In our increasingly dystopian world, who wouldn’t want to at least be open to a utopian antidote? The World Justice Report, published on Thursday, outlines how to build a prosperous, equitable world within safe planetary boundaries. It’s a push from the modern eco-socialist left in a global battle for ideas that will shape the future.
Based on past social achievements and future energy transformation, it indicates that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet could, by the end of the century, work less and earn more while keeping temperatures down and avoiding much of the current destruction of nature. It is an ambitious, comprehensive and upbeat plan, and a stronger argument around which to build a political campaign than abstract goals of “net zero” or “decarbonisation”.
By incorporating important concepts of “sufficiency” and “planetary habitability”, it also addresses the fundamental question of how to reduce the material impact of economic activity – a topic long ignored by the traditional left.
While critics will question the feasibility of this vision because it relies on a radical reform of global financial institutions and massive wealth taxes – both of which have long been dismissed as unthinkable by rich nations – there can be no worthwhile assessment of its value without considering the far bleaker alternatives offered by the far right and the old left.
Chief among them is the far-right techno-extractivist vision currently being championed by the US president and his supporters in Silicon Valley, who are putting artificial intelligence ahead of renewable technology. In the quest for “energy dominance”, the US is now using tariffs and military power to widen markets for oil, gas and coal. This strategy of literally concentrating power in the hands of billionaires is driving the world towards catastrophic levels of global heating and inequality.
Thomas Piketty, one of the coordinators of the report, said the ambition of the mega-rich has become unrealistic and undesirable. “People realise this is simply not working. If the billionaires and the centimillionaires of the world were conducting our economy, investing the money in a way that brings us to a fantastic future with planetary habitability, rising wages and better housing conditions and health conditions for all, then everybody would be happy to give them the keys. But that’s not what we see. Their new dream is to cover the entire planet with data centres. This is their economic project for the world. But everybody can see that this is just going to increase the material footprint of our economy, that this is going to make global warming even worse.”
The report also fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s. One of the architects of that system, the British chemist Robert Watson, who is also a former chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me that if…
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