Modern myths
Myth: “An unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify a social institution” dictionary.com
Myth 1: More world trade makes us stronger
Imagine you are walking across the drowned land of Saeftinghe, now part of the breathtaking banks of the Scheldt river, at the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. These brackish marshes are a breeding area for a variety of beautiful birds. The wind blows salty air through your hair and the high helm grass tickles your knees. The scene easily brings you to the edge of a trance until, suddenly, a container ship looms large. Three football fields long and as high as a suburban housing block, it is apparently sliding slowly through the tidal muds. In fact the Scheldt runs somewhere in between this vast expanse of salt-loving grasses and a maze of gullies. The mass of containers might as well be on an airport luggage belt, one that is in this case heading towards Antwerp. Today, the port of Antwerp receives over 200 million tonnes of goods a year. The next batch of stuff Made in China is always on the horizon. 24/7.
Once upon a time, things were very different here. Forget about the ancient Silk Road bringing in a few goods once every now and then. Very little stuff that was made in China ever made it to Belgium before World War II. Even the supply from colonies in Africa was a mere trifle compared to the floating hypermarkets that now arrive by boat every hour, day and night. After World War II, international trade started to grow exponentially. Between 1950 and 1992, the number of tonnes shipped over sea multiplied by a factor of eight.169 On global trade, humanity entered a whole other level in those decades. But the time lag between trade’s benefits and bills created a myth: the myth that more global trade always equals progress.
Fair enough: more free trade created great prosperity, especially at the top. But after World War II economists were misled by temporarily cheap oil prices that made them believe that geographical limits were now a thing of the past. What we’re witnessing now is revenge. The revenge of geography, the revenge of the climate and the revenge of the victims of unequal trading.
In 1804, the British sunk the Spanish frigate Mercedes, along with 500,000 gold and silver coins that were on board. Two hundred years later, they were found by US treasure hunters. A court ruled that the US treasure hunters had to hand over their $500 million booty to Spain. But just before the coins were about to be flown from Florida to Spain, the US Supreme Court received a novel claim from Peru. The country had been occupied and plundered at the direction of the Spanish crown and that armed robbery was neither forgotten nor forgiven. But the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the conquistadores, thus renewing the legitimacy of the plundering that colonization was. Collective memories of the robbed have a very real meaning today – even if 2 centuries have passed.
Ships have a massive impact on our history and not always and only for the better. Without ships, the Spanish elite would not have been able to plunder Latin America, millions of slaves would not have been abducted from Africa and shipped to the Americas and we would not today be emptying Senegalese waters of its fish thanks to European super trawlers the size of small aircraft carriers. Australian sand would not be going into concrete for the world’s highest tower in Dubai, and it would not be dumping our e-waste in Ghana and China. Many unfair and damaging trade flows, fed on over-extraction and encouraging overconsumption, are powered by just a few thousand mighty ships, who depend on just about a dozen major shipping hubs or knots in the global shipping lanes.
All along the way, the argument has been used that big ships are more efficient. But it’s just like our refrigerators and cars that have become more energy efficient but also a lot bigger and heavier, thus undoing any benefit of the efficiency gain. More importantly: the so-called gains have allowed for new uses and new wastes. Efficiency is only useful in an ecological sense if it helps to get us to use less of our finite resources. Super-efficient shipping has done just the opposite. There are just not enough materials on earth to provide every earthling with the most efficient Tesla and iPhone.
Professor Alf Hornborg of Lund University, Sweden calculated that Europe has been a net importer of natural resources for centuries. His research also shows that Europe not only managed to maintain this position after decolonization, but expanded it massively. Europe is the most import dependent of all continents, followed by the US.170 If you see how unequal trade is sucking life out of non-European countries, you could even argue that there is empirical evidence to the claim that Europe is the world’s largest bloodsucker, unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Our dependency on materials, energy, food and so much more from other continents makes us subsidize dirty international shipping in exchange for the possibility of unsustainably high consumption, which is enjoyed mostly by a few at the top at the cost of billions elsewhere. But a majority of Europeans consider access to cheap exotic products a basic necessity and vote for political leaders who promise more of the same. With the problems exported beyond Europe, there’s no democratic way in Europe to correct this unfair system – unless you count on a majority voting purely on moral grounds. Clearly, that is not happening. Neither do I expect that to happen.
