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What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these challenges? While we cannot be sure of the exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that humankind will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the capitalists, individualism, and personal responsibility, the new century will present challenges that require collective action, unity, and enlightened self-interest. Confronting global warming, depleted natural resources, global super viruses, global crime syndicates, and multinational corporations with no conscience and no accountability will require cooperation, openness, honesty, compromise, and most of all solidarity – ideals not exactly cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life through the tiny lens of our own existence. Never in the history of the world has our collective fate been so intricately interwoven. Our very existence depends upon our ability to adapt to this new paradigm, to envision a more cohesive society. With humankind’s next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern individualism backed us into a corner. We have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation. Unlike any other crisis before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once. Global super viruses will ravage rich and poor alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming and damage to the environment will affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe. Air pollution will force gas masks on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the sun, and chemicals will invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to change our current course, to survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical solidarity we can alter the course of human events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and tolerance in schools. We need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores alone will not begin to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can we teach community in the age of rugged individualism? How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true meaning of power? These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical transformation of our conception of education. We’ll need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the potential of youth to make sense of their world. In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set before educators in the twenty-first century, this paper is a proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical climate of public K-12 education does not lend itself well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study targets a higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some possibilities for a large community college in an urban setting with a diverse student body. Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay between ideas of social justice, civic engagement, and service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As such, a simple and straightforward explanation of the three terms is helpful to direct this inquiry. Before we look at a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained therein, this paper will draw out a clear understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and how their relationship to each other affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often ascribed long, complicated, and convoluted definitions. In fact, one could fill a good-sized library with treatises on this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice to have a general characterization of the term, focusing instead on the dynamics of its interaction with civic engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community conscience that values inclusion, fairness, tolerance, and equality. The idea of social justice in America has been around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social contract. The Declaration of Independence is the best example of the prominence of social contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically that the government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete expressions of the spirit of social justice. Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate definitions of civic engagement and service learning, respectively. Once again, let’s not get bogged down on subtleties. Civic engagement is a measure or degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual and a community demonstrate around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some will say that today’s youth are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic engagement. Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement. And there are about a hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and today’s youth. But one thing is for sure; today’s youth no longer see government and politics as an effective or valuable tool for affecting positive change in the world. Instead of criticizing this judgment, perhaps we should come to sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.” Maybe the youth’s rejection of American politics isn’t a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new meaning for us today. In order to foster fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twenty-first century, we need to fundamentally change our systems. Therefore, part of our challenge becomes convincing the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean government and commerce, have the potential for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political meaning in this context. Service learning is a methodology and a tool for teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and deepening practical understanding of a subject. Since it is a relatively new field, at least in the structured sense, service learning is only beginning to define itself. Through service learning students learn by experiencing things firsthand and by exposing themselves to new points of view. Instead of merely reading about government, for instance, a student might experience it by working in a legislative office. Rather than just studying global warming out of a textbook, a student might volunteer time at an environmental group. If service learning develops and evolves into a discipline with the honest goal of making better citizens, teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and most importantly, exposing students to different and alternative experiences, it could be a major feature of a modern education. Service learning is the natural counterbalance to our current overemphasis on standardized testing. Social justice, civic engagement, and service learning are caught in a symbiotic cycle. The more we have of one of them; the more we have of all of them. However, until we get momentum behind them, we are stalled. Service learning may be our best chance to jumpstart our democracy. In the rest of this paper, we will look at the beginning stages of a project that seeks to do just that.

Education is vitally important for several, key reasons. It can deliver the scientific facts about the biggest issue facing young people, something that is being felt by millions worldwide. It equips youth with the skills to help combat climate change, and be part of a green recovering, and positive future. It also encourages young people to be involved as global citizens, and involves and engages them in an issue that’s impacts will be felt most keenly by those now going through the education system. We have a responsibility to educate, not only bound by international convention, but by moral and ethical duties. Schools must educate young people about the world around them, so that they are informed with facts and key issues. Education should keep up to date with science and academic thought. Just as the facts and science of stem cell research or alcohol abuse are taught, because of their relevance and strong scientific foundations, so should climate change and sustainability – indeed, even more so, given the magnitude and impact of environmental issues. Facts not fiction Such education must be about facts and science, not treated as the political football as it so often is. Such politicisation mires the issue, and means that the urgency and relevancy of climate change education is often lost amidst political point scoring. This should, as with other relevant science-based issues, be an area of consensus, not party political manoeuvring. Beyond establishing the facts of the issue, education can have be a great force for good, preparing young people to face, and indeed improve, the world after education has long been completed. How can we expect creative solutions and innovation to combat climate and sustainability issues if we don’t educate the next generation about them? The UK campaign against the removal of climate change from the Geography curriculum is itself proof of the power of education. Esha Marwaha, at 15-years-old, was able to write so eloquently on the dangers of removing climate change that her petition gained over 30,000 signatures in a matter of weeks. Yet without education, would we get another Esha, or another generation of activists, or even another generation who care about climate change. Without education, those who want or who’re able to combat climate change will surely be in the minority. New jobs This is especially relevant with the need for innovation and sustainable development. Currently the green economy is nascent, its burgeoning growth providing employment and a viable alternative to resource hungry industries and economic models. But positive growth needs new generations who both understand the need for alternative development and have the passion and desire to act. Education has a key role in showing young people that not only do they have wider responsibilities, but also that they are entitled to involvement in decisions. Climate change and sustainability are issues that cut across generations, and the decisions that are made today will have impact not upon the generation that makes them, but generations to come.1 Education can help give young people the tools to take part in these decisions, allowing them to enter into the debate. UN agreements Finally, there is a legal obligation for many countries to educate about climate change. Under Article 6 of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, signatories are obliged to: ‘Promote and facilitate …the development and implementation of educational and public awareness programmes on climate change and its effects’. This article is clear and direct, and must not be ignored. However in many respects this legal obligation is a lesser consideration when compared to the moral obligation each generation has to educate the next about climate change. Education is the most powerful tool and can engage young people in the debate, prepare them for working with the green economy, and give the definitive science and facts about the biggest issue facing young people. To quote H.G. Wells: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

