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Off the Top of My Head

Competition Leads to the Proliferation of Redundant Commodities. Cooperation is Necessary to Deal with Global Warming

by John Lawrence

Private enterprise fueled by competition is a great mechanism for creating products which can be sold in the market place to consumers. This has worked wonders for economies both in the western world and in China where private enterprise brought 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years, the largest reduction in poverty in world history. This was accomplished by private enterprise at the local level not by communism at the national level. However, private enterprise, while good at creating products to be sold in the market place, is not good at global cooperation which is what is needed to solve the problem of climate change let along create world peace. The problem of cooperation on a multi state level has not been solved let alone hardly addressed with the result that human society is hastening down the path to its own destruction, meanwhile trying to proliferate the sale of gadgets and the making of money and the regaling of competition as the solution to the world's problems. It's not. Unless national societies can learn to cooperate, the destruction of the earth's ecosystems necessary for human and animal well being is assured. While giving lip service to reducing the effects of climate change, no politician anywhere in the world wants to contemplate the fact that national GDPs might actually have to be reduced in order to reorient human energy and natural resources to the most important job of saving the planetary environment so that humans can safely live in it. Last year, 2023, was the hottest year on record and the year in which the most carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere, just the opposite of the necessary conditions to save the planet for human habitation on a long term basis.

Meanwhile, advertising is supercharging the hawking of relatively worthless redundant products to individual consumers. Bolstered by the upcoming presidential election and attention-grabbing sporting events such as the Olympics, the U.S. will account for almost a third of the total ad spend, rising 2.2% to $303.6 billion in 2023 and 7.6% to $326.7 billion in 2024. Lingering macroeconomic concerns are not expected to hold back ad spending in 2024 amid a confluence of attention-grabbing events. Global ad spending is on track to top $1T for the first time, WARC (the World Advertising Research Center) says. Five companies — Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance and Meta — will attract 50.7% of global spending in 2023 and 51.9% in 2024. Their ad revenues are expected to increase by 9.1% in 2023 and by 10.7% in 2024, while the rest of the industry remains stagnant. “High interest rates, spiralling inflation, military conflict and natural disasters have made for a bitter cocktail over the preceding 12 months, but the latest earnings season shows that the ad market has withstood this turbulence and has now turned a corner,” said James McDonald, director of data, intelligence and forecasting for WARC, in a release. “With the establishment of retail media as an effective advertising channel, the advent of connected TV as the next evolution of conventional video consumption, and the continued growth of social media and search, we are seeing once again the value advertisers place in leveraging first-party data to target the right message to the right person at the right time,” McDonald continued. WARC’s forecast suggests social media will account for $227.2 billion of ad spending in 2024, more than a fifth (21.8%) of the total spend. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp and controls almost two-thirds of the social media market, can expect to see more than $146 billion in ad revenue, followed by TikTok owner ByteDance, which will see just under $40 billion in ad revenue (equating to a 17.6% share). It is to be noted that Meta does not produce one product necessary for human survival.

The force feeding of products to individual consumers is reminiscent of the force feeding of ducks to produce foie gras. It's relentless. United States Private Consumption accounted for 67.5 % of its Nominal GDP in Sep 2023. In other words without private consumption of individual consumer oriented products, the US GDP would hardly exist. Yet for the world to get climate change under control, it must reduce private consumption and individual competion for sales to consumers and redirect these resources to combating climate change. Instead human beings prefer actual combat and competition among nations to the global cooperation and cooperation between nations and the national efforts required to get climate change under control. It's a different mindset than the mindset that competition to sell products in the market place in order to get rich engenders. 2023 was the hottest on record by a long shot. Europe’s top climate agency released data showing 2023 global temperatures averaged 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Record-high temperatures are expected to continue this year. The planet didn't just set a new global annual heat record. It shattered previous records.

Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are projected to reach a record 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, an increase of 1.1% over 2022, according to an annual report by the Global Carbon Project. While emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) are declining in some regions including Europe and the United States, they continue to rise overall, the authors said, adding that global action to reduce fossil fuel consumption is not happening fast enough to prevent dangerous impacts from climate change. The steep reductions that are urgently needed to meet global climate targets have yet to emerge, said Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who led the study. Atmospheric CO₂ in 2023 will likely reach 419.2 ppm, 51% above pre-industrial levels. Remember when countless scientists, climate experts, and governments officials agreed that 350 ppm was the “safe” level of carbon dioxide?

So the handwriting is on the wall. Far from an all hands on deck effort to prevent climate change so that future generations can live in peace and comfort on planet earth, global competition in both the commercial and military realms is the preferred and ongoing mode of human behavior, climate change and global warming be damned. Hey, humans seemingly say, we'll get around to preventing climate change just as soon as we win this war. Human greed and the competition among greedy individual participants is a far greater force than altruistic human cooperation to do what's right by future generations. Greed has outpaced morality in the competition for individual accumulation of economic and financial resources. The cooperation and sacrifice that the world saw in the 1930s and 40s to win the Second World War is nowhere to be found today. The US is still preoccupied with individual consumption and especially in entertainment venues which contribute nothing to the effort to make the world safe in terms of climate change. Instead of making the world safe for democracy we must change the paradigm to making the world safe and habitable for future generations by an all hands on deck effort to prevent global warming, an effort, objectively speaking, that seems doomed for failure unless our collective mindsets somehow find a way to change. By the way, U.S. oil production reached a record high of over 13 million barrels per day in September 2023, surpassing all other countries.

Off the Top of My Head

All Those Americans Who Didn't Have $400 to Cover an Emergency Now in Food Lines

by John Lawrence, April 17, 2020

If you don't have $400 to cover an emergency, you sure don't have enough money to cover a pandemic. Ten thousand cars waited hours in line for emergency food assistance in San Antonio last week. Meanwhile lawmakers are deadlocked over a bill to create more money for small businesses. Democrats want money also for hospitals and states and local governments. Governor Cuomo has stated that New York state is totally broke, and expenses are only increasing. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulkner announced that there would be a $250 million budget shortfall which would be partly made up by laying off city employees. San Diego relies on the tourist industry and the Tax on Transiency (TOT taxes) which are collected by the hotels. Right now tourists are staying home and self-isolating.

Almost 40% of American adults wouldn't be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that they could quickly pay off according to the Federal Reserve's "Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018" published in May 2019. This gem is from the report's executive summary:

Results from the survey show that many adults are financially vulnerable and would have difficulty handling an emergency expense as small as $400. In addition, volatile income and low savings can turn common experiences—such as waiting a few days for a bank deposit to be available—into a problem for some. At the same time, there is evidence of coping strategies, such as supplementing income through gig work and seeking financial support from family members.

If waiting a few days for a bank deposit to be available creates a hardship, how much of a hardship must it be to lose your job and not know where your next meal is coming from with a pandemic going on for months. Even though Americans, as many as 40%, have little or no savings, they are encouraged to go out and spend, spend, spend. Maybe the government should run ads encouraging Americans to save, save, save. Most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, yet they are encouraged by all the propaganda on TV to buy more stuff. It's practically a criminal enterprise, and yet consumer spending comprises 70% of GDP. There is no incentive for Americans to save. Banks are paying zero interest and threatening  to go to negative interest rates. That means you would be encouraged to spend your money at an even greater rate or put it in the stock market. The Federal Reserve will do whatever it takes to prop up the stock market because, if it tanked, the 50% of Americans that have 401ks would see all their accumulated wealth go down the drain. The government has a vested interest in seeing that that does not happen.

The function of the Federal Reserve used to be "to take the punch bowl away just as the party got started." Otherwise, the economy would overheat and inflation would take off. Now the last thing they're worried about is inflation. They pump as much money into the economy as necessary to keep the economy going, and, since consumers are the main engine in energizing the economy, the Fed is suddenly concerned about consumers. But consumers don't have huge amounts of reserves, and neither do small businesses which provide about 50% of the jobs. So the Fed's job now is to just keep pumping more punch into the punch bowl. Inflation is not a problem any more since unions don't have the power to demand higher wages as they used to do. The union movement has been incapacitated by corporations which have moved jobs to China and elsewhere - wherever they could get the cheapest labor.

