We can afford what we can do. This is the theme of the book in your hands. There are limits to what we can do – notably ecological limits, but thanks to the public good that is the monetary system, we can, within human and ecological limits, afford what we can do.

For humanity to survive on a liveable planet there is an urgency to what we must, and can, do. 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 has warned, ‘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.’¹

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 twelve years and hit net zero carbon by the middle of the century. According to Jason Hickel in Foreign Policy magazine,

It would be difficult to overstate how dramatic this trajectory is. It requires nothing less than a total and rapid reversal of our present direction as a civilization. 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 most important in our history.’ After decades of delay, this is our last chance to get it right.²

For the UK and US, as well as other OECD countries, averting climate breakdown means cutting CO₂ emissions by 80 per cent by 2030 and reaching a zero carbon economy by 2040. This will allow OECD emission cuts to be equitably shared with non-OECD countries’ emission cuts (as in the 1992 UN Convention on Climate Change’s ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR), in which OECD nations have to cut first and hardest).

To protect earth’s life support systems and to achieve such a radical transformation we must escape from capitalism’s globalised, carbon-belching financial system – designed and engineered to issue trillions of dollars of unregulated credit to fund supposedly limitless consumption, and in turn to furiously fuel toxic emissions. It is an economic system that over a relatively short period of human history has wrecked earth’s natural systems. And thanks to capitalism’s dependence on a system enriched by imperialism, racism and sexism, it has bound all human societies to a form of slavery.³ And yet, some have made historically unprecedented capital gains from this system. They are the ‘1%’.

As the Economist noted back in 2012, the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans not only get more of the pie; they are increasingly creatures of finance. Steve Kaplan and Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University reported that investment bankers, corporate lawyers, hedge-fund and private-equity managers have displaced corporate executives at the top of the income ladder. In 2009 the richest twenty-five hedge-fund investors earned more than $25 billion, roughly six times as much as all the chief executives of companies in the

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The Case for the Green New Deal

Contents

Preface

The Case for the
Green New Deal