Europeans amount to less than 10 percent of the world population. If you look at the voting turnout, it is more like 3 percent of the world population that somehow voted for this massive transfer of goods into Europe. Our economy has been globalized but democratic constituencies remained regional, and flawed.
Let us spend some more time on the consequences of the current trade volumes. One consequence of all this freedom and blank checks for shipping is that the 16 largest ships in the world emit more sulfur than all cars together.171 Yes, all billion cars. International shipping is not only tax-free, it is also free to poison our atmosphere. Ships are allowed to use unfiltered bunker fuel that is literally thousands of times more filthy for the air than what is used in the average car. James Corbett of Delaware University, a world authority on ship emissions, estimates the worldwide death toll from ship emissions at 60,000 victims a year, of whom 27,000 are Europeans. The idea that these ships can pollute the air above the ocean without having an effect on humans is fatally flawed and the flaw has a name: wind. Ships don’t stay in the ocean forever, they even usually come to shores right where many people live. Shipping emissions have continued to rise since Corbett published his groundbreaking paper in 2007 and we are probably now looking at almost 100 European deaths every single day. From shipping.
It is a similar story with CO2 emissions. Almost every sector and industry has been required to reduce emissions (or pay for fake carbon offsets). Not so for international shipping. As a result, studies show emissions from shipping will increase fourfold between 1990 and 2050.
The experts know all this. But at the 2015 climate summit in Paris, shipping and air traffic were again sitting pretty, exempted from action to reduce their emissions. A package of measures to further reduce emissions of road vehicles was adopted by the European Commission in 2016. That too was a missed opportunity to lock horns with the aviation and shipping sectors. The UN Maritime Administration decided at the end of 2016 to postpone emissions reductions from shipping for at least 7 years. Climate urgency? What urgency?
Why would the powers that be give shipping such a free ride? Could it be because they are at the very heart of the macroeconomic model in which each product has to be made where the cost of extracting or making the product is at its lowest? The invisible hand must be free to show us its magic tricks. Just to be clear, I do believe that some world trade is necessary for our well-being. I could not go without coffee, to name just one daily indulgence. But the question needs to be asked: what is the optimum trade volume? Is it a volume that allows for a level of specialization and prosperity, but also makes over-extraction and overconsumption hard instead of easy? A volume that allows our ecosystems to regenerate so we can carry on enjoying their benefits forever?
Why not take as a benchmark Earth Overshoot Day, the day in the calendar year after which we are eating into our capital, as the rent for that year has been used up by then. On that measure, one could argue that the optimal volume of the global economy was reached in around 1970. In 1987 we were still close to balance but from there onwards the speed of taking more from the earth than it can regenerate has been exponential. Now, it’s important to understand the scale of the problem. The exports of goods didn’t just double or triple ever since. In dollar value, world exports in 2016 were 50 times bigger than in 1970.172
Returning to 1970s trade volumes does not mean trading the same Ford Cortinas, flared jeans, disco vinyl and other 70s stuff. Once a manageable volume is agreed upon, many questions can be asked around quality, fairness and ecological sense. A Ugandan farmer making money from fair trade bananas sounds to me like a better idea than building a greenhouse in my garden that is heated to 30°C throughout the year. It also makes sense to keep trading in bananas, given their contribution to a healthy diet. But should our ships really be made in China, used in Europe and broken down in Bangladesh? Should shrimp caught in the North Sea get trucked to Morocco to be peeled then trucked back again? In that process it is not just the climate that suffers. We lose jobs and gain traffic jams, excessive packaging, emissions and the associated avoidable air pollution diseases and deaths in return. It adds GDP, but costs the public more than it benefits the shareholders of the companies who do just that. Any policy that is serious about both climate change and bringing back jobs must say the unthinkable; that we need the right mix between world trade and protectionism.