In the 2008 Great Recession it was banks, not consumers, that needed a bailout. Most consumers did not lose their jobs so they could continue to consume, and the Fed as well as the Federal government ignored the plight of Americans who lost their homes since there weren't that many of them comparatively. Now it's a different story. Banks are flush, and vast hordes of people are wondering where their next meal is coming from and when the pandemic will be over.

'There Is Genuine Panic': Fears of Global Financial Meltdown as Human Toll of Coronavirus Grows

Published on Monday, March 09, 2020

by Common Dreams

President Donald Trump described as "the worst person to be in charge in this moment" as the number of known coronavirus cases in the U.S. topped 500 over the weekend.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

46 Comments

Traders work the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March 5, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

Fears of a financial meltdown at least on the scale of the 2008 crisis intensified Monday as global markets were gripped by panic resulting from the spread of the coronavirus across the globe and the ensuing oil price war launched by Saudi Arabia over the weekend.

"The fear today is about a global recession," said Thomas Hayes, chairman of management firm Great Hill Capital, as markets headed for their worst day since the 2008 crash.

"Trump won't let people infected off of a cruise ship and into quarantine because he likes 'the numbers being where they are.' He'd rather keep the numbers down than help these folks. This is literally the worst person to be in charge in this moment."
—Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone

As the Washington Post reported Monday morning: "U.S. futures pointed to heavy losses on Wall Street on Monday. Overseas, London's FTSE 100 fell more than 8 percent to its lowest in three years; Japan’s Nikkei index slumped more than 5 percent and Australia's benchmark shed more than 7 percent. Oil prices suffered the sharpest plunge since the 1991 Gulf War, while 10-year U.S. bond yields dropped to a record low as investors sought safety."

While some urged caution in interpreting the meaning of daily market fluctuations, analysts said there is reason to fear that destructive economic crisis is on the horizon. Chris Weston, head of research at the Melbourne-based web trading platform Pepperstone, told The Guardian that "there is genuine panic" in the market, noting that he hasn't "seen anything like this for years."

Escalating market turbulence and warnings of a worldwide economic fallout came as the human toll of the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, continued to grow. In the United States, the number of recorded cases surpassed 500 across 34 states and deaths rose to 22 as the Trump administration's lack of preparedness was on full display Sunday morning.

Asked about the White House's plan for the 3,500 passengers and crew members aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship—which is set to dock Monday at the Port of Oakland after 21 people on the vessel tested positive for COVID-19—U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson insisted that "the plan will be in place."

Pressed to elaborate, Carson admitted the plan "hasn't been fully formulated."

STEPHANOPOULOS: The Grand Princess is docking tomorrow. What's the plan for the 3,500 people on board?

BEN CARSON: They're coming up with one

S: It docks tomorrow

C: The plan will be in place

S: Shouldn't you be able to say what it is?

C: It hasn't been fully formulated pic.twitter.com/J717Q7q0DG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2020

U.S. President Donald Trump, for his part, told reporters Friday that he would prefer that the passengers remain aboard the Grand Princess because he doesn't want "to have the numbers double because of one ship," referring to the number of known coronaviruses cases in the United States.

"This is 25th Amendment stuff," tweeted Jamil Smith, senior writer for Rolling Stone. "Trump won't let people infected off of a cruise ship and into quarantine because he likes 'the numbers being where they are.' He'd rather keep the numbers down than help these folks. This is literally the worst person to be in charge in this moment."

Trump's remarks came just hours after the president falsely claimed that his administration "stopped" the spread of coronavirus in the U.S.

