This Changes Everything (16 page)

Another way of thinking about this is that what is needed is a
fundamental reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product. GDP is traditionally understood to consist of
consumption
plus
investment
plus
government spending
plus
net exports
. The free market capitalism of the past three decades has put the emphasis particularly on consumption and trade. But as we remake our economies to stay within our global carbon budget, we need to see less consumption
(except among the poor), less trade (as we relocalize our economies), and less private investment in producing for excessive consumption. These reductions would be offset by increased government spending, and increased public and private investment in the infrastructure and alternatives needed to reduce our emissions to zero. Implicit in all of this is a great deal more redistribution,
so that more of us can live comfortably within the planet’s capacity.

Which is precisely why, when climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not (only) because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.

A great deal of thought in recent years has gone into how reducing our
use of material resources could be managed in ways that actually improve quality of life overall—what the French call “selective degrowth.”
^IV
Policies like luxury taxes could be put in place to discourage wasteful consumption.
⁶²
The money raised could be used to support those parts of our economies that are already low-carbon and therefore do not need to contract. Obviously a huge number of jobs
would be created in the sectors that are part of the green transition—in mass transit, renewable energy, weatherization, and ecosystem restoration. And those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impact (such
as the caregiving professions, which tend to be occupied by women and people of color and therefore underpaid). “Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages,” Tim Jackson, an economist at the University of Surrey and author of
Prosperity Without Growth,
has written. “In the first place, the time spent by these professions directly improves the quality of our lives.
Making them more and more efficient is not, after a certain point, actually desirable. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour?”
⁶³

There could be other benefits too, like shorter work hours, in part to create more jobs, but also because overworked people have less time to engage in low-consumption activities
like gardening and cooking (because they are just too busy). Indeed, a number of researchers have analyzed the
very concrete climate benefits of working less. John Stutz, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute, envisions that “hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries today.” If countries aimed for
somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.
⁶⁴

Many degrowth and economic justice thinkers also call for the introduction of a basic annual income, a wage given to every person, regardless of income, as a recognition that the system cannot
provide jobs for everyone and that it is counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption. As Alyssa Battistoni, an editor at the journal
Jacobin
, writes, “While making people work shitty jobs to ‘earn’ a living has always been spiteful, it’s now starting to seem suicidal.”
⁶⁵

A basic income that discourages shitty work (and wasteful consumption) would also have the
benefit of providing much-needed economic security in the front-line communities that are being asked to sacrifice their health so that oil companies can refine tar sands oil or gas companies can drill another fracking well. Nobody wants to have their water contaminated or have their kids suffer from asthma. But desperate people can be counted on to do desperate things—which is why we all have
a vested interest in taking care of one another so that many fewer communities are faced with those impossible choices. That means rescuing the idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care, education, food, and clean water. Indeed, fighting inequality on every front and through multiple means must be understood as a central strategy in the battle against climate
change.

This kind of carefully planned economy holds out the possibility of much more humane, fulfilling lifestyles than the vast majority of us are experiencing under our current system, which is what makes the idea of a massive social movement coalescing behind such demands a real possibility. But these policies are also the most politically challenging.

Unlike encouraging energy efficiency,
the measures we must take to secure a just, equitable, and inspiring transition away from fossil fuels clash directly with our reigning economic orthodoxy at every level. As we will
see, such a shift breaks all the ideological rules—it requires visionary long-term planning, tough regulation of business, higher levels of taxation for the affluent, big public sector expenditure, and in many cases
reversals of core privatizations in order to give communities the power to make the changes they desire. In short, it means changing everything about how we think about the economy so that our pollution doesn’t change everything about our physical world.

I
. China has of course emerged as the world’s dominant supplier of inexpensive modules, and in that role has helped to drive dramatic drops
in solar prices. It has also flooded the market with cheap panels in recent years, contributing to a global oversupply that has outpaced demand.

II
. And they don’t let developing countries like China and India off the hook. According to their projections, developing countries can have just one more decade to continue to increase their emissions to aid their efforts to pull themselves out of poverty
while switching over to green energy sources. By 2025, they would need to be cutting emissions “at an unprecedented 7 per cent” a year as well.

III
. A law passed by the European Parliament that would require that all cell phone manufacturers offer a common battery charger is a small step in the right direction. Similarly, requiring that electronics manufacturers use recycled metals like copper
could save a great many communities from one of the most toxic mining processes in the world.

IV
. In French, “decroissance” has the double meaning of challenging both growth,
croissance
, and
croire,
to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

“We have no option but to reinvent mobility . . . much of India still takes the bus, walks or cycles—in many cities as much as 20 percent of the population bikes. We do this because we are poor. Now the challenge is to reinvent city planning so that we can do this as we become rich.”

—Sunita Narain, director general,
Centre for Science and Environment, 2013
¹

“The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’s bombing-planes.”

