Borneo rainforest cleared for oil palm
Over the past year the bad news about the climate has been accelerating, until I can hardly tell if I’m reading blogs by “Doomists” like Guy McPhearson, or a column in Medium.com. There is also a Kabuki–like feel to reading about all the new bad news: like that classic drama style, the articles follow rigid conventions with individual authors trying to distinguish themselves by creative variations on permitted themes. Thus, every article lays out the latest unsettling data, then expounds on how we need to replace fossil fuels soonest (now featuring the Green New Deal), before moving to scary scenarios of what happens if we do nothing (which we are, in fact, doing very well), and finally to urgent but unspecific calls for "drastic reforms" or "systemic change" in the American political and economic system: i.e. neoliberal capitalism.
No argument there. The data are in: open-ended capitalism and a living biosphere are incompatible. All that money piling up inside the global oligarchy is getting shoveled into the very activities that are most quickly destroying our planet: fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, surface mining, and inflating the mindless consumption economy. Coincidentally, that same economic system also fuels the massive inequality that is making even “mainstream” economists nervous. The most appropriate name for the present world economy is Near-Term Extinction Capitalism.
Global warming is actually a pollution problem, one of several, caused by a much more basic dilemma: human civilization trying to live the fantasy of endlessly increasing consumption of resources (labeled Economic Growth) on a planet that stubbornly refuses to increase its size to match human pipe dreams.
The “Green New Deal”, culturally appropriated by Democrats from the Green Party, goes farther than most in putting forward specific policies that need to be enacted. However, it too, misses or avoids dealing with the thing that will eventually doom virtually all plans for stopping runaway climate change: the “runaway economics” of NTE Capitalism. The Green New Deal as currently outlined is somewhat like giving a single dose of antibiotics to someone with a gangrenous leg: the antibiotics are certainly necessary but alone will not save the patient.
Ultimately, all responses to global warming depend on consuming less (fossil fuels, natural resources, land), which is rather difficult in an economic system demands ever more of everything. Overthrowing the religion of ‘GDP-ism’ is actually practical, in the sense that it can be done using existing legal structures, and necessary for giving other more "traditional" climate change fixes a chance to actually work over the long term. Below are the two major steps that need to be taken.
1. Change current tax law to an ‘UBI-Max’ structure.
The UBI has become a popular Internet topic in recent years, for example hardly a day goes by without a new article appearing in my Medium and other news feeds. For those with mental squeamishness about the government giving money to ordinary people (as opposed to bankers and other wealthy kleptocrats), don’t call UBI a payment. Call it “Bottom-up Quantitative Easement”.
The discussions about UBIs vs. guaranteed jobs are important but the real key for adapting to climate change is in the other pole of the ‘UBI-Max’ axis: the maximum income. Or wage ceiling, as it is sometimes called. Or a current favored expression: “TAX THE RICH”. The “Max-Tax”, set at a marginal rate somewhere close to 100%, should be designed to kill some of the present incentive to trash what’s left of Planet Earth for the sake of piling up endlessly increasing mountains of wealth in order to pile up even more wealth. Where would the top bracket kick in? The best place would be some reasonable multiple of the basic UBI, say, ten times. So, taking $30,000 per year as a possible UBI, the 100% rate would apply to any form of income above $300,000 in given year. Other proposals have suggested a maximum income equal to the President’s salary ($400,000) which is not that far off, a return to the 90% top tax bracket of the Eisenhower years (or the 94% marginal rate during FDR’s presidency), and other variations between 10 and 50 times a basic minimum wage or UBI. The top marginal rate should be legally linked to the basic minimum wage such that the only way to give “tax relief” to the billionaires would be to raise the basic rate of the UBI for everybody else.
Subparagraph 1a. Hose down the FIRE sector. Just as destructive to the planet as unlimited capitalist accumulation is the gradual takeover of the economy by rent-seekers, particularly embodied in the so-called FIRE Sector (finance, insurance, real estate). This is where all the modern forms of planetary destruction are hatched: the mining, energy extraction, giant agricultural schemes, Bolsonario’s wet dreams of killing the Amazon. Along with the asset price inflation, financial bubble creation, predatory patent and copyright rules, and the myriad other schemes by the financial oligarchy to grab public assets. In short, it’s time to give the rentier class another haircut. [Maybe not quite as short as the first one in the 1790’s, which was at shoulder level.] All forms of unearned income would be treated the same as hourly wages. No special rates or exemptions for investment income, inherited income, farm subsidies, restoration of meaningful inheritance taxes (as recently proposed by Bernie Sanders), and no deductions on interest payments. There are probably other measures that I have missed. Michael Hudson has written extensively on the parasitism of the FIRE sector; Dean Baker (although not the greatest fan of the Green New Deal) is also a persistent critic of the rentiers.
Taxing the oligarchs has had until recently, very little discussion in the oligarch-owned media, unsurprisingly. Recently, however, people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Paul Krugman, Keith Ellison, Sam Pizzigati, and others have come out in favor of, well, not a Max Tax in the above sense, but at least reasonably high tax rates on the uber–wealthy. The usual rationale has been getting the oligarchs to help pay for badly needed programs and infrastructure (Green New Deal, and that UBI). But that’s not really the important thing. The real goal is to dismantle the poisonous growth addiction of the NTE economy. The response to NTE Capitalism, at least what I’ve seen so far, has been to call for countermeasures to curb the individual outrages being perpetrated by the oligarchy, outrage by outrage. This means, of course that a myriad of campaigns will have to be fought against pipelines, fracking, air pollution, water pollution, waste production, open pit mines, various aggressions against poor and indigenous people, aggressions against climate refugees, resource grabs. Each one of these campaigns will be ferociously resisted by the One-percent Kleptocrats, who correctly see that their future profits will be getting pinched. Winning one campaign will not make the next and the next any easier. The way I see it, we’ll have the same huge fight getting to UBI and Max Tax but after those are in place, the obscene profit motives aggravating the rest of the environmental and social outrages will be far less appealing. Why scheme and bribe to clearcut the Amazon on top of all your other dodgy business deals if you still can only cart away $300,000 per year?
[Digression]
If the above looks familiar, it should. The combination of a universal subsidy linked to marginal tax rates of close to 100% was proposed 40 years ago by Herman Daly as part of his Steady State Economy (SSE)(summarized, with a history of Daly’s intellectual antecedents here, a recent interview here).
Not surprisingly, cornucopian economist heads exploded all over mainstream economics departments, think tanks, and government bureaus. In the meantime, capitalism has progressed from slightly restrained colonial plundering to the full-bore Neoliberal parasitism in which we now find ourselves. Now, a new polemical wrinkle has been injected into the debate: degrowth. This argument is that the economy has to be shrunk, not merely stabilized, and Daly's SSE is not enough (and too capitalist-friendly) to get us where we need to be. Instead of an SSE they promote something called Ecosocialism, and here is where degrowthers themselves fall down on the job. For all their blazing rhetoric, they (and "reformed capitalists") are just as vague and short of specifics as the hardline Marxists and the radical climate warriors (NaomiKleinists, McKibbenists, and Monbiotists, for example) when it comes to concrete steps on how that longed-for "fundamental social change" might be brought about. "Social transformationists" seem to have a long-term vision of a society that actually looks a lot like a Steady State Economy, but their road maps, such as they are, keep getting into a tangle because they want to do away with the bad effects of economic growth while trying to ignore that most of those effects are intrinsic to growth itself. Those who haven't read Daly seem compelled to reinvent SSE badly.
[/Digression]
2. Put Depletion taxes on natural resources
Disincentivizing the financial looting in the current economy (see 1. above) will be a big help but won't by itself end the pillaging and polluting of Planet Earth. For that we need to directly intervene in the resource stripping of the modern global economy. The most straightforward way to do this is to slap an appropriate depletion tax or tariff on a disappearing resource, to be applied at every point in the product cycle. We already have a good model in the carbon tax. However, there's so much more than just carbon that needs depletion taxes:
- Agricultural products that rely on massive clearing of tropical forests (soybeans, palm oil, "biofuels").
- All lumber and other forest products that come from or result from destruction of old growth forests, wherever they are. These activities are directly undermining the only "carbon sequestration" method that we know actually works.
- Every mineral that comes out of a strip or open pit mine. We all know about the harms that come from coal and mountain top removal but open pit mining is metastasizing all over the tropics and devastating both the environment and human societies. Coal may be in decline but the ever growing demands of the London bullion market, solar cell makers, wind turbine makers, and your damn smartphone are set to equal or surpass the damage from fossil fuel extraction over the coming years.
