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(Matt, Geo@Syracuse, https://jacobin.com/2023/03/ipcc-report-climate-doom-cycle-science-technocracy)

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its “synthesis” report summarizing the findings of its sixth assessment (the last occurred in 2014). The findings are painfully familiar: the world is falling far short of its emission goals, and without rapid reductions this decade, the planet is likely to shoot to beyond 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century (we are at 1.1 degrees now). We seem to be stuck in a doom-loop news cycle where scientific reports create headlines, and earnest climate commentators insist the new report represents a true “wake-up call” for action, and then . . . emission keep rising. They hit a record once again in 2022. The world of climate politics appears to exist in two completely different worlds. There is a largely liberal and idealist world of climate technocrats where science informs policy, and there is the real, material capitalist world of power. In the liberal world, the base assumption is that if we can communicate the science better — or as one former Extinction Rebellion spokesperson argues, if we can try “to tell and hear and live in truth” — our political systems will respond with action. As the science becomes more terrifying, the moral righteousness of this approach only seems more vindicated with each new report. Another crucial aspect of this liberal worldview is to map out and model precise pathways to decarbonization. You probably heard the Inflation Reduction Act is projected to spur a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; what you don’t hear is that, according to the same models, doing nothing gets us 24 to 35 percent. As emissions keep rising, the models become more fantastical in terms of what is required, but they still give an army of climate technocrats the ammunition to supply the policy commentariat with a message that following the science is still possible — if we simply start right away. The other world is very different: it is a world of capitalist and state power. In this world, the market says fossil fuels are as profitable as ever. ExxonMobil announced record profits in October and then again in January. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the coal industry — the worst of the fossil fuels — was posting windfall profits. The Financial Times recently reported on hedge funds making absurd 43 percent returns betting on coal. One hedge funder bluntly remarked, “It’s almost immoral not to invest in coal because of the reliance [by so many countries] on fossil fuels.” It is this brute world of power that has also led our alleged climate president, Joe Biden, to approve the Willow Project in Alaska. The move has rightly triggered denunciations of hypocrisy because, upon taking office in 2021, the Biden administration vowed to embark on “a whole-of-government [climate] effort in every sector of the economy.” The Willow “carbon bomb” is projected to unearth six hundred million barrels of oil, “effectively adding the emissions of the entire country of Belgium, via just one project.” The New York Times reports, “ConocoPhillips plans to install devices called thermosyphons in the thawing permafrost to keep it solid enough to support the heavy equipment needed to drill for oil — the burning of which will release carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say will worsen the ice melt.” This is how the world of power plans for a warming world. Yet we shouldn’t act as if there is zero reason for Biden’s turnabout. He understands, like every president before him, that surging gasoline prices are an enormous political liability in a society where the vast majority of workers still require the dirty fuel to get to work. As long as Biden acts as if his administration is helpless in the face of fossil fuel price volatility — and only increased supply will bring the price down — political viability will continue to hinge on cheap fossil fuel prices. The Green New Deal was a call to reject the idea that we can cede climate solutions to markets and price swings. Yet this is exactly what the Biden administration still believes. In 2021, Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, insisted, “I think we’re on the cusp of a massive transformation . . . ultimately, the market is going to make the decisions, not the government.” For all the grandiose claims of “industrial policy,” the Inflation Reduction Act is simply a generous set of market incentives — tax credits, to be exact — that aim to spur mostly private investment in clean energy and private consumer purchases of low-carbon commodities like electric vehicles and heat pumps. If Biden were really acting according to the science, rather than approve Willow he would launch a large-scale plan of public investment to build the clean energy transition we need. Such a plan could only be viable politically if accompanied with serious redistributionist programs that shield workers from any energy price spikes. A public works plan to vastly expand union jobs and manufacturing alongside guaranteed stable and affordable energy prices for the working class could actually create the mass constituency needed to intervene in the real world of capitalist power and climate politics. But no one in the ruling class seems willing to challenge the capitalist stranglehold over the energy sector to embark on such a project. And the Left, for the time being, remains too weak. As such, the liberal climate technocrats and those with real power remain worlds apart. This will not be the last terrifying scientific report on climate change. But the only path out of the dull repetitiveness of increasingly dire headlines is a politics that acknowledges that science and truth won’t automatically lead to change. The struggle for the planet is a struggle for political power.

(Oliver , https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/20/ex-meteorologist-names-us-heatwaves-after-oil-gas-firms)

