Search the archive.

[Richard, “The unseen 'slow violence' that affects millions,” BBC Future, January 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210127-the-invisible-impact-of-slow-violence, accessed July 1, 2023, GDS-LL]

The idea of slow violence can be traced back to the 1960s, though it wasn't called that back then. In 1969, the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung – known as the "father of peace studies" – argued that violence could be enacted by more than fists or weapons. Violence, he argued, could also be "structural".

[Jhumpa, “Exploring Guaranteed Income Through A Racial And Gender Justice Lens,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]

The continued push towards mass incarceration is closely tied to the movement to criminalize poverty through local and state fines and fees. Since 2010, over 48 states have either increased their criminal fees or adopted new fees (Shapiro 2014). In North Carolina, fees have risen by 400 percent, leading to the startling fact that 20 percent of people incarcerated in a county jail in North Carolina are there for failure to pay their fines and fees debt (Hunt and Nichol 2017). The Ferguson Report, written by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the aftermath of the police shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, brought national attention to the unconstitutional and discriminatory impact of the practices and priorities held by local government. Local law enforcement agencies and the courts engaged in patterns that systematically targeted communities of color, essentially using community residents as cash registers to fund the municipal budgets through fines and fees related to non-violent offenses, such as traffic violations, loitering, sleeping on the sidewalk, and other causes for ticketing (US Department of Justice 2015). The DOJ deemed these acts to be unconstitutional.

[Jhumpa, “EXPLORING GUARANTEED INCOME THROUGH A RACIAL AND GENDER JUSTICE LENS,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]

WEALTH: THE TRUE INDICATOR OF ECONOMIC STABILITY

Despite this, Marx’s prophecy is unlikely to be fulfilled. On the one hand, he took a teleological model of change that holds that a state of affairs nurtures its opposite, and that from the violent clash between the two a completely new state of affairs bursts into existence. However, the idea that changes happens in evolutionary and not revolutionary fashion seems to better describe societal change. Marx underestimated the adaptability of capitalism. Social systems can absorb challenges, tweak practices, learn from the past and come up with novel solutions to problems, especially when threatened by radical alternatives. For instance, in the late 19th century, as the influence of socialism and communism in Europe rose, Otto von Bismarck introduced the foundations of the modern welfare state, in order to reduce their influence in Germany (Valocchi, 1990). Like in the past, new policy innovations are currently being explored to find new ways to deal with the social pressure resulting from the increasing obsolescence of manual labour, as can be seen in the experimenting with . On the other hand, Marx did not account correctly for the effect of increases in productivity caused by durable technological progress. The Industrial Revolution saw both wages and living standards rise, which lowered the pressure for revolutionary change and served as a counterweight to the process of accumulation of private capital. Similarly, block-chains and artificial intelligence are expected to increase productivity significantly. While technological progresses will lead to new social pressures, new policy innovations such as Universal Basic Income might serve as counterweights. It is true that many jobs will be replaced by technology, however it is also true that a range of new jobs is going to be created. Two decades ago, nobody would have expected the emergence of jobs including app developers, data scientists or Instagram influencers. While certain jobs will disappear, newly created ones will require a different set of skills, put a premium on creativity, problem solving skills and the ability to connect with people. Marx’s revolution, then, will not materialise in the 21st century. Despite this, the future of capitalism, as its past, will lead to new socio-economic consequences and the continued transformation of employment, modes of production and societal structure.

There are good reasons to think that with careful planning, this planet should be able to house seven billion or more people stably and comfortably.11 With sustainable agricultural practices and innovative use of irrigation methods, it should be possible for many relatively uninhabited and agriculturally unproductive parts of the world to support more people and food production. An endless population growth on a finite planet is not possible without a collapse; however, growth until the point of collapse is by no means inevitable. Stabilization of population size is strongly correlated with several factors we are making steady global progress on: including education (especially of women), and rights and a greater level of control for women over their own lives. While there are conflicting studies,12 many experts hold that decreasing child mortality, while leading to population increase in the near-term, leads to a drop in population growth in the longer term. In other words, as we move toward a better world, we will bring about a more stable world, provided intermediate stages in this process do not trigger a collapse or lasting global harm.13, 14 Current advances in science and technology, while not sufficient in themselves, will play a key role in making a more resilient and sustainable future possible. Rapid progress is happening in carbon-zero energy sources such as solar photovoltaics and other renewables.15 Energy storage remains a problem, but progress is occurring on battery efficiency. Advances in irrigation techniques and desalination technologies may allow us to provide water to areas where this has not previously been possible, allowing both food production and other processes that depend on reliable access to clean water. Advances in materials technology will have wide-ranging benefits, from lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, to more efficient buildings and energy grids, to more powerful scientific tools and novel technological innovations. Advances in our understanding of the genetics of plants are leading to crops with greater yields, greater resilience to temperature shifts, droughts and other extreme weather, and greater resistance to pests—resulting in a reduction of the need for polluting pesticides. We are likely to see many further innovations in food production; for example, exciting advances in lab-grown meat may result in the production of meat with a fraction of the environmental footprint of livestock farming. Many of the processes that have resulted in our current unsustainable trajectories can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, and our widespread adoption of fossil fuels. However, the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels must also be recognized as having unlocked a level of prosperity, and a rate and scale of scientific and technological progress that would simply not have been possible without them. While a continued reliance on fossil fuels would be catastrophic for our environment, it is unclear whether many of the “clean technology” breakthroughs that will allow us to break our dependence on fossil fuels would have been possible without the scientific breakthroughs that were enabled directly, or indirectly, by this rich, abundant, and easily available fuel source. The goal is clear: having benefitted so tremendously from this “dirty” stage of technology, we now need to take advantage of the opportunity it gives us to move onto cleaner and more powerful next-generation energy and manufacturing technologies. The challenge will be to do so before thresholds of irreversible global consequence have been passed.

