After the Virus: Politics and Economics in an Age of Terracide
A long time ago — in a different world, before we retreated into private spaces, before the economy crashed — I read a column in The New York Times, by the mainstream right-wing commentator Bret Stephens. Stephens invited Democrats to “celebrate prosperity.” He wrote that the then-booming Trump economy was not a mirage, did not benefit merely the 1%, and was not the result of President Obama’s policies. Give credit where due, he said; if Democrats want to defeat Trump — as Stephens does — then they need to acknowledge that a strong and growing economy is a great thing. Not doing so “creates the perception that Democrats… are secretly hoping for a downturn… It’s unbecoming. Democrats need a candidate who gets this. They need someone who will work to enlarge our prosperity, not redistribute it.”
If the Coronavirus brings anything good in its wake, I hope it will discredit ideas like this one. Perhaps we will learn that, yes, survival is more important than short- or medium-term economic growth; and that we are in fact capable of undertaking the huge collective effort and sacrifice that will be necessary if our economies are to co-exist with an environment that can support human life. The economic slowdown engendered by the Coronavirus is a good time to pause and think about what kind of recovery we want, what kind of recovery will be sustainable, when we can leave our homes again.
In this context, let’s look at that old, perhaps-only-temporarily vanished world of economic growth that Stephens described.
I’m perfectly willing to concede that while President Obama’s wise economic policies — too many of them blocked or sabotaged by a bloody-minded Republican caucus — pulled us back from the edge of depression and saved the world economy, President Trump’s economy was doing better before the virus hit, even much better; and that this was largely the result of Trump’s policies. Why deny it? If you eliminate as many environmental protection laws and regulations as you can, subsidize major extractive industries with cheap leases on public lands, get rid of the financial regulations that were specifically designed to prevent another Crash of ’08, hand out huge tax breaks to corporations that were already flush with cash, shred expensive social mandates, bust unions, run trillion-dollar Keynesian deficits that act as a socialistic economic stimulus applied to the wrong point in the business cycle, and pressure the Fed to keep interest rates so low that there’s no margin in reserve against an inevitable downturn, I’d surely expect to see the economy grow as a result of those policies.
There’s a reason why previous administrations did not do these things, at least not to this degree. These actions are wildly irresponsible and unsustainable. They are so obviously pulling us toward collapse that they practically advertise their conception by a sociopath past seventy, immune from the consequences of his policies, anxious to trade short-term public adulation for a national and planetary future; and could only have been implemented by those who defend personal interest with invulnerable personal ignorance, or who have by other means been able to escape the overwhelming anxiety that flows from cognitive dissonance.
Here is the reality. Quite aside from the economic instability of the model above, there is an obvious and direct relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth. Since increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are the cause of our present-day anthropogenic climate change, economic growth — and economic activity in general — is a huge driver of climate change. Climate change is here, and will reshape our world in the coming decades. If we act right now, taking drastic measures, we might be able to hold it to a 1.5˚C global change from pre-industrial levels. If we allow the change to go to 2.0˚C, the difference in terms of flooding, food supply, biodiversity loss, thawing of permafrost, rising and dying oceans, and habitable terrain will be catastrophic.
To stay at or below 1.5˚C, we would have to cut fossil fuel use in half in about 15 years, and stop burning fossil fuels almost entirely in 30 years. And this increasingly looks like a best-case scenario; the reality may well be far worse than that — and may involve risk factors for civilizational collapse not previously considered, such as the spread of long-dormant pathogens to which modern humans have no resistance, as they escape from prisons of thawing ice. The Coronavirus pandemic itself — as well as many other current and potential pandemics — is connected to economic growth, which brings human invasion of wild habitats and the attendant harmful consequences.
And it’s all happening far faster than scientists had previously predicted.
We’re not anywhere near on track to staying below 1.5˚C, nor 2.0˚C of warming (even strict global adherence to the 2015 Paris climate agreement — the agreement that the United States has now repudiated — would probably put us above 3.0˚C of warming.) Instead, until the Coronavirus hit, world consumption of fossil fuels and production of emissions had been, unsurprisingly, growing with a growing American and world economy; made worse by an American policy that seems driven by one deeply insecure man’s preoccupation with undoing the work of a much-loved predecessor; and, indeed, the work of all the presidents, of both parties, all of whom were more popular than he is, going back to Theodore Roosevelt.
The roof is caving in, and Trump and his fellow denialists are talking about economic growth as a good thing. They are planning our way back to where we were in January 2020 — full steam ahead.