The summer’s heatwaves have been so blistering they have inspired their own names. In Europe they have been called nightmarish figures from Greek mythology, but one meteorologist in the US has taken a more pointed approach – by naming the country’s heatwaves after the oil and gas companies that have worsened the climate crisis. The heatwave that has baked much of the US south-west in recent weeks, helping bring a record-breaking string of days over (43C) 110F to Phoenix, has been named Heatwave Chevron by Guy Walton, a veteran former Weather Channel meteorologist. Walton, who now runs a blog on weather as well as writing a range of children’s books he calls “Harry Potter meets the climate crisis”, has already christened two previous heatwaves this summer Amoco and BP, after two other oil companies. The rebadging of heatwaves as being directly the fault of companies like Chevron is “a naming and shaming thing”, according to Walton, who wants weather forecasters and the media to be more explicit between the links between extreme heat and the burning of fossil fuels that has caused the climate crisis. “I’m trying to be a bug in the ear of my compatriots to take what I’m doing and run with it,” he said. “I realize what I’m doing is controversial and corporate media will want to steer clear of it, but people need to be riled up. I don’t think we need to pull any punches. If it causes consternation, so be it.” Walton has devised his own criteria for named heatwaves in the US, based on duration and extremity, on a one to five scale similar to hurricanes. Heatwave Chevron is classed as a four and is “historic”, Walton said. The meteorologist said he has a list of 20 oil and gas companies – including Exxon and Shell – for upcoming heatwaves and will turn to coal companies if he runs out of names. “It’s a little tongue-in-cheek but it’s not a fun topic, I want to galvanize the way the public thinks about these threats,” said Walton, who previously named heatwaves after dragons (a heatwave in Europe blamed for 60,000 deaths last year was named Smaug, after the antagonist in JRR Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit). “It would be great if the media started naming heatwaves, although I’d expect them to use a more buttoned-up criterion than what I’ve used,” he added. Although extreme heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the US and many other countries, there is no standardized naming system for heatwaves, unlike hurricanes that are routinely named after people – Atlantic storms this year will be given monikers including Emily, Cindy and Sean. The World Meteorological Organization, comprising 121 governments, has said it has no plans to alter this status quo, pointing to the lack of an agreed definition of heatwaves and the perceived danger that names would “misdirect” public and media attention away from important messages on how to cope with a blast of dangerous heat. A wave of record heatwaves has, however, forced a rethink in some quarters. Last year, authorities in Seville, Spain, started naming heatwaves – one, called Zoe, reached 43C (109F) – and this summer an Italian weather website has turned to mythological figures to name some of the fiercest heat the continent has ever seen. Two major heatwaves that have affected southern Europe with temperatures as high as 48.8C (119F) have been named Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed hound belonging to Hades, and Charon, the ferryman of Hades, the Greek underworld. The names have caught on with several media outlets and prompted some calls for change among meteorologists. “I can see a benefit to giving heatwaves names, to help people understand them and make them memorable,” said Chris Gloninger, who had a long career as a TV meteorologist in the US before quitting after receiving a death threat for mentioning climate change on air. “But I’d have a concern about naming them after oil companies,” he added. “It’s already such a politicized issue and it would give people dismissive about climate change more ammunition. I’d fear it would turn people off.” Some climate campaigners, though, see a benefit in directly linking oil companies to the escalating climate disasters currently unfolding around the world. “I think it’s a great idea,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a psychologist and executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund. “Any kind of extreme weather should be named after the fossil fuel companies. It’s a brilliant way to bypass media silence and denial, and get the message to the public. We are in a climate emergency, and the fossil fuel industry is to blame.” Chevron did not respond to a request to comment about being named after a heatwave that Walton said is now shifting eastwards. “I’m sure it will be responsible for about 100 deaths, it’s got a while to go yet,” he said.

(Brad, Climate activist/author, , 3-3)

It’s time for America to be ambitious again. Congressional advocates of a Green New Deal are calling for a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era” in order to decarbonize the US economy by 2030. Taking the climate crisis seriously means getting the United States to net-zero or negative carbon pollution within ten years while working to undo the damage already done. Doing so involves reconstituting not only our electrical grid, but also our transportation system, agricultural system, financial system, built infrastructure, medical system, trade and manufacturing, land use, political system, gender relations, military — our entire economy, our entire relation to each other and to the rest of the world. While all that may seem impossible to those on the fossil fuel industry payroll, it can be done if the United States mobilizes at a scale achieved in our nation’s history during World War II. The Green New Deal resolution calls for the United States to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” “through a ten-year national mobilization.” This target of rapid, total decarbonization is at odds with the goals of Trump’s administration and the projections of carbon polluter giants such as ExxonMobil; and is considerably more ambitious than recent Democratic Party leadership plans, which have been fixed on an 80 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2050 benchmark since the Step It Up campaign of 2007. Rapid, total decarbonization is also what is needed in this time of climate emergency. The consequences of extracting and combusting hundreds of billions of tons of fossilized carbon in recent decades are with us now. Nation-states are crumbling from a degraded climate, with catastrophic droughts, floods, fires, storms, ocean rise, glacial retreat, and biodiversity collapse putting people in all corners of the globe in biblical peril. If humanity does not end the burning of fossil fuels and reverse deforestation, the possibility that it will share the fate of the vast majority of all species to have existed on this planet — extinction — is unreasonably high. The price tag of insufficient action, as Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s “dismal theorem” finds, is potentially infinite, “since catastrophes that would cause human extinction remain too plausible to ignore.”

(Andrei Ionescu, https://www.earth.com/news/new-evidence-that-climate-change-is-caused-by-human-activities/)