The American media, and powerful sections of it, are holding the Republicans and other captive channels accountable for the attack by lumpens on Capitol Hill. Truth is being brought to power as even those Republicans who have hastened to move away from the Trump incited attack on Washington’s citadel of power, have been brought under media scrutiny for not stopping the US President earlier. The assault on American democracy while being condemned, is also being supported from within. Polarisation effected by Trump and the Republican Party along with sections of the media is now visible in a country that always prided itself on infallible democracy. That Trump was able to chip away at it surely and steadfastly has brought America up short, with the citizens wondering aloud how matters had been allowed to come to such a pass. And naturally fingers have started pointing at the institutions, individuals and the Republican party itself for encouraging the White supremacists and fanning the flames of violence. Fortunately, this happened towards the end and after the US elections with Joe Biden well in place to take over as per schedule. However, there is a nervousness emanating from media columns and discussions about the next few days, and the ability of Trump and his supporters to do more damage to American polity. That Republicans are not prepared to impeach the President recognised as mentally unsound by most sections of society, is an indication of how deep the rot is now. And how difficult the task will be for Biden and his team to get out of the morass, and restore American democratic institutions to former levels of health. Importantly, there is a growing realisation in the US that its democracy is fragile, and the threat is from within more than without. The electoral campaign did much to rest the bogeys of Islamophobia as well as the prejudice against African Americans as a national weapon. The Democrats and the independent media were compelled to tackle these issues up front after Trump and his supporters seized the White supremacist end of the stick. And Black Lives Matter did not just dominate the streets but also the discourse with the Democrats promising to work for a just and equitable society. Biden, thus, has come to power against the background of democracy and rights. The attack on Capitol Hill has brought home to the US visions of fascism that has clearly become a major cause of concern in America that was over the past years looking only at Islamic terrorism. The discourse has changed to focus on the threat of fascism that has been brought not just to the door but inside the room a la a US President. This shock will colour the Biden Presidency as he will be compelled to deal with the internal threat, as well as fight fascism that rears its head in other parts of the world. This is the path that Trump and his supporters have set for the new American President with the support of the majority to ensure that it is trampled even as democratic institutions are strengthened. The complexion of the new government, with members of the team having been selected already, will not allow any tolerance of fascism with the heat being felt by authoritarian regimes in time. Simply because for Washington the within is rolled into the without and now that prejudice and bigotry have led to the threat of fascism as American commentators are describing it, the last can be seen as the new bogey for the Biden government to quell.

Some leftist economists like Mariana Mazzucato argue that governments might be able to step in and become laboratories for innovation. But that would be a historical anomaly; socialist-leaning governments have typically been less innovative than others. After all, bureaucrats and worker-corporate boards have little incentive to upset the status quo or compete to build a better widget. And even when government programs have spurred innovation—as in the case of the internet—it took the private sector to recognize the value and create a market. And that brings us to a third reason to believe in markets: productivity. Some economists, such as Robert Gordon, have looked to today’s economic problems and suggested that productivity growth—the engine that fueled so much of the progress of the last several decades—is over. In this telling, the resources, products, and systems that underpin the world’s economy are all optimized, and little further progress is possible. But that is hard to square with reality. Innovation helps economies do more with fewer resources—increasingly critical to addressing climate change, for example—which is a form of productivity growth. And likewise, many of the products and technologies people rely on every day did not exist a few years ago. These goods make inaccessible services more available and are changing the nature of work, often for the better. Such gains are made possible by capitalist systems that encourage invention and growing the pie, not by socialist systems that are more concerned with how the existing pie is cut. It is far too soon, in other words, to write off productivity. Innovation helps economies do more with fewer resources—increasingly critical to addressing climate change, for example—which is a form of productivity growth. Here, it is worth considering the lessons of a previous productivity boom: the Industrial Revolution. As the economist Joel Mokyr has shown, it took new innovations like the steam engine more than 100 years to appear in productivity estimates. The same could be happening today with smartphones and the internet. Meanwhile, even as that upheaval transformed the human experience, creating a more comfortable existence for most everyone, it was also messy and disruptive. The early part of that innovative cycle—like others since—displaced existing workers while the gains flowed to the owners of capital first, causing social instability.

Weinzierl '21 – the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration at HBS and a Research Associate at the NBER. His research and teaching focus on the design of economic policy and the economics and business of space. (Matt, "The Commercial Space Age Is Here," Harvard Business Review, 2-12-2021, https://hbr.org/2021/02/the-commercial-space-age-is-here, Accessed 6-9-2021, )

There’s no shortage of hype surrounding the commercial space industry. But while tech leaders promise us moon bases and settlements on Mars, the space economy has thus far remained distinctly local — at least in a cosmic sense. Last year, however, we crossed an important threshold: For the first time in human history, humans accessed space via a vehicle built and owned not by any government, but by a private corporation with its sights set on affordable space settlement. It was the first significant step towards building an economy both in space and for space. The implications — for business, policy, and society at large — are hard to overstate. In 2019, 95% of the estimated $366 billion in revenue earned in the space sector was from the space-for-earth economy: that is, goods or services produced in space for use on earth. The space-for-earth economy includes telecommunications and internet infrastructure, earth observation capabilities, national security satellites, and more. This economy is booming, and though research shows that it faces the challenges of overcrowding and monopolization that tend to arise whenever companies compete for a scarce natural resource, projections for its future are optimistic. Decreasing costs for launch and space hardware in general have enticed new entrants into this market, and companies in a variety of industries have already begun leveraging satellite technology and access to space to drive innovation and efficiency in their earthbound products and services. In contrast, the space-for-space economy — that is, goods and services produced in space for use in space, such as mining the Moon or asteroids for material with which to construct in-space habitats or supply refueling depots — has struggled to get off the ground. As far back as the 1970s, research commissioned by NASA predicted the rise of a space-based economy that would supply the demands of hundreds, thousands, even millions of humans living in space, dwarfing the space-for-earth economy (and, eventually, the entire terrestrial economy as well). The realization of such a vision would change how all of us do business, live our lives, and govern our societies — but to date, we’ve never even had more than 13 people in space at one time, leaving that dream as little more than science fiction. Today, however, there is reason to think that we may finally be reaching the first stages of a true space-for-space economy. SpaceX’s recent achievements (in cooperation with NASA), as well as upcoming efforts by Boeing, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic to put people in space sustainably and at scale, mark the opening of a new chapter of spaceflight led by private firms. These firms have both the intention and capability to bring private citizens to space as passengers, tourists, and — eventually — settlers, opening the door for businesses to start meeting the demand those people create over the next several decades with an array of space-for-space goods and services. Welcome to the (Commercial) Space Age In our recent research, we examined how the model of centralized, government-directed human space activity born in the 1960s has, over the last two decades, made way for a new model, in which public initiatives in space increasingly share the stage with private priorities. Centralized, government-led space programs will inevitably focus on space-for-earth activities that are in the public interest, such as national security, basic science, and national pride. This is only natural, as expenditures for these programs must be justified by demonstrating benefits for citizens — and the citizens these governments represent are (nearly) all on earth. In contrast to governments, the private sector is eager to put people in space to pursue their own personal interests, not the state’s — and then supply the demand they create. This is the vision driving SpaceX, which in its first twenty years has entirely upended the rocket launch industry, securing 60% of the global commercial launch market and building ever-larger spacecraft designed to ferry passengers not just to the International Space Station (ISS), but also to its own promised settlement on Mars. Today, the space-for-space market is limited to supplying the people who are already in space: that is, the handful of astronauts employed by NASA and other government programs. While SpaceX has grand visions of supporting large numbers of private space travelers, their current space-for-space activities have all been in response to demand from government customers (i.e., NASA). But as decreasing launch costs enable companies like SpaceX to leverage economies of scale and put more people into space, growing private sector demand (that is, tourists and settlers, rather than government employees) could turn these proof-of-concept initiatives into a sustainable, large-scale industry. This model — of selling to NASA with the hopes of eventually creating and expanding into a larger private market — is exemplified by SpaceX, but the company is by no means the only player taking this approach. For instance, while SpaceX is focused on space-for-space transportation, another key component of this burgeoning industry will be manufacturing.

It's no secret. Sooner or later, Earth's bell will be rung. A giant asteroid or comet will slam into the planet, as has happened many times before, and a deadly dark cloud will envelop the globe, killing much of whatever might have survived the initial impact. "We live on a small planet covered with the bones of extinct species, proving that such catastrophes do occur routinely," says J. Richard Gott, III, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton and author of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe." Gott cites the presumably hardy Tyrannosaurus rex, which lasted a mere 2.5 million years and was the victim of an asteroid attack, as an example of what can happen if you don't plan ahead. But space rocks may not be the only threat. Epidemics, climatological or ecological catastrophes or even man-made disasters could do our species in, Gott says. And so, he argues, we need a life insurance policy to guarantee the survival of the human race. "Spreading out into space gives us more chances," he says. And the time is now: History instructs that technological hay should be made while the economic sun shines. "There is a danger we will end the human space program at some point, leaving us stranded on the Earth," Gott warns. "History shows that expensive technological projects are often abandoned after awhile. For example, the Ancient Egyptians quit building pyramids. So we should be colonizing space now while we have the chance.">

In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars. In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people. “This is not about everyone moving to Mars, this is about becoming multiplanetary,” he said on September 27 at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. “This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure.” Musk’s timeline sounds ambitious, and that's something he readily acknowledges. “I think the technical outline of the plan is about right. He also didn’t pretend that it was going to be easy and that they were going to do it in ten years,” says Bobby Braun, NASA’s former chief technologist who’s now at Georgia Tech University. “I mean, who’s to say what’s possible in a hundred years?” And for those wondering whether we should go at all, the reason for Musk making Mars an imperative is simple. “The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions: Either we’re going to become a multiplanet species and a spacefaring civilization, or we’re going be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event,” Musk told Ron Howard during an interview for National Geographic Channel’s MARS, a global event series that premieres worldwide on November 14. “For me to be excited and inspired about the future, it’s got to be the first option. It’s got to be: We’re going to be a spacefaring civilization.” Mars Fleet Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s. And he thinks the plan for getting there will go something like this: It starts with a really big rocket, something at least 200 feet tall when fully assembled. In a simulation of what SpaceX calls its Interplanetary Transport System, a spacecraft loaded with astronauts will launch on top of a 39-foot-wide booster that produces a whopping 28 million pounds of thrust. Using 42 Raptor engines, the booster will accelerate the assemblage to 5,374 miles an hour. Overall, the whole thing is 3.5 times more powerful than NASA’s Saturn V, the biggest rocket built to date, which carried the Apollo missions to the moon. Perhaps not coincidentally, the SpaceX rocket would launch from the same pad, 39A, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket would deliver the crew capsule to orbit around Earth, then the booster would steer itself toward a soft landing back at the launch pad, a feat that SpaceX rocket boosters have been doing for almost a year now. Next, the booster would pick up a fuel tanker and carry that into orbit, where it would fuel the spaceship for its journey to Mars. Once en route, that spaceship would deploy solar panels to harvest energy from the sun and conserve valuable propellant for what promises to be an exciting landing on the Red Planet. As Musk envisions it, fleets of these crew-carrying capsules will remain in Earth orbit until a favorable planetary alignment brings the two planets close together—something that happens every 26 months. “We’d ultimately have upward of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse,” Musk says. The key to his plan is reusing the various spaceships as much as possible. “I just don’t think there’s any way to have a self-sustaining Mars base without reusability. I think this is really fundamental,” Musk says. “If wooden sailing ships in the old days were not reusable, I don’t think the United States would exist.” Musk anticipates being able to use each rocket booster a thousand times, each tanker a hundred times, and each spaceship 12 times. At the beginning, he imagines that maybe a hundred humans would be hitching a ride on each ship, with that number gradually increasing to more than 200. By his calculations, then, putting a million people on Mars could take anywhere from 40 to a hundred years after the first ship launches. And, no, it would not necessarily be a one-way trip: “I think it’s very important to give people the option of returning,” Musk says. Colonizing Mars After landing a few cargo-carrying spacecraft without people on Mars, starting with the Red Dragon capsule in 2018, Musk says the human phase of colonization could begin. For sure, landing a heavy craft on a planet with a thin atmosphere will be difficult. It was tough enough to gently lower NASA’s Curiosity rover to the surface, and at 2,000 pounds, that payload weighed just a fraction of Musk’s proposed vessels. For now, Musk plans to continue developing supersonic retrorockets that can gradually and gently lower a much heavier spacecraft to the Martian surface, using his reusable Falcon 9 boosters as a model. And that’s not all these spacecraft will need: Hurtling through the Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds will test even the most heat-tolerant materials on Earth, so it’s no small task to design a spacecraft that can withstand a heated entry and propulsive landing—and then be refueled and sent back to Earth so it can start over again. The first journeys would primarily serve the purpose of delivering supplies and establishing a propellant depot on the Martian surface, a fuel reservoir that could be tapped into for return trips to Earth. After that depot is set up and cargo delivered to the surface, the fun can (sort of) begin. Early human settlers will need to be good at digging beneath the surface and dredging up buried ice, which will supply precious water and be used to make the cryo-methane propellant that will power the whole enterprise. As such, the earliest interplanetary spaceships would probably stay on Mars, and they would be carrying mostly cargo, fuel, and a small crew: “builders and fixers” who are “the hearty explorer type,” Musk said to Howard. “Are you prepared to die? If that’s OK, then you’re a candidate for going.” While there will undoubtedly be intense competition and lots of fanfare over the first few seats on a Mars-bound mission, Musk worries that too much emphasis will be placed on those early bootprints. “In the sort of grander historical context, what really matters is being able to send a large number of people, like tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, and ultimately millions of tons of cargo,” he says.

It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?

For these industries, we must fall back on the profit motive. The profit motive got us here in the first place by driving increases in global production, but the same quest for economic returns may also be the best way to help us change course. Why? The key to driving more profit from existing processes is to increase efficiency. The same efficiency improvements also reduce emissions.

