green economics

By Sun-Chul Kim, Seungmin Ryu, Sandra Van Niekerk, and Tom Reddington, et. al. - KPTU, KCTU, and Public Services International, November 17, 2022

Strengthening quality public services in the Global South should be a key priority ofinternational climate finance. Important lessons can be taken from the COVID-19 pandemic. To protect people from the deadly virus governments of all persuasions have had to take back control of privatised public services and rein in international supply chains designed to maximise profit.

This study aims to assess the degree to which international climate finance strengthens universal quality public services in developing countries. It focuses on the case study of the Green Climate Fund to assess whether the concerns of workers and communities have been heeded.

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By Green Left - London Green Left Blog , September 26, 2022

In this document, we trace the development of a Green Socialist New Deal (GSND) from its origins in the ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s, to the more recent Green New Deal.

We believe that the latter can only be effective in tackling the multiple crises of finance, climate change, environmental degradation, social and global justice and peace through an eco-socialist alliance of workers and trade unions that challenges the current capitalist order.

We outline a set of interim policies in our GSND, concluding that these medium-term changes would reduce climate change and also enhance our democracy and human welfare.

By Isabelle Ferreras - Green European Journal, September 14, 2022

With digitalisation and shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic and extreme weather, the world of work is changing rapidly. But this transformation should not become an inevitability that workers must passively endure. Rather, it should be a democratic process shaped and decided by workers themselves. On the sidelines of the European Trade Union Institute’s Blueprint for equality conference, we sat down with Isabelle Ferreras, who has co-authored a new book calling for a re-organisation of the economy, to discuss democratising work in the 21st century.

Green European Journal: Digitalisation and automation are transforming how we work. How do you see the new face of work?

Isabella Ferreras: What is most notable about digitalisation is the loss of work’s physicality. As soon as jobs adopt technological tools that allow remote or computer-assisted working, workers cease to come together in the same place. In Marx’s analysis of the first age of industrial capitalism, the concentration of workers in factories was an important factor in the development of class consciousness. It enabled the working class to shift from what he called a “class in itself” to a “class for itself”. The opportunity to come together in one place, at a frequency imposed by industrial capitalism, meant that workers could get to know one another, take their breaks together, talk to one another. They realised that they shared very similar lives and problems that needed shared solutions.

The digitalisation of the economy individualises the experience of work. You might find an engineer based in Delhi, another in Boston, and a third who is subcontracted to write some lines of code from South Africa or Ukraine all working on the same project. All these people interact via an online platform, without getting to know one another and without the opportunity to realise that they are all part of the same “work investment” necessary for a business. By work investment, I mean all the workers required to successfully produce something or provide a service.

So the fragmentation of work, brought about by digitalisation, leads to a less social experience of work and, in the end, a loss of power for workers?

As this fragmentation has taken root, workers have grown more aware. Workers aspire to something else. We can see this in two ways. First, since the pandemic, there is a massive rise in people changing careers because they aspire to more meaningful work. There was a real misery for “non-essential” workers slaving away in front of their computers, stuck at home with this interface. In the hope of keeping their workers, some British companies have embarked on a full-scale experiment: the biggest ever trial of a four-day working week has just begun in the UK. About 50 businesses are implementing it, offering a better work-life balance for the same salary. Workers are expected to be just as productive over four days and gain a better quality of life.

Second, businesses are going to great lengths to improve job satisfaction. This is essentially a retention strategy whereby companies work to increase job satisfaction so that employees remain loyal. Employers are giving workers more say in decisions that affect them, such as combining working from home and the office.

In France, a survey conducted by the Association Pour l’Emploi des Cadres (APEC) in January 2021 revealed that 9 out of 10 managers are listening much more, building bonds within teams, and empowering employees as a result of the pandemic. This is an opportunity to be seized. On 16 December 2021, the European Parliament passed a historic resolution demanding, among other things, a revision of the European Works Council Directive. In Democratize Work, we call for a collective veto right for workers so that they can influence decisions taken by company boards or works councils.