When you ask yourself what you can do to limit climate change, it’s natural to think of things like driving an electric car or eating less meat. This sort of personal action is important for the signals it sends to the marketplace—see the next section for more on that point—but the bulk of our emissions comes from the larger systems in which we live our daily lives. When somebody wants toast for breakfast, we need to make sure there’s a system in place that can deliver the bread, the toaster, and the electricity to run the toaster without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We aren’t going to solve the climate problem by telling people not to eat toast. But putting this new energy system in place requires concerted political action. That’s why engaging in the political process is the most important single step that people from every walk of life can take to help avoid a climate disaster. In my own meetings with politicians, I’ve found that it helps to remember that climate change isn’t the only thing on their plate. Government leaders are also thinking about education, jobs, health care, foreign policy, and more recently, COVID-19. And they should: All those things demand attention. But policy makers can take on only so many problems at once. And they decide what to do, what to prioritize, based on what they’re hearing from their constituents. In other words, elected officials will adopt specific plans for climate change if their voters demand it. Thanks to activists around the world, we don’t need to generate demand: Millions of people are already calling for action. What we do need to do, though, is to translate these calls for action into pressure that encourages politicians to make the tough choices and trade-offs necessary to deliver on their promises to reduce emissions. Whatever other resources you may have, you can always use your voice and your vote to effect change. Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. What you can help your leaders understand is that it’s just as important for them to think about the long-term problem of climate change as it is for them to think about jobs or education or health care. It may sound old-fashioned, but letters and phone calls to your elected officials can have a real impact. Senators and representatives get frequent reports on what their offices are hearing from constituents. But don’t simply say, “Do something about climate change.” Know where they stand, ask them questions, and make clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. Demand more funding for clean energy R&D, a clean energy standard, or a price on carbon, for example. Look locally as well as nationally. A lot of the relevant decisions are made at the state and local levels by governors, mayors, state legislatures, and city councils—places where individual citizens can have an even bigger impact than at the federal level. In the United States, for example, electricity is primarily regulated by statewide public utility commissions, made up of either elected or appointed commissioners. Know who your representatives are and keep in touch with them. Run for office. Running for the U.S. Congress is a tall order. But you don’t have to start there. You can run for state or local office, where you’ll probably have more impact anyway. We need all the policy smarts, courage, and creativity in public office that we can get. As a Consumer The market is ruled by supply and demand, and as a consumer you can have a huge impact on the demand side of the equation. If all of us make individual changes in what we buy and use, it can add up to a lot—as long as we focus on changes that are meaningful. For example, if you can afford to install a smart thermostat to reduce your energy consumption when you’re not at home, by all means do it. You’ll cut your utility bill and your greenhouse gas emissions. But reducing your own carbon emissions isn’t the most powerful thing you can do. You can also send a signal to the market that people want zero-carbon alternatives and are willing to pay for them. When you pay more for an electric car, a heat pump, or a plant-based burger, you’re saying, “There’s a market for this stuff. We’ll buy it.” If enough people send the same signal, companies will respond—quite quickly, in my experience. They’ll put more money and time into making low-emissions products, which will drive down the prices of those products, which will help them get adopted in big numbers. It will make investors more confident about funding new companies that are making the breakthroughs that will help us get to zero.

The thing that is crucial to recognize is that we, society as a whole, are extremely dependent on the actions of investors because of what has been called the "privileged position of business" (Llndblom, 1977). Adam Przeworski (1985) describes the dilemma particularly well. Consider, he says, the perspective of a democratically elected left-wing government. The fundamental problem of which, and the main reason why progressive reform is consistently so hard to achieve, is the problem of investment. To see why this is so recall that left governments lend to get elected by a broad coalition of unionized workers, students, retirees, the unemployed, and others on a range of promises to increase wages and pensions, improve workplace and environmental regulations, and so on. However, these policy reforms inevitably bite into profit margins. So as soon as the government starts implementing its promises, private profits start falling (because, for example, business owners become forced to pay higher minimum wages, grant maternity leave, clean up their pollution, pay higher taxes, etc.). This reduces their incentive to invest (why would one go through the effort of investing if one were unlikely to profit from it?). If the government changes are drastic enough, and business confidence becomes seriously shaken, investment rates can plummet. Companies lay off their workers, cut back their activity, and stop buying products from other firms, which makes those downstream firms lay off workers too. So the amount of taxable revenue going to government starts to shrink, resulting in less money to fund the social programs that the government promised. Recall that there can only be social programs like welfare if there is sufficient investment and productive activity happening to tax to pay for it. Wealth has to be produced before it can be redistributed. So those who want welfare find that they have a direct interest in making sure production happens steadily. This means that, given private control of investment, even the most radical welfare-rights organizations, for all their anti-capitalist rhetoric, are still dependent on business proceeding basically as usual. So with mass layoffs on one side, and deep cuts to social programs on the other, the average person may well conclude that she was better off under the former conservative government—at least then she had a job. If the investment crisis continues, the population comes face-to-face with a stark choice: be progressive and starve or reactionary and eat. The investment crisis swells into an economic crisis which fractures political coalitions, leaving left-wing governments facing a crumbling economy, mass unrest, and even a right-wing coup (Chile under Allende is a classic example of this). This, then, is the paradox: the very capacity of left governments to intervene in the economy depends on the profits of the businesses which bear the intervention. Przeworskl (1985) puts it this way, "This is the structural barrier which cannot be broken: the limit of any policy is that investment and thus profits must be protected in the long run" (p. 42). Another way to see this "paradox of investment dependence," as I call it, is to recognize that, on the one hand, employees and employers usually have opposing interests: lower wages = higher profits. On a deeper level, however, employees are dependent on their employers being happy, because if they are not, if profits are falling and confidence is shaken, then investment slows and everyone suffers. Employees thus find themselves in the paradoxical situation of having to care about the happiness of their bosses, and mitigate their own demands for improvements, because they are dependent on their employers continuing to invest. This means that what is good for the employer is usually bad for the employee, but, and this is the paradox, what is bad for the employer is usually worse for the employee. So the private control of investment means that workers find themselves in a structural straightjacket, unable to protest the inequities of their circumstances too vehemently without risking making themselves even worse off. This is what l.indblom (1982) meant when he called the market a "prison." So in normal limes, the stability and growth of the economy depend largely on the profit levels and the confidence of business owners who are making investment decisions. Profit-seeking private investment is the engine of economic growth. This means that government policy is ultimately constrained, and popular sovereignty ultimately undermined, to the extent that the government cannot risk overly undermining business profits or confidence. This is why governments, even progressive ones, find it so difficult to make important social justice advances, like redistributing wealth—because what would happen if they tried? Any attempt to engage in substantial redistribution would be less likely to generate actual equality as it would be to lead to investment slowdown and economic recession. As long as investment decisions remain predominantly in private hands, we would get collapse and depression far before we would get equality.