—
George Orwell,
The Lion and the Unicorn
, 1941
²

It was a tight vote but on September 22, 2013, residents of Germany’s second largest city decided to take their power back. On that day, 50.9 percent of Hamburg’s voters cast their ballots in favor of
putting their electricity, gas, and heating grids under the control of the city, reversing a wave of corporate sell-offs that took place over a decade earlier.
³

It’s a process that has been given a few clunky names, including “re-municipalization” and “re-communalization.” But the people involved tend to simply refer to their desire for “local power.”

The Our Hamburg–Our Grid coalition made
a series of persuasive arguments in favor of taking back the utilities. A locally controlled energy system would be concerned with public interests, not profits. Residents would have greater democratic say in their energy system, they argued, rather than having the decisions that affect them made in distant boardrooms. And
money earned in the sale of energy would be returned to the city, rather
than lost to the shareholders of multinationals that had control over the grids at the time—a definite plus during a time of relentless public austerity. “For people it’s self-evident that goods on which everybody is dependent should belong to the public,” campaign organizer Wiebke Hansen explained in an interview.
⁴

There was something else driving the campaign as well. Many of Hamburg’s residents
wanted to be part of
Energiewende
: the fast-spreading transition to green, renewable energy that was sweeping the country, with nearly 25 percent of Germany’s electricity in 2013 coming from renewables, dominated by wind and solar but also including some biogas and hydro—up from around 6 percent in 2000. In comparison, wind and solar made up just 4 percent of total U.S. electricity generation
in 2013. The cities of Frankfurt and Munich, which had never sold off their energy grids, had already joined the transition and pledged to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and 2025, respectively. But Hamburg and Berlin, which had both gone the privatization route, were lagging behind. And this was a central argument for proponents of taking back Hamburg’s grid: it would allow them to get
off coal and nuclear and go green.
⁵

Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition—particularly the speed at which it is being achieved, as well as the ambition of its future targets (the country is aiming for 55–60 percent renewables by 2035).
⁶
The weaknesses of the program have also been hotly debated, particularly the question of whether the decision to phase out nuclear
energy has led to a resurgence of coal (more on that next chapter).

In all of this analysis, however, scarce attention has been paid to one key factor that has made possible what may be the world’s most rapid shift to wind and solar power: the fact that in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, citizens have voted to take their energy grids back from the private corporations that purchased
them. As Anna Leidreiter, a climate campaigner with the World Future Council, observed after the Hamburg vote, “This marks a clear reversal to the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, when large numbers of German municipalities sold their public services to large corporations as money was needed to prop up city budgets.”
⁷

Nor is this some small trend. According to a Bloomberg report, “More
than
70 new municipal utilities have started up since 2007, and public operators have taken over more than 200 concessions to run energy grids from private companies in that time.” And though there are no national statistics, the German Association of Local Utilities believes many more cities and towns than that have taken back control over their grids from outside corporations.
⁸

Most surprising has
been the force with which large parts of the German public have turned against energy privatization. In 2013 in Berlin
83 percent
of participating voters cast their ballots in favor of switching to a publicly owned power utility based eventually on 100 percent renewable energy. Not enough people turned out to vote for the decision to be binding (though the campaign came very close), but the referendum
made public opinion so clear that campaigners are still pushing for a nonprofit cooperative to take over the grid when the current contract ends.
⁹

Energy privatization reversals—linked specifically to a desire for renewable energy—have started to spread beyond Germany in recent years, including to the United States. For instance, in the mid-2000s, residents and local officials in the liberal
city of Boulder, Colorado, began lobbying their privatized power utility to move away from coal and toward renewable energy. The company, the Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, wasn’t particularly interested, so a coalition of environmentalists and an energetic youth group called New Era Colorado came to the same conclusion as the voters in Germany: they had to take their grid back. Steve Fenberg of New
Era explains, “We have one of the most carbon-intensive energy supplies in the country, and [Boulder] is an environmentally minded community, and we wanted to change that. We realized that we had no control over that unless we controlled the energy supply.”
¹⁰

In 2011, despite being outspent by Xcel by ten to one, the pro-renewables coalition narrowly won two ballot measures that called on the
city of Boulder to consider buying back its power system.
¹¹
The vote did not immediately put the power utility under public control, but it gave the city the authority and financing to seriously consider the option (which it is currently doing). The coalition won another crucial vote in 2013 against an Xcel-supported initiative that would have blocked the formation of a new public utility, this
time by a wide majority.

These were historic votes: other cities had reversed earlier privatizations because they were unhappy with the quality of the service or the pricing under the private operator. But this was the first time a U.S. city was taking these steps “for the sole purpose of reducing its impact on the planet,” according to Tim Hillman, a Boulder-based environmental engineer. Indeed
the pro–public forces had put fighting climate change front and center in their campaigns, accusing Xcel of being just another fossil fuel company standing in the way of much needed climate action. And according to Fenberg, their vision reaches beyond Boulder. “We want to show the world that you can actually power a city responsibly and not pay a lot for it,” he now says. “We want this to be a
model, not just do this one cool thing for ourselves in our community.”
¹²