A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has provided clear evidence of a human “fingerprint” on climate change, showing that specific signals from human activities have altered the temperature structure of our planet’s atmosphere. While differences between tropospheric and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as anthropogenic effects on the climate, scientists have largely ignored what happens from the mid to the upper stratosphere (about 25-50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface). “Including this information improves the detectability of a human fingerprint by a factor of five. Enhanced detectability occurs because the mid to upper stratosphere has a large cooling signal from human-caused CO2 increases, small noise levels of natural internal variability, and differing signal and noise patterns,” the authors explained. While in the troposphere, noise can include daily weather, interannual variability caused by El Niños and La Niñas, and longer-term natural fluctuations in climate, in the upper stratosphere such noises are smaller, making anthropogenic climate change signals easier to distinguish. “Extending fingerprinting to the upper stratosphere with long temperature records and improved climate models means that it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured trends in the thermal structure of the Earth’s atmosphere,” the scientists argued. “This research undercuts and rebuts claims that recent atmospheric and surface temperature changes are natural, whether due to the Sun or due to internal cycles in the climate system,” said study lead author Benjamin Santer, an expert in Physical Oceanography at WHOI. “A natural explanation is virtually impossible in terms of what we are looking at here: changes in the temperature structure of the atmosphere. This research puts to rest incorrect claims that we don’t need to treat climate change seriously because it is all natural.” This study is rooted in the earlier work of Suki Manabe and Richard Wetherald in 1967, who utilized a simple climate model to investigate the potential impact of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion on atmospheric temperature. Their modeling revealed a distinct finding: an elevation in CO2 levels resulted in increased heat retention within the troposphere (the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere) and decreased heat dissipation in the stratosphere (the layer above the troposphere), consequently causing warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere. This projection of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling in response to rising CO2 levels has been consistently supported by more intricate models and validated through comparisons of model outcomes with global-mean atmospheric temperature measurements obtained from weather balloons and satellites. While these earlier studies focused on global-mean temperature alterations in the middle and upper stratosphere, approximately 25 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, they did not delve into the intricate patterns of climate change within this particular layer. However, advancements in simulations and satellite data have now made it possible to examine this region more comprehensively. The current study marks the first attempt to identify discernible climate change patterns, often referred to as “fingerprints,” specifically attributed to human activities in the middle and upper stratosphere. “The human fingerprints in temperature changes in the mid to upper stratosphere due to CO2 increases are truly exceptional because they are so large and so different from temperature changes there due to internal variability and natural external forcing. These unique fingerprints make it possible to detect the human impact on climate change due to CO2 in a short period of time (~10 – 15 years) with high confidence,” said co-author Qiang Fu, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. “This study shows that the real world has changed in a way that simply cannot be explained by natural causes. We now face important decisions, in the United States and globally, on what to do about climate change. I hope those decisions are based on our best scientific understanding of the reality and seriousness of human effects on climate,” Santer concluded.

(Andreas T., Phil@Gronnigen, and Daan, Senior Strategic Policy for Climate at The Hague, Economic inequality and the long-term future https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Inequality-and-the-Long-Term-Future_Andreas-Schmidt-and-Daan-Juijn-reupload.pdf , May )

