Today CCPA released a new report by myself and Ken Carlaw, an economist at UBC-Okanagan, called Climate Justice, Green Jobs and Sustainable Production in BC. I doubt you’ll see any headlines about it in the major news dailies, but I think it will have a longer-lasting impact as a key economic framing piece for our Climate Justice Project.
In the paper we start with an ecological economics perspective on what “sustainability” really means when it comes to climate change policies, and from that we consider implications for “green jobs”. These are both important concepts that in the course of prominent usage tend to get thrown around without much clarity. So, we try to fill in those containers with meaning.
One important implication is that we need to cut our fossil fuel habit by 2040, and reduce remaining greenhouse gases to near-zero by mid-century. That means we need a moratorium on new oil and gas developments unless 100% of the emissions can be sequestered underground forever. It means that people and governments should not waste time and money assuaging carbon guilt by buying offsets. And it means rethinking industrial policies that have been successful in economic terms, but now fly in the face of good climate policies.
We then go on to apply this framework to the world of work in BC. We look at GHG emissions and employment by industrial sector, and find that (surprise, surprise) mining and oil and gas industries have a ridiculously high amount of emissions while providing comparably little employment. So the bad news is that we need to transition our economy away from GHG-intensive industries, and this requires transition planning for workers; the good news is that those industries actually employ relatively few workers, and many of the skills in those industries have broader applicability in a low-carbon economy. On the other hand, most of the service sector is “green” but is not always decent work. Plans for green jobs need to ensure we are creating decent work and that we actively seek to create new opportunities for traditionally disadvantaged populations.
In the last part of the paper, we review the bright spots for new green job creation, and put a major onus on the public sector to make large investments that create green jobs as we rebuild the infrastructure of our economy and society. Retrofitting buildings and public transit are low-hanging fruit, but I’m particularly interested in the nexus between zero waste policies and green manufacturing as an under-appreciated area with lots of employment potential. Adaptation to climate change already in the pipeline is another source of green jobs, including everything from growing food to shoring up dykes to planting trees to deepening our social services networks.
Of course, it’s going to take money to make this happen. The Stern Review for the UK Government called for 1% of GDP to be invested per year, and in BC this translates into $2 billion. A ten-year rapid action plan is readily fundable through revenues from the carbon tax and royalties on oil and gas. It’s easy to get cynical about this exercise when we see such intransigence from the big carbon polluters around the world, including the BC government, who have ramped up oil and gas production even as they brought in a carbon tax (we have a whole chapter on these contradictions). Someone needs to break from the status quo and show real leadership. With the right amount of political will, BC is ideally poised to do so.
Tom Walker // Oct 1, 2010 at 9:36 am
“Someone needs to break from the status quo and show real leadership.”
This CCPA paper doesn’t show that leadership. In fact, it deliberately evades the key issue raised by a group of prominent ecological economist who participated in the workshop, “The challenge of sustainability: towards Rio+20″ organized by the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development on May 8-10, 2010 in New York.
PREMISES FOR A NEW ECONOMY: AN AGENDA FOR RIO + 20
http://tinyurl.com/rio20
From which I quote:
“3. Decarbonization is necessary but not sufficient. A necessary condition for avoiding the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming is to “decarbonize” the economy, that is, to reduce energy use, neutralize carbon emissions from fossil fuels and to shift to renewable sources of energy that do not add to the atmospheric accumulation of CO2.
“Can a decarbonized economy continue to grow? Technological optimists believe so: some combination of decoupling economic growth from relying on ever more energy use and decoupling energy use from CO2 emissions would allow us to live within planetary boundaries even as the economy continued to grow at rates that have been achieved historically and to which economics, politics (both domestic and international) and societal arrangements have become habituated and dependent. Very rapid improvements in efficiency could theoretically permit such “absolute decoupling.”
“Up to now the results of decoupling have been meager at best, so that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption increased by 40 percent between 1990 and 2009. Whatever the theoretical possibilities, the practical reality today is that the challenge of decarbonization on the requisite scale is daunting, requiring global rates of improvement in energy efficiency several times faster than anything that has been sustained historically.
“Although technology may deliver dramatic improvements, indeed, even if technology does come to the rescue on the energy front, the growth regime of the past is problematic. The CO2 barrier is only one of many constraints: without absolute decoupling, continued growth on a global scale at historical rates will sooner or later bring us up against barriers such as toxification, exhaustion and pollution of fresh water supplies, and loss of genetic diversity, not to mention shortages of raw materials, or, equivalently, sharply increasing costs of raw-material extraction. In short, succeeding beyond our wildest expectations with respect to energy will stabilize the climate, but will also exacerbate these other problems and bring us more quickly up against other barriers to the planetary safe operating space—and perhaps barriers that have not yet been identified.
“4. Our considered view is that the range of problems the world faces require nothing less than a civilizational response, a change in how we live, work, and understand….”
The statement was prepared by Stephen Marglin and endorsed by the following other participants (in alphabetical order): Frank Ackerman, Lois Barber, Peter Brown, Robert Costanza, Paul Ekins, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Maja Göpel, Tim Jackson, Ashok Khosla, Nebosja Nakicenovic, Paul Raskin, William Rees, Wolfgang Sachs, Juliet Schor, Gus Speth, Peter Victor, Ernst von Weiszäcker.
Marc Lee // Oct 1, 2010 at 10:49 am
I don’t really have any disagreement with what’s quoted. If you read our paper and its recommendations, I’d suggest we take a similarly hard line (though we have the luxury of focusing our efforts on BC).
We talk about throughput of energy and materials in the economy, and wastes, which is to say, an ecological economics framework. Tom would have requested a specific condemnation of economic growth per se, which we did not do, but nor did we argue for growth as usual. There are many nuances to this issue, and well, the paper is long enough already. The point was to set out the framework, look at emissions sources by industry and think about what this all means for jobs, dirty and green.
Tom Walker // Oct 1, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Tom WOULD NOT “have requested a specific condemnation of economic growth per se”. This is what gets my goat, Marc thinking that he can speak for me and attributing views to me that are not mine. Instead, I have pointed out that you should have acknowledged the critique of the growth imperative. What kind of dialogue is it to pretend that acknowledging the critique of growth amounts to the same thing as “condemning growth per se”.
If Marc really doesn’t have any disagreement with what I’ve quoted from the joint statement, perhaps he can explain why there is no acknowledgment in the Green Jobs paper of the critique of the growth imperative.
Marc says, “we did not argue for growth as usual”. Does that mean it doesn’t argue for growth at all? Or does it mean it argues for more growth in “green” sectors of the economy and less in the “ungreen” sectors? If it is the former than the problem of massive unemployment arises unless there is substantial reduction of working time — a topic not addressed in the paper. If it is the latter, then (let’s not be coy) we’re talking about a centrally planned economy. I personally am agnostic on the question of central planning because I would prefer the route of work time reduction as both less coercive and less susceptible to systematic corruption. Marc assumes that work time reduction implies coercion while not addressing the central planning implications of the sectoral shift.
Two and a half months ago, I sent Marc a discussion paper that addresses non-coercive institutions and analytical guidelines for work-time reduction. Marc offered to “have a look at it at some point” but never did. At least he has never acknowledged having read it and shows no sign of being aware of its non-coercive policy recommendations. That paper is available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/34906617/Canoe-and-Compass
I do suppose it would have been more diplomatic of me to make a point of acknowledging all the parts of Marc’s paper that I do agree with. But two factors brought me up short. One was the glaring omission of any explicit acknowledgment of the extant critique of growth. The other was the fact that I have tried to engage Marc at a substantive level on several occasions and have been given the bum’s rush.
Now, I sometimes entertain the possibility that I am just some wild-eyed eccentric kook with an ax to grind and that scholars like Bill Rees, Peter Victor, Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor, Bill McKibben, Elinor Ostrom, Dean Baker and Robert Pollin are only humoring me when they express interest in and even admiration for my analysis.
Personally, it doesn’t matter to me if Marc detests me. But for the sake of social justice — and climate justice — it matters a great deal if Marc not only dismisses my analysis without giving it serious consideration but feels obligated to act as some kind of gatekeeper, shielding others from my allegedly obnoxious, insulting and coercive views. Especially when he thinks he knows what I “would have requested” but never have.
Tom Walker // Oct 1, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Having gone through the document now with a fine tooth comb, I find little to upset my first quick read. The report DOES advocate a centrally-planned economy but leaves that to an exhortation in the final paragraph:
Contrary to what Marc implied above, there is what appears to be an explicit statement of the imperative of economic growth, although the wording is somewhat ambiguous and the context is vague– it is presented as an “example” of a desired objective:
I could find no evidence of agreement with or even acknowledgement of the joint statement’s assertion that
Tom Walker // Oct 1, 2010 at 11:22 pm
The blockquote in the above should have ended after “sustained historically.”
Tom Walker // Oct 1, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Please excuse (or delete) the formatting errror in the above comment. The following corrects the blockquote misformat.
Having gone through the document now with a fine tooth comb, I find little to upset my first quick read. The report DOES advocate a centrally-planned economy but leaves that to an exhortation in the final paragraph:
Contrary to what Marc implied above, there is what appears to be an explicit statement of the imperative of economic growth, although the wording is somewhat ambiguous and the context is vague– it is presented as an “example” of a desired objective:
I could find no evidence of agreement with or even acknowledgement of the joint statement’s assertion that
I found two cursory and vague references to reducing consumption, the most explicit and expansive being, “Beyond efficiency measures, conservation also requires changes in the amount and composition of consumption.”
Finally, the report references the United Nations Environment Programme report, “Green Jobs: Towards decent work in a sustainable, low-carbon world” three times. It is worth pointing out that the United Nations report contained brief sections on “Rethinking Consumption” and “A New Approach to Work Hours” even though these topics were “not in the report’s remit” (explicitly stated) and were considered too controversial to do much more than mention.
Interestingly, the UNEP Green Jobs report was produced by the Worldwatch Institute (Worldwatch’s Michael Renner was the lead author), which, in its 2010 State of the World Report: Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability, which focused on “the need to reorient cultures on sustainability instead of consumerism, if the human species is going to thrive long into the future.” http://www.worldwatch.org/sow10
Marc Lee // Oct 2, 2010 at 10:59 am
Thanks for the deconstruction, Tom. I’m glad you took the time to read the report. But I’m once again alarmed by your tone, which is angry and insulting, on what is ultimately a minor quibble blown up to look like a theological dispute.
To reiterate, I think that it is better to focus on what really matters — energy and materials throughput and wastes — rather than growth per se. As we point out in the paper, different work has different sized footprints, and we move the discussion forward by zeroing in on what industries are dirty and which are green.
As much some policy makers are obsessed with growth, I find the de-growth mantra to be equally simplistic. Economic growth is an outcome, not something that can directly be targeted, so we need to focus on policies that lead to structural changes in how we live, work and play so that we are sustainable, and do so in a way that ensures just outcomes (ideally, a major reduction in inequality). That is, if we got the ecological economics right it could lead to higher or lower GDP but the point of good policy would make it much less relevant as an outcome.
We have many climate justice projects on the go looking at this huge question, with the participation of 40 NGOs and 25 academics, and CCPA also held a workshop this past year on economic growth that you attended. When we discussed the matter with folks like Peter Victor and Bill Rees about this they were generally are in agreement with the nuances. And that perspective seemed to be the outcome at the end of the workshop, too.
Finally, I would invite you to reflect on how well you play with the other children. Your hectoring tone is unhelpful, and seem to have a lot of anger directed at me, not just here but in other comments you have made on the PEF blog. How do you expect to advance your own priority issues when you are insulting to people like me who are sympathetic to those issues?
Tom Walker // Oct 2, 2010 at 12:53 pm
This really takes the cake, Marc. No, I’m not angry. I feel numb. Dispirited. Demoralized. Negated. Violated.
You win.
Enjoy your million-dollar climate justice grant.
Tom Walker // Oct 7, 2010 at 8:48 am
Do I detect a pattern here? Bob Simpson’s “angry and insulting” remarks about Carole James: