Latest / the Dr Gilbz pod / Ep. 3 | Can capitalism "fix" climate change? | James Meadway

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Ep. 3 | Can capitalism "fix" climate change? | James Meadway · the Dr Gilbz pod

• speaker-0: Money famously makes the world go round. So in this episode of the podcast, we're talking about something slightly outside this channel's usual world of climate science. Today I'm talking to Dr. James Meadway, an economist and podcast host who has worked as an economic advisor to the UK's Shadow Chancellor on International Development and Climate Change at the UN, and most recently, As the co-director of new progressive think tank Verdant, working on social and environmental justice issues. He's a progressive economist who focuses a lot on bringing and integrating social and environmental issues into economic thinking. And I spoke to him about how to get neoliberalism to value the environment and whether capitalism can ever solve the climate crisis. Hello, James, how are you? speaker-1: Very well, thank you. How are you, Ella? speaker-0: Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. Happy to be chatting to you about something a little bit different today. Tell the people at home a little bit about yourself. Like can you introduce yourself, tell us ⁓ what you're working on, who you are. speaker-1: Yeah, well th thanks for having me on. You could describe me as as someone who's who's kind of ended up by accident working in climate change and on climate issues. I mean, I was I was an economist and I started doing that years ago now, always with interest in social justice and like how you make the world sort of fairer for people. But I suppose what's happened over the last few years is an i a realization, and I I don't think I'm unique in this, in that climate change has gone from being something that's, you know, you'd recognise is important, you know, everyone's Pretty much everyone, not everyone, but almost everyone by this point say, Yeah, this matters and we have to do something about it and some level. And there are varying degrees of attachment to how much you need to do, but that's what you think about. To understanding climate change as something that is in fact shaping our everyday lives. Like, not just in the big sense that people often think about, where you think climate change and you know, you get kind of Hollywood depictions of it where it's always natural disasters and terrifying and big and all that, and that does happen. But also the sort of day to day impact of why is inflation higher now? In other words, why are prices rising more quickly than they used to, particularly in things like food. ⁓ and you can trace this back to the impacts of climate change. So I got really into thinking about the way in which our world is not something that is it's often presented in economics where we're in command of everything. We're in charge. The natural world is there and we work on it. And, you know, usually economics you think about how you're gonna make money out of it. ⁓ instead it's a bit like actually the world is something that sits on top of us. Like we all have to exist on this planet. We all have to make use of what it provides and try and look after in some sense. And our failure to do that latter part is in fact now having these huge consequences. So so that's where I'm coming from, I think, in in talking about climate change. And we set up, as you mentioned, this think tank ⁓ just a a few months ago. Literally actually just about two months ago. It's quite focused on on Britain and British politics, but this is moment where suddenly you've seen a big surge in support for the Green Party in particular, with Zach Polansky becoming leader. ⁓ you know, got a hundred thousand and more new members, ⁓ really big by-election result with Hannah Spencer elected in Gorton and Denton. The fact you've just had these local council elections with a really, really big gains for the Greens up and down the country, particularly in London, some of the big cities, but elsewhere as well. ⁓ and really the think tank is trying to fit into that. political moment and say, look, we've got three years to the next election, most likely. What can we do to build a programme for a progressive, climate focused government that we can get it to in about three years' time? The alternative of course is something like reform and Nigel Farage being in power. ⁓ so that's that's the thinking behind it. It's quite a time tight time frame for it, isn't it? There's a certain ⁓ I think probably c everyone can understand a big downside to some of this, but that's what we're trying to do. speaker-0: Yeah, and I think what you're saying about having this kind of everyday impacts of climate change at the forefront of your mind is super interesting because yeah, no, on my channel I often talk about things like extreme events or long-term sea level rise or tipping points. And that was the kind of like ⁓ headline messages, the the big stuff. But it is everyday. It is affecting the price of your coffee, it's affecting the price of your grocery shop. It's all of these things that we don't necessarily asso associate with climate change directly, but they're impacting everyone's pockets very clearly right now. And it's obviously not just about climate change, of course, it's about politics and the wars and things. But also climate change is a definite part of it and we have to remember this. I'm gonna pick up on the green stuff because you ran as a a green party candidate, didn't you? Like what was that experience like? speaker-1: Well, it's I mean, look, I I have to admit to always find the elections kind of fun in a very ⁓ intense and and and sometimes a bit horrible ⁓ way after some years of doing this. And when I was working for working for the Labour Party, I was working for John MacDonald, the Shadow Chancellor in twenty seventeen when Labour had its big surge. This is the Jeremy Corbyn sort of peak moment back then. ⁓ so this was a smaller scale, but still the same kind of intensity about ⁓ just that condensed moment of Trying to trying to talk to as many people as you can, but also this moment of where you're you're sort of expected to think a bit about politics. Everyone is, right? You know, it sort of focuses everyone's minds. Usually there's something political happening in the background. I'm gonna say this, I'll actually what's happened over the last few years is more and more people are kind of very intensely politically involved, often because they're sitting on the internet all day long. But aside from that, it's this