Two Crises at Once, for March 3

Inequality and climate change: perhaps it's good we face them at the same time

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:

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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."