It is often argued that a country’s long-term performance depends to a significant extent on the quality of its institutions, including its political and legal institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005). Economic research mostly focuses on explaining long-term differences in growth rates. As seen above, some researchers argue that high inequality will reduce growth rates, among other things, because it can worsen institutional quality. However, besides facilitating economic growth, public institutions have other functions that matter from a long-term perspective. For example, disaster preparedness, education, public health, foreign policy, science policy, and many other areas could influence long-term trajectories. If such things go badly, they could increase existential risk. Conversely, good institutions will help reduce existential risk. For many existential risk reduction strategies likely require public goods and collective action, which in turn require good public institutions (among other reasons, because some such public goods are unlikely to be provided by markets). So, it seems reasonable to assume that, with most other societal goals, good institutions can help deliver existential risk reduction. Here is a cheesy analogy: targeted actions like washing your hands regularly or getting a flu shot can reduce your risk of dying from an infection. But you will also do well investing in a strong immune system, as that is an ‘all-purpose goods’ in lowering your risk of dying from any bacterium or virus. Investing in good institutions might similarly be an all-purpose-good: rather than tackling individual sources of existential risk directly, we improve conditions for tackling whatever existential risks may come our way. There are at least two reasons why higher inequality could decrease institutional capacities for long-termist public goods. First, there is some direct evidence that, whatever the causal pathway, inequality reduces institutional quality (which in turn typically leads to more inequality) (Chong and Gradstein 2007; Savoia, Easaw, and McKay 2010). Second, high inequality can lead to elite capture. Empirical work on studying political and de facto legal power is difficult, yet there is a growing consensus that high levels of inequality can lead to elite capture and thereby reduce the long-term quality of legal and political institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson 2008; 2013; Bartels 2018; Bavel 2016; Chong and Gradstein 2007; Cummins and Rodriguez 2010; Savoia, Easaw, and McKay 2010). Further, if institutions are disproportionately geared towards elite interests, then they might be less likely to be geared towards positive longterm trajectories. We might see more rent-seeking and less investment in public goods. Moreover, if elite capture is strong enough, such capture, and the potential inequality that comes with it, can intensify going forward (Chong and Gradstein 2007). Now, one might object and wonder whether elite interests and longtermist interests will necessarily be misaligned. Could an enlightened elite not even be more longtermist than a more democratic system? Here are two potential arguments. First, wealthy donors fund a significant part of research and direct action on existential risk and longtermism (the Open Philanthropy Project, for example). Indirectly, inequality might thus reduce existential risk through such funding. Second, rich people might have a lower rate of pure time preference than less well-off people, which would make them more naturally aligned with investing in long-term causes. In response to the first argument, remember we here focus on income inequality reductions. Private funding only requires ‘enough’ wealth inequality going forward, it need not require elite capture. And reducing income inequality is unlikely to eradicate the required wealth inequality and the existence of big donors. In response to the second argument, we are somewhat sceptical that elite capture would translate a lower impatience rate into longtermist strategies in policy. A successful transmission would require influence to be systematic and well-coordinated across time and, probably, across different elite actors. Yet lobbying and elite influence must often capitalise on shorter windows of opportunities, which makes well-coordinated intertemporal, and positive longtermist, policy capture less likely. Of course, such considerations are speculative. But, in any case, we think that, on balance, there are stronger reasons to believe elite capture would increase – rather than decrease – existential risk. First, elite capture often comes with rent seeking, which lowers institutional quality (Chong and Gradstein 2007). Second, industries like oil, gas, weapons and others are often concentrated and well organised in exerting influence in law and legislation. Their interests and influence overall are likely to be more short-term than longtermist. Third, recent decades have seen a shift towards a stronger shareholder value orientation in corporate governance. A common criticism of this shift is that it incentivises more short-term decisions. Accordingly, corporate influence into public institutions will likely display short-termist bias too. Finally, we can of course imagine that ‘prolongtermist elite capture’ could happen and gamble on that possibility. However, if strong democratic and legal oversight and the power to check elite influence is lost, we might struggle to reverse our gamble. Second, high inequality is likely to reduce social capital and trust (Alesina and La Ferrara 2002; Knack and Keefer 1997; Rothstein and Uslaner 2005). Social capital and trust in public institutions in turn are important for effective public goods provision (Knack and Keefer 1997; Beugelsdijk, Groot, and Schaik 2004). Effective public goods provision, in turn, is important for (some) effective measures to reduce existential risk (and, more generally, to coordinate towards more valuable long-term trajectories). Therefore, high inequality could reduce societies’ capacities to effectively respond to large-scale challenges like existential risk. Finally, some limited direct evidence suggests societies with higher social capital and lower inequality exhibit better preventive and adaptive outcomes for environmental risks and can show greater resilience to external shocks (Bavel and Curtis 2019; Kahn 2005). For example, Matthew Kahn provides some evidence that more equal countries, when controlled for GDP, have significantly lower death rates in natural catastrophes (Kahn 2005). While smaller natural catastrophes are different from global catastrophic risk scenarios, resilience in such events might be somewhat indicative of societies’ resilience to catastrophic risks. So, good social and institutional conditions could help reduce existential risk. Consider next how, conversely, bad conditions might increase existential risk. A key driver of existential risk is conflict, both between and within nation-states (or what (Ord 2020, 175–79) calls a ‘risk factor’). Conflicts and arms races raise human-induced existential risks such as nuclear war, the outbreak of a bioengineered virus or the launch of misaligned artificial intelligence. Note that an existential catastrophe could be set in motion either purposefully or accidentally. Both are more likely during conflict. Nuclear warheads, cyberweapons, and bioweapons could all be used purposefully to attack enemy states, leading to potential global escalation. But as past nuclear incidents and close calls during the Cold War show, arms races also increase the probability of accidental catastrophes (Schlosser 2013). Esteban and Schneider find that formal and empirical evidence suggests that political and social polarization increases the risk of violent conflict, both intra-nationally and internationally (Esteban and Schneider 2008). If income inequality increases polarization, inequality may indirectly drive existential risk. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that income inequality can increase the degree of polarization between groups of citizens. Bonica et al. find that the degree of polarization within the US House of Representatives, for example, is accurately tracked by domestic income inequality, with correlation coefficients rising up to 0.95 depending on the chosen time-period (Bonica et al. 2013, 105–8). Of course, correlation does not imply causation and the correlation is likely at least partially the result of reverse causation or a confounding variable. That said, we should assign a non-negligible credence to inequality partially causing polarization. Moreover, inequality and polarisation might also play some role in getting polarising and populist candidates elected (Piketty 2018). In a preliminary analysis of US election data, Darvas and Efstathiou find that more unequal states were more likely to vote for Donald Trump, after controlling for variables such as income, race and education (Darvas and Efstathiou 2016). Populist politicians – like Trump, Bolsonaro and others – are likely bad news for existential risk reduction. They are less cooperative in delivering regional and global public goods and typically prefer riskier, and more conflictual and nationalistic policy styles. (iii) Differential progress We have surveyed some reasons why inequality might translate into worse institutional conditions for longtermism. Beyond more formal institutions and avenues for collective action, we might also consider the cultural, moral and informal social norms that could potentially impact existential risk. The simple idea is that countries that sustain low levels of inequality will foster – and require for their support – a public moral culture that values solidarity and cooperation. More egalitarian policies might in turn move citizens and leaders towards more altruism and stronger regard to moral and social considerations in decision processes. Societies that actively work against income inequality may thereby reinforce broadly ‘pro-social’ social norms. Arguably, more egalitarian attitudes and norms might support public goods provision and favour expanding one’s moral circle to other countries and future generations. Countries with high levels of inequality, in contrast, might reinforce norms of competition, individualism, and personal responsibility. Policies that encourage competition and smaller moral circles also seem more likely to attract leaders that value individualism and competition. Indeed, as Wilkinson and Pickett note, more equal societies give more in development aid and score better on the Global Peace Index (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010, 227). Again, we may wonder whether these relationships are not partially explained by confounding variables or reverse causality. That said, the causal link through social norms and public morality has some intuitive force. If true – and drawing on what we said above – a public commitment to equality might support a public moral culture that values solidarity and cooperation, which could help reduce existential risk.17

(George, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/15/food-systems-collapse-plutocrats-life-on-earth-climate-breakdown)

According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk. The new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought. In both cases, the stuck weather, exacerbated by global heating, affects crops. With certain meander patterns, several of the northern hemisphere’s major growing regions – such as western North America, Europe, India and east Asia – could be exposed to extreme weather at the same time, hammering their harvests. We rely for our subsistence on global smoothing: if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. Even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”. A woman holds a malnourished child at the nutrition unit of Gode General Hospital, in Gode, Ethiopia, on 11 January 2023. The last five rainy seasons since the end of 2020 have failed, triggering the worst drought in four decades in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. Number of people going hungry has risen by 122m since 2019, UN says Read more Already, regional climate shocks have helped cause a disastrous reversal in the trend of global chronic hunger. For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them. The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low. If this happens when harvests are affected in just one country or one region, we can only imagine the results if extreme weather simultaneously hits several major growing regions. Other papers have been published with similar themes, showing, for example, the impacts of the rising frequency of “flash droughts” and concurrent heatwaves in grain-producing regions, and how global heating hits food security. All have been largely or entirely ignored by the media. We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other. There are plenty of signs, some of which I’ve tried to explain in the Guardian and, with a sense of rising urgency, in a presentation to parliament, suggesting that the global food system may not be far from its tipping point, for structural reasons similar to those that tanked the financial sector in 2008. As a system approaches a critical threshold, it’s impossible to say which external shock could push it over. Once a system has become fragile, and its resilience is not restored, it’s not a matter of if and how, but when. So why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why, when governments know we’re facing existential risk, do they fail to act? Why is the Biden administration allowing enough oil and gas drilling to bust the US carbon budget five times over? Why is the UK government scrapping the £11.6bn international climate fund it promised? Why has Labour postponed its £28bn green prosperity fund, while Keir Starmer is reported to have remarked last week “I hate tree huggers” (a pejorative term for environmental campaigners)? Why are the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express competing to attack every green solution that might help to prevent climate chaos? Why does everything else seem more important? The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation. As a result, the rich have become ever richer, a process that seems to be accelerating. In 2021, for example, the ultra-rich captured almost two-thirds of all the world’s new wealth. Their share of national income in the UK has almost doubled since 1980, while in the US it’s higher than it was in 1820. The richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. The problem is summarised in one sentence in the resignation letter of the UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith: instead of attending a crucial environment summit, Rishi Sunak went to Rupert Murdoch’s summer party. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few. What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests. Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class. It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children? Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.

(Sudesh Baniya https://www.euronews.com/2023/07/13/inequality-decimating-social-trust-in-europe-finds-who-report)

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report has linked declining levels of trust between people and institutions across Europe to yawning inequality. Analysis by WHO's Regional Office for Europe highlighted the connection between widening health and social inequities - reflected by the ever-increasing number of people living insecure lives - and reduced trust. People have increasingly turned away from governments and public institutions feeling they do not benefit them, while others enjoy privileges, explained the report. For those on low incomes, trust in others is 40% lower compared to high earners, it added. Trust in governments has also declined significantly since the start of the pandemic for people out of work, according to the report. It detailed that a lack of social protection for the vulnerable has further widened the inequality. “All governments and policymakers should take note of the report’s ominous findings and implement concrete policy solutions that benefit everyone, including and especially the most neglected," WHO Regional Director for Europe Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge said. The report also detailed the fatal consequences of widening health and economic inequalities. Some 600,000 preventable deaths across member states with comparatively less health care spending in Europe were observed, it estimated. “Our new analysis further confirms that ‘profit-only’ economic policies do not work,” warned Christine Brown, Head of WHO European Office for Investment for Health and Development. A government's failure to improve people's lives can lead to a "breakdown" of social stability, Brown added, calling for accountable and transparent public policies focused on well-being in Europe. The analysis called for five policies — such as ensuring that social support was catered to the vulnerable, an equitable distribution of health and care resources, and universal protection system — as a way forward to build and strengthen social cohesion, resilience and trust, while reducing inequalities.

(Rick, PoliSci@CCSF https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/the-u-s-has-made-great-progress-at-increasing-economic-inequality/

One of the more impressive accomplishments of the United States in recent decades is how it has achieved greater economic inequality in line with what Marx expected from a capitalist economy. There are periods of setbacks—in which economic inequality is reduced–followed by improvements resulting in even higher levels of inequality. Advancing economic inequality has been a bipartisan undertaking. The actions of both the Democrats and Republicans in power have increased economic inequality as their leaders, together, champion the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle and working classes. Additionally, despite the growth in the diversity of the ruling class, economic inequality has continued to widen. Examples of progress towards greater economic inequality that results in unmet needs and misery for many is made apparent in media stories such as a recent one in the Guardian with the title “I can’t afford groceries’: why one-third of US college students don’t have enough to eat.” Wealth Inequality Wealth is the value of what one owns minus one’s debts. Many people owe more than all of what they own is worth. They have negative wealth. Then there are those at the top who have played a major role in our country’s success at achieving such high levels of economic inequality. They include our “generous” good friends, the “job creators,” Musk, Bezos and Gates, the wealth of each is more than $100 billion. The Federal Reserve Board, the banker’s bank, has been providing data on the distribution of wealth in the U.S. going back to 1989. The share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest has grown tremendously. In 1989, the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent held 8.7% of the nation’s wealth rising to 12.6% as of the end of 2022. The Fed’s data show that in 1989, the wealth of the .1% was 2.26 times greater than the poorest 50%. At the end of 2022, the value of their holdings, $17.6 trillion, was more than four times greater than the wealth, $4.16 trillion, of the poorest 50% of the U.S. population.

(Alicia, money reporter at CNBC Make It. She formerly covered personal finance at Money Magazine and Lifehacker. Adamczyk has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/coronavirus-is-exacerbating-economic-inequality-in-the-us.html)