Protectionism? Relax. Breathe in...and out. I know that some readers may get a little hot under the collar reading this. Protectionism is, after all, embodied by fascists like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. That should not be the case. Influential Belgian Green Party member and columnist Jan Mertens wrote a strong piece about the misplaced fear of green progressives who were anxious not to be associated with the taboo word, protectionism.173 “You sure need to question policies based on ‘own people first’...but at the same time, that does not mean that you cannot talk about the deeper meaning and consequences of social and environmental exchanges in the form of international trade. Faith, because that’s what it essentially is, in the blessings of unfettered international free trade is dangerous. We need to have that debate without being lumped together with the likes of Donald Trump.”
Protectionism is not the same as patriotism. Patriotism is about nationalism but protectionism can be about protecting the global ecosystem from a collapse. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, you can apply existing WTO procedures for tariff walls around polluting countries. Instead of charging an import tax on solar panels from China, why not penalize damaging imports like bauxite, uranium, gold, oil, gas, coal, wood pellets and palm oil? But things also need to go further than taxing. Why should the international transport of pellets even be legal? Why should gadgets with hidden kill switches be allowed on the market?
Will all this not hurt the poorest part of the population hardest? Not necessarily. That depends on how you spend the extra import taxes and how you organize your economy in general. Guaranteeing a good living standard for all and a limit on luxury goods merely requires political imagination. No laws of nature need be broken. It is if we fail to intervene that systems will collapse, with super inequality as a result and the poorest starving to death. A much fairer distribution of the raw materials, through a global trade regime that respects the capacities of our ecosystems, can deliver more people more prosperity over a longer period than today’s free trade mantra. Governments need to step up and co-operate to create ecological trade barriers, instead of negotiating on what trade barriers they will eliminate first.
What does all this say about the so-called free trade agreements that most Western leaders are so keen about? The two big cross-Atlantic ones are known best by their acronyms: TTIP and CETA, standing for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement respectively. They are two of the approximately 30 agreements that the EU wants to conclude. All want to further increase the flow of goods to and from the EU.
Most of the classically big conservative, liberal and even many social parties on the European continent still believe in the myth that TTIP and CETA are good for us. They discuss the details of what trade barriers to eliminate but not the fundamental problem with current trade volumes.
The threat from TTIP seemed less acute when Trump took office and immediately poured cold water over it. But the threats are anything but over. First of all: CETA is TTIP through the back door. About 42,000 US multinationals have a branch in Canada. If CETA is pushed through with an arbitration panel, those companies would also be entitled to claim damages of up to several billion euros against any new EU law that curbs profits of US companies, however ill gotten. The watchdog NGO Corporate Europe Observatory, in its report The Great CETA Swindle, denounced the Canadian government and the European Commission’s efforts to sell the deal as a “progressive” agreement. CETA remains what it has always been: an attack on democracy, employees and the environment.174 A total of 101 law professors warn that it will result in a transfer of billions from states to multinationals.175 For more on the spine-chilling power grab of secretive trade deal courts, look no further than The Court that Rules the World, a BuzzFeed report that was 18 months in the making.176
Belgian professor Paul De Grauwe of the London School of Economics thinks all so-called free trade agreements should be put on ice for a number of reasons, but especially because of their environmental impacts.177 Another Belgian professor, Jonathan Holslag, wrote of CETA: “We forget...all the hidden costs such as the inefficiency of the endlessly long distribution networks and the associated mountain of packaging waste and energy-loss for cold storage transport.”178
One of the key features of CETA is that it opens all areas of health, environment, food safety and social protection up for privatization, unless something is explicitly put on a safe list of regulations that is set in stone at the start. So the European Commission now calls all consumer protection and environmental laws non-tariff barriers to trade. What protects us and the earth is a “barrier”, de facto a “bad thing”. A ban on the carcinogenic weed killer Round-Up? Bad. A ban on tar sand oils? Bad. Trade is good. Barriers are bad. And all the sheep from Orwell’s Animal Farm repeat that mantra all over the place until we’re totally brainwashed. Trade is good. Barriers are bad.