"The [coronavirus] tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. This was not a perfect as that, but pretty good." -- is Trump referring to the transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian president here? pic.twitter.com/FU5XxPTu7Z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

Meanwhile, Italy on Sunday ordered what the New York Times described as "an unprecedented peacetime lockdown of its wealthiest region," restricting movement for as much as a quarter of the country's population as the country struggled to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

"The Italian outbreak—the worst outside Asia—has inflicted serious damage on one of Europe's most fragile economies and prompted the closing of Italy's schools," the Times reported. "The country's cases nearly tripled from about 2,500 infections on Wednesday to more than 7,375 on Sunday. Deaths rose to 366."

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Off the Top of My Head

The Changes Needed in the Composition of GDP

by John Lawrence

The four components of GDP are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Right now personal consumption is 70% of GDP in the US. Business investment is 18%. Most businesses are buying back their stock rather than investing in manufacturing or R&D. Government spending is 17%. More than 60% is military spending. Net exports were -5% since imports (18%) were greater than exports (13%). This represents an oil based economy heavy on fossil fuel pollution. What needs to happen to fend off global warming is a reduction in personal consumption especially in those aspects that are high in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions such as automobile, airplane and cruise ship travel. Government needs to increase its spending in areas of infrastructure rebuilding and spending on renewable energy systems while reducing military spending which is highly GHG contributing as well.

Businesses need to be encouraged to manufacture here in the US instead of importing everything from China and elsewhere because cargo ships are highly polluting. Businesses which help solve the climate change dilemma need to be encouraged while high polluters need to be reined in. We need to become more like Europe where personal consumption is only 54% of GDP. In Europe government spending is 46.5% of GDP. Of this spending on defense amounted to 1.2 % of GDP in 2018. Contrast this with the 60% that the US spends on defense, and you see the difference between a highly militarized nation that has no money to spend on infrastructure much less a Green New Deal and a group of countries that spends more of its money on the welfare of its citizens. Trump has been agitating to get European countries to spend 2% on defense. This would still mean that the US would be spending 30 times as much.

If Bernie Sanders wins the election for President of the US, we can expect radical changes in the current composition of GDP. Certain items of personal consumption need to be reduced, namely combustion engine car travel. The infrastructure for electric automobiles needs to be built out. Government subsidies need to be given to electric car purchasers. Mass transit needs to be built out and encouraged. Military expenditures need to be reduced both to promote peace in the world and so that the money can be freed up for more constructive purposes. Coal fired electric power generating plants need to be replaced with renewable energy electric power generating plants. Frivolous personal consumption needs to be discouraged while consumption based on human needs for all people should be encouraged especially affordable housing, nutritious non-industrialized food production which is affordable for all and universal health care like Europe has.

In short we need to become more like Europe with a reduced military empire and an increased build out of green infrastructure based on renewable energy. Bernie Sanders represents this kind of change for America - a government which invests in its people and takes radical steps to mitigate global warming.

'Everything Is Not Fine': Nobel Economist Calls on Humanity to End Obsession With GDP

Monday, November 25, 2019 by Common Dreams

 

"If we measure the wrong thing," warns Joseph Stiglitz, "we will do the wrong thing."

 

Jon Queally, staff writer

 32 Comments

"It should be clear that, in spite of the increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us, everything is not fine," writes economist Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. (Photo: Local Future Project)

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is warning the world that unless the obsession many world leaders have with gross national product (GDP) comes to end, there will be little chance of adequately fighting back against the triple-threat of climate destruction, the scourge of financial inequality, and the crises of democracy now being felt around the globe.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Guardian, Stiglitz says that these interrelated crises of environmental degradation and human suffering have solidified in his mind the idea that  "something is fundamentally wrong with the way we assess economic performance and social progress."

"Something is fundamentally wrong with the way we assess economic performance and social progress."—Joseph StiglitzDefining GDP as "the sum of the value of goods and services produced within a country over a given period," Stiglitz points to the financial crash of 2008—and the so-called "recovery" which has taken place in the decade since—as evidence that the widely-used measurement is not up to the task of providing an accurate assessment of the economy, let alone the state of the world or the people living in it.

"It should be clear that, in spite of the increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us, everything is not fine," writes Stiglitz. "We see this in the political discontent rippling through so many advanced countries; we see it in the widespread support of demagogues, whose successes depend on exploiting economic discontent; and we see it in the environment around us, where fires rage and floods and droughts occur at ever-increasing intervals."

