As time rolls on and the ipcc’s deadlines for reducing the rise in global temperatures get closer, the prospect of climate catastrophe looms larger, and the problem of how to avert it becomes ever more pressing. This is the question that has been under discussion in recent numbers of nlr. The debate has featured interventions from a number of distinct positions, on both sides of the Atlantic and across different political generations. Herman Daly, a pioneer in the field of ecological economics, was quizzed on his programme for a steady-state system by Benjamin Kunkel, n+1 founding editor and author of Buzz. Canadian environmental historian Troy Vettese argued for a pollution-shrinking ‘half-earth’ project of natural geo-engineering and eco-austerity. Taking the opposite tack, the radical economist Robert Pollin called for massive global investment in renewable energy. In the current number, uk-based scholar-activists Mark Burton and Peter Somerville reply with a defence of ‘degrowth’. Still to come are contributions from an eco-feminist perspective and from the global South.footnote1
At this mid-point in the debate, it may be helpful to pause and take stock. As well as putting forward their own solutions, the contributors have responded—sometimes with assent, but often in the form of rebuttals or correctives—to each other’s. The result of this direct engagement is that, reading the texts in sequence, one feels one has witnessed a conversation. Yet, in a conversation stretched across twelve months and congealed in text, the latest voices can become the loudest—having both the opportunity to respond to everything that has come before, and the privilege of going temporarily unanswered. So, in order to collect one’s thoughts on the debate so far—to reflect on the progress made, the problems thrown up, the questions still untabled—it may be worth, as it were, putting the thinkers in a room together, to help the existing strands of dialogue become more audible.
One way of comparing the contributions is to regard them as providing different answers to the question: what does the world need to cut in order to avoid global disaster? Herman Daly defines ‘environmental impact’ as ‘the product of the number of people times per capita resource use’. Following the logic of this equation, Daly thinks we need to reduce our use of resources, including, but not limited to, fossil fuels, and to limit population growth. To implement these reductions, he envisions some kind of cap-and-trade system. In the case of resources, there would be a ‘limit on the right to deplete what you own’, and that right would be purchasable ‘by auction from the government’. In the case of population, everyone would be given the right to reproduce once, but since not everyone can, or wants to have children, those rights could be reallocated ‘by sale or by gift’. Daly also advocates a minimum and maximum income. These redistributive policies are critical accompaniments to his caps on resource use and population growth since without setting a limit on inequality too, the distribution of the rights to consume and to have children could be drastically uneven and unfair (the mega-rich could, for example, monopolize reproduction).
Taking land scarcity as the ‘fundamental metric’ for his ‘alternative green political economy’, Troy Vettese’s ‘eco-austere’ answer is that we must reduce our energy consumption and cut out meat and dairy. Mandatory veganism would free up farmland for ‘land-hungry’ clean-energy infrastructure like wind turbines and solar panels, which could then become the world’s primary way of meeting its energy needs. The extra land could also be used for natural geo-engineering projects like large-scale rewilding (‘half-earthing’) to create ecosystems that would act as carbon sinks.
Robert Pollin takes issue with Vettese’s ‘fundamental metric’: he thinks Vettese’s estimates about how much land renewable-energy systems would require are inflated. With land scarcity not a limiting factor in Pollin’s account, cutting our energy consumption—beyond reducing energy wastage—becomes unnecessary. So, unlike Daly and Vettese, Pollin is almost exclusively concerned with reducing not energy use but fossil-fuel use: ‘To make real progress on climate stabilization, the single most critical project is to cut the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas dramatically and without delay.’ Through concerted global investment in both clean-energy infrastructure and more energy-efficient ‘technologies and practices’, we can cut out fossil fuels while continuing to ‘achieve the same, or higher, levels of energy service’.
In the latest contribution to the debate, published in this issue, Mark Burton and Peter Somerville agree with Pollin about the necessity for ‘targeted curtailment of [carbon] emissions’ through a transition to clean energy. But, whereas Pollin is wary about the political and economic viability of massively shrinking the economy—which he fears could result in ‘a green great depression’, featuring impossibly high unemployment and unacceptable drops in living standards—Burton and Somerville argue that a drastic contraction of the material size of the economy through cutting industrial production, construction, agriculture and distribution is the essential complement to a switch to renewables. They calculate that to generate enough energy at current usage levels without recourse to oil, coal or natural gas would require ‘an 18-fold increase in renewables deployment’, and so argue that if energy consumption were to increase further—as it would if economic activity continues to expand—weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would only be more difficult.
Pollin’s answer stands out from the rest because his version of the transition to clean energy would mostly not be felt by individual consumers, whose energy use, unaffected by the change of provenance in quantitative terms, could continue as normal. This prompts a second question that may throw the specificity of Pollin’s contribution into relief: how much sacrifice do the different proposed cuts require? However costly Pollin’s proposals—he estimates they would suck up ‘between 1.5 and 2 per cent of global gdp every year’, which amounts to roughly $1 trillion—and however temporarily painful the transition (necessary job losses in fossil-fuel industries, which would need to be cushioned by adequate social provision including retraining and relocating workers), the question of sacrifice in Pollin’s text is largely out of frame.footnote2 By using different energy resources, and using them better, we don’t have to use less energy; we can even use more. Far from climate change ‘changing everything’,footnote3 as long as ‘energy consumption, and economic activity more generally’ are ‘absolutely decoupled from the consumption of fossil fuels’, both can go on as before. The key, repeated figure in Pollin’s proposal sounds small—a mere 1.5 per cent—whilst the scale of the projected changes is huge—global and industrial, even supra-industrial. This combination makes their human cost seem at once negligible and abstract. Predominantly affecting large-scale industries and to be handled by remote global bureaucracies, Pollin’s solutions release us from significantly altering our lifestyles and call for little curtailment of individual freedom.