Experts, who have been trying to sound the alarm on the growing economic inequality in the United States for the past few decades, are seeing their worst fears realized during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since mid-March, tens of millions of Americans across the country have lost their jobs as a result of the economic fallout from the pandemic. No group has been spared: men and women, young and old, Black and White. But as the economy starts to recover, some groups are faring significantly worse than others, including Blacks, Hispanics, millennials, mothers and low-wage workers in the service industry. They are not returning to work at the same rate as White professional workers. The same groups, ironically, are also overrepresented in frontline industries that were deemed essential during the peak of the crisis, including health care, child care, cleaning services and grocery stores. In North Carolina, these frontline workers are 65% women and around 30% Black, according to the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, disproportionate to the percentage of the total workforce those two groups account for. Economic recessions never impact every group the same. But the degree to which Black and White workers are seeing their fortunes diverge post-Covid is one of the reasons many economists have deemed the ongoing recovery “K-shaped.” While White Americans have recovered more than half of the jobs they lost between February and April, Black Americans have recovered only around one-third. As recovery drags on, the coronavirus recession has turned into the most unequal in modern U.S. history. “The recession is almost over for white collar jobs with good benefits,” says Patrick McHugh, research manager at the nonpartisan North Carolina Budget and Tax Center. “But we’re still a long way away from recovering for people in the middle, and particularly low wage jobs.” Even before the Covid-19 crisis, many North Carolinians, like many Americans generally, still hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession. While the number of white collar jobs in the financial and tech sectors have grown in the state over the past decade, job growth in mid-income industries like manufacturing has been stagnant. “A lot of the other job growth was in extremely low paying positions that don’t have real opportunities for career advancement and would come with entirely meager benefits, if any,” says McHugh. With those middle-income jobs disappearing, many individuals, especially Black workers, settled for lower paying work and have not been able to build up the assets they would need to cushion another financial blow: Before coronavirus, 42% of North Carolina households would have been unable to cover all of their expenses for three months without assistance, including 33% of White households and 63% of Black households. Covid-19 has decimated those low-wage industries. Temporary furloughs in these fields are turning into permanent job loss. Long-term unemployment is on the rise. “We have to get a handle on income disparity,” says Ken Schorr, executive director of the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, based in Charlotte, NC. “This will not be a society that anybody wants to live in if we don’t get a handle on providing a better deal for working people in the bottom half of the income spectrum.” Systemic racism means people of color face the worst outcomes Centuries of systemic racism have made the financial outcomes disproportionately worse for Black and Hispanic Americans, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported earlier this month. Black Americans, especially, have been kept from higher-paying white collar jobs, and are over-represented in the service and hospitality sectors, which have borne the brunt of the coronavirus layoffs. That is further bifurcating the U.S. economy. Across the country, just 20% of Black workers are able to work from home, compared to 30% of White workers and 37% of Asian workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While white collar professionals work remotely, service industry workers must go to work and risk being exposed to Covid-19 or go without income at all. “Racism forms the foundation of inequality in our society, and it threatens our economy and limits economic opportunity for people of color,” the Fed wrote. And not only are Black workers more likely to lose their jobs, they are also more likely to have their unemployment insurance claims denied by their employers and more likely to receive less aid when they do get approved, according to research from Nyanya Browne and William Spriggs of Howard University. That’s no accident. It’s “the legacy of white supremacy” in North Carolina, says McHugh. States with higher populations of Black residents, especially in the South, have slashed unemployment insurance budgets and intentionally designed the systems so that they are more difficult to access, he says. Even more stark are the health disparities. Black Americans are disproportionately dying of Covid-19. In fact, APM Research Lab estimates that the virus is responsible for the death of 1 in 920 Black Americans, compared to 1 in 1,840 White Americans. The age-adjusted Covid-19 mortality rate is 3.2 times as high for Black Americans as it is for Whites. “Inequality has been building for decades, and the pandemic ripped it open,” says Schorr. How to move forward Another Covid-19 recovery package from the federal government is necessary to help the 23 million Americans still without work and keep inequality from growing even worse. The CARES Act, passed in March, included $2 trillion in enhanced unemployment, stimulus checks for individuals, food assistance and much more. Aid was disbursed quickly and was well-targeted to those who needed it, say the experts interviewed for this article. Fewer people fell into poverty than would have been expected, according to recent research from Columbia University. But now many of the most helpful provisions have expired. Yet the crisis is ongoing, and though some jobs have come back, the recovery has flat lined. Meanwhile, Congress has been negotiating another deal for months but has so far been unable to agree on what to include in the next aid package. Without more relief, everyone loses, says Eliza Forsythe, a labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Some economists believe if we had been more proactive, we could have gotten back to recovery faster,” says Forsythe. “The CARES Act was really successful in terms of mitigating the effects. But we’re not giving [workers] more support. That prolongs the recovery.” Enhanced unemployment benefits, a sticking point of the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, are important. They helped prop up the economy in the early months of the crisis, says Forsythe, ensuring families could pay all of their bills. Without them, households are falling behind. Now is the time to think big Just as important as the benefits themselves is the continuity of providing them, says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Households need the short- and long-term assurance that they will have income. “We know that when families are experiencing huge fluctuations in income, it can have a [domino] effect. It can lead to them losing their homes, or to debt that can end up costing them way more than the original bill,” says Curran. “Without action even more folks are going to be losing out.” Federal assistance for state and local governments is also crucial, says North Carolina Budget and Tax Center’s McHugh. With tax revenues down across the country, this would allow local governments to offer more aid to their citizens. Now is the time to think big, says William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University. The virus has demonstrated the need for an expanded national health-care program and a federal jobs guarantee. The latter would essentially be a national payroll to ensure people could have income whenever there was a need, not on the “sporadic basis” Congress is providing now, says Darity. Nationalized health care would mean that if people lost their jobs, they wouldn’t automatically lose their health insurance. Without more relief, inequality in the U.S. will continue to grow. That hurts individuals and families, and the economy as a whole. “The data is clear that the need is high,” says Curran. “As a poverty researcher, we’re trying to sound the alarm here. We know action that was taken earlier this year worked, but we know that it wasn’t enough and we know that families need more. Congress can do something, but they need to take action.”

It is an essentialist conception to consider sex work as always a violence whatever the period, the place, or the conditions. Sex workers are often seen only as women when many men and transsexual people are also working, and women are always seen as victims by essence. All acts of violence against a sex worker are thus analysed as intrinsically the result of sex work itself and not the conditions in which sex work is exercised.

It stops the real violence that exists in the sex industry being visible. We are told that we must stop sex work to avoid this violence. If we refuse, we become accomplices of the patriarchal system. We are accused of being responsible for maintaining an industry that harms women.