moment where you have a sudden focus of attention on who's gonna be running your local Council, if it's a local election. What are they going to do about it? And what are the issues that have come up over the last period of time? And I always just find it really interesting in terms of a process to like try and make an election campaign happen and what you have to do, but also just talking to so many people, just what comes up, and like the consistent things that people raise and the way people are thinking about how they relate to the rest of the world. ⁓ and and all sorts of interesting political things. The one that's so striking to me was just the number of people, not not huge, because I'm standing in Tower Hamlets, but it was substantially enough that it's clearly a thing here and elsewhere. The number of people who are really just kind of hacked off with all politics and the way the entire system works. That's what it comes down to. And they'll say they're undecided between the reform party and the Green Party or just not voting. Right. And there's a few people, there's quite a few people out there thinking like that. And that to me looks like potentially a bit of a guide to the future. Certainly in other parts of the country where reform are much stronger, that in people's heads there's this like a sense of things have to change. And it's looking for whoever is most likely to deliver that sort of change. And and it could be either reform or it could be over the Greens, that set of people in particular, I think. speaker-0: I don't think it's necessarily just the UK thing either, because that's kind of what people were in the US are voting for in some ways. Like they just want a change from what has happened before. And I think that's exactly what you're expressing. It's this shift to the extremes represents, okay, well, the two-party system that we had before is not really working. ⁓ the Tories really showed that they weren't working, so we voted for the Labour Party. They're also not doing what we want, so we're gonna go even further to the other parties that are, you know, quote unquote fringe. And try them out. And it's just a frustration with politics because nothing seems to be working. And that's partly, you know, partly because of climate change. That's a big part of it. We're not really dealing with these perma crises that keep arising very well. And politics isn't really equipped to deal with an unstable society and environment. So this is why climate economics is really, really important. So can you give us a ⁓ a sort of summary of how you see Climate economics for people who are not necessarily economists, like speaker-1: That's fine. So so climate economics is is kind of this emerging field of study ⁓ within economics that that tries to take what I've just said, ⁓ which is understand the relationship between how climate change particularly although you can throw another you can throw another sort broader crises of nature as part of that, ⁓ how that is changing how the economy operates. So it's the interaction between what the Climate change models tell us about what is happening in the world, and then how these start to fit in, usually how economists ⁓ try and think about the world, which is the the usual sort of economic stuff about inflation, which I just mentioned. So, in other words, how much things cost and how that is changing, unemployment, ⁓ growth, which we can talk about, the economy becoming bigger as economists measure it over time. How are all these things influenced by the fact that climate change is now a real factor in our lives? I mean, sadly, ⁓ this is this is where we are now. And and one that's likely to get worse. And and it becomes really I think it's really the sort of decisive part, or it will become the decisive bit in economics as climate change gets worse. I mean, this seems to be to me, I wouldn't say if it's obvious necessarily, but if you say you have these big climate change models that basically say this is definitely going to get worse in this point, these are the average temperature increases, these are the impacts we can expect, these are our scientific models that say that. That's clearly going to have more and more impact on how the economy, as we usually understand it, functions, because all of our lives are going to different. So where we work, how we live, how much we pay for things, yeah, what what we can do on a really day-to-day basis. And it's happening already. If you have things like, you know, regularly days where the temperature is reaching extreme levels in parts of the world, it's over forty degrees, you you can't work in these conditions. No most basic level if you can't work. The economy's going to slow down, right? This is and this is already happening. We already have modeling that tells us this is already happening. Not just in places that you might think of are going to be most dramatically affected by by this, I mean parts of the global south. But there's you know a really interesting paper just published end of last year on how climate change is already slowing down the American economy, right? The whole of the USA is now growing less quickly than it was because of the impact of climate change already. And obviously our models tell us that this is just going to get worse over time. So I think this is just going to become more important, trying to understand that. speaker-0: Wow. Yeah, no, that and also we're terrible as you know, physical scientists, ⁓ at including the economic element in our models. That we yeah, there's this a type of model called an integrated assessment model, which is used to produce these scenarios of the future, the next century anyway. And it's a very kind of ⁓ fudgy approach to economics, I would say. I mean, it includes lots of there's lots of fudges in the physical models as well. But I think the way that it tries to bring Absolutely everything together means that you necessarily have a lot of detail lost and you know human behavior is inherently quite difficult to predict, especially over the long term. So it's yeah, it's something that we definitely overlook as physical scientists, because we could predict reasonably well what's going happen in the the physical world, but actually the interaction with the social is is very different. I wanted to ask you, why are economists so obsessed with GDP? speaker-1: Well that's I mean that's a really good question. It it has to be said, I'm I'm a I suppose a a critical economist relative to ⁓ what other people who call themselves economists might think about this. I I don't think GDP or gross