While the motivation is strong, until recently, enterprises have lacked the cost-effective and easy-to-use tools needed to identify where processes fail, where waste or pollution occurs and where the opportunities to drive greater efficiency exist.

Mitigation of future CO2 emissions alone may not be sufficient to prevent future climate impacts due to uncertainty in both the rate of future mitigation and in the climate response (Rogelj et al., 2016), and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) has been suggested as a possible temporary supplement to mitigation and carbon dioxide removal. There have been a number of simulations of “global” SAI strategies with the aim of maintaining a desired global mean temperature or other climate goals: The G3 and G4 experiments of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) injected SO2 above the equator to offset increases in radiative forcing and global mean temperature (Kravitz et al., 2011), and the Geoengineering Large Ensemble (GLENS) study injected SO2 at 30°N, 15°N, 15°S, and 30°S independently to try and stabilize global mean temperature alongside the interhemispheric and equator-to-pole temperature gradients (Kravitz et al., 2017; Tilmes, Richter, Kravitz, et al., 2018). Several studies have evaluated the Arctic impacts of these “global” approaches, finding that low- or mid-latitude injections of SO2 could reduce global-warming-induced losses of sea ice and permafrost (Chen et al., 2020; Jiang et al., 2019; Lee et al., 2020; Moore et al., 2019). However, high-latitude SAI intended specifically to preserve the Arctic has been hypothesized to provide greater Arctic cooling per unit of injection than low-latitude SAI with smaller effects at low latitudes; for example, high-latitude injections have been shown to have smaller impacts on tropical precipitation than equatorial injections (Sun et al., 2020). Simulations of localized solar reduction northwards of 50°, 60°, and/or 70°N (or similar) have been shown to slow or reverse the loss of sea ice to varying extents (Caldeira & Wood, 2008; Kravitz et al., 2016; MacCracken et al., 2013; Tilmes et al., 2014). However, solar reduction is at best a limited proxy for SAI because it fails to account for stratospheric heating, changes to stratospheric ozone concentrations, changes to the stratospheric circulation, and perhaps most important of all, the actual spatial and seasonal distributions of AOD, which are driven by stratospheric transport (Visioni et al., 2021). There have been a few studies of Arctic-focused SAI, its effects on sea ice, and potential extra-Arctic impacts: Robock et al. (2008) injected 3 Mt/yr of SO2 at 68°N, which restored September Sea Ice (SSI) comparably to 5 Mt per year injected at the equator; Jackson et al. (2015) successfully managed the restoration and stabilization of SSI through injections at 78.55°N; and Sun et al. (2020) showed that aerosols present at high-latitudes injections have smaller impacts on tropical precipitation than equatorial injections.

There is substantial evidence that high-latitude SAI could, to some degree, counteract Arctic warming and consequent impacts on the Arctic more efficiently than low-latitude injection. However, to date, most simulated Arctic SAI strategies have been ad hoc; Jackson et al. (2015) and Lee et al. (2020) are the only strategies which have actively managed injection rates to maintain a desired SSI concentration, and Jackson et al. (2015) is the only strategy which has done so by injecting at a high latitude. Little effort has been undertaken to design an Arctic-focused SAI strategy: what combination of latitude, altitude, quantity, or timing of the injection will best preserve Arctic climate? Of these, time of year of injection is likely critical. Visioni, MacMartin, Kravitz, Richter, et al. (2020) found that injection in different seasons (at lower latitudes) has different regional climate outcomes. Moreover, the difference between injecting SO2 year round, as has been the case for most simulations of SAI to date, and injecting seasonally, is likely even more critical for higher-latitude-injection Arctic-focused geoengineering due to both shorter aerosol lifetime and higher seasonality of insolation. Insolation north of 60°N is at least 10 times greater in summer than in winter (Peixoto & Oort, 1992); at low latitudes, insolation is comparable year-round, but at high latitudes, there is little to no sunlight in winter, meaning aerosols injected to reflect sunlight are largely useless. Furthermore, SO2 injections are oxidized by OH, which forms in the presence of sunlight; since there is little to no sunlight in winter, SO2 injected during the winter will oxidize into aerosols much more slowly, if at all. Finally, while sulfate aerosols present in winter oxidize more slowly and reflect less sunlight, interactions with other components of the atmosphere would still take place, including the trapping of longwave radiation, stratospheric ozone depletion, and sulfur deposition. Therefore, there is little purpose to injecting in winter, and aerosols should be concentrated in the summer for maximum effect. SO2 injected in the spring will oxidize in time to be present as aerosols throughout the summer period of peak insolation (our results show an oxidation lifetime of approximately one month), producing greater effects on the climate than if the same quantity of SO2 were distributed year-round. This hypothesis is supported by the results of Dai et al. (2018), who compared June and December injections of SO2 and H2SO4 at 66.3°N; summer SO2 injections produced 2–3 times greater maximum changes in radiative forcing than winter SO2 injections, and summer H2SO4 injections (which do not need to oxidize and begin reflecting sunlight immediately) produced 3–5 times greater maximum changes in radiative forcing than winter H2SO4 injections. While Jackson et al. (2015) injected SO2 seasonally, their primary focus was to determine whether sea ice was controllable rather than on the climate response, and they evaluated neither the differences relative to annually constant injection nor the dependence on injection latitude and timing.

Last month, a two-person start-up company by the name of Make Sunsets claimed that it had launched weather balloons filled with reflective sulfur particles into the sky somewhere over the coast of Baja California. More provocation than experiment, the launch was a first-of-its-kind field test of a climate intervention known as geoengineering: a branch of speculative technology that promises to counteract and even reverse global warming by altering Earth’s atmosphere.

Long a taboo idea among climate experts thought too dangerous even to research, geoengineering is becoming increasingly mainstream. In 2019, Congress gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $4 million to research techniques like the one Make Sunsets just tested, and it has since drawn interest from the Biden administration.

Manifestations of economic malaise—stagnant growth, stagnant employment numbers and job losses—will have disturbing political consequences. They can lead to political extremism, usually under the guise of right-wing populism, but the left-wing version shares some commonalities. When populism reaches a fever pitch, it tends to vilify pluralistic values associated with liberal democracy and rule of law. Populists of both extremes are united in their callousness or antipathy toward foreigners and against domestic elites. That creates an opening for authoritarian demagogues who denounce their political opponents as elitists, and embrace prejudice against disadvantaged minorities, while praising redistribution of wealth from rich to poor not based on the rule of law, as in China and Russia.

In emerging markets—leaving aside outright dictatorships in some of the poorest countries—authoritarians now run governments in Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and China, among others. Cascading megathreats will only make that list grow longer.

If the pursuit of corporate profits led to the paradox now posed by climate change, then the same precept applies if global leaders want to reach net-zero. That’s a cornerstone of the proposed securities rules — requiring companies to disclose their climate-related market risks.

Roger Ballentine explained the logic, a climate capitalist who is the president of Green Strategies Inc. Cheap fossil fuels have powered the globe’s remarkable economic growth. But times have changed, and now is the moment to align profit-seekers with climate-friendly businesses. The market will reward companies that embrace the challenge, while those that do not will get sidelined.

That is the single biggest problem with most environmental groups: they don’t offer realistic solutions to the very real climate change threat. What they offer, if you follow their arguments to their logical conclusion, is eco-austerity: that we should all use less energy, stop going on holiday, live in colder homes, and so on[i].

In the latest papal encyclical published on 04 October (the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi), Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), Papa Francisco wrote that the Covid-19 pandemic had proven that the “magical theories” of market capitalism have failed and that the world needs a new type of politics that promotes dialogue and solidarity. (Perhaps the unjustified restrictionism pursued by First Minister Drakeford in Wales?)

Rao’s findings ought to have a profound impact on the divisive discourse on climate change, which continues to pit the attempts of developing countries to eliminate poverty by mimicking Western modes of development against many in the West who see this path as ruinous for the planet and ultimately self-defeating for the poor. They are both wrong. In truth, there need be no incompatibility. Ecomodernists are right: humanity can have its cake and eat it, too.

Rao, who grew up in a middle-class family in Mumbai but with poverty around him, is now at Yale University and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an Austria-based intergovernmental think tank. He has spent years as what he calls an “interdisciplinary scholar,” addressing both technological advances and social equity and how they might interact.

The past 30 years have seen immense progress in improving the quality of life for much of humanity. Extreme poverty — the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day — has fallen by nearly two-thirds, from 1.9 billion to around 650 million. Life expectancy has risen in most of the world, along with literacy and access to education, while infant mortality has fallen. Despite perceptions to the contrary, the average person born today is likely to have access to more opportunities and have a better quality of life than at any other point in human history. Much of this increase in human wellbeing has been propelled by rapid economic growth driven largely by state-led industrial policy, particularly in poor-to-middle income countries. However, this growth has come at a cost: between 1990 and 2019, global emissions of CO2 increased by 56%. Historically, economic growth has been closely linked to increased energy consumption — and increased CO2 emissions in particular — leading some to argue that a more prosperous world is one that necessarily has more impacts on our natural environment and climate. There is a lively academic debate about our ability to “absolutely decouple” emissions and growth — that is, the extent to which the adoption of clean energy technology can allow emissions to decline while economic growth continues. Over the past 15 years, however, something has begun to change. Rather than a 21st century dominated by coal that energy modelers foresaw, global coal use peaked in 2013 and is now in structural decline. We have succeeded in making clean energy cheap, with solar power and battery storage costs falling 10-fold since 2009. The world produced more electricity from clean energy — solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear — than from coal over the past two years. And, according to some major oil companies, peak oil is upon us — not because we have run out of cheap oil to produce, but because demand is falling and companies expect further decline as consumers increasingly shift to electric vehicles. The world has long been experiencing a relative decoupling between economic growth and CO2 emissions, with the emissions per unit of GDP falling for the past 60 years. This is the case even in countries like India and China that have been undergoing rapid economic growth. But relative decoupling alone is inadequate in a world where global CO2 emissions need to peak and decline in the next decade to give us any chance at limiting warming to well below 2℃, in line with Paris Agreement targets. Thankfully, there is increasing evidence that the world is on track to absolutely decouple CO2 emissions and economic growth — with global CO2 emissions potentially having peaked in 2019 and unlikely to increase substantially in the coming decade. While an emissions peak is just the first and easiest step towards eventually reaching the net-zero emissions required to stop the world from continuing to warm, it demonstrates that linkages between emissions and economic activity are not an immutable law, but rather simply a result of our current means of energy production. In recent years we have seen more and more examples of absolute decoupling — economic growth accompanied by falling CO2 emissions. Since 2005, 32 countries with a population of at least one million people have absolutely decoupled emissions from economic growth, both for terrestrial emissions (those within national borders) and consumption emissions (emissions embodied in the goods consumed in a country). This includes the United States, Japan, Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, Belarus, Austria, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Singapore, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Croatia, Jamaica, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, and Cyprus. Figure 1, below, shows the declines in territorial emissions (blue) and increases in GDP (red). To qualify as having experienced absolute decoupling, we require countries included in this analysis to pass four separate filters: a population of at least one million (to focus the analysis on more representative cases), declining territorial emissions over the 2005-2019 period (based on a linear regression), declining consumption emissions, and increasing real GDP (on a purchasing power parity basis, using constant 2017 international $USD). We chose not to include 2020 in this analysis because it is not particularly representative of longer-term trends, and consumption and territorial emissions estimates are not yet available for many countries. There is a wide range of rates of economic growth between 2005-2019 among countries experiencing absolute decoupling. Somewhat counterintuitively, there is no significant relationship between the rate of economic growth and the magnitude of emissions reductions within the group. While it is unlikely that there is not at least some linkage between the two factors, there are plenty of examples of countries (e.g., Singapore, Romania, and Ireland) experiencing both extremely rapid economic growth and large reductions in CO2 emissions. One of the primary criticisms of some prior analyses of absolute decoupling is that they ignore leakage. Specifically, the offshoring of manufacturing from high-income countries over the past three decades to countries like China has led to “illusory” drops in emissions, where the emissions associated with high-income country consumption are simply shipped overseas and no longer show up in territorial emissions accounting. There is some truth in this critique, as there was a large increase in emissions embodied in imports from developing countries between 1990 and 2005. After 2005, however, structural changes in China and a growing domestic market led to a reversal of these trends; the amount of emissions “exported” from developed countries to developing countries has actually declined over the past 15 years. This means that, for many countries, both territorial emissions and consumption emissions (which include any emissions “exported” to other countries) have jointly declined. In fact, on average, consumption emissions have been declining slightly faster than territorial emissions since 2005 in the 32 countries we identify as experiencing absolute decoupling. Figure 2, below, shows the change in consumption emissions (teal) and GDP (red) between 2005 and 2019. There is a pretty wide variation in the extent to which these countries have reduced their territorial and consumption emissions since 2005. Some countries — such as the UK, Denmark, Finland, and Singapore – have seen territorial emissions fall faster than consumption emissions, while the US, Japan, Germany, and Spain (among others) have seen consumption emissions fall faster. Figure 3 shows reductions in consumption and territorial emissions for each country, with the size of the dot representing the size of the population in 2019. Absolute decoupling is possible. There is no physical law requiring economic growth — and broader increases in human wellbeing — to necessarily be linked to CO2 emissions. All of the services that we rely on today that emit fossil fuels — electricity, transportation, heating, food — can in principle be replaced by near-zero carbon alternatives, though these are more mature in some sectors (electricity, transportation, buildings) than in others (industrial processes, agriculture).