Just negotiating TTIP and CETA has already had massive impacts. The European Commission approved a whole series of genetically modified crops (GMCs) for sale in the EU in 2015 as a concession to US negotiators and a step towards harmonization. A better choice of words would be: as part of a race to the bottom. The European Commission also dropped regulations that would have side-lined dirty tar sand oil, to please Canadian negotiators. It’s all in leaked official documents.179
Also on the chopping block: the precautionary principle, a tenet that policymakers can ban a particular product if there is a high risk of damage, even if there is no existing scientific proof of the damaging effect yet. Currently, the burden of proof lies with the company to prove that its goods are really safe. CETA and TTIP are based on the reverse thinking, which is customary in the US and Canada. Harm must first be proved by the state before a policymaker can ban a product.
More than 3 million Europeans signed a petition against TTIP and CETA. Protests have been among the largest seen on the continent in recent years. Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner for Trade, reacted with this: “I do not get my mandate from European voters.” If the European Commission ever needed an epitaph for its gravestone, it need look no further.
Malmström had a point: she’s not elected. But she does hold a lot of power. How come? Problem one: the vast majority of eligible Europeans did not bother to vote for a member of the European Parliament last time round. The 2014 elections reached a record low, at just 42.5 percent. More than a third of those who made the effort voted for an anti-European party. Only a quarter of eligible voters took the effort to go and vote for a pro-EU candidate.
After that is all done, the strongmen of the biggest pro-Europe parties decided who they want in the club that we call the European Commission. The European Parliament has close to zero impact on that. But only the commission can draft new laws and its president is the de facto prime minister of Europe. The checks on this system today are not a strong parliament, but a couple of anti-EU nationalist heads of state who try to sabotage the European Commission in the European Council – often on the already weak environmental initiatives they do propose to take.
So if Cecilia Malmström does not work for European voters, who does she work for? It is hard to keep up with the number of commissioners who, at the end of their term in office, score an extremely well-paid role in a large company with plush offices. Just take the previous boss, José Manuel Barroso. He is now working for Goldman Sachs, a bank that, according to the commission’s current boss, was partly to blame for the recent financial meltdown. Moreover, it played a very dubious role in cooking the books in order to allow Greece to join the EU in the first place, a fiddle that would come back to haunt Europe. Leaked emails show that during his mandate, Barroso met people from Goldman Sachs much more than official documents suggested. As Peter Mertens, leader of Belgium’s fast rising left-wing party PVDA, writes in Graailand: “The business bank that has been responsible for the major banking crisis has given advice to the President of the European Commission on how to address this banking crisis.” Barroso is no exception. Former European Commissioner for Trade Charles De Gucht went on to receive €144,000 a year from ArcelorMittal, a steel company that has a major interest in not paying the real total costs that come with shipping stuff around the globe. CETA and TTIP are good for our wallets, say people like Karel De Gucht. He probably had his wallet in mind.
The arrogance of the European political ruling elite, and even of the majority in the European Parliament who voted in favor of CETA, is a total disaster for the EU as a project. It is a disaster because this arrogance has brought Europeans to the point where they are ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater by dumping the European project wholesale. If the entire European project comes to a dramatic end, there will of course be other reasons besides rotten trade deals. But TTIP, CETA and the lack of democratic legitimacy and respect for the democratic expression of Europeans has alienated millions of Europeans towards what was once considered a beacon of progressive governance.
In October 2016, Wallonia made its big stand against CETA, standing alone in Europe. The pressure was shouldered by the then heroic minister-president of Wallonia: Paul Magnette. The great and the good of Europe’s political aristocracy put in calls to try and railroad Magnette into backing down. The President of the Council of Europe, Donald Tusk, issued several impossible and undemocratic deadlines to Wallonia. Yet, little Wallonia (and the Brussels region as well) stood firm and forced a number of concessions. It’s thanks to them that at least the ECJ is now looking into the basic question of whether CETA is legal or not.
Tatiana Santos works for the EEB on European chemicals policy, lobbying on behalf of 30 million environmentally conscious Europeans.
