A Green New Deal

Humanity faces extinction if it doesn’t change its unequal systems of production and consumption. The Green New Deal offers an alternative.

Words: Ann Pettifor
Illustration: Anthony Russo

We are facing extinction. The Earth’s complex life support systems of atmosphere, oceans, land surface and life forms are at the point of breakdown, according to the world’s top scientists. As George Monbiot argues “only one of the many life support systems on which we depend — soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity — need fail for everything to slide.” For humanity to survive on a liveable planet, there is an urgency to what we must, and can, do.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a clear and trenchant call for action in 2018. We need to cut annual global emissions by half in the next 12 years and hit net zero carbon by the middle of the century.

“It would be difficult to overstate how dramatic this trajectory is,” wrote Jason Hickel in Foreign Policy magazine. “It requires nothing less than a total and rapid reversal of our present direction as a civilisation. The challenge is staggering in its scale, and the stakes are even more so. As the co-chair of an IPCC working group put it, ‘The next few years are probably the…