After all, the purpose of climate change regulations is to drive energy prices higher so families and businesses use less energy. Abundant energy sources such as coal, oil and natural gas have allowed Americans to affordably drive to their jobs, light and heat their homes, and power their refrigerators, computers, and iPhones. On the other hand, more heavy-handed climate regulations would drive up electricity bills and prices at the pump. Families would be hurt multiple times over, paying not just more for energy but also more for food, clothing, and healthcare, as energy is critical for every stage of planting, harvesting, manufacturing, and transporting goods to consumers. These rising costs would stifle economic growth, one of the most important factors for maintaining a cleaner environment. As a country’s economy grows, the financial ability of its citizens to take care of the environment grows, too. So creating more economy-killing climate regulations and taxes would not only harm the livelihoods of the American people, they would also harm our ability to protect our environment. Instead, government should focus on keeping the economy strong by reducing taxes and eliminating regulatory barriers to energy innovation. For example, some states produce clean, cheap natural gas, but excessive regulations and litigation prevent the construction of pipelines to distribute natural gas to other parts of the country. Furthermore, competitive electricity markets can give consumers the option to buy 100 percent renewable power if they like. And fixing a broken regulatory system will allow new, innovative commercial nuclear technologies to get off the ground.

Survey results for businesses — especially smaller firms — suggest regulatory changes are having some impact nonetheless: As shown in Figure 1 below, there is a link between the way small businesses view regulations and improvements in manufacturing sentiment.1 This is consistent with research that shows the impact of government regulations is greatest on small size firms. The environment is an extensive area of regulations to deal with externalities such as pollution. However, several studies suggest environmental regulations have become overly complex, and market-based solutions offer a more effective means for dealing with the problem of acid rain. Although several former Republican policymakers have proposed a carbon tax to combat global warming, President Trump believes the costs are too great for the economy. Another important area is financial services, where the principal challenge is to ensure stability without turning banks into quasi-utilities. It is too early to ascertain the impact of policy changes to lessen the impact of Dodd-Frank, but financial stocks have matched the overall stock market for the first time in several years after trailing the broad market consistently since 2008. Small Business Views on Regulation and ISM Manufacturing Sentiment chart Background: The Case for Deregulation One of the most controversial issues in public policy relates to the role of government regulation of the economy. This is an area in which many businesses have expressed frustrations over the past two decades. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York shortly before the November 2016 elections, Donald Trump mentioned that he frequently asks CEOs what they would pick if forced to choose between tax cuts or diminished regulations. According to him, nine out of ten executives would opt to have fewer regulations. The reason: companies can hire tax experts to navigate their way around the tax code, but it is more difficult to circumvent regulations. The regulatory burden is especially problematic for small businesses because the rules cause them to incur fixed costs, and the scale of operations is much smaller than for larger firms. For example, a study by Nicole Crain and Mark Crain of Lafayette College estimates the cost per employee of complying with federal regulations at $10.6 thousand for businesses with fewer than 20 employees compared with $7.8 thousand for those with more than 500 workers.2 The researchers also contend that government regulations make small business less competitive against foreign firms. Nor does the United States fare well when compared with many industrialized nations. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) undertaken a decade ago found the U.S. barriers had higher regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship, greater administrative burdens on small business owners, and higher barriers to competition than a number of other industrialized countries. An article in The Economist titled “Over-regulated America” (February 18, 2012) made the following observation: Americans love to laugh at ridiculous regulations…But the red tape in America is no laughing matter…Americans are supposed to be free to choose for better or worse. Yet for some time Americans have been straying from the ideal. How Costly Are Regulations? This begs the question about how costly regulations are for the economy as a whole. The problem is no one really knows.The federal government is not required to track regulatory costs, and most empirical studies have focused on a narrow set of industries. Federal agencies are only required to conduct cost-benefit analyses on rules deemed “economically significant,” which are defined as having an annual effect on the economy of at least $100 million. The Congressional Research Service, therefore, has warned that it is inherently difficult to estimate the total cost of regulations and that estimates “should be used with a great deal of caution”.3 What is clear is the Trump administration is serious about reducing regulatory burdens businesses face. It has done so by instituting a freeze that has slowed the number of new regulations considerably and by reinterpreting existing statutes to be more favorable to business than during the Obama administration. The Trump administration, in turn, has touted its pro-business stance as having contributed to the acceleration in economic growth over the past year to a 3% annual rate from 2% previously. Most economic analyses have credited the changes in tax legislation that were enacted at the end of 2017 rather than deregulation for this outcome. The consensus view, for example, is the stimulus from corporate and personal tax cuts were front-end loaded and will add the equivalent of 1% to 1.3% of GDP this year. By comparison, the impact on the economy over the long-term is estimated to be 0.1%-0.2% per annum, compared with 0.5% by the Trump administration. An alternative view is that of Mickey Levey, chief economist for Berenberg Capital Markets, who contends the easing of burdensome regulations has been a key factor driving U.S. business confidence, production, and capital spending: “While the deregulatory thrust has received far less attention than 2017’s tax reform deliberations or 2018’s skirmishes on trade policy, it is of utmost importance to business production processes and decisions about hiring, expansion plans, and investment strategy.” As evidence, Levy cites the latest survey by National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which shows that many small businesses have expressed reduced concerns about government requirements, and Levy links this to improved manufacturing sentiment in the ISM survey. Levy’s forecast for the U.S. economy over the long-term is upbeat: He believes the improved climate for business investment spending will help lift the potential growth rate of the economy from the Fed’s estimate of 1.8% per annum to at least 2% soon. In this regard, Levy contends that a “growing web of regulations imposed at the national, state and local level” after the 2008-09 financial crisis created policy-induced “supply constraints” that offset the Fed’s unprecedented monetary stimulus.4 At this juncture, it