Some of us call ourselves prostitutes, but recognize its negative connotations when outsiders use it. People use the word prostitute in different contexts: to refer to legislation where word prostitute is written into law; to refer to sex work that involves intercourse with clients; to refer to street prostitution; to refer to debasing oneself, not necessarily in a sexual context; and to refer to history when the word prostitute was used with pride. How and when we use these terms will differ depending on our audience. Sex workers’ rejection of the term is often based in how the public perceives prostitutes and prostitution rather than an inherent shame in the word itself.

Some sex workers also embrace the term sex professional. Like sex work, this term highlights and legitimizes the labour context of sex work. Other sex workers find this term alienating because the term professional can imply a level of accreditation that is not afforded to criminalized work. It can also insert a classist element to the work — some workers are seen as professional while others are not. Not all sex workers have access to the mechanisms that professionalize their work, and many work under precarious conditions.

-This could be seen as a critique of the affs use of sex work

-Or this could be a direct answer to the prostitution pic as the aff is hopefully trying to talk about the struggles and lives of sex workers but it may be the first one more since it takes a very pessimistic approach to the issue in general

Words matter. So does context. That’s why you need to strike the word “labor” from your lexicon.

It’s easier said than done. If you think adjusting to new pronouns is hard, try telling a businessman to eliminate the word “labor” from his vocabulary.

This Women’s History Month, as we celebrate the accomplishments of women throughout history, it feels appropriate to reflect upon the language we use to do so.

Historically, “female” has been widely accepted as the adjective form of “woman.” However, this usage is not only exclusionary, but frankly inaccurate. Not everyone who was born female is a woman, and not every woman was born female.

This Women’s History Month, as we celebrate the accomplishments of women throughout history, it feels appropriate to reflect upon the language we use to do so.

Historically, “female” has been widely accepted as the adjective form of “woman.” However, this usage is not only exclusionary, but frankly inaccurate. Not everyone who was born female is a woman, and not every woman was born female.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

In deciding on a styling, fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors generally fall back on a pair of considerations. The first is broad adherence to a general rule—like, say, the Chicago Manual of Style’s (§8.38) edict that “Names of ethnic and national groups are capitalized.” (Though Chicago still generally mandates lowercasing both black and white, it does include the proviso that the rule can be suspended if “a particular author or publisher prefers otherwise.”) The second thing we look for is attestation. In this case, it’s instructive to turn not to the largely lilywhite mainstream press (nor to the style guides that govern their renderings), but to writers of color and to alternative stylebooks. The Diversity Style Guide (2019), produced by Rachele Kanigel in consultation with some fifty journalists and experts, takes it as a given that Black ought to be capitalized. Sarah Glover, a past president of the National Association of Black Journalists, wrote in a recent piece for the New York Amsterdam News, a historically Black weekly, that “capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities.” After all, she pointed out, “We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.” 

And there’s plainly a rationale for capitalizing black in order to head off ambiguity (what am I referring to when I refer to “black hair”?). For many advocates of the uppercase, though, the stakes are far greater. “Black with a capital ‘B’ refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces,” Lori L. Tharps, who teaches journalism at Temple University, wrote in 2015. “When a copyeditor deletes the capital ‘B,’ they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Or as Anne Price, the president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, put it last year: “capitalizing Black is about claiming power.” When W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned, back in the 1920s, for Negro, rather than negro, he remarked, mordantly: “Eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” According to the diversity committee of USA Today, which decided last week to capitalize the B-word, the change reflected “understanding and respect.”

What complicates things is that, as a rule, capitalizing a word doesn’t convey elevation: We don’t rank Masonite over mahogany. Written languages are not highly consistent, to be sure, so we generalize at some peril. But in English, the long-standing convention is to capitalize proper nouns and proper names, which are terms that refer to what philosophers call “particulars” or “individuals”—a specific person, place, or thing. We routinely name and capitalize entities (the Middle Ages, January, the Pacific Ocean, Copenhagen) that reflect human interests or actions. On the other hand, we tend not to capitalize “natural kinds”—that is, categories that track with inherent features of the world, independent of our interests or doings. Einstein, the physicist, is capitalized; einsteinium, the element, is not.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

In deciding on a styling, fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors generally fall back on a pair of considerations. The first is broad adherence to a general rule—like, say, the Chicago Manual of Style’s (§8.38) edict that “Names of ethnic and national groups are capitalized.” (Though Chicago still generally mandates lowercasing both black and white, it does include the proviso that the rule can be suspended if “a particular author or publisher prefers otherwise.”) The second thing we look for is attestation. In this case, it’s instructive to turn not to the largely lilywhite mainstream press (nor to the style guides that govern their renderings), but to writers of color and to alternative stylebooks. The Diversity Style Guide (2019), produced by Rachele Kanigel in consultation with some fifty journalists and experts, takes it as a given that Black ought to be capitalized. Sarah Glover, a past president of the National Association of Black Journalists, wrote in a recent piece for the New York Amsterdam News, a historically Black weekly, that “capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities.” After all, she pointed out, “We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.” 

The summer of 2020 was a turning point for many style manuals—and the capitalization of the word Black is now the norm.

Generally, style guides, which set language conventions for specific groups and/or professions, are not quick to change. Many years can pass between new editions, in fact, and there can be contentious discussions among these language arbiters on things as simple as whether to hyphenate email.