The opposite trend is the growing physicality of work in the care sector. What does the rising need for care, both for people and the planet, mean for the world of work?

Alongside the trend towards automation is a realisation that we’re going to need more human labour and, let’s hope, not more unrecognised and unpaid exploitation. Taking care of both the planet and other human beings, like through public services, requires more and more work but nobody is talking about paying for this work. Neglecting the remuneration side of care comes from misconceptions about the future of work.

The intrinsic content of all jobs has changed with each technological revolution. But the key issue we must grasp here is that there’s much more work for us to do so that we’re no longer dependent on our energy slaves [the quantity of energy required to replace human labour]. We must also formalise that part of the care sector which just exploits women’s labour. Equalising living standards and giving men and women the same number of opportunities means investing massively in childcare, for example.

By R.C. Smith - PhD Dissertation, September 1, 2022

Oil and finance have long played central roles in defining how the global economy has developed and this is especially true of the modern neoliberal economic system. One factor of their relationship that is often unexamined is how oil industry profits and liquid capital influence the developments of finance. Understanding their relationship during the modern period first requires understanding this petrocapital cycle, how it influences economic development, and the ways that its rise to prominence in the 1970s transformed the global capitalist financial system.

We are living in a world that has been shaped by the demands of oil and finance. Under the neoliberal capitalist order these two sectors enjoyed central roles in setting the pace of the global economy. Shocks in the price of oil, as recent events like the record-high oil prices experienced following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine have reminded us, tend not to stay confined to the fuel pump and radiate throughout our economic system. One particular avenue of influence that is often not seen but is widely felt is the reinvestment of oil profits in global financial markets. This question was first thoroughly examined in Mahmoud el-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe’s Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold which traced the relationships that formed the endogenous petrocapital cycle, which is the reinvestment of the profits reaped by oil exporters in financial markets and how this changed global credit and financial markets. The Real Oil Shock builds on their earlier work by digging deeper into the birth of this process in the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. It will do this by examining how OPEC’s windfall capital fundamentally changed financial markets, practices, and the creation of money.

What The Real Oil Shock is examining is not a new phenomenon in economic history. The human experience abounds with instances where dramatic redistributions of wealth and resources created significant changes in the existing social and economic order. An excellent example comes from the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Exploitation of gold, silver, and other precious metals in the Americas provided the Spanish monarchy with an enormous windfall of liquid capital. This was spent by the Spanish monarchy on projects of the state, fighting wars, and expanding their influence in Europe. This put increasing quantities of Spanish doubloons in circulation outside of domestic markets. Spanish gold had become the capital for Dutch, English, and French merchants for financing their own commercial, industrial, and colonial enterprises whose activities were the foundation of early modern capitalism in Europe.

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By Jonathan Neale - Fight the Fire, September 2022

This article is about stopping climate change and about fighting for a world based on love and sharing. My argument is that both these projects have to go together. But for either project to work, both climate activists and socialists have to change, fundamentally and fast. And there has to be a deeper change, a change in all humanity.

We may well fail. But with these ideas we have a chance.

Let me explain. I start with climate, and I start with failure.

For thirty years everyone who cares to know has known about the threat of climate change. Over those thirty years more and more world leaders have said louder and louder that the crisis will be upon us, that something must be done, that they promise to do something. And the more the leaders of the world tell us that they will do something, the worse things get.

It is not just that the temperatures continue to rise. It is not just that the temperatures rise faster and faster. The amount of carbon dioxide – CO2 – in the air grows every year, and each year it grows faster and faster. It is not just that the leaders of the world have failed to stop climate change. It is that they have collectively presided over making things worse.

At the United Nations climate talks in Scotland last year Greta Thunberg sent out two tweets. To the leaders of the world, she said: “Blah, blah, blah. Fuck You.”

To us, she said: “Uproot the system.”

That’s the politics of ecosocialism in eight words.

By Jonathan Thompson - High Country News, August 29, 2022

Cleaning up the West could prove to be as lucrative as the extractive industries that wrecked it.