A central argument of his new book—co-authored by fellow economists Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Martine Durand and titled "Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being"—Stiglitz says that studying the last ten years of the global economy has showed him with increasing clarity why governments "can and should go well beyond GDP," especially with the climate crisis knocking down the planet's door. He writes:

If our economy seems to be growing but that growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources, our statistics should warn us. But because GDP didn't include resource depletion and environmental degradation, we typically get an excessively rosy picture.

These concerns have now been brought to the fore with the climate crisis. It has been three decades since the threat of climate change was first widely recognized, and matters have grown worse faster than initially expected. There have been more extreme events, greater melting of glaciers and greater natural habitat destruction.

Everything is not fine, Stiglitz argues, but says economists have been working hard on providing new ways to measure economic health. Embraced more broadly, new economic measures that include accounting for human happiness and environmental well-being could help change the course of humanity.

As he notes in the op-ed, "If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing."

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Off the Top of My Head

Gross Domestic Product is Not a Good Measure of Economic Health Any More

by John Lawrence, November 26, 2019

Trying to maximize GDP is what's destroying the environment and will kill planet earth from global warming. Capitalism is insistent on growing the economy. Wall Street insists on short term growth or your corporation will be downrated. The only valid criterion is stock market value and return to shareholders. This mentality supports pollution, resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions and increasing inequality. What is needed is an economy which values the well being of all people and a respect for the health of the planet rather than the depletion thereof. Growth in and of itself is not what's needed; steady state sustainability is much more important in this stage of human evolution. The unlimited despoiling of the environment and production of unrecyclable and unremitting waste can no longer be acceptable.

GDP does NOT measure: 1. health, 2. infant mortality, 3. morbidity, 4. suicide rates, 5. crime, 6. poverty,
7. environmental health/decay and destruction of the natural environment, 8. infrastructure such as highways and bridges, 9. family breakdown, 10. loss of leisure time, 11. cost of commuting to work, 12. lack of civility in communities, 13. lack of concern for future generations, 14. income gap (women/men; poor/wealthy)

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) attempts to shift the prevailing definition of progress from economic growth to people's sense of quality of their lives. The GPI assigns value to the life-sustaining functions of households, communities and the natural environment so that the destruction of these, and their replacement with commoditized substitutes, no longer appears as growth and gain. Quality of life has deteriorated at an accelerating rate since 1970 - the GPI went down as the GDP went up in the US.

Insistence on "the American Way of Life" is insistence that things will remain the same even as extreme weather events become more and more common and even though many areas of the earth will become uninhabitable within a very short time. This will lead to mass migrations and more war as nations that are inhabitable fight to keep the migrants out. Consumption is 70% of GDP, and increased consumption is what is driving global warming. If the US and other mass consumption cultures cannot find a way to bring into being a sustainable economy which is environmentally viable, global warming which is directly tied to the pursuit of increased GDP will make the generation which will leave the earth within the next few years, namely the baby boomers, the last generation to enjoy "the American Way of Life."

Despite warnings from scientists and activists, global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing according to a new UN report with the US and China being the chief culprits. "There is no sign of [greenhouse gas] emissions peaking in the next few years," the authors write. Every year that emissions continue to increase "means that deeper and faster cuts will be required" to keep Earth from warming more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

We're Addicted to Economic Growth and It Will Be the Death of Us

From Post Carbon Institute    By Asher Miller, Rob Hopkins October 2, 2013

The idea that economies must keep growing is an underlying cause of the climate crisis.      

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

The following is excerpted from the new report,Climate After Growth: Why Environmentalists Must Embrace Post-Growth Economics and Community Resilience by Post Carbon Institute and Transition Network.

On November 14, 2012, just days after his re-election and two weeks after Hurricane Sandy flooded New York City, President Obama was asked by the New York Times about climate policy, specifically the possibility of a carbon tax:

I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don't think anybody is going to go for that. I won't go for that.

