mother was not paid for it!), the commercial sector, the government sector, and the Commons. The Commons includes all wealth created by self-organizing groups. Consider, for example, the largest repository of information on the planet, Wikipedia. Note that money (financial flows) only appears in the smallest, inner-most layer of this diagram. GDP (measured in dollars) is no longer the paramount indicator of economic performance. All the principal indicators are measured in real units, for example, tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere, the rate of underemployment.

Once the big-picture goals are established, Mission Economy tells us how to achieve them. Mazzucato’s main message is that a strong, highly skilled, and well-resourced government sector is critical to achieving big goals. The elimination of poverty or reaching a net-zero carbon economy will never be achieved by a small, impoverished public service and treasury officials tinkering with interest-rates. Boris Johnson’s recent demand that 20% of the UK civil service be slashed to pay for tax cuts is social and economic suicide. Similarly in Australia, a succession of flood and bushfire disasters over the past three years has revealed the inability of the Australian government to cope with emergencies. Indeed, the message from the country’s conservative prime minister is that it’s not his job!

Apart from reskilling the public service sector (stop outsourcing) and establishing the administrative and physical infrastructure required to achieve big-picture goals, Mazzucato has interesting things to say about the government’s role in creating value.

“The ambition of government should be to set off catalytic reactions across society.” Mazzucato.

Government can infuse (and enthuse) the public service and the public imagination with positive sentiments about big picture goals. The idea is to link ethical values with economic values. Values (in both senses of the word) should be at play in markets. Markets for goods and services, says Mazzucato must be biased towards desired end goals. One way to do this is to tax “bads” and subsidise “goods”. Mazzucato describes this as “shaping markets” and “tilting the playing field” towards goals. Furthermore, supply and demand in a market can be influenced by catalytic sentiments, thereby influencing prices. In other words, economic value is not a static concept dependent on material constraints. Value has psychological determinants, and these can also “tilt” markets towards goals. This introduces a fascinating area of economics which in Prout is referred to as psycho-economics. The discipline is only in its infancy.

Both Raworth and Mazzucato acknowledge the important role of finance in the new economy but insist that it must be subservient to the production of real social and ecological value. This brings us to The Deficit Myth. Kelton is a high-profile economist within the Democratic Party in the USA and has acted as advisor to Bernie Sanders. She is the best known of a growing number of advocates for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). MMT attracts praise and condemnation in equal measure — condemnation because MMT’s critique of the financial system gets to the heart of capitalist exploitation and praise because MMT states that there is no purely financial constraint that stops governments from achieving full employment and eliminating poverty. Poverty is a policy choice made by governments who are protecting the wealth of those who are already wealthy. One of MMTs proposals is the Job Guarantee, which makes it attractive to public welfare groups who already know that there is something rotten at the heart of capitalist finance.

This is not the place to elaborate on MMT. Even advocates admit that it takes time to “get your head around it”. But one of the most common attacks on MMT is that policies such as the Job Guarantee would be inflationary. MMT advocates are at great pains to explain that they are not proposing the unrestrained printing of money. What they are saying is that all capitalist economies are grossly underperforming and not utilizing the resources available to them. High levels of underemployment (currently running around 16% in Australia and 24% in the youth age-group) are, by definition, indicative of a stagnant economy. MMT says that creating jobs for the unemployed is not inflationary if those jobs produce value. And this returns us to Mission Economy and all that the government sector can do to co-create value with the sectors of the economy.

Despite the maturity of the New Economics, there remains much that the Proutist perspective can offer. The five fundamental principles offer a solid theoretical underlay to Raworth’s powerful pictures. The three-tier enterprise system, socio-economic units, block-level planning, and economic decentralization are frequently implied in the NEM literature, but the ideas could be much further developed. What the NEM offers is an emerging progressive movement with whom it will be possible to grow a new economy.

[1] Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy – beyond crisis capitalism and environmental destruction, Innerworld Publications, 2016. ISBN: 9781881717539.

[2] Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics – Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House UK, 2018. ISBN: 9781847941398

[3] Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy – A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Penguin UK, 2021. ISBN: 9780141991689

[4] Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy, Publisher: John Murray, 2021. ISBN: 9781529352566

The New Economy Movement Comes of Age

What is carbon offsetting?

If you are concerned about global warming and you are the CEO of a corporation in Europe or the US, and your company’s production plants pollute the air and water with various chemicals, then you’d naturally want to do something about it. Luckily, there is a solution—it’s called carbon offsetting. To compensate for your emissions, you spend a small portion of your budget planting trees in Africa so that they can do what they do best: suck carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow.

This sustainable business activity is visibly highlighted on your website and in all ads selling your products. But does it really work? Not if you ask Greenpeace. The organization thinks the practice is nothing more than greenwashing—creating a better corporate image without doing much good to the environment.

In a recent article, Time magazine agreed. In “A closer look at carbon offsets” Kyla Mandel writes that, “Tech options, like carbon capture, are nowhere near the scale needed, leaving nature-based solutions, like growing new forests, as the current best choice.”