Scandinavian countries had to water down their chemical standards when Europe adopted new rules called REACH. Although this raised the bar for many countries with weak regulations, that is only useful if the laws are put into effect. But in recent years, the banning or phasing out of hazardous chemicals has ground to a halt. Two forces are driving this; lobbying by a strong chemical industry, and TTIP. The result is that hormone disrupting chemicals are still making the environment and people sick.
The report A toxic affair describes this in detail.180 Hormone disrupting chemicals are causing diseases, deaths and medical costs to the tune of over €150 billion every year in the EU. By comparison, of 60,000 known industrial chemicals, only five are forbidden in the US. In the EU, thousands are either regulated or forbidden. No wonder that REACH legislation has attracted a record number of “trade barrier” procedures by the US. Just negotiating TTIP is hacking away even at the already limited regulations.
Similar pressure is being applied to European fiscal policies. The Robin Hood Tax – a tax on financial transactions long in the making that would provide financial stability and money for the economy outside the finance bubble – was put on hold due to the trade deal negotiations. The Robin Hood Tax would take money from the rich speculative class of people who want to make even more money with their money without having to actually work for it. At one point it seemed that a long struggle to get such a tax was finally coming to fruition in Belgium and ten other EU countries. But one bizarre element in this story is that worldwide one of the great proponents of this Tobin tax is the same man who suddenly started obstructing: Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. In 2010, Michel fought within the UN for a global financial transaction tax that would bring over €30 billion to fight “injustices”. He was still in charge of development affairs then, so it would have been great for his portfolio. But even back in 2004, Belgium was the first in the world to introduce such a tax – even if the tax would not come into effect until all other European countries did the same. When that seemed too much to be asked, there was a European initiative to start with a group of countries. This tax would make Belgium more than €1.36 billion richer. However, a leaked document on the TTIP negotiations talks about reducing obstacles to the financial sector. According to the Corporate Europe Observatory, it aims at the financial transaction tax even before it is there.181
Trump took a hammer to US trade agreements with Pacific countries, with Canada and Mexico and with Europe. He then started a trade war and at first it seemed that the flow of goods across the oceans would not continue to rise as fast as it did under the watch of his predecessors. But with Trump there’s no strategy for reducing ecological impacts, rather to the contrary. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when he suddenly brokered a deal with Jean-Claude Juncker in the summer of 2018 to not only make trade war exceptions for the EU but even talked about zero tariffs and zero subsidies as the ultimate common aim. These gentlemen are now deciding that rather than going for a pretense of democratic control by burdensome parliaments, they’ll just deal with trade issues in closed door meetings. One thing they decided is that the EU will buy more liquid gas from the US, thus allowing the US fracking industry to wreak even more havoc.
In short, trade agreements aiming to increase the trade flows across the oceans even further are hitting the environment on a global scale, reducing environmental protections, eroding democracy and support for the European project, increasing inequality, deteriorating our food safety, attacking our health through the use of more hazardous chemicals, undermining financial stability, privatizing anything not on a “safe list” and leading to the confiscation of billions of taxpayer funds by multinationals that are allowed to play victims of policies that try to protect people and the environment. These are all not some vague opinions or leftist ideas but facts.
The arguments in favor of a deal like CETA? Europeans and Canadians will recognize each other’s professional qualifications and emigrate more easily. People migrating more easily is a liberal idea and I’m happy to see that happen, but most of the features of TTIP and CETA come right from the neoliberal cookbook. And that brings us to the second great myth of our times, one that is crucial to understand if we ever want to be serious about the challenges described in this book.
Myth 2: Neoliberalism is the way to freedom
At the end of 2014, a strange article appeared in The Economist: Ships that pass in the night. As it was about TTIP, I was curious if it mentioned any of the Titanic drawbacks of long-distance transport we have covered. But no, The Economist was concerned with insufficient slime trade. San Francisco oysters, it claimed, are every bit as delicious as those of Normandy. But those poor French are being wrongly deprived of them and TTIP will finally do something about this problem.