is too early to tell which view is correct. However, insofar as improved business sentiment translates into increased business capital spending, there is some corroboration for the view that burdensome regulations impeded economic growth after the financial crisis. Impact of Environmental Regulations Because of difficulty quantifying the impact of regulations on the overall economy, I have taken a closer look at two areas — the environment and financial services — where government regulation is especially important. With respect to the environment, the signature piece of legislation was the Clean Air Act that was enacted in 1970, which authorized the development of comprehensive federal and state regulations from both industrial sources and automobiles. It was followed by amendments to cover geographic areas that do not meet one or more of the federal quality standards in 1977 and legislation enacted in the early 1990s to deal with the problem of acid rain. Considerable progress has been achieved in battling air and water pollution, which has improved human health and the environment. Nonetheless, a prevalent view today is environmental policy is extremely complex, has led to ungainly bureaucracies, has incurred high costs, is politically polarized and is also very litigious.5 A report by the Brookings Institution on the 30th anniversary of the creation of the EPA, for example, acknowledged that U.S. companies were complaining about the high cost of compliance, and it cited two studies that estimated the annual cost in the late 1990s to range between $144 billion to $185 billion.6 Businesses have also complained the rules have outlived their usefulness, have resulted in job losses, and make American companies less competitive internationally.7

The argument that ‘fighting climate change will hurt the economy’ seems to overlook the fact that so will do nothing. This is one of the core issues when it comes to action on climate change whether this is from government or businesses perspective. It is essentially choosing between accepting the costs now or deferring them to a later point where they could have an even greater negative effect. The business as usual argument Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and author of Balancing Green, believes that the issue is simply that businesses perform a cost-benefit analysis surrounding investing in sustainability today and most conclude that meaningful actions do not justify the costs. He says that he actively advises business who want to increase their ESG appeal, to find something they are already doing that is aligned and “PR the hell out of it”. He gives the example of McDonald’s recent ban on straws, which received a large amount of media attention and praise in spite of its minimal real impact. Yossi argues that if McDonald’s really wanted to become sustainable they would stop serving beef, which has a significantly bigger effect on the environment than its plastic usage. If that were to happen McDonald’s customers would be up in arms and flock to the plethora of competitors who still served beef. This is his fundamental point; business’s first obligation is to its customers. The sad truth is that no matter how vocal they are about sustainability, customers are not willing to forgo cheap prices and convenience for a lower environmental impact. Until we see a significant change in this area, Yossi argues, business will not change. While I disagree with Yossi’s view on companies implementing superficial strategies that are no more than glorified PR campaigns, I do think that companies need to adopt impactful strategies that also promote shareholder returns. The benefits of a significant sustainability strategy can be looked at from a risk mitigation standpoint. If the company has a culture of long-term value and good governance, they minimize their risks to large tangle losses in value due to controversy related events. Should CEOs care about sustainability? Winston’s counterpoint to Yossi, in terms of consumer retention, is one which has a more long-term focus and is centered on the two things that businesses compete to acquire: future customers and future employees. While customers now don’t seem to be willing to pay a premium for sustainability, it is plausible that in the future they will be. By not investing in clean business models today, are companies at risk of being punished by future customers? There is increasing social momentum, especially in the younger demographics, behind social sustainable movements such as “meat-free Monday”. The number of young people who consider themselves vegetarian is more than double that of older generations (figure). While these have little tangle effects now, they are an indicator that consumer tastes are shifting. Business would be naive to overlook them. We are also witnessing a fundamental difference in what younger generations expect from an employer. Employees increasingly seek an employer that is aligned with their belief and values, and not just the level of compensation. This is important given the “talent war” which US businesses are engaged in. With unemployment at record lows, it is increasingly more difficult to hire the top talent. One way in which business can gain an advantage is by aligning their values with those of their future employees. CEOs should shift from seeing these as mere side notes and realize that they are likely to be key profit drivers in the future. It’s about getting ahead of the curve There are numerous aspects to this crucial decision but I would like to focus on two which I think are important. The first is the issue of business executive compensation and tenure structure. This will aid understanding what drives executive decision making and might help explain the relative lack of progress in any significant way on this issue. Executives are compensated highly for their role in a business’s strategy and decision-making process, often raking in millions of dollars in bonuses. However, their tenure in charge, and benefiting from this compensation, is usually short. According to Harvard’s school on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, the median CEO tenure in large-cap companies was 5 years in 2017. This short amount of time to personally capitalize on the position, combined with how bonuses are often judged against financial return levels, could explain why companies are not implementing widespread meaningful initiatives. The second aspect I would like to discuss is the likelihood of underestimating the cost of regulation down the road. The longer it takes before meaningful regulations are implemented, the harsher the terms of those regulations need to be in order to have the necessary impact. This affects both governments and businesses, politicians and CEOs. In terms of government, the further down the line they push implementing regulations, the stricter those regulations are going to need to be. The more time that passes, the further we move away from where we need to be and the larger the pull needed to bring us back. This is not a great prospect for future politicians who tend to incur larger public backlash the larger the inconvenience they impose. From a business perspective, the longer a company defers its sustainable transformation the more drastic it is likely to be when the harsh regulations are eventually implemented. It would make more sense to get out in front of the curve, implement a transformative policy now when there is less corporate inertia to overcome and the costs are comparatively lower. If companies are truly serious about maximising long-term shareholder value, they should consider reevaluating how their executives are compensated. A shift to prioritizing long term value, lowering the costs of transformation and minimizing the impacts of future regulation by taking the initiative today should be incentivized.

Under pressure from shareholders and regulators, companies are increasingly disclosing the specific financial impacts they could face as the planet warms, such as extreme weather that could disrupt their supply chains or stricter climate regulations that could hurt the value of coal, oil and gas investments. Early estimates suggest that trillions of dollars may ultimately be at stake. Even so, analysts warn that many companies are still lagging in accounting for all of the plausible financial risks from global warming. “The numbers that we’re seeing are already huge, but it’s clear that this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Bruno Sarda, the North America president for CDP, an international nonprofit that wrote the new report and works with companies around the world to publicly disclose the risks and opportunities that climate change could create for their businesses. Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In 2018, more than 7,000 companies submitted such reports to CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project. And, for the first time, CDP explicitly asked firms to try to calculate how a warming planet might affect them financially. After analyzing submissions from 215 of the world’s 500 biggest corporations, CDP found that these companies potentially faced roughly $1 trillion in costs related to climate change in the decades ahead unless they took proactive steps to prepare. By the companies’ own estimates, a majority of those financial risks could start to materialize in the next five years or so. The disclosures show how business leaders expect climate change, and the policy responses to it, to ripple through every corner of the global economy. Many firms are bracing for direct impacts. Hitachi Ltd., a Japanese manufacturer, said that increased rainfall and flooding in Southeast Asia had the potential to knock out suppliers and that it was taking defensive measures as a result. Banco Santander Brasil, a large Brazilian bank, said increasingly severe droughts in the region might hurt the ability of borrowers to repay loans. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc., noted that rising temperatures could increase the cost of cooling its energy-hungry data centers. Editors’ Picks Help! I Signed Up for a $4,800 Bird-Watching Trip but the Company Shut Down. New Zealand’s Fruit-Rich Ice Cream Gets a Sugary American Makeover Gretchen Whitmer Would Like You to Meet ‘Governor Barbie’ SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Image Google’s energy-hungry data centers could become more expensive to cool its parent company has said. Above, a Google data center facility in Iowa. Google’s energy-hungry data centers could become more expensive to cool its parent company has said. Above, a Google data center facility in Iowa.Credit...Brian Snyder/Reuters Others are keeping a close eye on the potential public reaction to climate change. Total, a French energy company, is grappling with the possibility that ambitious efforts by nations to limit global warming and restrict fossil fuel use could render some oil and gas reserves “unburnable.” BASF, a German chemical company, said it has a “significant corporate carbon footprint” that could scare off environmentally conscious shareholders unless it takes steps to act on climate change. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In all, the world’s largest companies estimated that at least $250 billion of assets may need to be written off or retired early as the planet heats up. Those assets include buildings in high-risk flood zones, or power plants that may have to shut down in response to tighter pollution rules. Latest News on Climate Change and the Environment Card 1 of 6 Worms in the Arctic. As human-caused climate change raises temperatures and thaws the permafrost, worms are taking over territory in the Far North that’s been wormless since the last ice age. Scientists say the expansion will inevitably change northern ecosystems, with implications for the whole planet, in ways we don’t fully understand and probably can’t undo. Natural gas leaks. Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use. A law to repair nature. After an unexpectedly bitter political battle, European lawmakers approved a bill that would require E.U. countries to restore 20% of nature areas within their borders on land and at sea. The measure, a key element of the bloc’s Green Deal environmental initiative, passed with 336 votes in favor, 300 against and 13 abstentions. Underground heat in Chicago. Since the mid-20th century, the ground between Chicago’s city surface and the bedrock has warmed by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit on average, according to a study out of Northwestern University. The heat has caused the earth to deform over the decades, potentially worsening cracks in building foundations. Heat waves. More than 61,000 people died because of brutal summer heat waves across Europe in 2022, according to a study published in the journal Nature Medicine. The findings suggest that two decades of efforts on the continent to adapt to a hotter world have failed to keep up with the pace of global warming. Heat records. As an astonishing surge of heat across the globe shattered temperature records from North America to Antarctica, forecasters warned that the Earth could be entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth driven by continued emissions of heat-trapping gases and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern. The disclosures offer only a partial glimpse at the potential price tag of climate change. Only a fraction of companies worldwide currently report their climate risks, and many large firms, including energy giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron, did not submit a disclosure to CDP last year. The companies that do disclose often struggle to tease out precisely how rising temperatures might hurt or help them financially.

