Plan B vs. Plan C
Or
Why I didn’t be attending the launch-Conference for Compass’s ‘Plan B’ event, this weekend.
By Rupert Read
I got an invite from Gavin Hayes and Neal Lawson to attend the launch-Conference this Saturday for Compass’s ‘Plan B’. Now, I’m a big fan of Compass. It has been for some time the only real sign of life in Labour. Its full opening up to members of other Parties earlier this year was a genuinely exciting moment in British politics, a key moment in the possible realignment of the Left. I am one of the co-ordinators of the effort to get together Greens who are in Compass, to ensure that there are lots of us and that we think together within the Green Party. I have been since its beginning a member of Compass’s ‘Sustainability Panel’, which seeks to green-validate Compass’s publications. In this capacity, I have seen successive drafts of Plan B.
These drafts have greatly improved as time has gone on. Plan B is a document which makes an effort to take account of the sustainability revolution.
But nevertheless, I cannot sign up to Plan B and I wouldn’t have felt at home at a conference launching and celebrating it.
This is because, despite the improvements to it, Plan B is still seeking a “model for growth”. That is yesterday’s language, yesterday’s aim. ‘Plan B’ won’t be worth having unless it seeks prosperity without growth.
This isn’t just about playing with words. Plan B is, to put it plainly, a strategy to restart economic growth. That just isn’t compatible with ecologism.
‘Green [economic] growth’ is an oxymoron. Growthism – a commitment to growth without end — is the ideology of the cancer cell. (And we know how that ends…).
If there is to be a Green New Deal, and a rebalancing of the economy, then there is a need for a commensurate REDUCTION in other economic activities. And attention needs to be paid to determining a long-term sustainable level of economic activity, which will probably require (considerable) further reductions. These things are not in Plan B.
Some may respond by saying that in theory there could be green economic growth. What is laid out very nicely in Jonathon Porritt’s book, CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS, is how there is no historical precedent for absolute decoupling between growth in economic activity and environmental impacts. Porritt is hardly a radical g/Green. If even Porritt, who wants to be business-friendly, shows that there is no ‘evidence-based’ reason to believe that green growth is feasible, then we should all take note.
This point is so important that it is worth restating and elaborating on a little. Porritt would prefer to break the correlation between emissions and growth; he wants, as Plan B does, a kinder gentler greener capitalism. But what he states clearly and supports extensively with stats is this: that, while the relative carbon and ecological-footprint intensity of economic activity can be reduced, there is simply no evidence that the absolute intensity thereof can be reduced, without a reduction (or at the very least a stabilisation) of overall economic activity.
A further question: what is ‘green growth’ growth of? Presumably not GDP, which none of us really believes in. So: what? Maybe growth in ISEW (The ‘Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare’, a leading proposed replacement for GDP) etc.?; but that, of course, doesn’t require growth in economic activity. So it is entirely misleading to call growth in ISEW ‘green [economic] growth’.
No-one has ever satisfactorily explained what ‘green growth’ is growth in, or of.
Yes indeed, we need to insulate buildings; we need renewables; we need targeted public transport investment; we need new homes; we need more teachers and care workers. We need targeted increases in economic activity, in certain areas. But we need serious decreases in economic activity, in other areas. The message of ‘green growth’ provides governments and polluters with a tacit excuse to carry on economic/extractive/destructive business-as-usual, with a green veneer overlaid on top of it.
Yes indeed, we need to move beyond GDP as a measure. But it is playing into the hands of those who are completely unserious about transforming our economy and society in the direction of sustainability, to simply turn the latter point into an excuse for saying that there are no limits to growth, provided such growth is ‘green’. There are very real limits to growth, and we have breached them already in many cases. Unless you believe that growth can be ‘angelized’, then you must accept the logic of zero-growth or of decroissance.
Incidentally, BG readers may be interested to see that Saral Sarkar has made a particularly topical case in this direction, recently. His new book is highly recommended.