I found so much wrong in that story that I’ve started using it in trade debates over and over again. Only a journalist that is unaware of the fact that the metabolism of our economy is already way too high can come up with this shit. “The consumer is king” narrative is killing us all and shipping oysters from San Fran to Paris in cooled containers is exactly the kind of trade we just can’t afford ecologically. Such articles, as well as TTIP and CETA, are the children of neoliberalism.
But what is neoliberalism? Essentially, this ideology states that a government must function like a company. According to Wikipedia, neoliberalism is a collection of ideas about how to manage the world economy. Four principles stand out: privatization, minimal government spending, deregulation and so-called free trade. These assumptions, axioms or dogmas are the four commandments of the neoliberal ideology, a toolkit to engineer unlimited economic expansion. It boils down to putting capitalism on steroids.
For neoliberals, all economic discussion can be reduced to the speed, order and details of implementation of those four commandments. They claim this is the road to freedom. Free is their sacred verb: free markets and free people. So dominant is this ideology that its adherents do not even call it an ideology at all. To do so would acknowledge that there are competing alternatives to steer the economy. There’s a long line of politicians from Margaret Thatcher in the UK to Bart De Wever in Belgium who try to kill economic debates by crying TINA: There Is No Alternative.
That’s the myth, but what’s the reality? Money must also be free to go where it wants to go. We know that through the various scandals covered by the press, such as Offshore Leaks, LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks and the Panama and Paradise Papers. Belgium has lost out on billions of tax income through the international financial architecture that allows the rich to park their money in tax havens. It is estimated that globally, tax havens have allowed a transfer of €18 trillion. That is money taken away from the great leveler: taxation. It is people with a big capital making an even bigger capital. Trillion is a big number, not used often and it has different meanings in the US and UK so just to be clear, we are talking about €18,000,000,000,000. This is a lot of money that states couldn’t tax. States that, according to this class of tax evaders, need to solve their financial problems by spending less on frivolous things like healthcare, public transport, pensions and so on. To justify the dismantling of the welfare state various names are used: austerity, axing, solving the structural deficit etc. Neoliberals are good at victim blaming: if the budget has a hole they’ll blame those profiteering ill and pensioned people.
Under neoliberalism, private profits trump public losses. A good example is Dieselgate. Europe has emissions standards for cars to limit things like fine dust to reduce the risk of getting lung cancer and other diseases. That standard is supposed to shield us from the 400,000 dirty air deaths that Europe endures every year, of which 11,000 are in Belgium.182 In this small country, more than one person dies every hour because of air pollution. But there is more to diesel than how it kills legions of citizens in a rather direct way. Diesel cars are also the main source of black carbon, which causes the North Pole to warm up much faster than the rest of the world. Greenland was never really that green but today it should perhaps be called Greyland. Black carbon soot covers much of the ice, absorbing warm sunbeams and melting the ice faster than what can be explained by rising temperatures alone. The melting of the Greenlandic icecap is just one more piece of collateral damage of the private gains of car manufacturers. After Dieselgate, European policymakers undertook a balancing act. They then set new rules allowing car manufacturers to emit twice as much as before. If you decry this measure as legalization of mass murder, you get the swift response that the automotive industry, private interests, is important for our economy. Meanwhile, consumer, air pollution and climate fraud continue to grow. In 2001, the deviation between claimed emissions and reality was about 9 percent. By 2015, it was 42 percent.183 Thanks to ever more creative ways to count the “normal use of a car”. Climate progress over the last 4 years? Zip. A commission from the European Parliament investigated the Dieselgate scandal and the response of European policymakers. Its conclusion: “Totally inadequate”.184 The European Commission had been informed about the cheating by Volkswagen since 2012. It did nothing. Even after the scandal came to light, the response was inadequate. One wonders why Volkswagen models enjoy favorable exceptions even to the hopelessly generous new rules. The answer was found in a Microsoft Word document containing the favorable amendment. Its author: the Volkswagen Group.185
But it’s not just cars. The European Commission is so keen on the neoliberal logic of putting private profits before public losses that it wants to submit all European laws to a test. This is dubbed the “better regulation” agenda – but it boils down to scrapping or calling down regulations that stand in the way of GDP growth. Never before has the European Commission showed such a neoliberal zeal than under the watch of Jean-Claude Juncker. It is notable that the commission president is from Luxembourg. His deputy, Franz Timmermans, is from the Netherlands, as is the influential Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the former chairman of the EU finance ministers club. Luxembourg and the Netherlands are also the EU’s premier tax havens. In a global ranking of tax havens, the Netherlands is ranked third in the world, just after Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.186 The role of Jeroen Dijsselbloem in guiding the Netherlands to this position was briefly discussed in the first part of this book. At the beginning of 2017, documents appeared showing that Jean-Claude Juncker had for years been blocking all efforts to write new European rules to halt tax evasion.187 This was during a period in which he held roles first as Minister of Finance of Luxembourg, then Prime Minister. The only other EU country that regularly supported his sabotage was the Netherlands, with Dijsselbloem at its financial helm. And these two were like the prime minister and finance minister of the EU for many years.