New York City’s water works money shows that, in the case of money and public debt, ideas about money shape possibilities for public action: Had policymakers attempted to borrow or tax before starting construction, work on the steam pump might never have begun. And had the New York State Assembly been able to create money to address the water issue after the war, they might have repeated the engineering feat. Instead, they chartered a corporate bank that had other priorities. Because of the way New York City and later the State Assembly institutionalized money creation, people’s knowledge of money and debt changed. While public water works currency did not drown out the end, corporate cash functioned according to the logic of a for-profit institution. Money, then, is an example of “the elaborate imaginative construct that is human society. […] because it is a mental construct, how we think about it changes how it works” (Atwood : 203). Money has no inherent logic it imposes on societies, and there is no reason this large-scale mechanism for coordinating activities has to be opaque from the perspective of the population at large.

What would be today’s equivalent of water works money—the practice of using money for a public purpose, and intelligibly so? An increasingly popular policy proposal, the federal Job Guarantee (e.g., Tcherneva , ; Ehnts and Höfgen ), at first glance appears as just another social policy, but it could lead to a profound rethinking of money and society. The Job Guarantee would guarantee a publicly funded job to anyone willing and able to work. It would end involuntary unemployment, and provide jobs tailored to people’s already-existing skills, allowing them to serve their communities. But the Job Guarantee is more than a promising social policy: it has the potential to transform our current understanding of money. If we begin to understand that governmental bodies can create money to coordinate the activities of people in communities, we can reconnect with money’s character as a means. Collectively, we no longer think like Simmel’s “foolish parents” who only ask what something costs. We can, instead, value the contributions and skills of real, living individuals on our own terms, and organize their contributions for tasks small and large, from municipal water provisioning to addressing the myriad emergencies of climate change.

Trump’s dismantling of the federal government has only been possible because of decades of Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as well as Republicans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, deregulating and dismantling the federal government and instilling in the U.S. populace the idea that the government cannot and does not serve the people. The liberal proposed solution to a post-Trump government is to ask the American people to make a leap faith in trusting the government based a litany of experts, ranging from actual experts like Dr. Fauci to know-nothing consultant types like Pete Buttigieg. This will not work because those experts cannot be trusted with the well-being of the American people and the American people know it.

A federal job guarantee could be the most radical reorientation towards democracy in the federal government since the New Deal. Its surviving programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority show that the methodology of rebuilding the federal government, specifically a democratic methodology, matters just as much if not more than what is built. Mr. TVA’s message that “We are not inert objects on a wave of the future” is one we can send today with a federal job guarantee that will both provide Americans with the relief they need and empower them to decide what that relief will look like.

These are turbulent times of crisis and opportunity. On the one hand, we have witnessed a significant turnabout in the past two years—the theft of two Supreme Court seats; ongoing voter disenfranchisement; and the undermining of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among countless other attacks on democratic life and governance. All of this comes atop escalating state and state-sanctioned violence. Although the unemployment rate has come down dramatically in the ten years since the Great Recession, the employment-to-population ratio has yet to recover to pre-recession levels, and wage growth remains slow. For many workers, jobs remain too low paid, too insecure, and too dangerous.

On the other hand, progressive politics are getting bigger and more imaginative. One key indication is the increasing support from leading politicians for a federal job guarantee—for plans to provide good jobs for all who want them. Over the past few months Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders, among others, have championed a variety of plans to further these goals. Last week, Representative Ro Khanna released an important new bill, the Coretta King Full Employment Federal Reserve Act, that would compel the Federal Reserve to address the interests of working people and people of color and weaken the grip of the financial sector on the central bank. Exciting as these proposals are, they will need massive grassroots social movements behind them to achieve their goals.

Minsky believed a job guarantee would be supportive of democracy because all members of society profit from reduced unemployment and the socially useful output the program would produce. He did not spend much time thinking about democratic processes within the program. To fill this gap, Pavlina Tcherneva (2020, 88) proposes a participatory democracy approach with a bottom-up design, “[…] encouraging direct input from citizens, community members, and other stakeholders representing the public interest in the proposal, management, and execution of the project. […] Because the job guarantee program encourages citizen input, puts pressure on punitive private sector labor practices, and invests in the public good, it can be an institution with profound democratizing tendencies, functioning as a conduit for transformative change in the workplace, in people’s everyday lives, and in the economy as a whole.” Combining the job guarantee with a democratic and decentralized bottom-up approach also tackles the issue of how to provide enough jobs in an economic downturn. Local communities and citizens provide suggestions regarding urgent, ongoing, and nice-to-have projects, and many existing local projects and initiatives could easily be scaled up.