domestic product is a particularly good measure of most of the things in practice that we really value in life, but I'll come back to that. So just to describe it, GDP, gross domestic product, was invented really in the nineteen thirties as a way to ⁓ try and capture The amount of value, as economists would tend to understand it, that is being produced by the economy. So in other words, are you making more cars this year than last? Are those cars faster and, you know, more efficient potentially? And do they have like more exciting features than they used to have? Are you capturing this in one big number? And if you add up all the cars produced and everything else produced, you will get to this big number GDP. And if that number goes up, You're producing more value. So you'd say as an economist, there is more stuff out there for people to buy and they can all consume more and everything's going to be great. So growth in this number, GDP, becomes really important. When people talk about growth, they're talking about growth or economic growth. They're talking about growth in this big number, gross domestic products. That's what really it comes down to. The problems with this are that first, as I said, there's just a great stack of stuff we do. That is never bought or sold but is incredibly important. The the fact is if you go and like hang out with your friends, if you go and care for an elderly relative, if you just go for a stroll around the park, right? These things are all valuable, like in a really obvious human sense, but GDP won't even touch them. And there's a real problem with that, especially on care work, which tends to be something that still ⁓ across the world is very significantly more performed by women. So that's work, actually. It's like hard work to bring up a child or to care for an elderly relative or whatever, it may be valuable. But it's still work, but it's not including GDP at all. So yeah, it's quite a kind of it's a sexist measure, right? It measures typically the work that men are typically more likely to be doing historically and still. ⁓ that's one part of it. It also doesn't capture the fact that okay, so there you go, you've made this wonderful new car, you've made a hundred thousand of them because you're a massive car factory. It doesn't capture the amount of pollution you're producing. It doesn't capture the pollution the car produces, it doesn't capture the pollution that goes into that. It doesn't capture the carbon dioxide that's been output from all of this. It misses a whole load of bad consequences from economic growth. It just says numbers going up. Right. So these are the two really, really huge problems with thinking about GDP as a measure of what we really want to do with the economy. It doesn't capture a load of things we value and it doesn't capture a load of things that are actually really bad when it ought to, because it ought to be telling us that these things are actually bad. It's not all good just to produce a hundred thousand more internal combustion engine cars. There are consequences to that, you know? So GDP doesn't catch all of this, but because it's such a big number and because everybody kind of knows how to measure it, it becomes really dominant in how we talk about the economy, which is not necessarily very helpful to the conversation we perhaps should be having about how the economy operates. speaker-0: And it also assumes that we need constant growth on a finite planet, of course. Your characterization of if of lots of things being outside of that framework of thinking is totally applicable to climate change, of course, because everything is external to that framework. Everything is externality. I'm going to use some economics ⁓ jargon that I know from my very limited understanding. But like, what's your take on the best way to bring in some of those external or valuable things that aren't really ⁓ valued by that traditional framework of thinking. Climate services, you might call it, if you want to be a little bit more ⁓ tech broy about like, you know, the value of going out for a walk in nature, the value of having more trees to absorb carbon dioxide. How do you bring that inside the framework and internalize the externalities? What's the best way to do that? speaker-1: So there's there's a standard way of doing this. The sort of thing you get taught if you go and do an economics degree is exactly as you said, you go, here's the economy producing all these cars or whatever, but ⁓ we've just noticed there's a load of pollution that arises from this that is separate from the economy. So you say, and that's the jargon, it's an externality because it's external. So you say, right, we must try and introduce the cost. We know there are costs from all this pollution, so we have to try and bring these costs into the economy. ⁓ And the way we might do that say, right, we're going to tax pollution would be one thing to do it. Or a more complicated thing that is quite popular is ⁓ we're going to introduce a sort of system of trading credits, licenses to pollute, so that you can pollute if you have a license to pollute and there'll be a market to buy these things, but it's going to become really expensive to buy that license so you won't pollute so much, right? That's the idea behind carbon trading. And these are all ways, as economists would understand it, to take cost that the economy by itself doesn't see because there's no market there, there's no price, and turn it into something that everybody in the economy can see because it's got a price on it. So if people talk about a carbon price, this is the idea behind what they're doing. Now, I tend to think there's there's a big problem with this, which is that look, we're the environment isn't external to the economy. It's not the economy's here first and then here's a poor old environment. It's the environment is here first and the economy sits on top of it. So there's a really fundamental flaw in how mainstream conventional economics thinks about the environment, which is to start in the wrong place. It starts from our activity rather than s understanding that our activity as human beings is entirely conditioned by the planet we live in. Right? It we don't exist without that. We can't produce those cars without the raw materials that are there in the earth to dig up and turn into cars eventually. Right? These things cannot happen. So we are in that sense external to the environment and we probably ought to start thinking about flipping in our heads and therefore in our modelling how we think about the world in those terms. Because that