However, things are more complicated than the arguments above would suggest, and the benefits of capitalism, especially for the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, are in fact myriad and significant. In addition, as we will see in this section, many experts argue that capitalism is not the fundamental cause of the previously described problems but rather an essential component of the best solutions to them and of the best methods for promoting our goals of health, well-being, and justice. To see where the defenders of capitalism are coming from, consider an analogy involving a response to a pandemic: if a country administered a rushed and untested vaccine to its population that ended up killing people, we would not say that vaccines were the problem. Instead, the problem would be the flawed and sloppy policies of vaccine implementation. Vaccines might easily remain absolutely essential to the correct response to such a pandemic and could also be essential to promoting health and flourishing, more generally. The argument is similar with capitalism according to the leading mainstream arguments in favor of it: Capitalism is an essential part of the best society we could have, just like vaccines are an essential part of the best response to a pandemic such as COVID-19. But of course both capitalism and vaccines can be implemented poorly, and can even do harm, especially when combined with other incorrect policy decisions. But that does not mean that we should turn against them—quite the opposite. Instead, we should embrace them as essential to the best and most just outcomes for society, and educate ourselves and others on their importance and on how they must be properly designed and implemented with other policies in order to best help us all. In fact, the argument in favor of capitalism is even more dramatic because it claims that much more is at stake than even what is at stake in response to a global pandemic—what is at stake with capitalism is nothing less than whether the world's poorest and most vulnerable billion people will remain in conditions of poverty and oppression, or if they will instead finally gain access to what is minimally necessary for basic health and wellbeing and become increasingly affluent and empowered. The argument in favor of capitalism proceeds as follows: Premise 1. Development and the past. Over the course of recorded human history, the majority of historical increases in health, wellbeing, and justice have occurred in the last two centuries, largely as a result of societies adopting or moving toward capitalism. Capitalism is a relevant cause of these improvements, in the sense that they could not have happened to such a degree if it were not for capitalism and would not have happened to the same degree under any alternative noncapitalist approach to structuring society. The argument in support of this premise relies on observed relationships across societies and centuries between indicators of degree of capitalism, wealth, investments in public goods, and outcomes for health, wellbeing, and justice, together with econometric analysis in support of the conclusion that the best explanation of these correlations and the underlying mechanism is that large increases in health, wellbeing, and justice are largely driven by increasing investments in public goods. The scale of increased wealth necessary to maximize these investments requires capitalism. Thus, as capitalist societies have become dramatically wealthier over the past hundred years (and wealthier than societies with alternative systems), this has allowed larger investments in public goods, which simply has not been possible in a sustained way in societies without the greater wealth that capitalism makes possible. Important investments in public goods include investments in basic medical knowledge, in health and nutrition programs, and in the institutional capacity and know-how to regulate society and capitalism itself. As a result, capitalism is a primary driver of positive outcomes in health and wellbeing (such as increased life expectancy, lowered child and maternal mortality, adequate calories per day, minimized infectious disease rates, a lower percentage and number of people in poverty, and more reported happiness);5 and in justice (such as reduced deaths from war and homicide; higher rankings in human rights indices; the reduced prevalence of racist, sexist, homophobic opinions in surveys; and higher literacy rates).6 These quantifiable positive consequences of global capitalism dramatically outweigh the negative consequences (such as deaths from pollution in the course of development), with the result that the net benefits from capitalism in terms of health, wellbeing, and justice have been greater than they would have been under any known noncapitalist approach to structuring society.7 Premise 2. Economics, ethics, and policy. Although capitalism has often been ill-regulated and therefore failed to maximize net benefits for health, wellbeing, and justice, it can become well-regulated so that it maximizes these societal goals, by including mechanisms identified by economists and other policy experts that do the following: optimally8 regulate negative effects such as pollution and monopoly power, and invest in public goods such as education, basic healthcare, and fundamental research including biomedical knowledge (more generally, policies that correct the failures of free markets that economists have long recognized will arise from “externalities” in the absence of regulation);9 ensure equity and distributive justice (for example, via wealth redistribution);10 ensure basic rights, justice, and the rule of law independent of the market (for example, by an independent judiciary, bill of rights, property rights, and redistribution and other legislation to correct historical injustices due to colonialism, racism, and correct current and historical distortions that have prevented markets from being fair);11 and ensure that there is no alternative way of structuring society that is more efficient or better promotes the equity, justice, and fairness goals outlined above (by allowing free exchange given the regulations mentioned).12 To summarize the implication of the first two premises, well-regulated capitalism is essential to best achieving our ethical goals—which is true even though capitalism has certainly not always been well regulated historically. Society can still do much better and remove the large deficits in terms of health, wellbeing, and justice that exist under the current inferior and imperfect versions of capitalism. Premise 3. Development and the future. If the global spread of capitalism is allowed to continue, desperate poverty can be essentially eliminated in our lifetimes. Furthermore, this can be accomplished faster and in a more just way via well-regulated global capitalism than by any alternatives. If we instead opt for less capitalism, less growth, and less globalization, then desperate poverty will continue to exist for a significant portion of the world's population into the further future, and the world will be a worse and less equitable place than it would have been with more capitalism. For example, in a world with less capitalism, there would be more overpopulation, food insecurity, air pollution, ill health, injustice, and other problems. In part, this is because of the factors identified by premise 1, which connect a turn away from capitalism with a turn away from continuing improvements in health, wellbeing, and justice, especially for the developing world. In addition, fertility declines are also a consequence of increased wealth, and the size of the population is a primary determinant of food demand and other environmental stressors.13 Finally, as discussed at length in the next section of the essay, capitalism can be naturally combined with optimal environmental regulations.14 Even bracketing anything like optimal regulation, it remains true that sufficiently wealthy nations reduce environmental degradation as they become wealthier, whereas developing nations that are nearing peak degradation will remain stuck at the worst levels of degradation if we stall growth, rather than allowing them to transition to less and less degradation in the future via capitalism and economic growth.15 In contrast, well-regulated capitalism is a key part of the best way of coping with these problems, as well as a key part of dealing with climate change, global food production, and other specific challenges, as argued at length in the next section. Here it is important to stress that we should favor well-regulated capitalism that includes correct investments in public goods over other capitalist systems such as the neoliberalism of the recent past that promoted inadequately regulated capitalism with inadequate concern for externalities, equity, and background distortions and injustices.16