[Adam D.K. King, 7-15-2022, "Degrowth Isn’t The Right Way Out Of The Climate Crisis," Maple, ] WL

As thinkers and activists on the left attempt to address the climate crisis, there has been a vigorous debate in recent years over the merits of something called “degrowth” — the basic idea that in order to meet the challenges of global climate change, our economies must shrink. For example, the pages of the New Left Review hosted one such instance of this debate between proponents of degrowth and champions of the Green New Deal. While the latter are concerned with a revived social democratic program to make the necessary public investments to achieve energy transition and environmental sustainability, the former articulate their program as much more radical and concerned with ending the profit motive and economic growth. Some degrowth advocates even claim that plans like the Green New Deal are simply ‘green capitalism,’ leaving the overall imperatives of profit and growth in place, and thus undermining the purpose of shifting to a green economy. As Kelsey Piper aptly summarized in Vox, degrowth imagines that, “The only solution […] is an extreme transformation of our way of life — a transition away from treating economic growth as a policy priority to an acceptance of shrinking GDP as a prerequisite to saving the planet.” It can at times be difficult to nail down exactly what is meant by “degrowth,” as proponents use a variety of terms and measures to argue for their versions of green transformation or economic contraction. However, a central claim among most degrowthers is that GDP growth has become disconnected from improvements in human wellbeing. A few years ago, the economist Branko Milanović engaged in an online debate with degrowther Jason Hickel. The exchange revolved, to a large extent, on precisely this issue of the relationship between growth and wellbeing. (To follow the debate, read here, here, here and here.) For Milanović, who has spent much of his career studying global inequality, the primary problem with degrowth as an economic agenda is that its advocates fail to appreciate just how poor much of the world remains. Consequently, they underestimate the amount of misery that would be imposed by halting GDP growth, and then either freezing incomes or attempting to redistribute them to some “global average.” According to Milanović’s calculations, even to let the incomes of the 90 per cent of the world population who currently live below the median income in developed countries rise to that latter level would require more than two and a half times current global GDP. (Keep in mind, also, that this is based on a scenario where the world population doesn’t grow. If it does, which it will, this means that average income must drop accordingly.) In more recent work, Milanović has characterized degrowth as a form of magical thinking that refuses to contend with the consequences for the world’s poor — including poor people in rich countries — of radically contracting world GDP. According to Milanović, degrowthers must accept one of two prospects: either the present income distribution is frozen as GDP ceases to grow, which leaves 10 to 15 per cent of the world’s population in absolute poverty, or a radical redistribution of income would have to take place, so large in fact that for every person to reach a global average of $16 per day, the entire population of North America and Western Europe would have to see a decline in income. As Milanović summarizes: “Degrowthers thus need to convince 86 per cent of the population living in rich countries that their incomes are too high and need to be reduced.” Engaging in this type of redistribution while holding GDP constant, let alone shrinking it, would require imposing economic depression for a decade or more, and then, ostensibly, holding the resultant level of incomes steady indefinitely. While GDP is by no means a perfect measure of social welfare or quality of life — a country with lower per capita GDP may achieve relatively better social outcomes, for example — the overall wealth of a country is a good predictor of how well-off the population can expect to be. Indeed, apart from the outlier of the United States, the robustness of social welfare states is strongly correlated with GDP per capita. A country like Cuba has been able to achieve quite remarkable public health with limited resources and wealth, which ought to be celebrated and learned from. But such lone examples don’t trouble the overall trend: the poorer the country, the worse off its population tends to be on all dimensions, including education, health, welfare, etc. Hickel, who is the author of Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, has countered that nations may score quite high on education, employment, social support and life satisfaction at lower per capita incomes, according to him as low as $10,000 per year. While Hickel is certainly correct that global inequality prevents the world from achieving much better social outcomes (the richest 5 per cent of the global population capture about half of world GDP, he tells us), his estimates for what an acceptable average per capita income looks like seem truly bizarre, and are unlikely to be politically palatable to the vast majority of people in the West. There’s also an ongoing debate concerning whether emissions can be “decoupled” from growth. In other words, is “green growth” possible? According to Hickel, the consensus is that decoupling emissions from GDP is possible, but only over a much longer time horizon than we have to keep global temperatures under 1.5 or 2 C. In his estimation then, more immediate energy use reduction is required, which will necessarily entail degrowth. Along these lines, degrowthers will object that their political project is not necessarily about reducing GDP per se, but rather about diminishing what they refer to as “energy throughput,” i.e. resource and energy use. They claim that this will likely reduce GDP as a result, but that this is a byproduct of reducing energy use, not the primary object. As a variation on this theme, some will argue that overall growth isn’t important because what matters is that green industries are growing and resource-intensive industries are shrinking. It’s for this reason, the argument goes, that degrowth would be distinct from a recession: During a recession the economy as a whole contracts, whereas a process of degrowth would be planned and targeted to shrink the most environmentally harmful industries. The latter claim, while technically plausible, obfuscates the central problem: it does in fact matter quite a lot whether or not the overall economy is growing or in recession/depression, not just because capitalists want to earn a profit, but because economic contractions hit workers the hardest. Just because your economic contraction is directed at particular sectors doesn’t change the fact that if overall growth is shrinking, we’re in a recession and the consequences for the poorest could be devastating if sustained over time. There’s no question that capitalism is wasteful and often extremely inefficient at meeting human needs. Any politically feasible path to environmental sustainability will have to contend with both capitalism’s waste and its preventing people from accessing the services and resources they need to live healthy and meaningful lives. However, allowing or even pursuing economic contraction is no path to win workers to the climate cause. Moreover, without being hyperbolic, it’s difficult to imagine a planned program of degrowth being implemented without some revolutionary change of government — a prospect that, while many might pine for it, is unlikely. All those who are concerned about the existential threat of climate change must think about how to work and live differently. We need to tax carbon-intensive industries and goods, which the rich consume far more of, and plan for a green and just transition to environmentally-friendly production. As Matt Huber argues, a class-based strategy that raises the material well-being of the working class is needed to win a just transition in the first place. Advocating degrowth and trying to convince workers in the West that they must undergo extreme austerity and immiseration is hardly a path to achieving this.