On a blazingmid-June day, Don Schreiber stands on a plateau on the edge of northwestern New Mexico’s San Juan Basin. The landscape is spare and spectacular — like a giant cathedral, Schreiber says — offering views of Tse Bit’a’i (Shiprock) and the Carrizo Mountains.

Yet this hallowed place is blighted, invaded nearly seven decades ago by oil companies and drill rigs. Roads slice haphazardly across the khaki earth to motionless pumpjacks littered with tumbleweeds. PVC and steel pipes snake over sandstone, connecting to clusters of fittings and valves.

The Horseshoe Gallup oil field is home to several hundred oil and gas wells, many suffering from “orphaned/non-orphaned well syndrome”: They’re defunct and the owners are bankrupt, but regulators still consider them active, so cleanup can be delayed indefinitely.

“It’s like someone went into a church and vandalized it,” Schreiber, a local rancher and industry watchdog, said. Robyn Jackson (Diné) of Diné CARE agrees: “This place may not be pristine or lush. But for our people, it is sacred. It has significance. I’m disturbed by industry being allowed to do whatever it wants.”

But where there’s desecration, there’s also opportunity: Both land and economy could be restored by employing displaced fossil fuel workers to help clean up the mess.

By Gabriela Calugay-Casuga - Rabble, July 4, 2022

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) claims that Canada Post is placing an undue burden on Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers (RSMCs) that is also harming the environment. As Canadians from coast to coast are feeling the pinch at the pumps, RSMCs are paying out of their own pockets to do their delivery routes. RSMC vehicles are left out of Canada Post’s plan to move their fleet to electric, which means that there is no end in sight. 

As the thousands of RSMCs continue to shoulder the burden of gas, they struggle to serve the more than 8,000 routes they cover. In 2021, over six million Canadian residents, or 17.8 per cent of the population, lived in rural areas, according to Statistics Canada. Including relief employees, there are more than 11,000 RSMCs who cover 8,129 routes, according to CUPW National President Jan Simpson. 

Amidst rising gas prices, CUPW members launched a petition urging the government to act on the high gas prices. 

“The members who initiated the petition tell us that the additional cost for gas cuts into their earnings, and that some of them have to consider changing jobs because they can’t afford to keep delivering the mail,” Simpson said in an email to rabble.ca. “It’s an extra burden on top of the costs of maintenance and insurance to keep their own vehicles on the road for work.” 

According to a press release by CUPW, RSMCs are currently compensated for their mileage up to the CRA cap for non-taxable automobile allowances for 2022, which is 61 cents per kilometer up to 5000 kilometers. The release says that this cap was set in December 2021, which means it is based on 2021 inflation figures. 

The tax-exempt per-kilometer allowance limit is reviewed annually against inflation to ensure that it continues to roughly reflect the average costs involved in business driving. Any changes to cost components that arise during a year will typically be reflected in the limit that applies in the following year.

Simpson said that RSMCs collectively drive more than four million kilometers daily. She calculated that at an average consumption of 13 liters per 100km, that would be more than 62,000 liters of fuel used daily.

“This burden does not belong on the individual worker,” Simpson said. 

The large amount of fuel used by RSMCs falls under Canada Post’s Scope 3 emissions, which means they are not considered direct emissions caused by Canada Post. Scope 3 is supposed to be for emissions by contractors and suppliers that Canada Post does not have control over. Simpson said, Canada Post makes the routes, and tracks the distances for compensation. 

CUPW said in their press release that RSMC emissions should be included in Scope 1 which encompasses emissions that Canada Post is directly responsible for. 

Due to the classification of RSMC vehicle emissions, the more than 11,000 RSMCs are left out of Canada Post’s plan to move to electric vehicles. This means Canada Post RSMCs will continue to use tens of thousands of liters of fuel daily. This not only maintains the cost burden on workers, it also means that Canada Post will not truly have net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 

Simpson said that the burden of responsibility should shift from the worker to the corporation. 

“If Canada Post Corporation were responsible for equipping RSMCs with vehicles and fuel, then the workers wouldn’t have to worry about the cost of the gas they need to do their job,” Simpson said. “It would also bring the RSMCs’ emissions into CPC’s scope 1 emissions, which would increase their incentive to electrify more of the delivery fleet. Or there may be other solutions we could find to make Canada Post responsible for rising fuel costs, which would also increase their incentive to improve fuel economy and emissions.”

By Timothée Parrique - Timothée Parrique, July 3, 2022

The best the degrowth literature has to offer served on a silver platter. That’s how I would describe The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism(June 2022) by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan.[1] Reading it, I felt like Neo in The Matrix learning everything there is to know about Kung Fu all at once – “I know degrowth.” 

This kind of synthesis was long overdue. The degrowth literature has grown rather large and I cannot think of a single text that maps it all. Research on degrowth used to be my favourite guide to degrowth but there is only so much you can do in a 20-page article (plus, the literature has more than doubled since it was published in 2018). Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era (2014) is a good pot luck of perspectives but lacks coherence and depth due to its multi-author, short-entry format. I tried my best in The political economy of degrowth (2019) but the end result is rather cumbersome. 

In The Future is Degrowth, the authors have achieved a colossal Spring cleaning of the field. Sufficiency, dépense, commoning, pluriverse, unequal exchange, conviviality, self-determination, and many more (I have counted more than sixty concepts throughout the book). With such an exhaustive span, this book is to degrowth what the IPCC is to climate science: the best available literature review on the topic. 

But warning: this book is not for the academically faint hearted. If you’re looking for a wide-audience introduction to degrowth, this is not one of them, and I would rather recommend The Case for Degrowth[G. Kallis, S. Paulson, G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria], a shorter, less demanding way of covering the basics. If you’ve never heard of the topic at all, Less is more[Jason Hickel], Post Growth: Life after capitalism[Tim Jackson], and Degrowth [Giorgos Kallis] are also good places to start. 

The Future is Degrowth is rather long (more than 100,000 words) but neatly organised. The literature is chiselled into six tidy lists: 3 dimensions and 7 critiques of growth, 5 currents and 3 principles of degrowth, 6 clusters of proposals, and 3 strategies for change. The book itself is divided in seven chapters. After a long introduction (12% of the total book length), the first two chapters deal with understanding economic growth and its critics (that’s about half of the book). The remaining chapters follow Erik Olin Wright’s famous triad: Chapter 4 is about the desirability of degrowth (11%), Chapter 5 about its viability (13%), and Chapter 6 about its achievability (11%). This leaves us with a short concluding chapter (5%) titled “The future of degrowth.” 

With such a monumental piece of work, I could not resolve myself to write a short review, which would feel like summarising all seasons of Game of Thrones in a single tweet. This book deserves a proper dissection, and so I will here process chapter by chapter, taking all the space needed to summarise its content and, in the end, analyse its (many) strengths and (very few) weaknesses.

By Michael Kwet - ROARMag, April 4, 2022

In the space of a few years, the debate on how to rein in Big Tech has become mainstream, discussed across the political spectrum. Yet, so far the proposals to regulate largely fail to address the capitalist, imperialist and environmental dimensions of digital power, which together are deepening global inequality and pushing the planet closer to collapse. We urgently need to build a ecosocialist digital ecosystem, but what would that look like and how can we get there?

This essay aims to highlight some of the core elements of a digital socialist agenda — a Digital Tech Deal (DTD) — centered on principles of anti-imperialism, class abolition, reparations and degrowth that can transition us to a 21st century socialist economy. It draws on proposals for transformation as well as existing models that can be scaled up, and seeks to integrate those with other movements pushing for alternatives to capitalism, in particular the degrowth movement. The scale of needed transformation is massive, but we hope this attempt at outlining a socialist Digital Tech Deal provokes further brainstorming and debate over how an egalitarian digital ecosystem would look and the steps we might take to get there.