The point of depletion taxes is not to completely shut down resource use but to actively discourage overconsumption and bring it in line with the ability of ecosystems to regenerate. Of course, depletion taxes would not be applied to recycled materials. If use of a resource is demonstrably sustainable (I've heard there are a few such, but couldn't give you an example), that too could have reduced or exempted taxes. "Feebates" (fees plus rebates) might be one way to fund alternative energy and non-destructive agriculture with depletion and pollution taxes. I'm a fan of putting a blanket depletion tax on everything coming off or out of the ground or water (not just fossil fuels) until the current general environmental degradation is ended. When might that be? We can actually set specific markers, like adopting the goals of the Nature needs Half movement as yardsticks to decide if or when to lower a depletion tax. Satellite imagery has now developed to the point we can actually measure the disappearance of essential ecosystems in almost real time. Taking the Amazon forest as an example, we can measure the amount of destruction that's now taking place and we know the products the forest is being destroyed to produce, and we should put a nice fat depletion tax on all of them. When we see that the destruction has stopped and a reasonable amount of regeneration has taken place, we can revisit those particular depletion taxes.
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So that's a route to a Steady State Economy, without which none of the other measures to combat global warming will be effective enough to make a permanent difference. It may not be the only route to where we need to be, but it's the only one I've seen in 40 years of looking. All the "ecosocialist" and "degrowth" alternatives that I've seen are theoretically attractive, but they have been stuck for decades in a fog of nebulous sloganeering. Global warming activists might take a lesson from two other social movements that have recently unstuck themselves from the bog of unfocused generalizations: Medicare for All, and the Decent Minimum Wage. Medicare for All was little more than a talking point until Bernie Sanders started fleshing out some details. Now it's a seriously debated part of Democratic policy. Sander's original formulation may be substantially changed or even replaced by something else, like Single Payer, but everyone is at least pushing for specific policies, rather than repeating political vaporware.
An even clearer example is the change in the minimum wage debate. Most Democrats were for a decent minimum wage, and have been so for decades, without doing anything for the people actually stuck in the minimum wage jobs. When activists started calling for a $15/hour minimum wage, the debate became focused wonderfully. Not only are we demanding a specific policy, but a few communities are actually passing $15/hr. minimum wages.
Actually, several important parts of a SSE are already being seriously discussed, although in a disconnected and disorganized way. UBI's are actively discussed and debated and not just within the "lefty ecochamber". Sen. Warren has made some suggestions for taxing away some of the oligarchy's bloated and mostly ill-gotten gains. I don't think a 70% marginal rate is enough (I'm a hardline Eisenhowerist on this issue), and her romantic attachment to a bygone version of capitalism may be getting in her way, but Warren's ideas are certainly a good beginning. There are already numerous depletion taxes and regulations on the books to preserve specific natural resources, although regulated industries too easily can evade them. Sanders' and Warren's thinking on the economy, especially some of their latest proposals, suggest that they both may have read some Daly at some point during their careers.
All of the plans put forward for the Green New Deal, along with a good many of the other social reforms the majority of Americans are supporting will fit comfortably inside a Steady State Economy. The renewable energy and infrastructure projects will be easier to finance once the oligarchy is paying a reasonable amount of taxes, and taxes on the rentiers and resource extractors should make more financial and physical resources available for renewable energy and mitigation of global warming. Keeping in mind that the Green New Deal also has to observe planetary resource limits and not just substitute one type of unsustainable consumption with another.
Will a Steady State Economy be easy to put into effect? Of course not. Daly's plan would upend all sorts of current financial applecarts, which the oligarchy finds very convenient to help them cart away vast amounts of money. The oligarchs will not give up their cushy position on top of the social pyramid without fighting tooth and nail. But they're already fighting tooth and nail to derail the far more timid Green New Deal, as well as raising the minimum wage, curbing drug price extortion, and literally every other program aimed at giving us in the lower 90% a decent existence. In the end, I doubt it will cost significantly more energy to just get rid of NTE capitalism, rather than fight a very long string of battles to try to make it less toxic. Whether or not we proclaim Steady State as a goal in the sense of the Green New Deal we need to keep SSE components firmly in mind and support politicians and programs that advance us toward a steady state. And oppose and undermine, as Extinction Rebellion seems to be doing in England, anything that is "business as usual", or the right-wing and "centrist" attempts to further solidify the current neoliberal assault on the planet.
Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, David Wallace Wells, their many predecessors, and their growing number of followers and imitators are not wrong in calling for sweeping social changes. But with the Great Climate Tipping Point advancing at bullet train speed—from "next century" to 12 years to maybe...next year?— the time for vague rhetoric about "transformations" is past.