Debates about the social and environmental impacts of America’s food system cannot be disentangled from the basic reality that in a modern industrialized society, most people will live in cities and suburbs and will not work in agriculture. As a result, most food will need to be produced by large farms, with little labor, far away from the people who will consume it. Many sustainable agriculture advocates tout the  of organic agriculture as proof that an alternative food system is possible. But growing market share vastly overstates how much food is actually produced organically. In reality, organic production accounts for little more than  of total U.S. agricultural land use. Meanwhile, only a bit more than  of food sales come from organic producers, mostly because organic sales are overwhelmingly concentrated in high-value sectors of the market, namely produce and dairy, and fetch a premium from well-heeled consumers. Moreover, organic farms, large and small, don’t actually outperform large conventional farms by many important environmental measures. Scale, technology, and productivity make good environmental sense and economic sense. Because organic farming requires more land for every calorie or pound produced, a  to organic farming would entail converting more forest and other land to farming, resulting in greater habitat loss and more greenhouse gas emissions. And while organic farming doesn’t use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, it often results in greater nitrogen pollution because manure is a highly inefficient way to deliver nutrients to crops. Another benefit of large-scale U.S. farms is that because they are so efficient, economically and environmentally, they are also able to produce vastly more food than Americans can consume, making the country the world’s largest agricultural exporter as well. That benefits the U.S. economy, of course, but it also comes with an environmental benefit for the world. In the contemporary environmental imagination, highly productive, globally traded agriculture is a bad thing—poisoning the land at home and undermining food sovereignty abroad. But in reality, a pound of grain or beef exported from the United States almost always displaces a pound that would have been produced with more land and greenhouse gas emissions somewhere else. An accurate understanding of the benefits of the U.S. food system points toward a number of important opportunities to improve it. First, the United States should double down on technology and productivity. Better seeds, irrigation, fertilizers, feeds, and animal breeding—together with precision farming made possible by big data, GPS systems, and rural broadband—could significantly improve both the competitiveness and environmental performance of U.S. farms. We  that doubling federal support for agricultural research and development, from $4 billion annually to $8 billion, over the next decade would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from global agriculture by an amount equivalent to about 40 percent of current U.S. cropland emissions while increasing U.S. exports. Second, liberalizing trade agreements can improve global food security, benefit U.S. agriculture, and bring substantial environmental benefits. Free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have historically been a target for environmentalists, who argue that they hurt poor farmers in developing countries while opening up U.S. markets to producers with lower labor and environmental standards. But overall, agricultural trade benefits the global poor and further liberalization  while . Further reducing trade barriers, particularly for goods with relatively low environmental footprints, would also concentrate production in places with an environmental comparative advantage. For instance, NAFTA mostly shifted Mexican and U.S. production toward crops that each country . Third, the United States should stop growing crops for biofuels and incentivize farmers to produce food for export markets. About  is diverted for production of biofuels, largely because the federal government mandates for ethanol use in gasoline. These policies might have made some sense in the 1970s, when oil was scarce and America’s petroleum reserves seemed to be on the wane. But today, the country is awash in oil, and the transition to electric vehicles is just getting started. Continuing to use some of the most highly productive farmland in the world to grow corn for biofuels also has terrible environmental costs. Under the best of circumstances, biofuels have a marginally lower carbon footprint than conventional petroleum-based fuels. But every bushel of corn that is used for fuel is also a bushel that isn’t used for food, which increases pressure to convert forests for farming somewhere else in the world. If President Joe Biden were to change just one thing about the U.S. food system to protect the environment, it would be to get rid of ethanol, not Twinkies.

In some ways, it is not surprising that many of the best fed, most food-secure people in the history of the human species are convinced that the food system is broken. Most have never set foot on a farm or, at least, not on the sort of farm that provides the vast majority of food that people in wealthy nations like the United States consume. In the popular bourgeois imagination, the idealized farm looks something like the ones that sell produce at local farmers markets. But while small farms like these account for close to half of all U.S. farms, they produce  of total output. The largest farms, by contrast, account for about 50 percent of output, relying on simplified production systems and economies of scale to feed a nation of 330 million people, vanishingly few of whom live anywhere near a farm or want to work in agriculture. It is this central role of large, corporate, and industrial-style farms that critics point to as evidence that the food system needs to be transformed. But U.S. dependence on large farms is not a conspiracy by big corporations. Without question, the U.S. food system has many problems. But persistent misperceptions about it, most especially among affluent consumers, are a function of its spectacular success, not its failure. Any effort to address social and environmental problems associated with food production in the United States will need to first accommodate itself to the reality that, in a modern and affluent economy, the food system could not be anything other than large-scale, intensive, technological, and industrialized. Not so long ago, farming was the principal occupation of most Americans. More than  labored in agriculture in 1800. As late as 1900, some 40 percent of the U.S. labor force still worked on farms. Today, that figure is less than . The consolidation of U.S. agriculture has been underway for more than 150 years. First came irrigation and ploughs, then better seeds and fertilizers, and then tractors and pesticides. With each innovation, farmers were able to produce larger harvests with fewer people and work larger plots of land. Better opportunities drew people to cities, where they could get jobs that provided higher wages and, thereby, produced greater economic surplus—that is, profits and ultimately societal wealth. The large-scale migration of labor from farms to cities pushed farmers to invest even more in labor-saving and productivity-enhancing practices and technologies in a virtuous cycle of urbanization, agricultural intensification, and economic growth that is the hallmark of all affluent societies. It is not a stretch to say that the United States is wealthy today because most of its people work in manufacturing, services, technology, and other sectors of the economy. In this, the country is not alone. No nation has ever succeeded in moving most of its population out of poverty without most of that population leaving agriculture work. No nation has ever succeeded in moving most of its population out of poverty without most of that population leaving agriculture work. That transition often isn’t easy. Millions of Black Americans made the difficult journey from tenant farming in the South to factory work in the North, where they faced new forms of racism even as they escaped the tyranny of sharecropping. More recently, small farmers have struggled to survive as increasingly high agricultural productivity and falling commodity prices tilted the playing field toward large farms. Rural communities have likewise suffered as dramatic improvements in labor productivity have shrunk employment in agriculture. But over the long term, the living standards and life opportunities offered in the modern knowledge, service, and manufacturing economies have proved vastly greater than anything possible under the agrarian social and economic arrangements that most Americans over the last two centuries happily abandoned—and that too many Americans today romanticize. Modern life required not only liberating most Americans from agrarian labor but also the development of a food system capable of getting food from farms to the cities where increasing numbers of Americans lived and worked. A food system that lost much of its harvest to pests and spoilage needed to dramatically cut losses even as its bounty needed to travel farther and farther. For this reason, the rise of modern agriculture is as much a story of railways and highways as combines and tractors, refrigeration and grain elevators as pesticides and fertilizer. The development and growth of feedlots followed a similar path. As the historian Maureen Ogle recounts in her magnificent history of the beef industry, , the first feedlots grew out of the stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City in the late 19th century. The most efficient way to get beef to burgeoning markets in America’s cities was to drive cattle to these new rail centers, where they were finished, slaughtered, and then shipped throughout the country by rail. After World War II, beef production and feedlots expanded massively, driven not so much by corporate greed as by rising demand for beef from the United States’ newly prosperous middle class and by a scarcity of labor as ranch hands returning from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific chose to pursue better economic opportunities in the postwar economy.

