This Changes Everything
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So what to do in the meantime? Well, we do what we can. And what we can do—what doesn’t require a technological and infrastructure revolution—is to consume less, right away. Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic—indeed, they encourage us to go out and buy more new, efficient, green cars and washing machines.
Consuming less, however, means changing how much energy we actually use: how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to us, whether the goods we buy are built to last or to be replaced in two years, how large our homes are. And these are the sorts of policies that have been neglected so far. For instance, as researchers Rebecca Willis and Nick Eyre argue in a report for the U.K.’s Green Alliance, despite the fact that groceries represent roughly 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain, “there is virtually no government policy which is aimed at changing the way we produce, incentivising farmers for low energy farming, or how we consume, incentivising consumption of local and seasonal food.” Similarly, “there are incentives to drive more efficient cars, but very little is done to discourage car dependent settlement patterns.”58
Plenty of people are attempting to change their daily lives in ways that do reduce their consumption. But if these sorts of demand-side emission reductions are to take place on anything like the scale required, they cannot be left to the lifestyle decisions of earnest urbanites who like going to farmers’ markets on Saturday afternoons and wearing up-cycled clothing. We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences.III59
And as hundreds of millions gain access to modern energy for the first time, those who are consuming far more energy than they need would have to consume less. How much less? Climate change deniers like to claim that environmentalists want to return us to the Stone Age. The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s. Not exactly the various forms of hardship and deprivation evoked at Heartland conferences. As Kevin Anderson explains: “We need to give newly industrializing countries in the world the space to develop and improve the welfare and well-being of their people. This means more cuts in energy use by the developed world. It also means lifestyle changes which will have most impact on the wealthy. . . . We’ve done this in the past. In the 1960s and 1970s we enjoyed a healthy and moderate lifestyle and we need to return to this to keep emissions under control. It is a matter of the well-off 20 percent in a population taking the largest cuts. A more even society might result and we would certainly benefit from a lower carbon and more sustainable way of life.”60
There is no doubt that these types of policies have countless benefits besides lower emissions. They encourage civic space, physical activity, community building, as well as cleaner air and water. They also do a huge amount to reduce inequality, since it is low-income people, often people of color, who benefit most from improvements in public housing and public transit. And if strong living-wage and hire-local provisions were included in transition plans, they could also benefit most from the jobs building and running those expanded services, while becoming less dependent on jobs in dirty industries that have been disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities of color.
As Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of the environmental justice organization Green for All puts it, “The tools we use to combat climate change are the same tools we can use to change the game for low-income Americans and people of color. . . . We need Congress to make the investments necessary to upgrade and repair our crumbling infrastructure—from building seawalls that protect shoreline communities to fixing our storm-water systems. Doing so will create family-sustaining, local jobs. Improving our storm-water infrastructure alone would put 2 million Americans to work. We need to make sure that people of color are a part of the business community and workforce building these new systems.”61
Another way of thinking about this is that what is needed is a fundamental reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product. GDP is traditionally understood to consist of consumption plus investment plus government spending plus net exports. The free market capitalism of the past three decades has put the emphasis particularly on consumption and trade. But as we remake our economies to stay within our global carbon budget, we need to see less consumption (except among the poor), less trade (as we relocalize our economies), and less private investment in producing for excessive consumption. These reductions would be offset by increased government spending, and increased public and private investment in the infrastructure and alternatives needed to reduce our emissions to zero. Implicit in all of this is a great deal more redistribution, so that more of us can live comfortably within the planet’s capacity.
Which is precisely why, when climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not (only) because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.
Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One
A great deal of thought in recent years has gone into how reducing our use of material resources could be managed in ways that actually improve quality of life overall—what the French call “selective degrowth.”IV Policies like luxury taxes could be put in place to discourage wasteful consumption.62 The money raised could be used to support those parts of our economies that are already low-carbon and therefore do not need to contract. Obviously a huge number of jobs would be created in the sectors that are part of the green transition—in mass transit, renewable energy, weatherization, and ecosystem restoration. And those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impact (such as the caregiving professions, which tend to be occupied by women and people of color and therefore underpaid). “Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages,” Tim Jackson, an economist at the University of Surrey and author of Prosperity Without Growth, has written. “In the first place, the time spent by these professions directly improves the quality of our lives. Making them more and more efficient is not, after a certain point, actually desirable. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour?”63
There could be other benefits too, like shorter work hours, in part to create more jobs, but also because overworked people have less time to engage in low-consumption activities like gardening and cooking (because they are just too busy). Indeed, a number of researchers have analyzed the very concrete climate benefits of working less. John Stutz, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute, envisions that “hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is see
n in the developed countries today.” If countries aimed for somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.64
Many degrowth and economic justice thinkers also call for the introduction of a basic annual income, a wage given to every person, regardless of income, as a recognition that the system cannot provide jobs for everyone and that it is counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption. As Alyssa Battistoni, an editor at the journal Jacobin, writes, “While making people work shitty jobs to ‘earn’ a living has always been spiteful, it’s now starting to seem suicidal.”65
A basic income that discourages shitty work (and wasteful consumption) would also have the benefit of providing much-needed economic security in the front-line communities that are being asked to sacrifice their health so that oil companies can refine tar sands oil or gas companies can drill another fracking well. Nobody wants to have their water contaminated or have their kids suffer from asthma. But desperate people can be counted on to do desperate things—which is why we all have a vested interest in taking care of one another so that many fewer communities are faced with those impossible choices. That means rescuing the idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care, education, food, and clean water. Indeed, fighting inequality on every front and through multiple means must be understood as a central strategy in the battle against climate change.
This kind of carefully planned economy holds out the possibility of much more humane, fulfilling lifestyles than the vast majority of us are experiencing under our current system, which is what makes the idea of a massive social movement coalescing behind such demands a real possibility. But these policies are also the most politically challenging.
Unlike encouraging energy efficiency, the measures we must take to secure a just, equitable, and inspiring transition away from fossil fuels clash directly with our reigning economic orthodoxy at every level. As we will see, such a shift breaks all the ideological rules—it requires visionary long-term planning, tough regulation of business, higher levels of taxation for the affluent, big public sector expenditure, and in many cases reversals of core privatizations in order to give communities the power to make the changes they desire. In short, it means changing everything about how we think about the economy so that our pollution doesn’t change everything about our physical world.
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I. China has of course emerged as the world’s dominant supplier of inexpensive modules, and in that role has helped to drive dramatic drops in solar prices. It has also flooded the market with cheap panels in recent years, contributing to a global oversupply that has outpaced demand.
II. And they don’t let developing countries like China and India off the hook. According to their projections, developing countries can have just one more decade to continue to increase their emissions to aid their efforts to pull themselves out of poverty while switching over to green energy sources. By 2025, they would need to be cutting emissions “at an unprecedented 7 per cent” a year as well.
III. A law passed by the European Parliament that would require that all cell phone manufacturers offer a common battery charger is a small step in the right direction. Similarly, requiring that electronics manufacturers use recycled metals like copper could save a great many communities from one of the most toxic mining processes in the world.
IV. In French, “decroissance” has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.
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PUBLIC AND PAID FOR
Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy
“We have no option but to reinvent mobility . . . much of India still takes the bus, walks or cycles—in many cities as much as 20 percent of the population bikes. We do this because we are poor. Now the challenge is to reinvent city planning so that we can do this as we become rich.”
—Sunita Narain, director general, Centre for Science and Environment, 20131
“The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’s bombing-planes.”
—George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 19412
It was a tight vote but on September 22, 2013, residents of Germany’s second largest city decided to take their power back. On that day, 50.9 percent of Hamburg’s voters cast their ballots in favor of putting their electricity, gas, and heating grids under the control of the city, reversing a wave of corporate sell-offs that took place over a decade earlier.3
It’s a process that has been given a few clunky names, including “re-municipalization” and “re-communalization.” But the people involved tend to simply refer to their desire for “local power.”
The Our Hamburg–Our Grid coalition made a series of persuasive arguments in favor of taking back the utilities. A locally controlled energy system would be concerned with public interests, not profits. Residents would have greater democratic say in their energy system, they argued, rather than having the decisions that affect them made in distant boardrooms. And money earned in the sale of energy would be returned to the city, rather than lost to the shareholders of multinationals that had control over the grids at the time—a definite plus during a time of relentless public austerity. “For people it’s self-evident that goods on which everybody is dependent should belong to the public,” campaign organizer Wiebke Hansen explained in an interview.4
There was something else driving the campaign as well. Many of Hamburg’s residents wanted to be part of Energiewende: the fast-spreading transition to green, renewable energy that was sweeping the country, with nearly 25 percent of Germany’s electricity in 2013 coming from renewables, dominated by wind and solar but also including some biogas and hydro—up from around 6 percent in 2000. In comparison, wind and solar made up just 4 percent of total U.S. electricity generation in 2013. The cities of Frankfurt and Munich, which had never sold off their energy grids, had already joined the transition and pledged to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and 2025, respectively. But Hamburg and Berlin, which had both gone the privatization route, were lagging behind. And this was a central argument for proponents of taking back Hamburg’s grid: it would allow them to get off coal and nuclear and go green.5
Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition—particularly the speed at which it is being achieved, as well as the ambition of its future targets (the country is aiming for 55–60 percent renewables by 2035).6 The weaknesses of the program have also been hotly debated, particularly the question of whether the decision to phase out nuclear energy has led to a resurgence of coal (more on that next chapter).
In all of this analysis, however, scarce attention has been paid to one key factor that has made possible what may be the world’s most rapid shift to wind and solar power: the fact that in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, citizens have voted to take their energy grids back from the private corporations that purchased them. As Anna Leidreiter, a climate campaigner with the World Future Council, observed after the Hamburg vote, “This marks a clear reversal to the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, when large numbers of German municipalities sold their public services to large corporations as money was needed to prop up city budgets.”7
Nor is this some small trend. According to a Bloomberg report, “More than 70 new municipal utilities have started up since 2007, and public operators have taken over more than 200 concessions to run energy grids from private companies in that time.” And though there are no national statistics, the German Association of Local Utilities believes many more cities and towns than that have taken back control over their grids from outside corporations.8
Most surprising has been the force with which large parts of the German public have turned again
st energy privatization. In 2013 in Berlin 83 percent of participating voters cast their ballots in favor of switching to a publicly owned power utility based eventually on 100 percent renewable energy. Not enough people turned out to vote for the decision to be binding (though the campaign came very close), but the referendum made public opinion so clear that campaigners are still pushing for a nonprofit cooperative to take over the grid when the current contract ends.9
Energy privatization reversals—linked specifically to a desire for renewable energy—have started to spread beyond Germany in recent years, including to the United States. For instance, in the mid-2000s, residents and local officials in the liberal city of Boulder, Colorado, began lobbying their privatized power utility to move away from coal and toward renewable energy. The company, the Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, wasn’t particularly interested, so a coalition of environmentalists and an energetic youth group called New Era Colorado came to the same conclusion as the voters in Germany: they had to take their grid back. Steve Fenberg of New Era explains, “We have one of the most carbon-intensive energy supplies in the country, and [Boulder] is an environmentally minded community, and we wanted to change that. We realized that we had no control over that unless we controlled the energy supply.”10
In 2011, despite being outspent by Xcel by ten to one, the pro-renewables coalition narrowly won two ballot measures that called on the city of Boulder to consider buying back its power system.11 The vote did not immediately put the power utility under public control, but it gave the city the authority and financing to seriously consider the option (which it is currently doing). The coalition won another crucial vote in 2013 against an Xcel-supported initiative that would have blocked the formation of a new public utility, this time by a wide majority.