The problem with carbon offsets

For Greenpeace, the main problem “with offsets isn’t that what they offer is bad – tree planting or renewable energy and efficiency for poor communities are all good things – but rather that they don’t do what they say on the tin.” In other words, carbon offsets are not enough to cancel out the actual emissions to which they are linked. It becomes an environmental deficit—and, thus, greenwashing.

Nature is only able to absorb a limited amount of carbon from the atmosphere each year, and because we humans keep increasing our carbon footprint, there is simply not enough land and water to meet the increasing demand.

Not exactly systems change

The great ecologist O.T. Odom famously said: “In nature, nothing is too big to fail.” But that kind of environmental insight is not followed by today’s corporate CEOs. For most of them, it would be unthinkable to radically restructure their business and production practices according to more ecological principles since short-term profit goals are still the main driver of corporate policies.

Carbon offsetting is a much easier way to pass the buck, to pay someone else to take care of the corporation’s problems. How does it work? By planting trees in developing countries, carbon is sucked out of the air, and by delivering energy-efficient cooking stoves, bicycles, or solar panels to communities in developing countries.

In theory this practice sounds great, but in practice it is not that simple to reduce our global carbon footprint. What we need to do in addition to planting trees and saving biodiversity in the forests and the oceans is to cut emissions directly—not through offsetting.

Greenpeace writes that, “offsetting allows companies like BP and Shell as well as airlines to continue with their unsustainable behavior while shifting their responsibility for the climate onto the consumer.” Carbon offsetting services are offered by many companies, including airports like Heathrow and airlines such as Easyjet. This allows passengers to feel like good citizens by paying to plant up to 12 trees per month. Other companies like BP and Shell run similar campaigns, and they laud this as a panacea to solving the climate crisis.

“A newly-planted tree,” writes Greenpeace, “can take as many as 20 years to capture the amount of CO2 that a carbon-offset scheme promises. We would have to plant and protect a massive number of trees for decades to offset even a fraction of global emissions. Even then, there is always the risk that these efforts will be wiped out by droughts, wildfires, tree diseases and deforestation.”

Deeper systems changes are needed to tackle the climate crisis. These companies are not too big to fail, indeed they have already failed both the people and the planet. The solution lies in deeper systems change through a comprehensive plan for sustainable drawdown of carbon in industry, agriculture, fishing and in the general human population through consumer lifestyle changes.

Less is indeed more when it comes to capture carbon and the future of our civilization. It is time we capture the problem at its main sources—our failed cultural, industrial, and economic systems. They are no longer too big to fail. We can no longer keep offsetting these systems’ inherent failures and simply pass them on to future generations.

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier

The Upset about Carbon Offsets

“The world's richest ten percent are responsible for an estimated 47 percent share of global CO₂ emissions,” writes Florian Zandt at Statista. This is the result of a recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. The study focused on how alleviating poverty worldwide would impact carbon emissions.

As the chart below shows, the difference between the poorest and wealthiest is staggering. On average, a person in the lower 50 percent income group only produces about one ton of CO₂per year while someone in the one percent group emits nearly 50 tons of carbon dioxide per capita.

“Of course,” writes Zandt, “the results are different depending on the region.” In the rich countries of Europe, the bottom 50 percent had a higher estimated share of total emissions than the top ten percent, while the top one percent in lower income Sub-Saharan Africa induced more carbon emissions than the bottom 50 percent.

How would raising people out of poverty on a global level impact the overall carbon footprint? The effects on global warming would be surprisingly minimal according to the study. “Lifting more than one billion people above the poverty line under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1 would only raise the estimated global CO₂ output by roughly two percent,” writes Zandt, “even though carbon emissions in low to lower-middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa could potentially double.”

To dramatically reduce global carbon emissions, we need to accomplish these four tasks simultaneously:

1. Dramatically reduce the conspicuous consumption and carbon footprint in rich countries. Yes, how many types of cereal brands (there are currently over 5000 in the US alone), toilet papers, plastic bags, or containers do we really need?

2. Reduce the income gap between rich and poor overall by having a maximum wealth cap, since the rich ten percent pollute by far the most. Some studies estimate that a private jet passenger produces ten times more carbon footprints than a commercial passenger.

3. Reduce carbon emissions globally by developing more renewable energy resources, reduce consumption of luxury goods, and produce goods in a more sustainable manner. To do that, we need a new economic system, one that combines sustainability with equitability.

4. We need to save nature and the poor by making the ultra-rich one percent go extinct. We can accomplish that by an aggressive tax-reform and by having a maximum wealth cap. Nobody needs to be a billionaire. According to Professor Richard Wilk at Indiana University, a billionaire has a carbon footprint over a thousand times that of an average person. So, let the billionaires go extinct, not the elephants and the tigers.

To Reduce Our Carbon Footprint, We Need Another Kind of Extinction Rebellion

1. Plant-Centered Diet

The Western diet is increasingly meat-centered and raising livestock accounts for nearly 15% of global greenhouse gasses. If livestock were a nation of their own, it would be the third greatest emitter of greenhouse gasses. Moreover, meat consumption has enormous human and monetary health costs. Humans can live healthy and long lives on a primarily plant-centered diet, which would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint. Whatever ways we achieve a more plant-based diet, studies have convincingly shown that such a strategy is a win-win for both people and planet.