A reader could be excused for concluding from Matthew R. Sanderson and Stan Cox’s criticism of our recent essay, “Big Agriculture Is Best,” that virtually all environmental impacts associated with the production of food in the United States and globally can be laid at the feet of “industrial agriculture.” But it is a definitional sleight of hand, not “empirical evidence,” as they claim, that does most of the work here. Sanderson and Cox define “industrial agriculture” so capaciously as to be basically synonymous with “agriculture.”

In the United States, that is arguably true. Most agricultural output—and hence environmental impacts—comes from large-scale, industrial production. Globally, it is not true. In both cases, there is no free lunch. Agriculture, unavoidably, has environmental impacts for the simple reason that growing food requires the conversion of forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems into fields whose biocapacity is then monopolized to produce food for people.

The COVID-19 pandemic increased global food insecurity in almost every country by reducing incomes and disrupting food supply chains—conditions worsened worldwide by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The pandemic continues to create devastating effects on global hunger and poverty – especially on the poorest and most vulnerable populations. Today, the number of severely food-insecure people has doubled from before the pandemic to 276 million people. By the end of 2022, due to the compounding effects of continued social, political, and economic crises around the world, the World Food Program (WFP) estimates this total to rise to 323 million people.

The UN warns that without immediate humanitarian assistance, over 43 million people in 38 countries across the globe are at risk of falling into famine or famine-like conditions. Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yemen are at the highest risk of famine.

The climate crisis is changing weather patterns and increasing the chances of extreme events such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts. It is also responsible for changing and polluting entire ecosystems, compromising biodiversity and destroying harvests. All these events have a huge impact on food production, as they significantly limit the quality, availability, and accessibility of resources, and compromise the stability of food systems around the world.

According to a new NASA study, maize (corn) crops are among the most threatened under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. If countries do not manage to drastically reduce their carbon footprint, maize crop yields are projected to decline by about 24% by 2030, with severe implications worldwide. The production of some other staple crops like rice and wheat is also projected to decline drastically as a consequence of climate change, with supplies of these resources shrinking substantially, particularly in food-insecure developing countries.

You go to work and soon move to a company that’s rendering captured CO₂ into building materials that can replace concrete and steel. You end up making a good living by doing work necessary for saving the planet from a catastrophic overheating. All good! Your experience is similar to millions of others, all performing different new jobs in different new situations—some moving from jobs lost to the Covid-19 depression and its rearrangements, others to technological improvements, others still to climate pressures—all together adding up to a huge jobs shakeup and reorganization. But on a warming, carbon-clogged planet there is always more work to be done than people to do it. And because there is, in this possible future, also a federally mandated job guarantee, you and millions of others are finding your way to the new jobs popping up everywhere. The coordination and sometimes the pay are provided by government, while the specific job requests come from any local projects that need labor.

The scenario outlined above is compiled from signs coming from all over, not least of which are the weekly U.S. unemployment numbers that have been reaching seven digits. There’s a major-party presidential candidate out there right now calling for a public jobs corps consisting of 100,000 health workers. And there’s also an economic case for a full-employment vision expressed by modern monetary theory. This economics discipline is usually understood to be a new kind of Keynesianism that might replace austerity policies of the neoliberal era. It advocates creating new money to pay for necessary work and argues that government debt can always be dealt with by later government actions, so creating this new money for good purposes need not be regarded as wrong or dangerous. Some conventional economists have attacked what they see as MMT’s cavalier treatment of money, and critics sometimes call the discipline “magic money tree.” Inflation might result from such money creation—or deflation. Opinions differ, but all agree destabilization would be disastrous.

Pandemics should instead be understood as falling between a natural and an anthropogenic risk. Non-engineered pathogens that emerge from nature do not represent the same type of direct natural risk as an event such as an asteroid strike. Understanding a pandemic in terms of a global catastrophic risk is more practical, meaning that it could threaten permanent civilizational collapse (Bostrom and Ćirković 2011). The John Hopkins Center for Health Security has followed this idea in defining pandemics as possible “Global Catastrophic Biological Risks” (GCBRs). Which they define as biological events—deliberate, accidental, or emerging—that could lead to sudden, extraordinary, widespread disaster beyond the collective capability of national and international governments and the private sector to control [that] if unchecked […] would lead to great suffering, loss of life, and sustained damage to national governments, international relationships, economies, societal stability, or global security. (Schoch-Spana et al. 2017, 323)

Though humanity has lived with diseases since its earliest history, the contemporary possibility of such a risk has increased. The global population recently climbed to over 8 billion, and the overall population density continues to increase (Roser et al. 2013). With more individuals, there are more possible origins of new pandemic diseases. As of 2018, 55% of the world’s population lived in urban areas (UN DESA 2018), and an estimated 65% by 2050 (UN DESA 2019). People living closer to one another will likely increase the transmission rates.

That’s because we eat a ton of meat, and the vast majority of it comes from factory farms. In these huge industrialized facilities that supply more than 90 percent of meat globally — and around 99 percent of America’s meat — animals are tightly packed together and live under harsh and unsanitary conditions.

“When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size sheds, to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling their immune systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs, and there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight — put all these factors together and you have a perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of disease,“ said Michael Greger, the author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.