To briefly summarise it: Saral Sarkar’s case is basically that the limits to growth have caused the world’s economy to grind to a slow halt, and thus indirectly caused the financial mayhem we are living through.
Sarkar argues that this is a crisis of the limits to growth because environmental limits have reduced profitability. Profitability in real-world investments has fallen, because of increasing costs of extraction, increasing pollution-effects, etc., and this has systematically biased or turned the economy to become a bubble economy based around parasitism (financialism).
Why may this lead to collapse? For various reasons, including because of the unprecedented nature and scale of the deleveraging now in progress.
If we are going to have more of what we need, then we don’t need the chimera of growth. We need to REDISTRIBUTE. ‘Growth’, of green or whatever hue, is basically an excuse for not making more serious efforts to have a more egalitarian and sane society.
So: Plan B is clearly better than Plan A; but I don’t see how it is good enough to pass a sustainability test, a test of green economics.
And actually, even the remark that ‘Plan B is clearly better than Plan A’ needs qualification. If Plan A results in stalled economic growth, that might end up being better, sustainability-wise, than if Plan B succeeded in resuming economic growth (which it almost certainly won’t, btw – see below). The counter-intuitive logic here is that same as that which applies clearly to the historical case of the U.S. over the last 20 plus years: the Clinton administration’s environmental regulations etc. were slightly better than either Bush’s, but the totality of the evidence suggests that the Clinton administration was on balance even worse for ‘the environment’ than the Bush administration. Why? Because Clinton managed the economy ‘better’. I.e. There was more economic growth under Clinton. And there is a direct correlation between economic growth and environmental destruction. [That explains why most environmental indicators, ‘surprisingly’, deteriorated MORE under Clinton than under Bush.]
As I’ve already allowed, above, there is clearly a need for more rather than less economic activity in some areas of the economy. But: An increase in (e.g.) renewable energy systems requires a compensatory reduction in (e.g.) oil or nuclear. You can’t just add ‘green growth’ to our existing economy — without making it if anything even less sustainable (Because, and this is crucial to Sarkar’s case, we need to acknowledge clearly that even free energy (‘renewable’ energy) has very significant resource and pollution inputs/implications. There are no free lunches in a genuinely green economy.
As Herman Daly (and Aubrey Meyer) have shown, the only alternative to such zero-growthism is to believe that economic growth can be ‘angelized’: that it can carry on indefinitely while throughput of materials (which, clearly, in fact, needs to fall) does not rise. This is about as plausible as a perpetual motion machine.
The Green New Deal is mentioned positively in Plan B. But there are two readings of the Green New Deal, as laid out in my piece on this in the Compass ‘red-green’ dialogue ebook.
Plan B’s reading seems close to the ‘green stimulus’ reading of the Green New Deal. Such Green Keynesianism by itself is not something that genuine g/Greens can or should endorse.
I am all in favour of a Green New Deal as part of a transition to a genuinely sustainable economy, and as a Depression-prevention device. What I disagree with is only the chimera of ‘green growth’. Obama, Cameron, Clegg — and Compass — all love the idea of ‘green growth’; it makes for great political rhetoric. It’s like apple pie and motherhood, given the current hegemonic forces and discourses in our society. But, following Herman Daly and the other leading ecological economists, I would simply point out that there is zero reason for believing that in the real world it is possible – and zero extant examples of it (and here once more I am in Porritt’s debt). (N.b. Once again, to be clear: I am talking about growth across the whole of society, not just about individual cherry-picked sectors.)
Now let’s tie these thoughts to the latest stage of the unprecedented economic crisis that we are living through. Last month’s actions and predictions by the Federal Reserve, ‘Operation Twist’, mark an important change in the world financial and economic crisis. Basically, the Fed is finally accepting that we are quite likely to be entering a prolonged recession, more likely perhaps a Depression. Even perhaps, I would add, a permanent Depression. And ‘the markets’ have realised this. That is, I believe, the huge significance of the massive drop in silver and copper prices that followed the Fed’s intervention:
“Morgan Stanley attributed silver’s drop to growing concerns about industrial usage and the “high retail component of the investor base”…
Three-month delivery copper fell 4 percent to $7,067 a ton, taking this year’s loss to 26 percent, after earlier today touching $6,800, the lowest level in more than a year. The contract lost 15 percent last week.
“Copper is clearly in a downward trend as investors see no improvement in the macro environment, only deterioration,” Zhang Zhenghua, an analyst at Minmetals Futures Co., said today by phone from Shanghai.”
In other words: silver and copper, which (unlike gold) are still bought primarily as genuine commodities for their actual use (speculative and ‘savings’ use of silver is still well under 50% of its use), have plummeted in price because manufacturers think that they are not going to need much silver or copper in the next several years. Because they finally have woken up to realise that we are not going to have net economic growth.
The mania for economic growth, combined with the elite’s determination not to take proper control over banking and not to make the banksters pay for this crisis, and combined of course with financialisation itself, has unleashed a disaster. A disaster that could probably have been prevented by a genuine Green New Deal. Now, we are in the midst of a growing sovereign debt crisis, because the banks’ losses have been socialised. That crisis shows no sign of ending. And on the verge of a massive corporate debt crisis: balance sheets are going to unravel, as plans that were made on the basis of predictions of expansion are reined in. The de-leveraging will continue to unwind and probably escalate, as expectations fall.
The actions taken to try to deal with these escalating crises without taking power from the bunch of bankers who have ruined the world economy are putting fiat currencies themselves at risk. ‘Quantitative easing’ has further enriched elites without putting more money into the hands of the populace at large: A Citizen’s Income should have been used instead, with the newly printed money. Money itself is finally starting to come into question. As yet more QE happens in Britain, we stand finely balanced between runaway deflation and runaway inflation.
Why is QE being tried? In a desperate bid for growth, through a zero-sum-game of export-led ‘strategies’, in the context of an unwillingness to take banking into social/public control. Most roads now lead back to growth-mania as increasingly the cause of our troubles.
This huge ongoing disaster was caused in part by the limits to growth (see Sarkar’s work) and the unwillingness of governments and peoples to face up to them. The level of denial about this is astonishing; governments seem prepared to trash everything on the unrealisable altar of their desperate bid to restart economic growth. Thus we are getting the environmentally-trashing economics of 3rd world ‘development’ – and of the destruction of the countryside envisaged under the new planning laws that the Coalition government are bringing in in Britain.
If growth seems like the only game in town, then it isn’t surprising that good folk such as Compass look for a greener version of it. We need to acknowledge why Compass et al plump for a green stimulus / green growth etc. package. They do so because, in our current system, they feel that that is the only way to deliver employment.
In the ecologically-limited post-growth world that we are entering/in, we have no option but to look at different models for employment, and for sustaining ourselves. There are models showing that zero growth needn’t mean unemployment (Peter Victor, Managing without Growth), and to some extent Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without growth.) More work remains to be done in this area. (www.GreenHousethinktank.org is seeking / will seek to do some of it.)
So: What is to be done?
What is needed is a strategy to deal with all of this that does not fantasise a way out via a return to growth.
We need to put finance back on the leash, swiftly: Vickers, for instance, represents too little, too late, and too slow: (See also this & this proposal, that I initiated, has since become Green Party policy. It stands diametrically opposed to the obscenity of allowing the banks to return to the private sector, at this delicately-balanced moment in human history).
We need a Green New Deal not as a ‘stimulus’ but as a transition to a dynamic equilibrium economy: See again my piece on this.
We need to go beyond Jackson’s (excellent) challenge to growth, and redefine prosperity through the idea of a REconomy: cradle-to-cradle processes incentivised, rationing not just of carbon but also of other virgin resource use (so an overall supply side resilience is secured), and, alongside this, rethinking how we incentivise appropriate technologies that match positive human-scale behaviour-change.
We need simultaneously to put in place a broader series of measures that will build resilience in the event, now probably likely, of the kind of vast crash and Depression indicated above. For instance, local currencies.
We need to warn people in plain terms that growthism, banksterism, and enormous gambles with our collective future have put the world on the edge of an unknown precipice. We need to talk about the risk of a Depression such as the world has never seen before; of an end to money as we know. There is far more than the Euro now at stake.
We don’t need Plan B. We need Plan C. The creation of a constant (no-growth, dynamic-equilibrium) economy.
[Thanks to Alexis Rowell, Jules Peck, Peter Lipman, and my colleagues at Green House (www.GreenHousethinktank.org ) for input into this article.]
Btw: An increasing number of people in Japan are starting to realise that the roof isn’t falling in, even though they have essentially had a growthless generation. How much better things would be going there, if they hadn’t been TRYING all this time to resume growth, but rather been building on their stable economy!
Thanks Ellie.
Thing is, other things aren’t equal. That’s the point about the stats about the absence of real examples of ‘absolute decoupling’ of growth from emissions and other impacts.
Hi Rupert, with you on every point including WHY ASSUME THAT _ENDLESS_ GROWTH IS GOOD? OR INDEED POSSIBLE?
*except* that you say flat out ‘i object to net growth’. this statement needs a qualifier. Other things being equal, a net increase in the value of output is a good thing – certainly for anyone seeking to increase living standards, education, health etc.
The trouble is that other things are not likely to be equal.
So feel free to keep saying you object to net growth whevever it stands in the way of sustainability, equality or environmental preservation. And that as far as you can see it is not possible to have both. But for a politician to say simplistically outright that all growth (even hypothetical) is bad, seems an offense against influence and against reason…
Ellie; re. your comment at 8: Wow, that’s an unusual criticism of me; I don’t often get told off for being insufficiently bold, clear and honest! I usually get told off for being overly bold, direct and (sometimes) ‘unrealistic’ or ‘rude’.
😉
I think a fair reading of my article actually makes it pretty clear that I am saying that we should call for “a reduction in carbon, destruction and inequality first, and that we are prepared for economic growth to fall if it is necessary to achieve this”, just as you say.
I am quite happy to give up talk of no-growth, _provided_ the mainstream is prepared to give up the ideology of growthism.
But in case I haven’t been direct enough, let me restate. The basic point is this:
WHY ASSUME THAT _ENDLESS_ GROWTH IS GOOD? OR INDEED POSSIBLE? Remember: I have no objection to some sectors of the economy growing. The point is that, roughly, other sectors then need to shrink. I don’t object to growth per se, then: I object to net growth, given the enormous fatness we have already reached, as a species / as an economy. I object to growth-ISM. The ideology of permanent growth, without end, is the ideology of the cancer cell or at best of an insane addicted wilfully-obese person.
Finally: We should always ask what is economic growth FOR? Is growth in emissions (good) for anything? Growth in extraction? I take it that growth is intended for jobs, for the conditions for well-being, etc. BUT GROWTH IS NOT NEEDED, FOR THESE THINGS. Not any more.
In fact, as I’ve shown, it’s getting in the way.
Thanks Michael, Alasdair. Look, I basically agree with you. The ur-text here is Joel Kovel’s THE ENEMY OF NATURE.
More work on ‘Plan C’ will in effect be undertaken by Green House.
Victor – of course you are right. Wish I had the time (and the ability) to write Plan C! But, as I’ve implied, Plan C kind-of virtually exists already. One can deduce it, from the Green New Deal reports (interpreted on my reading not on the ‘green stimulus’ reading), from the Green Party’s election manifesto last year (which had a lot of relevant calculations/figures in it), from Tim Jackson’s PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH, and from Peter Victor’s book, cited above.
Thanks Ellie. Re. your link at 12: Chris Goodall is a mate, but he is a raving techno-optimist and capitalist Green, way out on the Right of the Party. Be careful who you wish for! More importantly, his article is very unconvincing. See Tim Jackson’s impressive reply to it, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/01/peak-stuff-message-green-technology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/31/consumption-of-goods-falling?fb=optOut
An important difference between Plan B and Plan C is that Plan B actually exists. Who is going to write Plan C?
Thanks for the link to Tim Jackson. Alasdair Thompson is right to highlight the inherent problem with capitalism that it’s driven by accumulation and thus can’t stop.
To me the priority is to publicise more widely this hazard and also to show which elements of conventional GDP under-value and over-value output. Environmental factors are part of this but there are many others too, including the way public services are counted (at cost, with no value added) and the part which comes simply from asset price inflation. E.g. I estimate that the market value of the UK housing stock reached 70+% of all UK tangible assets in 2007: truly illusory, and it feeds into GDP.
Hi Rupert,
Sorry it wasn’t very polite of me to launch in straight before without saying hello.
Plan C is sort of the opposite of A/B. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Perhaps it is a polarising tactic to mark out the extremes in order to aim for the middle…
But the greens should be treating the voters with intellectual respect. Say what we mean. If we mean for a reduction in carbon, destruction and inequality first, and that we are prepared for economic growth to fall if it is necessary to achieve this, then that is what we should say. Not an abstract and anti-human sounding slogan about ‘no growth’… setting aside the fact that it is incredibly divisive.
Plan D which rejects the notion of GDP at all as a benchmark for our society perhaps?
Thanks Adam.
I am all in favour of unleashing human potential! have a read of Richard Douthwaite’s THE GROWTH ILLUSION, which argues (among other things) that such unleashing is curbed by growthism.
The point, as you and I agree, is to reduce throughput. All I say is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that we can do so, while increasing the amount of economic activity as measured by GDP. And that the utterly hegemonic desire to do so is proving catastrophic. It would be a shame for g/Greens to take the easy path, by remaining part of that hegemony, and not challenging the elements of Plan B which remain growthist.
Rupert, you keep saying that we have to challenge this hegemony of growth, and implying that to do so we need to take your line of talking about zero or even negative growth. I actually think we’re taking a much more critical line and challenging that hegemony much more radically, by calling not just for an end to ‘growthism’ but of the actual underlying cause: capitalism. You cite Jonathon Porritt to defend the statement that we’ve never seen decoupling of growth in GDP and in some less well defined measures, but the reason he fails is that he’s trying to keep capitalism. The problem isn’t growth. The problem is much more fundamental. What you identify are only the symptoms, we need to tackle the cause. Something you seemed almost at pains to avoid in your article.
Thanks Michael. I am unimpressed by the piece by my friend Chris G. I think that Tim Jackson’s response effectively does it in; http://gu.com/p/3337e/tw
High carbon and resource intensity in China is a key part of the story here. It was a total ecological disaster for us to export our emissions etc there.
As for London: I’m a Norwich boy!
Hi Rupert,
Thanks for this piece. Like Ellie, I agree that aiming for abstract “growth” is pointless, but so is aiming for an equally meaningless “zero growth”.
For me, it is by accepting the lens of growth that you make a mistake. You are right that centrist/more right wing greens like Porrit don’t see how to build an economic system which may deliver overall growth whilst seeing contraction of resource use. But that is not despite his lack of radical thought. It is *because* he is to tied to the world as it is.
As has been said in the comments of Bright Green before, the great geniuses of ancient Greece lived within a couple of generations in a city with a population roughly the size of Lowestoft. Only men of a certain class were educated. But they were so well educated, both formally and through the way that their society was organised, that they allowed a huge number of incredible thinkers to emerge.
Our current economic system is designed to exploit natural resources to the maximum whilst only educating elites. Huge swaithes of humanity remain illiterate. If the true genius swimming through all humanity were released – if every town the size of Lowestoft everywhere in the world was turning out Platos, Aristotles and Aristophoneses – and their female equivilents – then perhaps we would begin to see what humanity is capible of. In such a society, success would surely not be measured by GDP. But if, for the sake of historical comparison, they were to measure their gross production, would it be higher than ours today?
I believe it could well be.
So, yes, growth in GDP is a strange aim. But the carnage of capitalism cannot be understood though a crude measure like GDP alone. And that doesn’t mean that a better society wouldn’t have a higher GDP. It might well.
Impressed by your argument (tho sceptical on Sarkar’s reported account of global downturn). Would be very interested in your reaction to yesterday’s Guardian piece on Chris Goodall’s data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/31/consumption-of-goods-falling
Could we collaborate on alternative strategies for London? cf http://justspace2010.wordpress.com
Thanks, Tom Miller. The answer to your question was already in my piece – it is the Green New Deal. Only, it must be a Green New Deal to stabilise the economy, not a ‘green stimulus’ to attempt to restart economic growth again.
Hi Ellie. I am fine with what you say here – provided that we stop talking about economic growth. I will be happy to stop talking about zero growth, just as soon as the mainstream stops talking about economic growth, and stops relying on GDP figures. Until that happens, it is behaving like an ostrich to simply shy away from challenging the hegemonic talk of ‘recovery’, ‘growth’, etc.
Of course I agree with you that the variables that actually matter are the direct ones. Nothing I have said implies otherwise.
This chronic over-focus on GDP must be ended.
It is not sufficiently correlated with health, education or well-being to be the main yardstick of society. It is also not sufficiently correlated with environmental degredation to justify this GDP centred “no growth” policy.
Criticisms of “green growth” or environmental indexes are valid. They are imprecise and frustrating. But throwing our toys out of the pram altogether and saying “no growth at all!” is neither sensible nor practical.
The variables that matter are the direct ones. Let’s limit carbon. Let’s improve green GDP indexes. The result in long run will probably also reduce growth. Without the need to put a laughable target on something we barely understand as it is.
Green influenced labourite/democratic socialist here.
Couple of points. Firstly, I think that the context demands a non-doctrinaire approach. You talk about zero growth, but recession was not mentioned. What does recession mean for g/Greens? This is the frame we are in in the short term.
Should it be tolerated? How long for? How does it relate to population growth and the desire of millions for decent food and clean water? Can these be provided without growth internationally, or are we talking about paying the price of millions of dead to avoid millions of dead through ecological degradation or devastation?
Consider Lenin’s adoption of the NEP. It was capitalism in the short term, towards the long term aim of communism. Are the same strategic flexibilities forbidden in the (apparently less doctrinaire) political thought of the green movement?
You may have answers to all of these questions, but simplifying them into a single line, ‘zero growth’, does not do the serious thinking any justice. You end up with complex policy to support a single slogan, ratehr than the vice versa.
“If even Porritt, who wants to be business-friendly, shows that there is no ‘evidence-based’ reason to believe that green growth is feasible, then we should all take note.”
Is there an evidence base to support the contrary point? Can contrary interpretations be drawn?
Once again, big possibility of endorsing a likely cognitive bias in favour of a simple political slogan, when on closer examination this may not be as desirable as the slogan suggests.
Finally, if you have no job, that sucks.
This slogan simply rings true much more widely than ‘Don’t grow’.
I advocate sustainability, but I do so as an important element of an improving quality of life – not the long-term gain of a declining one.
The repetition of ‘no growth’ is the single line that most deters me from Green Party membership, in terms of policy. It is a key dividing point with a left that wants to provide housing, food, water, energy and recreation (albeit on a much fairer and more sustainable basis per unit).
I must confess that my suspicion is that this view is made as impractical and simple as possible in order to establish a political dividing line or guiding extreme relative to those outside the green movement, where actually its merit is of a more dubious character…