I suspect is is going to be forced on us more or less. As climate change worsens, it's going to be harder and harder to just assume that the climate and nature are things we work upon, that they're external to us, when in our daily lives being affected very dramatically by a breakdown in the in a stable environment that we all live in. speaker-0: Yeah, I've I've come across the like different solutions to this idea, like carbon taxes and carbon trading and all of these kind of things. It doesn't seem like they ever particularly take off. And is are there examples of those sorts of solutions actually working? speaker-1: It's a bit of a funny one, but it's kind of if you're prepared to accept things not working that well and not doing enough, you can say that carbon taxes, carbon pricing, carbon trading, ⁓ these things have worked and are starting to deliver. I mean, the European carbon trading system had a very shaky start. The price that it was setting for carbon was far too low. What's happened in recent years is that the well, the European Union has basically jacked up the price that people are going to be paying. So it's starting to have some serious impacts. China has just expanded its own carbon trading emission system. So there's a great chunk of the world economy now starting to get covered by these systems. And they are having some impact. They are forcing costs onto firms and onto producers to think about what they're doing in terms of their pollution. The problem really is that look relative to need, none of this stuff is moving fast enough. Right. It's not been enough to just set a price and then go to big companies now that you have a price of carbon, you need to adjust what you're doing. I mean they will adjust a bit. They'll adapt to the price a bit, but also try and game the system. Right, you'll also find people you know trying to hoard carbon trade ⁓ carbon credits and then trading with other people. ⁓ Tesla has been doing this, for example, in the in the US, you know, because it claims to be an electric vehicle manufacturer, so it can build up lots and lots of credit and it just sells and make a lot of money out of that. So you get gaming of the system. You get ⁓ overall not a fast enough decarbonisation relative to what we kind of know is needed if we want to limit the worst impacts of climate change. But it is happening. I mean, you know, the the predictions, the forecasts that you might have had. twenty years ago that said this will be utterly cataclysmic by the end of the century now looks slightly less bad on balance, right? So your your models tend to say things are less bad than it would have been. So clearly there's some impact. It's just not enough relative to what we ought to be trying to do. And it never has been. speaker-0: Yeah, that's a very familiar story from a physical climate science perspective as well. Very familiar story indeed. I'm butting in here because I've got something to tell ya. Did you know you can listen to this podcast series as an actual podcast? These are deliberately longer format conversations, so you can stick them on in your headphones and take them on your walk around the park at lunchtime or cook your dinner or clean the kitchen or whatever it is that you do when you listen to podcasts. But no. Let's get back into my conversation with James, shall we? Stand by for me being an awful no-it-all in three, two, one So I mean, I know the answer to this question that we should be thinking about economics and climate change together, but why what's the like argument for people who are kind of tied to this more traditional mode of thinking? Why should they be more enmeshed and what benefit does that bring? speaker-1: We touched on it really. And it's it's not so much the long term big horizon, what happens at the end of the century when, you know, I don't anticipate ⁓ being around any further. You know, your children and grandchildren might be, but it's like you're not talking about the very long horizons that is the compelling reason why you need to think about climate change right now. It's actually the right now reasons. You know, we've mentioned food as a fairly obvious thing. It's it's superficial, but like chocolate bars have shot up in price in this country and across the world and also shrunk. ⁓ in size, you know, you get less chocolate for the amount you spend. And there's a pretty direct relationship back to climate change, which is that 60% of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire in particular. These are two countries that have been absolutely hammered by extreme weather events over the last few years that disrupted the harvest of cocoa. There's been droughts, floods, disease outbreaks resulting from that. As a result, there's less cocoa being grown. And as a result of less cocoa being grown, the way the market is operating globally is that something in shortage, the price starts to go up. So the price goes up and that starts to get fed into how much we're all paying for our chocolate bars. And the the science of attribution studies will tell you pretty directly that those extreme weather events can be traced back to climate change. Not absolutely guaranteed, but pretty certain on these things. So in other words, your Mars bar or whatever it is costs more and is left and is smaller than it used to be because climate change is happening. Now that's that's an immediate sort of real, relatively superficial, but nonetheless real ⁓ consequence on what's going on. Stack up lots and lots of impacts like that. And it starts to look like over time that what in Britain we're calling the cost of living crisis, a big part of that and the growing part of that is actually kind of cost of climate crisis, right? The fact that this thing is imposing costs. Now there's a twist on this. The twist on this is if you take cocoa for example, but it applies across the food system in general. Less cocoa beans being grown. The farmers growing those beans are paid a pittance. I mean, you're talking some of the poorest paid jobs ⁓ on the planet. People pay one, two dollars a day, this sort of thing. They have fewer beans to sell. The price internationally goes up. They do not see more of that money. It is the big agribusinesses who can capture ⁓ and make extraordinary, record-breaking profits, which all the big agribusinesses have been doing over the last few years. So this is also where you need to think about climate change, because what's bad basically for most of us, right? It's superficial, but think about it applying to every single other food you buy. Your chocolate bar costs more and it's smaller than it used to be. This is kind of bad for you. That's the result of climate change. It's also producing these really positive impacts if you happen to own ⁓ one of the massive agribusinesses like Cargill, who is a privately owned American company, one of the big four or five that dominate global grain and food trade. And they've reported record profits ⁓ just in the last year. You know, it it's the the biggest ever dividend payouts to their family of shareholders. So climate change has this double sided impact in terms of economics. It's bad for all of us, ultimately bad for everyone. But a few people are making really an awful lot of money out of it. speaker-0: Again, a very familiar story and the same sort of thing is happening with the fossil fuel companies profiting out of the war in Iran. ⁓ how much do you find that people are receptive then to this argument that we should be thinking about things like social justice and inequality and climate change and economy all together in the same basket? Like, do you think that people are tired of neoclassical economics? Are we are we moving beyond that? Are we trying to think of a new way of conceptualizing our relationship. speaker-1: I think so, although it can go in all sorts of different ways. I mean, I think it's it's like the election results we've just seen. We were talking about this, you know, on one side it's a big vote for reform and on the other side it's a big vote for the Greens. And the two main parties, historically, ⁓ Labour and Conservative, who've been the two main parties for over a hundred years in this country, ⁓ pushed into third and fourth place. And so that's that that suggests a a tiredness with the kind of the centre ground position of going, it's all going to be okay, small adjustments, we'll just manage things, right? But it's going in two different directions. And and I think one direction is, as you say, I would hope, is looking for social justice and talking about inequality and thinking about how you're going to deal with climate change. And another direction I think is it's hard against that, whether it's reform in this country or as mentioned Trump in in the US. You know, this is a an alternative to the collapsing centre ground, but it's not one that is is particularly, I would say, congruent with my own values or the values of a lot of people. And there's a hard argument about why it's bad. And why it's gonna get worse for most people if we end up with a a Trump or reform sort of setting relative to the alternative of actually putting social justice and everything else centre ⁓ of what we're trying to do here. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean it's it's quite a scary prospect to have the thought of Trump and reform in the same in the same moment in time. But it is at least positive to realise that that there is like an undercurrent of people rejecting that like center ground, as you say, and moving towards ⁓ a different perspective. So with that in mind, do you think that capitalism can ever be green? Oof. Maybe a provocative question. speaker-1: Yeah, to be honest with you, I mean, y yes, it can be, right? And and we're kind of seeing this emerging. ⁓ when you look at the the progress that is being made on the expansion of renewables, ⁓ the fact that you have so many cheap solar panels being installed absolutely everywhere, but actually noticeably in places like sub Saharan Africa and across the global south, ⁓ you can see a version of capitalism that's moving very rapidly very rapidly, reasonably rapidly, into decarbonising its energy system. ⁓ and the Iran war has given another boost to that. I mean, sales of of ⁓ electric vehicles have gone through the roof ⁓ in right across Europe, even in the US, you know, we obviously have a government that's kind of anti all of this. Even in the US, it's picking up renewable installations in the US are still rising, even though Trump is so anti the whole thing. This is kind of the economics of it, by the way. It's just got really very cheap to install things like ⁓ solar panels relative to or everything any other kind of electricity generation you can think of. So people are doing it. ⁓ so that can happen. It kind of is happening. The problem you've got is it's still kind of pretty horrible. It's still very exploitative. Like if you think about the lithium that you need to put in the batteries that go in your shiny new EV car, right? That is often produced in really desperate conditions in lithium mines and other parts, poorer parts of the world, ⁓ before it gets turned into via factory into the the shiny new car that you get to drive, which is reducing emissions, sure, relative to ⁓ you know, an internal combustion engine. But behind it has This horrible process of extraction and exploitation that is necessary to get the raw materials out there. So you can have a green capitalism, but it's still capitalism. And it still has these conditions of exploitation and extraction built into the thing. So if we really want to think about how we're how we're going to move out of, you know, damaging the environment so much, it's not just climate change. It's how do you reduce your resource use? And then also how do you protect people? How do you provide decent conditions for workers who have to do this necessary work? How do you have a much fairer world than we have already, all these other questions start to open up that capitalism, even green capitalism, isn't likely to provide. speaker-0: Yeah, and I think this is something that often comes up, particularly in my comments, where you know, you talk about the huge expansion of things like solar or EVs or these kinds of solutions that are often touted and are objectively better than all the things that have gone before. But at the same time, you are still using resources and it doesn't address that power imbalance between those who have all the power and all the money and own companies versus the rest of us. And ⁓ as you were saying earlier, like a lot of the things that ⁓ happen which are beneficial to those large corporations are bad on both sides for the rest of everybody else. And it doesn't feel like well, lots of people are tired of that, but it feels like it's a huge problem to tackle. Like how do you change that really? So I wanted to ask you about the term degrowth, because I think I've heard that ⁓ thrown around a lot in recent years, particularly, but this idea that you know capitalism ⁓ always needs to grow, always needs to extract resources. It basically takes stuff from the earth and uses people and then concentrates