This short statement reveals the raw political calculus that prevents the Obama Administration--and really, most every national and international political body--from meaningfully addressing the climate crisis. Obama's comments reflect the underlying assumptions of politicians on both sides of the aisle (at least those who recognize that there is a climate problem) and conventional thinking across virtually all sectors of society.

The benefits of--and need for--economic growth are so widely assumed that they are hardly ever debated. And yet, maintaining perpetual growth on a finite planet is impossible--logically, physically, and yes, economically. Nevertheless, our Western way of life seems to depend on a shared belief in economic growth. And so most politicians, economists, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens continue to prop up this irrational view.

In our view, President Obama's widely shared judgment that addressing the climate crisis is secondary to getting "back to normal" is wrongheaded--not only because it implicitly underestimates the severity of the climate crisis, but also because it presupposes that the old economic "normal" can be revived. In fact, the "normal" of robust economic growth is gone and won't return, at least in the long term (as we'll show in this paper). But without recognition of that fact, and without a viable alternative to the growth paradigm, significant progress in climate policy is highly unlikely. And without climate policy, we are headed toward global catastrophe.

The environmental community recognizes that truly meaningful national and international climate policy solutions are currently politically infeasible. But the source of the intransigence is often attributed to political partisanship and the corruptive influence of moneyed interests--most notably the fossil fuel industry, which has used lobbying, campaign contributions, massive advertising, and similar tactics to shift public perceptions and exert political influence.

Therefore, the strategies employed by many in the organized climate movement (particularly after painful failures in 2009 and 2010, at COP15 in Copenhagen and the US Senate) have centered on pursuing state and regional policies, and on growing a citizen movement to stand in vocal, active opposition to the fossil fuel industry. On both these fronts the environmental community has accomplished a lot.

But the growth imperative is the underlying cause of the climate crisis. As long as the climate movement leaves it unchallenged, meaningful climate policy won't come until it's too late, if at all. If we (politicians, businesspeople, environmentalists, and ordinary citizens alike) continue to prioritize growth above all else, we will refuse to do what is required to address the climate crisis--which is to cut fossil fuel use dramatically. To put it plainly, we're hooked on economic growth and economic growth is hooked on cheap fossil fuels.

Cheap fossil fuels--particularly oil--grease the wheels of our globalized, consumerism-based economy. Of course, we must correctly price fossil fuels (internalizing their environmental costs instead of externalizing to other sectors of the economy and future generations), and we must concurrently commit to a massive build-out of renewable energy production and embrace energy efficiency. But it is difficult to imagine accomplishing this without a reduction in that pillar of conventional economic thinking--Gross Domestic Product (GDP)--in at least the OECD nations.

The good and bad news is that the growth paradigm is already in its death throes thanks to fundamental changes occurring in the very systems (energy, climate, and economy) that have supported it for the last century. The transition to a new paradigm will be challenging, but the sooner we act the better chance we have of managing it. Thankfully, models are already emerging for making our communities healthy, vibrant, and resilient without the need for perpetual economic growth.

In this paper we argue why the changes taking place in our energy, climate, and economic systems constitute a new (post-growth) "normal" and why a different kind of growth is absolutely critical to addressing the climate crisis: the growth of smallscale, local efforts aimed at responding to these changes by building community resilience.

The New Normals

We have entered an era of "new normals" not only in our economy, but in our energy and climate systems, as well. The implications are profound:

The New Energy Normal. The era of cheap and easy fossil fuels is over, leading the industry to resort to extreme fossil fuel resources (tar sands, mountaintop removal coal mining, shale gas, tight oil, and deepwater oil) to meet demand. Unfortunately, these resources come with enormous environmental and economic costs, and in most instances provide far less net energy to the rest of society. They also require much higher prices to make production worthwhile, creating a drag effect on the economy. As a result, high energy prices and economic contraction are likely to continue a back-and-forth dance in the coming years.

