Highlights from Jason Hickel
1) Compensation for atmospheric appropriation. This is my top highlight. We show that rich countries have already dramatically exceeded their fair-shares of the carbon budget for 1.5°C and 2°C and are rapidly appropriating the fair-shares of others, forcing them to mitigate faster than would otherwise be required. In a scenario where all countries aim for zero emissions by 2050, rich countries will owe $192 trillion to global South countries in compensation for atmospheric appropriation. In Nature Sustainability.
2) Climate change and racial justice. Rich countries and elites are overwhelmingly responsible for excess emissions, but communities in the global South—and Indigenous and racially minoritized groups within nations—face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change. The climate crisis is a process of atmospheric colonization, and the consequences are playing out along colonial lines. Make sure to check out these striking maps. In The Lancet.
3) Is “green growth” happening? We investigate this question empirically for the first time. We find that, at current rates, the countries that have achieved absolute decoupling of GDP from CO2 will take on average more than 220 years to decarbonize, burning their 1.5C fair-shares 27 times over. There is nothing “green” about this. Much faster mitigation is needed. For rich countries, sufficiently rapid mitigation will require transformative post-growth and demand-reduction strategies (described in the discussion). In The Lancet Planetary Health.
4) How to pay for saving the world. Here we argue that high-income countries can fund rapid decarbonization and ambitious social policy (including universal public services) without requiring more GDP growth to do it. The article synthesizes MMT and degrowth research for the first time. In Ecological Economics.
5) A viable path to limiting global warming to 1.5C. Here we demonstrate that post-growth pathways in high-income countries can make it substantially more feasible to achieve the Paris Agreement objectives. By contrast, if high-income countries pursue faster growth this will jeopardise the Paris goals. In One Earth.
6) On degrowth and technology. This brief piece debunks the false idea that degrowth is anti-technology. In reality, degrowth embraces ambitious technological change (to the extent that it is empirically feasible and socially just) while also prioritizing sufficiency and equity. In such a scenario we can accelerate green innovation through public investment, and ensure rapid dissemination of necessary technologies. In Monthly Review.
7) The double objective of democratic ecosocialism. Under capitalism we face a double crisis of mass deprivation and ecological breakdown. The solution is to achieve democratic control over production and organize it around the double objective of wellbeing and ecology. This piece describes the policies we need and the political alliances that are necessary to get us there. In Monthly Review.
8) Capitalogenic disease. Here we introduce a new term to describe disease dynamics arising from capitalism. We discuss eight ways that capitalism makes people sick, perpetuates disease, and produces health inequalities. In BMJ Global Health.
9) Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China. It is widely believed that China's socialist economy had high rates of extreme poverty while the capitalist reforms of the 1980s and 1990s delivered rapid progress. But this narrative relies on World Bank data that ignores variations in the cost of meeting basic needs. Using new data published by the OECD, we find that in the 1980s socialist China had some of the lowest rates of extreme poverty in the developing world, while the capitalist reforms of the 90s caused extreme poverty to increase as privatisation inflated prices of necessary goods and deflated the incomes of the working classes. In New Political Economy.
10) On capitalism and global poverty. Last year we published a paper in World Development showing that the rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward was associated with a decline in human welfare. Significant improvements began only around the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements. Here we discuss how capitalism impedes development in the global South, and how governments can overcome these limitations through democratic planning. In Monthly Review.
Finally, a few highlights from the blog. This piece describes what a full programme of universal public services and a job guarantee could look like, why this approach is critical to solving social and ecological problems, and how to fund it. This piece argues that degrowth can enable us to accelerate socially and ecologically necessary forms of production (and innovation!) faster than what can be achieved in a growth-oriented scenario. And this one provides a compilation of studies that assess the extent of popular support for radical economic transformation (good news: transformative paradigms are supported by strong majorities).
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