wealth in the hands of just a few people. And that generally doesn't work for most people. Most of us suffer as a result of that. How does degrowth fit into that picture? speaker-1: So this is this is the it's it's a term invented or at least popularised over last few decades, but I think really it's sort of exploded in use in the last couple of years. ⁓ and exactly as you say, that if you it's it's taken on the the idea that that typically capitalism or economists, people who try and talk about capitalism will say, Okay, growth is the central thing. If you wanted a justification for why capitalism is all right, really, you'd probably start by saying, look at the last two hundred and fifty years. of ⁓ industrial capitalism from let's say the industrial revolution onwards, ⁓ starting really in in the north of England and bits of Belgium, bits of Wales, and then expanding gradually over the entire world, as you've seen the last sort of few decades really, with sort of completion of this process, the creation of a massive global market, the the extraordinary industrialization of China and East Asia and this sort of thing, right? So you've got all this incredible transformation of human societies, which has produced huge riches For everyone, including most people. That'll be your justification for for capitalism. You go, to be honest with you, most people ⁓ living in this country right now are better off than most people living in this country ⁓ three hundred years ago. You go, look, you've all got iPhones, you've all got we're talking on this, you know, very ⁓ flashy bit of of computer equipment here. We can all access the internet, you can actually potentially go and buy a car and drive it around. You can just do a load of material consumption that wasn't even possible ⁓ a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago. And that applies actually to a large chunk of humanity now. Like if you look at what's happened in the last few decades, a lot of people, notably in East Asia, but actually to some extent across the rest of the world, have more material consumption than they used to have. And broadly you'd say that's a good thing. If life expectancy has risen, that if you have until recently, ⁓ fewer sort of infectious diseases with people succumbing to, if you had much bigger expansion of just stuff you could do as an ordinary human being alive in the planet somewhere, you'd probably say this is a good thing. And that would be your central justification of capitalism. And that is driven by growth. It's economic growth means you get all of this stuff. That's what that number going up kind of tells you. So if you start saying degrowth, like it's a direct confrontation with this idea. And it comes from the idea, I think broadly correctly, but I'll come on to why I think it's not everything, which is that you're stacking up all this material consumption. It all has to come out of the planet we live on. And that's either the stuff you're digging out of the ground. So the lithium just mentioned, ⁓ the oil, the coal, the whatever it is you need to produce all of this stuff and run all of this stuff and to keep our electricity systems going and all the rest of it is all taken from this planet. And therefore there are limits to the amount you can eventually do. And whether that limit is a sort of tipping point on climate where you've you've put so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that you've pushed the entire planetary system into a completely unstable point. So that's a tipping point. You don't want to do that. Or you've just run out of resources somewhere, or you or you've trashed biodiversity so much with industrial scale farming that you know there's a real risk of that collapsing and and various unpleasant losses even to farming and food production, all the rest of it you get out of backside of that. So there are limits, therefore, the degrowth people would say, to what you can have for this kind of growth. And we're either very close to or at or in some cases beyond those limits. So the degrowth people who say, look, you need a system that's based around something different, different set of values. ⁓ that isn't just about material growth and output for forever and ever ever into into the stratosphere. And that would mean, I think, if you unpack what degrowth people tend to say, it would mean having, first of all, much more equality. So you don't have just a few people who are extraordinarily using the Earth's resources. I mean, this is one thing that always is a bit mind-blowing to think about when you start to see the imbalance between how little most people actually consume and then just a fraction, the one percent, the 0.1%, and their their contribution to to climate change, their contribution to material resource use. In a way that that becomes really sort of and this is a direct result of of rising inequality over the last few decades, really. You just have a small group of people who can consume like this, but with all sorts of weird impacts. I mean I was absolutely blown over to discover that one in ten planes taken off from the UK today is a private jet. And it's like, hang on, how many people do you or I know who fly yes Right, how many people do you or I know who fly private jet? Right. That is a tiny number of people who are flying back so forth. ⁓ yeah, and the most popular route, by the way, if I remember rightly, was London to Paris. ⁓ which, you know, I mean I there are alternatives, you know. speaker-0: Really good ones. I took the Eurostar yesterday. speaker-1: Exactly. And it's just like, okay, th this is but this is another world of consumption. You or I, people watching this podcast, don't see, but there's enough people out there, even though it's a small number of people with enough money to make that happen. One in ten right, that is the kind of inequality you'd you'd want to address. Degrowth people who say, We're gonna address that inequality, right? We're not gonna have those private jets taken off. ⁓ that's just absolutely ridiculous. Like on any scale. ⁓ so that would be one thing you might do. The the other side of it is also, I think, thinking about Stuff you would do that isn't that is good, that isn't like really materially expensive. Like it it's yeah, some social occasions. Working less wouldn't be good if everyone had a four day week. This would be really solid degrowth kind of demand, right? A four day week instead working five days, with fix on five days because that's become culturally what we do. It's it's a measure of progress in that it's fallen from, you know, six and