The New Climate Normal. Climate stability is now a thing of the past. As extreme weather events grow in severity, communities are increasingly adopting strategies that build resilience against the effect of these and other climate shocks. At the same time, we must take dramatic steps if we hope to avoid raising global temperatures more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, this would require a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions per year, starting now -- a rate so significant that it can only be achieved through dramatic reductions in energy use.

The New Economic Normal. We've reached the end of economic growth as we've known it in the US. Despite unprecedented interventions on the part of central banks and governments, the so-called economic recovery in the US and Europe has been anemic and has failed to benefit the majority of citizens. The debate between stimulus and austerity is a distraction, as neither can fully address the factors that spell the end of economic growth the end of the age of cheap oil, the vast mountains of debt that we have incurred, the diminishing economic impacts of new technologies, and the snowballing costs of climate change impacts.

These fundamental changes in our energy, climate, and economic systems require unprecedented (and previously politically untenable) strategies. Yet this new reality is still largely unrecognized. As long as our leaders' predominant focus remains on getting back to the days of robust economic growth, no national or international climate policies will be enacted to do what is required: cut fossil fuel use dramatically.

Instead of focusing on achieving climate policy within the economic growth paradigm, the US environmental community must embrace strategies that are appropriate to these "new normals."

Responding to each of these new energy, climate, and economic "normals"  will require one common strategy: building community resilience. Efforts that build community resilience enhance our ability to navigate the energy, climate, and economic crises of the 21st century. Done right, they can also serve as the foundation of a whole new economy -- an economy comprised of people and communities that thrive within the real limits of our beautiful but finite planet.

Thankfully, innovations that build community resilience are cropping up everywhere, and in many forms: community-owned, distributed, renewable energy production; sustainable local food systems; new cooperative business models; sharing economies, re-skilling, and more. While relatively small and inherently local, these projects are spreading rapidly and creating tangible impacts.

Growing the community resilience movement to the national and global scale that s needed will require the full support and participation of the US environmental community. Specifically we need to:

• build the capacity of groups -- large and small -- who are leading these efforts;
• support the growth of a global learning network; and
• enable local investments to flow into community resilience enterprises.

By making community resilience a top priority, environmentalists can offer an alternative to the "growth at all costs" story, one in which taking control of our basic needs locally has multiple benefits. Community resiliencebuilding can create new enterprises and meaningful work, and increase well-being even as GDP inevitably falters.

It can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels, while addressing social and economic inequities. And it can strengthen the social cohesion necessary to withstand periods of crisis.

On their own, community resilience projects can't overcome all the environmental, energy, economic, and social equity challenges facing us. That will require coordinated global, national, regional, community, business, neighborhood, household and individual efforts. But the community resilience movement can help create the conditions in which what is now "politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

How the environmental community responds to the risks and opportunities of the new energy, climate, and economic "normals" will make an enormous difference in its success, and in the fate of humankind.

Read the full report at Post Carbon Institute.

Asher Miller is executive director of Post Carbon Institute.

Rob Hopkins is the originator of the Transition concepts and co-founder of the Transition Network.

A Better Plan Than 'Endless Growth': Enough Is Enough

Published on Monday, February 25, 2013 by Common Dreams

by  Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill

The World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland last month.  The official theme was "Resilient Dynamism," a catchphrase that makes about as much sense as the futureless economic policies trotted out at the meeting.  At least the attendees had something to ponder at cocktail hour. The mission of the forum, on paper at least, is "improving the state of the world."  And there is clear room for improvement: trillions of dollars of public debt, billions of people living in poverty, escalating unemployment, and a distinct possibility of runaway climate change.

The popular solution to these problems is sustained economic growth.  In fact, the first item of the Davos meeting's global agenda was "how to get the global economy back on to a path of stable growth and higher employment"  The thinking is that if we could just get people to produce and consume more stuff, then we could also pay off the debt, create jobs, eradicate poverty, and maybe even have some money left over to clean up the environment.

It's tempting to believe this economic fairy tale.  But if growth is the cure to all of our ills, why are we in such a bind after sixty years of it?  Even though the U.S. economy has more than tripled in size since 1950, surveys indicate that people have not become any happier.  Inequality has risen sharply in recent years, and jobs are far from secure.  At the same time, increased economic activity has led to greater resource use, dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and declining biodiversity.  There is now strong evidence that economic growth has become uneconomic in the sense that it costs more than it's worth.

Maybe it's time to consider a new strategy—an economy of enough.  Suppose that instead of chasing after more stuff, more jobs, more consumption, and more income, we aimed for enough stuff, enough jobs, enough consumption, and enough income.

To build a successful economy of enough, we would first need to eliminate the "growth imperative"—factors that make the economy reliant on growth.  These include reliance on inappropriate measures of progress, creation of debt-based money, and the use of aggregate growth as a tool (albeit a blunt one) for generating jobs.  With key policy changes, it is possible to dismantle the growth imperative and build an economy that works for people and the planet.

Let's start with measures of progress.  Our main economic indicator, GDP, is a good measure of economic activity—of money changing hands—but a poor measure of social welfare.  It lumps together desirable expenditures (food, entertainment, and investment in education) with expenditures that we'd rather avoid (war, pollution, and family breakdown).  In the language of economics, GDP does not distinguish between costs and benefits, but counts all economic activity as "progress."

Instead of GDP, we need indicators that measure the things that matter to people, such as health, happiness, and meaningful employment.  We also need indicators that measure what matters to the planet, such as material use and carbon emissions.  In fact, we already have these indicators; the problem is that we largely ignore them, because we are so fixated on GDP.  If the goal of society could be changed from increasing GDP to improving human well-being and preventing long-term environmental damage, then many proposals currently seen as "impossible" would suddenly become possible.

What about jobs?  If we forgot about GDP, would the economy spiral into recession?  The evidence for a relationship between economic growth and job creation is much weaker than you might expect and varies remarkably between countries.  In the U.S., for example, a 3 percent increase in GDP tends to be accompanied by a 1 percent fall in unemployment.  In France, the same amount of GDP growth reduces unemployment by about half a percent.  In Japan, there is no relationship whatsoever.  Clearly it is possible to break the connection between economic growth and unemployment.  We just need the right economic policies.

 

One of these policies is work-time reduction.  Over time, we have become more efficient at producing goods and services, such that it now takes us less time to produce the same amount of stuff as it did a few decades ago.  But instead of using the benefits of technological progress to reduce working time, we have mainly used them to produce and sell more stuff.  This may work in an economy where the goal is more (i.e., continuous growth), but not in one where the goal is enough.  What we can do instead is use the benefits of technological progress to gradually shorten the working day, week, year, and career. Besides increasing leisure time, this would help keep people employed by distributing available work more equally.

Finally, there's the financial system.  Most people don't realize it, but nearly all of our money is created by private banks.  Banks are able to create money because they can issue loans far in excess of their deposits.  This debt-based monetary system drives three things: (1) economic growth, as the need to pay back an ever-increasing amount of debt requires an ever-increasing amount of economic activity, (2) inflation, as the money supply tends to grow faster than the amount of real wealth that's available in the economy, and (3) instability, because if the banks stop lending, the whole house of cards collapses.  If we want to take a stab at the heart of the growth imperative, and also prevent future financial crises, the answer is simple: stop banks from creating money out of thin air, and transfer this power to a public authority.

It's hard to believe that many folks in Davos (or anywhere else, for that matter) came away with a clear understanding of what "Resilient Dynamism" means.  But one thing is certain: an economy founded on perpetual growth has no shot at being resilient.  Maybe we could classify such an economy as dynamic, since it will continue to displace people and communities and erode the life-support systems of the planet.  While the economic elites interpret "Resilient Dynamism" to fit their agenda, perhaps the rest of us should employ some plain language and let them know that enough is enough.

Rob Dietz is the editor of the Daly News, former executive director of CASSE (the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy), and co-author (with Dan O'Neill) of Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources.

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Dan O'Neill is a lecturer in ecological economics at the University of Leeds and the chief economist for CASSE (the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy). He is the co-author (with Rob Dietz) of Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources.