Penny U's question: A catalytic image?
We face two
major crises in our times: climate change and economic inequality. The roots of
each are deep. In terms of actually doing anything about them, though, we are
very slow to respond. One challenge facing both is that they seem to have come
on gradually, we keep muddling through. The situation might be captured in the
well-worn tale (useful, even though apparently untrue) of a frog in a pot. The
story goes that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will quickly
leap out. But if you put it in a pot of cool water and very gradually increase
the heat, you'll end up with a well-cooked frog.
So how can
we raise awareness that these two crises are heating up? Artists Buster Simpson
and Laura Sindell will ask Penny U participants: "What image could be
catalytic?" The "image" needn't be visual, but could also be
expressed as metaphor, story, or symbol. "Is there an international symbol
for climate change?" What images can you imagine that could raise the
visibility and understanding of the urgency of these crises, suggest the
connections between them, and perhaps provoke people to action in their own
ways? Can one help address the other?
Buster
offers an example, "The Smell of Money" – an art installation that
compares the smell of paper currency from economies that rely on extractive
labor, especially carbon-based energy industries, with the smell of money from
low-carbon economies, such as wood workers, rice farms, salmon canneries, and
jasmine fields.
On March 3,
in small groups of four or five, we'll see what images we can construct.
Brief
background information about both economic inequality and climate change
follow:
* * *
About inequality, after Thomas Piketty
Anne Focke
What
follows is a cursory summary of what Thomas Piketty seems to say about
inequality in his book, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century. It's offered not by an expert, but in a spirit of
curiosity and a desire to understand what's going on around me. It's wide open
to corrections and revisions.
Based on
lots of data and analysis, both current and historical, Piketty shows that the
"natural" or "normal" economic state is that inequality
will grow and reach great extremes with a few on the top and most at the
bottom. One concept that I've grasped and that, in part, helps me understand
why this happens is that capital increases in value faster than the overall
economy grows. Capital (investments in stock, real estate, etc.) has
historically increased at, more or less, a rate of about 5%. The economy, on
the other hand, grows at, more or less, a rate of about 2%. That means that capital
will always be ahead of the economy, or that a person who lives on earnings
from capital investments will always earn at a faster rate than a person who
lives on earnings from work in the economy of producing goods and providing
services. That is, a person with wealth is apt to keep getting more wealth,
while a person working in the production/service economy is apt to have a hard
time keeping up, especially as wealth gets more and more concentrated, and the
few get farther and farther ahead.
There's
lots more to it than that, of course, but for me, this sets a stage.
The anomaly of the economy in my lifetime
We had an
extraordinary period of nearly 50 years in the last century, from the end of
World War II until about 1980, during which the gap between the wealthy and the
rest was much smaller and the well-being of both grew at the same time. Their
chart lines rose in parallel rather than diverging. This period also more or
less paralleled my own life. It's what I – and many others like me – knew. It
was a productive time for many more people than would have been the case in
more "normal" economic times. So why did that happen?
What
happened was World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression. The wealthy
lost much of their capital and the rest lived in desperate conditions. The
results were riots and strikes, Hoovervilles and an economy driven by the wars.
Partly to quell civil unrest, all this led, in the U.S., to a new social safety
net with the New Deal and Social Security, new financial regulations, and
changes in tax rules that increased tax rates especially on corporate earnings
and upper incomes. The top income bracket in 1945 was 94% for income over a
certain amount.
With
President Reagan in 1981, all this began to change. Tax rates, especially on
capital, corporations, and upper incomes have declined; the top income bracket
today is 35%. Financial regulations have been loosened and the social safety
net weakened. As a consequence, income equality has grown dramatically. As Paul
Krugman said in a review of Piketty's book in the New York Review of Books, "we are living in a second Gilded
Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque."
What's to be done?
It's not
enough to just understand, even in such a shorthand way, what the story of
inequality is and how it happened. But what's to be done about it?
What I've
picked up is that we need to generate new revenue from new taxes, put new
social policies in place, and establish new financial regulations. And that's
all fine and good to know, but how in the world can those changes happen? Will
it take more bloody wars? Another desperate depression? Maybe another good
crisis would do, and we certainly have that.
The second crisis: This Changes Everything, climate change & capitalism
Edward Wolcher
Climate
change activism has often been mired in the traditional divisions of the
environmental movement: environmentalists who argue for reduced consumption or
increased regulations pitted against working class concerns that see
environmental protections as luxuries. In the past decade, however, a growing
movement has framed climate change (along with most of the energy use and
consumption issues tied to it) in the context of its intersections with
economic and political movements. This “climate justice” activism argues that
social and economic justice are fundamentally tied to climate change in the
21st century, that the overwhelming weight of the suffering caused by climate
change is and will be felt by the world’s poor, and that grassroots community
economics represent hope for a carbon neutral world.
This
climate justice framework inspired journalist Naomi Klein to research and write
her monumental This Changes Everything:
Capitalism vs. the Climate, which brought her to Town Hall in September
2014. Ms. Klein argues in this book that the global climate crisis has reached
a point where modest regulatory fixes like cap-and-trade can no longer mitigate
the ecological catastrophes from our warming planet. This failure results from
twenty years of policy inaction after scientific consensus was reached in the
late 1980s that global warming is anthropogenic. Only “radical” outcomes are
possible now: the radical transformation and suffering that would come from a
2+ degree Celsius rise in global temperatures, the radical application of
so-called geo-engineering technologies, (that is, technologically altering
earth's atmosphere) that would have unknown effects on the fragile planet, or
finally the radical reorganization of the global economy around the principles
of climate justice.
A real
green economy
The third
radical option would strive for a “green” economy in a much more profound sense
than the currently watered-down language of green energy. Though her analysis
tends to avoid the word, much of the necessary change would essentially be
increased socialism at a national level: massive reinvestment and management of
the energy economy, transportation infrastructure, and manufacturing. While
this could seem far away from our life today, much of what this economics would
look like is already happening in self-organized ways among communities
concerned with climate change: affordable, dense urban development; small-scale
and local agriculture; divestment from fossil fuels and investment in renewable
energy; and respect for indigenous land rights and sovereignty. The problem, as
Naomi Klein discusses, is that the situation is so dire that these communities
of activists and conscious communities are not even close to enough. These
economic principles need to become the basis of a major global political
realignment.
Activists
on all levels from street marchers to think tankers are beginning to achieve consensus
on this. Climate change is not simply another fight in the environmental
movement; it requires a cross-class, cross-race, transnational alliance whose
ultimate goal is not merely regulation but a profound reorganization of the
global economy. How to make that happen is the big question.
A big tent
During her
talk at Town Hall, Klein said, "We're allowing sea levels to rise in the
name of protecting an economic system that is failing the vast majority of
people on this planet, with or without climate change. By responding robustly
to climate change in line with what scientists are telling us, we have a once
in a century opportunity to solve some of our biggest and most intractable
social and economic problems." She went on to say that she believes
"climate change can provide the big tent that we need to build a new
coalition, put us on a science-based deadline, and tell us that we cannot
afford to lose."
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