a half days i in the early industrial revolution to five days now. But there's no reason to just stop at five days, you can make your four days. And fourth day, you could do all the other stuff that you don't get to do because you're working, right? And this will be a big gain for people. ⁓ you'd have more public spaces, more public parks, open libraries, do all these sort of things that are not materially expensive but are good sort of often public activities that people enjoy doing. So you do more of this stuff. And you can stack all of this up. And I think it all is starts to look quite compelling as an alternative to what we are actually doing, right? The challenge, there's two challenges. One is the obvious one, which is something like, ⁓ which I think degrowth people do deal with pretty well on the whole, which is going that it's all very well for us to sit in relatively rich, you know, United Kingdom and go, Hey, we've had all this growth and we're all kind of all right materially, so let's not have any more. What are you going to say to most of the world which doesn't live like this? You know, how can you turn around and say, You can drive a car in this country, but sorry if you happen to live in Botswana or whatever, that's not going to be on the table for you 'cause we've just consumed too much and we in particular, in the richer world, have consumed too much. So I think there's a part of degrowth where you'd have to argue for redistribution. You'd have to argue for like what's going to happen to material standards of living in different parts of the world. So you have some degree of fairness built into this. Otherwise it doesn't work. Otherwise you're basically saying everyone in this country carries on rich, everyone in the poorer world carries on poor. Right. That's what you literally say if you just freeze without any growth. So you have to have redistribution and you have to allow for some continuing growth in in major parts of the world so that they can improve their material living standards as well. Because it's just not fair otherwise. I it's just most obviously not fair. That's one objection. The other one I think is perhaps more obscure, but maybe more fundamental, which is that it's not so much that we we can choose to stop doing growth. It's also that we're going to end up not being able do growth. If you go and look at what climate change and resource depletion and nature crises are actually doing to the economy, they're making growth harder and harder to achieve. That's why prices are going up. That's why costs are going up. It just becomes difficult to have growth. On a planet that's been hit by loads and loads of extreme weather events, or there's regular droughts that affect farming and crops. And it's you don't get growth once you have lots of climate change. So it's not even a choice that we're faced with. Wouldn't it be good to not have growth? Increasingly, we're going to be heading into a world where growth is just really difficult. And once that starts to happen, it's no good saying we've got to make GDP go up every year because it's harder and harder to do that. You put more and more effort in and you get less and less out. You have to do something different. At that point, you're not even degrowth anymore. It's kind of it's just just it's not a choice. It's just something that's going to happen. You can see happening already to the way the the planet and the economy is operating that this is the kind of world that we're moving into. And so the ideas of regrowth, I think, are important to that. But it's also, it's not even like we're gonna have much choice about thinking like this. We're gonna have to start thinking about some of these things. speaker-0: Yeah, you can't insure your home, you can't ensure your business, your crops fail because of a drought that you can't predict, except the fact that we know they're going to happen more often. Yeah, and all of those topics. Inequality is obviously something that people are talking a lot more about. And I guess maybe conflating like the degrowth idea is a specific thing, but inequality and tackling inequality is probably something that we can all get behind because I think most people have a strong sense of fairness and justice. And it's very clearly Inequitable for the majority world who've not for the most part been contributing to the state of climate change versus the rich world who's hoarded all the resources and burnt all of this carbon over since the industrial revolution. Re-re-addressing that balance, that imbalance is probably, it makes total sense to most of us. But then also within countries, of course, there's that inequality. There's the 1% who are flying their private jets, or probably 0.1%. So like having A system that sort of allows for changing that somehow, ⁓ both within nations and across nations, it's probably very, very, I mean, I'm I'm I'm assuming it's quite appealing to most people, unless you happen to be one of the 0.1%. How do you go about that? Is it like banning private jets, or like, you know, as soon as you get to ⁓ 999,999,999 pounds, that's it, you get 100% tax. What is that? Like How do we do that? speaker-1: Well, it's different different ways of of sort of cutting into this. I mean, the one that's got really popular i in this country and elsewhere in the last sort of few years is the idea of a wealth tax. So in other words, you have these these it's it's extraordinary accumulations of wealth, like just people hoarding money and resources and assets. And and and basically not really using them. There's there's only so many private jet flights you can take in a day. You know what I mean? If you're if you aren't that wealthy that you can just do it, you just do it. But you can only really do two or three a day if you're really pushing yourself. So you have these accumulations of wealth that just aren't doing anything. Right, just property in London, the notional price of which has gone through the roof, you know, to extraordinary heights, but it's still the same house, mansion, most likely, that's sitting there. You know, it it it's not really doing anything for anybody else at all in any sense. So the idea of a wealth tax is a way to change that inequality, of just introducing a small tax on that accumulation of wealth over time has become very, very popular. And you can see how it might work. You say, okay, ⁓ you tax everyone who's got over ten million pounds a year. 1% and everything over 10 million, which is pretty generous by the way. 10 million is a lot. ⁓ and then you can make fairly significant amounts of money