Once the Coronavirus threat recedes, as it eventually will, would a serious attempt to grapple with the reality of climate change mean that the American economy, and the global economy, will not recover its pre-virus output and wealth? Yes, it would mean this. Even given the economic stimulus of a large and sustained investment in green technology and green jobs, it would be foolish to expect that the comprehensive reordering of national economies and of public life required for the survival of world civilization could be accomplished without great economic pain. Economic activity — and all activity — requires energy. Our energy at present comes from fossil fuels, and while there is some private and state-level entrepreneurial dedication to developing sustainable, renewable energy sources, the world-leading American federal government sees the extraction and burning of cheap fossil fuels as a clear social good, and has no intention of cutting back once the Coronavirus crisis passes.
The plain fact is that we need smaller, simpler, cleaner systems of production, respect for the complex ecosystems and climate systems that support us, and to reduce the human population of our planet (to be clear: I am certainly not advocating the horrendous population control methods that have been attempted in China. A lower population can be achieved — can only be achieved, in fact — non-coercively: through general attrition brought about by education, voluntary non-abortive birth control, and a multi-generational stake in the outcome, without legal mandates or punishment for individual decisions.) Our economies must shrink, or human civilizations, and many hundreds of millions of humans, will die. There simply is no sustainable route back to permanent economic growth — nor to a global economy anywhere near as large as the one we had in January 2020.
It is encouraging that there are now serious economists who are waking up to the obvious fact that permanent growth is both impossible and undesirable on a planet of limited resources — and who are envisioning what a reasonable prosperity might look like in the absence of growth.
Yet Stephens and his fellow proponents of economic growth pretend that economic growth and environmental stability are not contradictory goods; or, making war on basic rationality, insist that an economy is possible without an environment in which to place it; or proclaim that while climate change is real, the national and international governmental leadership that is clearly necessary to save our planet for human habitation would in itself create conditions worse than losing it. Or insist that climate change is merely a minor problem that — as Trump once said of the Coronavirus — will somehow miraculously disappear without any real sacrifice. Or simply say that we are doomed, so climate action is pointless. Assuming that we care about the future of our species and our world, these are all demonstrably delusional positions. They are at odds with the reality of physical law.
The delusion on the political right feeds the terrible political reality of the crisis, a reality that hints at the irreversible political damage that our current government has done and is doing. It was always going to be a hard task to get the American electorate to vote for economic contraction and lower standards of living, to get them to vote against jobs. This will be especially true as we struggle to recover from the Coronavirus, with all its attendant human and economic damage.
And it’s much harder to get people to vote against growth, against jobs, when you tell them that there is no cost to growth — that voting for growth will not, in fact, make the world miserable or uninhabitable for your children and grandchildren.
The populist fairy tale spun by this administration, and by commentators like Bret Stephens, about economic growth as an obvious good thing with no apocalyptic future costs, are making the tasks at hand less politically urgent, and therefore less politically possible. This myth — this lie — aggressively peddled to an uninformed electorate, forces Democrats to dissemble. It is too easy for them to turn towards the dead end of denying the pre-Coronavirus growth in the Trump economy, or of crediting that growth to Obama, thus avoiding the real problem and perpetuating the disconnect between the twinned realities of economic growth and environmental harm.
Democrats have been reduced to doing what Stephens wants them to do: celebrating economic growth, albeit by more equitable means than the Republicans endorse. But this misses the point. Permanent economic growth is not any part of the solution for the post-Coronavirus world.
Democrats (and many Republicans) surely know better. They don’t dare tell us the truth: we are living in an age of terracide. The facts of our situation require us to reexamine every aspect of the way we think about energy, resources, economic activity, and the natural world. It will take government leadership and comprehensive social mobilization, much as defeating the Nazis did — a task that few would now judge to have been unnecessary, although some did at the time.
I will say it clearly: I do hope for a smaller economy, even as we should be racing (with a massive, government-supported and fully integrated agenda, with comprehensive subsidies) to develop green energy, green jobs, and a healthy green economy as we recover from the Coronavirus. We should be celebrating the collapse of the domestic oil industry, even as we acknowledge and attempt to ameliorate the disruption and destruction that this collapse has had on the lives of so many who work in this industry.
I hope that the Coronavirus-induced drop in overall economic activity will not be “remedied;” that it will settle at some level that will support our present population, and then taper off to what is necessary to support a lower population at lowered material living standards. Because that drop, that taper, and that lowering will be a tiny fraction of what we will eventually experience unless we face our situation squarely.
I hope that the environmental gains realized by an economic contraction will accrue first to those most threatened by climate change, and allow them, perhaps, to avoid having to flee the equatorial regions, in an ongoing exodus that sows chaos and political backlash.
I do not think that this position is, as Stephens would have it, “unbecoming” — certainly not as unbecoming as the nonchalant endorsement of economic growth, carrying the casual consignment of our own children and grandchildren to misery and death.
The temperature hit 18˚C (65˚F) in Antarctica last February.
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Contact: larner@forgiveusourspins.com