2. Regenerative Agriculture

The main purpose of regenerative agriculture is to improve the health of the soil by restoring its carbon content, which in turn restores the health and productivity of the crops. Studies have shown that photosynthesis is one of the most effective methods to capture carbon dioxide from the air. By not tilling the soil, carbon is captured in a plant cover often containing between ten to twenty-five varieties of cover crops, each giving back nutrients to the soil and helping to sequester carbon. By feeding the soil through regenerative farming, we can dramatically improve both human and climate health.

3. Composting

The city of San Francisco collects over 500 tons of organic waste every day to be to be used as compost on local farmland, vineyards, and ranches. While many landfills have methane management, it is far more effective to turn organic waste into compost, thereby dramatically reduce emissions and creating fertilizer for plants who will furthermore draw down additional carbon. Composting can easily be done by individuals and families at home, but it is even more important to create composting facilities at scale in every city and town.

4. Black Earth Farming

In ancient Amazonian societies, it was customary to bury and burn organic waste into charcoal, which was used as a soil amendment called terra preta (black earth) in Portuguese. Black earth, or biochar, agriculture once covered 10 percent of the Amazon rainforest feeding hundreds of thousands of people, and those areas still retain extraordinary amounts of carbon. Biochar production for modern farming is a small but growing industry with tremendous potential for both increased agricultural yields as well as carbon sequestering.

5. Managed Grazing

If you place cattle inside a fence or on feedlots and measure their impact on the climate, this type of farming will rank next to coal as one of the greatest hazards to planetary health. If the same animals were to graze like migratory herds of herbivores on wildlands, on the other hand, they would cocreate a type of soil and biodiverse grassland that will sequester large amounts of carbon as well as reduce the use of pesticides, fertilizer, and diesel fuel. Pastures make up 70 percent of the world’s agricultural land, so managed grazing could have significant impacts on climate if it were to become widespread.

Photo by Ales Krivec

Five Ways Food Production Can Reduce Our Carbon Footprint

In our Systems Change Deep Dives video podcast series, we take a systemic look at some of the greatest social, economic and environmental challenges that we are facing as a global community and the ideas and projects that have the potential to catalyze systems change. For our first deep dive topic, Beyond Carbon Capture, we spark conversations with people leading carbon capture initiatives around the world to discuss the benefits and challenges of their work and how it fits into the wider paradigm of systemic change.

In the second episode, we spoke with Joel Salatin, Co-Owner of Polyface Farm, a thriving multi-generational regenerative family farm that services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets and a farmer’s market. When Joel is not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the calluses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems. He is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, he writes several magazine columns, co-hosts a podcast titled Beyond Labels, is a frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts and writes a blog called Musings from the Lunatic Farmer.

Keep reading for the the key points from the discussion with Joel:

Cattle and Time in the Carbon Conversation

Joel is keenly aware that, in recent years, cows have received a lot of negative publicity when it comes to the carbon conversation. However, he calls our attention to the fact that, at earlier points in Earth’s history, there was a lot more megafauna around. So the problem shouldn’t be in the animals themselves, but in the way that they have come to be managed.

In Nature, there is an important element to grazing which is almost always left out of the equation in modern production farms, and that element is time. “Nature does this (...) with fire seasonality and predators: wolves here in America, lions in Africa, and of course there were predators and other areas as well. What that movement does is that it stimulates, through strategic pruning, it stimulates the perennial prairie, the grasses, the forbs, all that, to actually produce more than it would if it just went into senescence.”

Technology nowadays actually enables us to steer our “four-legged pruners” across the landscape with precision and create a mosaic, making sure that at any given time, there is always a portion of the landscape in senescence, a portion growing rapidly and a portion blossoming and supporting biodiversity. It is possible to do this with all sorts of animals, pigs, sheep, poultry, ducks, and create a system that feeds the animals and leaves fertility behind.

“Routinely there's a lot of people asking me, well, how did you innovate these systems? And so the answer is very simple; when you look at nature, animals move.”

Grasslands, Forests, Perennials and Annuals

“People think about trees as being the biggest carbon sink, but actually the fastest way is through grasses, because their metabolism is so much faster than trees. Now, it's counter-intuitive because when you look at the forest, you say, well, look at all that carbon, but you're seeing, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 years of carbon storage above ground. You don't see that in prairie and grasslands. But if you took your lawn clippings and you were able to take a square meter of those lawn clippings, put them in a box and put that box in a storage shed, and in 60 years we opened that door and said: here's the carbon that came off of that square meter, it would make a believer out of you, to see it all in one place.”

Grasses go through three stages of growth, an initial slow period, a secondary fast growth period and finally it slows down again. The method of natural systems, with the choreography of movement of these large ungulates across the prairies, was to prune the grasses back so that they could re-start the regrowth cycle, but then leave it to rest until it regrew to that second tier of growth. Nowadays, with overgrazing, there’s not enough of a rest period for the forages to regrow and capture carbon in the process. And recently, animal production farms actually take a lot of these herbivores off of perennials and put them on annuals in feedlots, annuals which actually deplete carbon.