out of that, ⁓ which can then go to paying for public services. So the demand in this country that the, you know, the tax justice ⁓ UK and patriotic millionaires and various groups campaigning for this have raised, I think it was one percent over ten million. And their estimate is you'll get potentially up to twenty, twenty billion, but let's call it about ten, twelve billion pounds a year, which is money that could be used to spend on ⁓ public services for the rest of us. And that starts to address that inequality. And over time, you'd hope this tax on accumulation of wealth starts to slow down that rise in inequality that we've seen in really very dramatically, absolutely everywhere across the world, with rare exceptions, ⁓ over the last ⁓ 20, 30 years or so, ⁓ 30, 40 years by this point. So that's one sort of popular demand. And it kind of has an intuitive appeal to most people. They say, like, okay, it's unfair there's so much wealth, and it'd be good to have that. And it pulls, as they say, very well. The pushback on it has been immense, because obviously. The people sitting at the top who actually have these piles of wealth do not want to really give it up. So you get all stories about, ⁓ we can't tax the rich people, they'll all leave and they'll all like they'll take their money elsewhere and all these things will happen. It's kind of it doesn't seem to be the case that countries have actually introduced wealth taxes like this are not suffering these dramatic losses, all the rich people leaving and taking their money elsewhere. Norway, ⁓ just two years ago put up its own wealth tax, it's actually had a wealth tax for a while, put it up. Lots of stories, all the entrepreneurs will leave, the Norwegian economy will collapse, blah, blah, blah. You won't get any money in because everyone will take their money elsewhere. Turns out a few people leave and make a lot of noise about it. Most people actually stay ⁓ and carry on paying the tax. And Norwegian tax takes risen significantly as a result of introducing the wealth tax, right? So you have has to be said, Norway is a significantly more equal society in here already. It is becoming more equal as a result of doing this. The the underlying reason in the end is that most rich people are attached to where they live like everyone else. You know, it's where they're Their friends are, their social networks, where their kids go to school, all of these things. It's where their actual worth usually is located. They have to have a job here. They have to be plugged into all of this stuff. So they won't leave. They won't just up sticks and fly away somewhere else. ⁓ that's that's not very likely to happen. It isn't what we see happening when you introduce wealth tax. Now that's a fairly sort of modest measure on what you might want to think about doing here. If you get into like particular kinds of consumption, we touched on private jets. I mean, there's suggestion ⁓ coming from possible. ⁓ climate NGO here that, you know, with the fact that the Iran war means that Europe is by now just a few weeks away if the reports are correct, a few weeks away running out of jet fuel, we should be working out who gets a priority use in that. And that should mean banning private jet flights, 'cause this is just a grossly wasteful use of jet fuel. Now, leaving Even leaving aside the challenges of burning jet fuel and flying planes at all, this is clearly not what you want to do when it's in short supply and people's summer holidays are coming up, right? It's obvious what you should be prioritizing. So starting to think about how you allocate resources in this way, not by using a market but by saying what's important and what isn't is also I think part of addressing inequality. speaker-0: Such a huge thing, a huge task to achieve and something that feels really big, but also coming right back to the beginning where we started with the local elections and particularly in the UK but also elsewhere, where there's people basically voting for something different. I think most people are really s like fed up with the fact that their prices of everything are going up. The wages aren't following that and everything feels more expensive. And even if you get a raise, it's still really hard to just like exist in the world. We all want to feel like less stressed and more comfortable. And it does not feel fair that there are some people that are just like profiting massively out of this while the rest of us struggle. So some kind of measures to actually redress that I'm feeling like from Maybe, maybe it's just me. I live in London, like you know, different ⁓ environment. But it feels like most people everywhere, whether they're voting for reform or they're voting for the Greens or whoever else, want something different that is addressing the crazy cost of living, the spiraling cost of living that's happening all over the world. I think we should leave it there, but that was such an amazing chat and thank you so much for explaining some of that stuff so clearly. It was really brilliant to have a chat with you. And yeah, where can people find you? speaker-1: Well thank you. Thanks, having on and enjoy sort of rattling through some of that. ⁓ if people want to find me, then I host a podcast weekly called Macrodose, ⁓ which is basically very short. You don't have to spend long listening to me. 15 minutes every week, top three sort of economic stories, usually with an environment well, always really, with an environmental twist. So you can dig that out. Or they could find me on ⁓ Twitter, Meadway J, ⁓ M-E-A-D-W-A-J. I'm still sort of lurking about on that. But these would be the two main places that people want to find. speaker-0: Amazing and I'll stick some of those in the show notes. So thank you so much for coming along, James. It was really brilliant. speaker-1: Thank well. speaker-0: I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Thanks again to James for joining me and sharing some of his expertise and his insight about climate economics. Do check out his podcast, Macrodose, which is available on all good podcasting platforms and which I'll link down below. And you can follow his work with Verdon via their website. I've stuck a bunch of links to places where you can find him in the description. Thanks for listening. The podcast will be back in another three weeks with a chat that I had with a weather and climate celebrity. If you want to check out the other episodes, then I've made a playlist of them all over here, and you can check that out there. Otherwise, I'll see you next week with a very exciting collab. Bye!