“Perennials increase carbon. The energy flow of a perennial is down into the ground. The energy flow of an annual is up and out. So when people say, well, (...) we need to all go vegan and eat squash and watermelon instead of beef, what they're not recognizing is that if every plant were as efficient as a squash or a watermelon or a soybean, we wouldn't have any soil. Because it is the organic matter that's pumped in by perennials that actually built those soils, those legacy soils that we are now monocropping with corn and soybeans and wheat and rye.”

Supporting the Local Economy

“We call ourselves the economic reversal or the economic inversion. In other words, we're bringing money from the city to the country. The normal industrial system brings rural money to the urban sector, (...) agricultural lands are economically hemorrhaging their wealth to the cities. And we would like to see that reversed. We bring that to the farm and I think the spinoff is pretty big.”

Polyface Farm buys large amounts of grain from local GMO-free farmers, which supports their activities and protects the farms from the chemical industrial approach. There are 25 people employed on the property, and there is also a stimulus to the local economy caused by the annual influx of visitors to the region, coming to see the farm, a number that can reach 15 000 per year. And that also supports a community trying to work on artisanal and craft-type food and fiber.

Individual Food Choices and Taking Action

“Imagine you're getting ready to eat. And as you look at what's on your plate, just take a moment to squint through the plate and try to imagine the landscape that grew the food on that plate. Just imagine that landscape and then ask: is that landscape the kind of landscape I want my grandchildren to inherit?

If you happen to be around Virginia, you are more than welcome to take a day trip to Polyface Farm, or even take part in one of the educational activities they organize, and see how everything takes place with your own eyes. But to Joe, the most effective way to help the cause is to change our mindsets and then our actions to heal and regenerate Earth.

"The way to help me is to simply join the awareness team, join the thinking team. (...) There's a kind of sense that what I do today doesn't matter. But the fact is that where we are today on the planet, our track record, our stewardship, all of these things are a physical manifestation of trillions and trillions of little decisions that we and our ancestors have made for centuries.”

“Get your mind, get your head, get your heart, wrapped around the privilege, the honor of knowing that these hands and this intellect can engage, can participate with healing. If more people would understand that privilege and responsibility, we would have a different world.”

“My dad was a visionary very much ahead of his time and was all about trying to regenerate this piece of land. In my lifetime, I've watched it go from rocks and infertility to arguably the most abundant farm in the community. And I'm not saying that proudly, I'm saying that humbly recognizing that nature's templates do work, given enough time and enough persistence, they do work. The joy of my life is to have been a participant in that healing. It's not something that you have to be a non-participatory bystander in, you can touch the earth, touch the land and watch it respond.”

Regenerative Farming and Grazing Rotations: In Conversation with Joel Salatin

Deep inside the Lysefjord, on the Norwegian southwestern coast, heavy rain is the main energy source in producing clean energy. Waterfalls cuts into the mountains. The fjord’s wide gorge has steep, partly overhanging rock walls on both sides.

In this spectacular landscape, where Viking warriors once roamed with their sleek wooden ships, an ultramodern industry has made Norway one of the main producers of the world’s most lightweight metal: aluminum.

Aluminum is often used in the production of electric cars. Also quite often, the aluminum is recycled, making the production even more energy efficient.

For over a hundred years, Norway has built industry using hydropower, which was also the beginning of the country’s modern society. Today, when reduced emissions are critical in stopping climate change, Norway has a great advantage: an entire industry powered by clean renewable hydropower.

An Aluminum Superpower

By taking advantage of its access to renewable hydropower from nature; Norway has become an aluminum superpower. According to Norsk Hydro, an aluminum producer partially owned by the Norwegian State, 40 percent of all aluminum used in Europe is produced by the company.

The company claims that aluminum is an important component in making the world greener, both because it has a low carbon footprint, and because the finished products become lighter. For an electric car, for example, this will mean increased range without increased power consumption.

Photo by American Public Power Association

“We make aluminum with only a quarter of the carbon footprint of the world average, and we can largely thank the Norwegian hydropower for that,” says Ingrid Guddal.

She is factory manager at Hydro Karmøy, which since 1990 has cut its emissions by 55 percent. Hydro REDUXA aluminum is produced here with a footprint that is a quarter of the world average. Much thanks to hydropower, including from the power station in Lysefjord.

“We are working, among other things, to mix recycled aluminum into the production of new, which further reduces the footprint. Aluminum is eternal, it loses none of its qualities no matter how many times it is recycled,” says factory manager Ingrid Guddal.

Aluminum Recycling Around the World

Alongside glass and steel, aluminum is one of the easiest to recycle materials on the planet. According to the Aluminum Association, nearly 75 percent of all aluminum that has ever been produced is still in use to this day; with the majority of aluminum cans that you purchase in a store having already been recycled many times over.

Aluminum recycling rates around the world have, for the most part, continued to improve with time. A September, 2019 report by The Aluminum Association found that the consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans recycling in the United States is 49.8 percent, whereas the industry recycling rate is 63.6 percent. Similarly, a June 2018 report by European Aluminium found that the overall aluminum can recycling rate for Europe was 76.3 percent in 2015.

Countries with the highest aluminum recycling rates include Japan, which had a 77.1 percent recycling rate in 2015 (albeit down from 90.9 percent in 2006), and Brazil, which reached an astonishing 98.4 percent aluminum can recycling rate in 2014.

If aluminum producers and users could find better ways to recycle the trash from aluminum soda cans and other throwaway products that are never recycled, then producers and consumers would be on the right track to reduce the global carbon footprint from aluminum even further. And, as in Norway, we need to produce aluminum with increased sources of renewable energy.

Top Photo by Julia Maior

Aluminum Produced in Norway Has the World’s Lowest Carbon Footprint

In the first episode, we spoke with Niklas Kaskeala, Chief Impact Office from Compensate, a nonprofit addressing the current voluntary carbon market from within. Niklas oversees Compensate’s sustainability approach, carbon capture portfolio, and advocacy efforts to reform the voluntary carbon market. He is also the founder of Protect our Winters Finland, the Finnish affiliate of the International Protect Our Winters movement, and has more than 15 years of experience in development, sustainability and climate change.

Keep reading for the the key points from the discussion with Niklas:

Additionality

According to Compensate’s recently published white paper, focusing on the need for reform in the voluntary carbon market, 90% of carbon capture projects certified by international standards do not pass their evaluation process. The most prominent reason for this is the lack of additionality, which is a crucial aspect of a good carbon project or a good carbon credit.

“If you don't have additionality, the buyer of the carbon credit is paying for something that would have happened in any case and so is paying for nothing basically (…). If you then use that carbon credit to offset (...) some emissions and you want to neutralize them using a non additional carbon credit, the climate impact won't be there.”

Biodiversity is one of the other essential factors influencing the success of a carbon capture project within the organisation’s framework. For example, a forestry project will be rejected on the grounds of having a harmful impact on biodiversity if it is based on a plantation or uses pesticides.

Similarly, projects are assessed for social impact: “You can have negative social impacts where it is unclear how much the revenue of the sale of carbon credits flows back to local communities. You might even have forced evictions from project areas, community conflicts, all kinds of things. So, this criteria is quite holistic in that sense, it looks at different aspects.”

Reduce Emissions Before Offsetting

Despite a big part of Compensate’s work being based on carbon credits and offsetting, Niklas highlighted that the highest priority of any individual or institution in their endeavour to address the environmental impact of their activities should be to radically reduce their carbon emissions. However, as it is not possible to achieve zero emissions immediately, the carbon market exists to redress the balance.

“You should never start by thinking, how can I offset emissions? You need to radically reduce emissions. Think about how you can avoid them, how you can minimize them. And then the last option on the table is our carbon credits. And then you have me to make sure that you use good quality, transparent credits.”

Regulation and Responsibility

“We're going to need more regulation in the EU. We have a proposal from the commission to start regulating carbon removals. We need corporate responsibility standards, like the science-based targets and others who are already taking a good stance on how to make sure that we define the role offsetting has in corporate climate action so that it has the right role and that we always emphasize the importance of emission reductions.

If you're a buyer of carbon credits, read the studies and white papers that are out there and ask the right questions from the sellers of carbon credits. If they're unable to answer or you're not satisfied with the answers, then don't buy from them.”

Risks of Nature-Based Solutions and Overcompensation

“One of the big risks with these nature-based projects is the permanence of the carbon. (...) Obviously it's impossible to fully guarantee that carbon will be stored in some kind of biomass for no more than some decades or hundreds of years at max."

Since it's impossible to have those types of assurances with nature-based offsets, Compensate advocates for overcompensation, an approach where " ...we use more carbon credits than would be technically necessary to offset a certain amount of emissions. We make sure that we do more than would be necessary to achieve a one-to-one ratio of offsetting.”

“If you reduce emissions, it's real, there are no risks. You've avoided adding CO2 into the atmosphere. But when you use carbon credits, there are always these risks involved and you need to make sure you understand them and communicate them to your stakeholders or customers or whoever so that you're not creating a false image of the climate impact.”

In spite of the risks associated with nature-based carbon sequestration solutions, Compensate has focused on them because the current technology-based solutions, such as Direct Air Capture, are not likely to be scalable in the near future. However, 20% of their offset payments support what they call Innovative Carbon Capture Solutions, such as biochar production, which is capable of storing carbon for hundreds of years and has the added benefit of improving soil quality wherever it is used.

Getting Involved

For those inspired to do more, Niklas recommends looking more deeply into the subject and reading some white papers from those analyzing the field in order to start asking the right questions and participate in initiatives for meaningful carbon market reform.

"There are a lot of initiatives right now to reform the market, and many of them are very good initiatives. (...) a lot of them have open consultations where anybody can take part and contribute with their views, so really engage yourself."

Carbon Offsets and the Voluntary Carbon Market: In Conversation with Niklas Kaskeala

This article originally appeared on Mongabay.

When it comes to slowing climate change, there’s one natural solution that has recently gripped the world: large-scale tree planting and reforestation.
But a new study warns that other natural climate solutions should be considered first.
By comparing different natural climate solutions against four criteria, the study proposes a hierarchy: protect ecosystems first, then improve their management, and lastly restore them.
Protecting natural ecosystems offered the greatest climate benefits, fairly quickly, at relatively low cost, while at the same time providing other benefits for people and wildlife, such as reducing the impact of extreme weather and yielding clean air and water.

When it comes to slowing climate change, there’s one natural solution that has recently gripped the world: large-scale tree planting and reforestation. But a new study warns that other natural climate solutions should be considered first.

In fact, by comparing different natural climate solutions (NCS) against four criteria, the study proposes a hierarchy: protect ecosystems first, then improve their management, and lastly restore them.

“I am really happy this paper was published,” said Forrest Fleischman, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, U.S., who was not involved in the study. “A huge amount of time, energy, and rhetoric is being put into restoration as a low-cost climate solution, whereas scientists have been saying that protecting existing ecosystems is the high-priority climate solution. It is generally much cheaper and more reliable than restoring damaged ones. What the hierarchical framework helps with is in making the cost-benefit calculation on these different investments clearer.”

The crises of climate change and nature loss are intimately linked. Scientists predict climate change will alter ecosystems, causing many species to face extinction. As ecosystems like forests, grasslands and wetlands change, they not only release carbon that they once locked in, but they commit the additional carbon they could have stored in the future to the atmosphere. This is why, in addition to reducing emissions from humankind’s burning of fossil fuels, many scientists advocate for tackling climate change and nature loss together, through what they call natural climate solutions, actions that enhance the ability of Earth’s ecosystems to store carbon.

Deforestation in Indonesia’s Riau province. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

“Very importantly, natural climate solutions are not a substitute for fossil-fuel emissions reduction. We absolutely need those,” said Susan Cook-Patton, the lead author of the new study, who works for global environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy (TNC). “That said, even if we were to sharply drop our emissions, we’re still going to need to pull additional carbon out of the atmosphere and natural climate solutions are particularly helpful in that context.”

There are more than 20 NCS, according to Cook-Patton, but for the purpose of the study, she and her colleagues from TNC and Conservation International, both headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and WWF, based in Washington, D.C., focused on three big ones: protection, improved management, and restoration of ecosystems. The scientists then compared the potential of these three solutions against four criteria that they could assess at a global level. These were the amount of climate benefit each solution offers; how quickly the climate impacts become apparent; cost-effectiveness, that is, how much climate benefit each provides per dollar invested; and co-benefits to people and nature.

The analysis showed that, on a broad scale, protection of natural ecosystems offers the greatest climate benefits, fairly quickly, at relatively low cost. Improved ecosystem management comes next, followed by restoration. Prioritizing protection of intact ecosystems also brings other benefits, the authors write. These include protecting the livelihoods and cultures of Indigenous peoples and local communities, reducing the impact of rising sea levels and extreme weather events, and providing clean air and water.

Consider the example of Canada: In a study published earlier this year, Cook-Patton and several co-authors showed that, by 2030, out of more than 20 NCS, preventing the conversion of grasslands and peatlands to other land uses like agriculture would provide the single largest climate benefit by keeping carbon stocks locked in the soil. Improved management of agricultural lands and forests would also offer big benefits.

However, the country has instead been prioritizing tree planting, Cook-Patton said. “Canada has this 2 billion tree program that is all about tree planting and restoration of tree cover. And what we found was that in 2030, there’s very little mitigation available from it.” The benefits of restoration efforts would only start appearing by 2050, the June study found, and not within the next decade, which scientists deem critical for keeping planetary warming below 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit).

“If you want large, near-term climate mitigation, you really should think about protecting those intact ecosystems, and improving the management of agricultural lands,” Cook-Patton said.

William Bond, a grasslands researcher and emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who was not involved in either study, said the new study’s hierarchical framework would be particularly useful to evaluate in developing countries, “where international funding of tree planting is a major incentive.”

“It is not a rational response to plant trees to combat climate change,” Bond said in an email. “It is an emotional concern exploited by those who benefit, for example, by delaying more rigorous [fossil-fuel] emissions control. So it is up to us, the ecological and restoration ecology communities, to inform and broaden public opinion on options for NCS. The authors used credible carbon economy data and credible economics to develop their case.”

Cook-Patton acknowledged that local contexts could change what solution people prioritize. Yet, she said the purpose of the paper was to get people working for corporations and governments to think about their options for protecting and better managing ecosystems first, before jumping onto the restoration bandwagon.

Timberlands dominate the southern Georgia, U.S., landscape. These properties of expansive pines and cypress offer ideal nesting habitat for swallowtail kites, but they are always on the chopping block for harvest. Image courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.

Bond said the paper’s protect-manage-restore message can serve another audience: people wanting to contribute to climate projects who could use more information about where their money will have the greatest effect.

“At the personal level, I am generally extremely reluctant to pay the ‘carbon tax’ when travelling. I know it is highly likely to be spent on some poorly planned reforestation project planting trees where they likely never existed in a pristine grassland,” he said. “If I knew that the carbon tax was instead going to support protection of those grasslands and managing them for greater carbon storage, I would fully endorse paying the carbon tax.”

Fleischman, while agreeing that the new paper’s findings are valuable, highlighted a concern. “What does it mean to ‘protect’?” he wrote in an email.

Indigenous people, for example, play an important role in protecting natural landscapes. But big conservation organizations, including those that employ the paper’s co-authors, have historically focused on creating strict protected areas, which have often had tremendous negative impacts on the well-being of Indigenous communities, Fleischman said.

“The paper nods briefly to this, but I think it’s really important that this paper not be read as an endorsement of fortress conservation policies which these organizations have historically pursued,” he said. “Note that I’m not at all critical of these scientists, who I believe are excellent and many of whom have played a role in highlighting Indigenous contributions to conservation in their own work, but their employers.”

Fleischman also said it’s important to be clear about why restoration is having a big moment in global discourses, while protection is not.

“Protection is often harmful to powerful interests that would like to destroy natural ecosystems to extract resources,” he said. “These interests have a big seat at the global decision-making table. Restoration often fails but it makes a nice slogan, and organizations that are harming the earth can commit to long-term restoration as a way to greenwash their work. Since restoration takes decades, it will be decades before we can hold them accountable for the likely failures and shortcomings. Hopefully, this paper will make it harder for these organizations, but we’ll have to see.”

That is Cook-Patton’s hope too. “My title is senior forest restoration scientist, and I love tree planting, I love restoring forests; my science is targeted around quantifying accurately, the mitigation potential of that,” she said. “But even I want to make sure that people don’t forget there are these other powerful ways in which we can use nature to help tackle climate change.”

Citations:

Cook-Patton, S. C., Drever, C. R., Griscom, B. W., Hamrick, K., Hardman, H., Kroeger, T., … Ellis, P. W. (2021). Protect, manage and then restore lands for climate mitigation. Nature Climate Change, 11(12), 1027-1034. doi:10.1038/s41558-021-01198-0

Drever, C. R., Cook-Patton, S. C., Akhter, F., Badiou, P. H., Chmura, G. L., Davidson, S. J., … Kurz, W. A. (2021). Natural climate solutions for Canada. Science Advances, 7(23), eabd6034. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd6034

Photo by Külli Kittus

Protect Ecosystems Before Planting Trees

In British Columbia, there’s a little valley where the Squamish River snakes down past the cliffs of the Malamute, a popular hiking spot. The hills in all directions are, like much of BC, thickly forested with firs. And nestled in that valley is a newfangled industrial plant that aims to replicate what those millions of trees do: suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

The plant was built by Carbon Engineering, a pioneer in the technology known as direct air capture (DAC). In a long, squat building, a huge ceiling fan draws air inside, where it reacts with a liquid chemical that grabs hold of CO2 molecules. This “sorbent” flows into a nearby machine that transforms the gas, which is then stored in pressurized tanks. The goal is to help rid the atmosphere of its most ubiquitous climate change culprit. The Squamish plant will process up to 1,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. That’s a minuscule drop in the bucket of the planet’s annual emissions, an estimated 33 billion metric tons last year, but this plant is only a pilot facility.

If the process can be scaled up massively, what might happen to all the captured CO2? There are several possibilities, CEO Steve Oldham explains. You could, for example, sell some of it to companies like soda makers or concrete manufacturers. You could also convert it into liquid fuel to burn in cars, trucks, planes, and power plants. That would release still more CO2, but in Oldham’s vision, which involves a vast network of his company’s machines, you would simply run that pollution right back through the process. You could do it over and over, he says, allowing a society to burn fossil fuels in perpetuity without adding to global warming. Call it catch-and-release. Oldham thinks we should all hop on board with this mode of carbon recycling: “We can’t wait. We have to get on with decarbonizing now.”

Given our plodding embrace of renewables, the IPCC figured we’d have to start pulling carbon directly out of the atmosphere by 2100. A lot of carbon. Ten billion metric tons per year.

Of course, governments around the world could go much further than catch-and-release. They could flat-out try to reverse climate change by using direct air capture to grab surplus atmospheric carbon and bury it deep in the Earth—rewinding the Industrial Revolution. Ridding the atmosphere of the billions of tons of so-called legacy carbon we’ve emitted over the past 150 years wouldn’t come cheap. At current prices, nations would have to shell out, collectively, about $5 trillion a year for the rest of the century. But a dire report in August from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that our climate situation could decline so rapidly that we are left with little choice. Policymakers may well decide that removing all that legacy carbon is worth the cost, Oldham argues. “I personally like the analogy of water treatment,” he says. “When water was a problem with cholera and typhoid, governments worldwide built a water treatment infrastructure. It’s part of what they provide to their citizens. Today we have an air problem, so we need an air-treatment infrastructure.”

Solving climate change with CO2-sucking machines? It sounds, at first, like something from a Neal Stephenson sci-fi novel—or a particularly delirious Silicon Valley TED Talk. And for years, indeed, DAC resided in mad-scientist territory. Only a handful of startups worldwide were fiddling with prototypes, and few serious investors were paying attention.

That all changed in 2018, with the release of an earlier IPCC report. The panel warned that if we wanted to keep the planet from warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius—the goal of the Paris agreement on mitigating climate change—we’d need to slash atmospheric CO2 dramatically. Planting forests would help. Shifting to renewables would be crucial, too. But given humanity’s plodding embrace of wind and solar, the IPCC figured we’d have to start pulling carbon directly out of the atmosphere by 2100. A lot of carbon. Ten billion metric tons per year, equal to nearly a third of our current CO2 output.

Direct air capture, along with other capture and sequestration schemes—from planting trees to figuring out how to make marine organisms lock up surplus carbon—was suddenly hot, perhaps even crucial to our long-term survival. Policymakers and corporations, and even some environmentalists, snapped to attention. By spring 2021, more than 100 of the world’s largest companies—including PepsiCo, Alaska Airlines, Colgate-Palmolive, and Wall Street giants like Morgan Stanley—had pledged to get to “net zero” emissions by 2040, and Elon Musk’s foundation put up $100 million for the XPrize, a four-year competition to spur development of any tech, including DAC, that results in “negative emissions.”

Public money has begun flowing in, too. The federal government and a couple of states have passed tax credits for firms that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The infrastructure bill the Senate green-lighted in August contains $11.5 billion for various carbon-capture efforts, including $3.5 billion to build four “regional direct air capture hubs” that the feds hope will create big networks of clean-energy jobs. The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget blueprint included $150 billion to compensate energy producers that switch to lower-emissions processes—a move favored by the swing vote of Joe Manchin—that could include direct air capture. And some Democrats are pushing higher tax credits for DAC in particular. In June, the Department of Energy announced a modest $12 million grant to support, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm put it, the “brilliant innovators” developing DAC technologies that can “help us avoid the worst effects of climate change.” Even a few tech firms, like Stripe and Shopify, have budgeted millions to buy up CO2 sequestered by any reasonable means. “You’ve got this enormous momentum,” says Erin Burns, executive director of the think tank Carbon180.

In response, the DAC pioneers are gleefully rushing out new plants. Climeworks, based in Switzerland, is contemplating a facility in the Middle East. New York’s Global Thermostat is gearing up to create its first large-scale installation next year in Chile. Oxy Low Carbon Ventures (a division of the oil giant Occidental) will use Carbon Engineering’s technology to build a Texas plant eventually capable of removing up to 1 million metric tons of atmospheric CO2 per year, 1,000 times the rate of the Squamish facility.

This may all sound like a smart idea, but it grows more complex as you look closely at the world these companies envision. The only viable path to saving the planet, according to the entrepreneurs, is to get fossil fuel companies on board. That’s partly because Big Oil has the infrastructure and know-how to build these kinds of facilities at scale and to pipe captured CO2 to locations where it can be permanently sequestered. But it’s also because, in the eyes of the DAC inventors, internal combustion will be with us for a while yet. They envision using DAC mostly for catch-and-release over the next few decades: Harvest CO2 from the air, convert it into synthetic fuels, burn those fuels, and recapture the CO2. We wouldn’t start removing legacy carbon until 2060 or 2070 because only then will DAC, by small improvements, become cheap enough that companies and nations (at today’s tax rates, anyway) will be open to paying for it.

Their tech can save us in the long run, the inventors insist. In the meantime, they’re looking for help from the government—and from their partners at companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Occidental Petroleum.

Burial

CO2 is transported to locations whose underground geology enables permanent sequestration.

Downside

Requires 65,000-plus miles of risky pipelines.

Synfuels

CO2 is converted into liquid hydrocarbons to be burned in existing engines and power plants.

Downside

Extends fossil fuel era and creates additional pollution.

Enhanced oil recovery

CO2 is pumped deep into gas and oil wells to boost production output.

Downside

Extends fossil fuel era and requires pipeline expansion.

Manufacturing

CO2 is diverted to produce beverages, dry ice, cement, carbon-fiber materials, and more.

Downside

Existing markets are minuscule.

The Danger of Business as Usual

Many environmentalists view the game plan of the DAC visionaries as preposterous, a complex bank shot that can’t possibly work. The sheer scale of the endeavor “would make dealing with coronavirus look like playtime,” says June Sekera, a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, who analyzed 200 academic papers on DAC to identify its risks. Sekera came away from her analysis convinced that extracting, shipping, and burying so much captured CO2 would invite disaster.

Sure, one could co-locate DAC plants alongside synfuel plants, but to bury billions of tons of excess carbon permanently would be, Sekera says, a logistical nightmare. First you’d need to transport the CO2 from your DAC installations to locations with the type of subterranean rock needed to sequester the gas. This would require a web of specialized high-pressure pipelines crisscrossing the country. (Existing oil and gas pipelines won’t cut it.) We would need, by one estimate, at least 65,000 miles of them by 2050—12 times more than we have today. This and other considerations led the authors of a 2020 study in the journal Nature Communications to declare DAC an “energetically and financially costly distraction.”

CO2 pipeline leaks could be lethal. Heavier than air, the gas hovers near the ground, where it can sicken and asphyxiate pets, livestock, and people.

What’s more, CO2 pipeline leaks could be lethal. Carbon dioxide is heavier than the nitrogen and oxygen that dominate the air we breathe. If a pipeline breaks, concentrated CO2 initially hovers near the ground, where it can sicken and asphyxiate pets, livestock, and people. (Recent pipeline ruptures in Louisiana and Mississippi, where CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery, sent dozens to the hospital.) And if history is any guide, the new pipelines would be routed through some of America’s poorest areas, says Carroll Muffett, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, who opposes DAC. “When you’re adding carbon capture or direct air capture at—or around—industrial facilities, those facilities are overwhelmingly

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