The situation is dire but simple. The European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker is like a crew of fiscal pirates on a war path. Behind closed doors they are always on the lookout for emptying state coffers but in front of the cameras they complain about the state coffers being too empty. And when they find a state coffer too empty they’ll tell that state to cut social welfare schemes. We, the 99.9 percent of Europeans without private bankers and tax havens, are chained up below decks, forced to row, no matter where the ship is headed to. And we have to row harder and longer with every new conquest of the pirates.
The growth of inequality within Western societies is not in question. It is statistically evident and acknowledged even by the neoliberal IMF as a major problem. Tax evasion is one driver of inequality, but so is privatization of basic services. But what are the precise consequences of greater inequality? In their book, The Spirit Level – why more equal societies almost always do better, professors Wilkinson and Pickett use mathematics to prove that a country with less financial inequality also enjoys less illnesses, social problems, mental health problems, drug use, obesity, academic underachievement, teenage pregnancies, murders and prisoners. With equality comes trust, a longer lifespan and greater compassion for the plight of other countries. The study does not say we should all have the same income, just that society is better off when inequality is relatively small. But the opposite is happening. Celebrated economist Thomas Piketty raised the alarm in his masterwork Capital in the 21st Century, which showed that societies will continue becoming more unequal for as long as neoliberal policies continue. There’s no well-being for all within planetary limits as long as neoliberalism is our dominant ideology. There’s only extreme well-being for a few.
But neoliberalism is not just about the regulation, economic choices, financial flows and inequality. It is also about a society in which a particular mental attitude prevails. We learned a lot about that from psychology professor Paul Verhaegen. His verdict:
Not so long ago, our culture and thus our identity were determined by an interaction between four spheres: politics, religion, economics and art, where politics and religion were fighting for power. Today, politicians are shredded by comedians, religion reminds us of suicide terrorism or sexual abuse and everyone is an artist. Only the economy is holy and the neoliberal economic story determines everything.188
More importantly, Verhaegen wrote about neoliberalism in The Guardian, outlining the perfect characteristics to help land a job in today’s economy: talkative, narcissistic, an accomplished liar without remorse, flexible, impulsive and, above all, a risk taker. His punchline? These six characteristics are also the six key ways to recognize a psychopath. My 50 cents? These traits make me think of a certain Donald J. Trump. Trump is the kind of leader that neoliberalism leads to.
Under neoliberalism, there is only room for strong individuals. One of its most forceful proponents, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, literally said: “There is no such thing as society.” The idea that each individual only gets what they deserve has been elevated to a law of nature. There is no tolerance for bad luck. Set back by chronic fatigue syndrome, a car accident or being fired at 50 with precious little chance of finding a new employer? Tough luck. The ongoing epidemic of burn-outs is not recognized as the result of ever-increasing demands on workers. To the contrary, too often fingers are even pointed to the victims, accusing them of weakness.
Instead of society, neoliberals don’t see a diversity of citizens, they only see consumers and entrepreneurs. Both of them need to perform, no matter what. Each individual must consume and may not go bankrupt, expectations that are the mirror image of a private company. Neoliberals are in fact counter-revolutionaries, not that they would care to admit it (they rarely even admit being a neoliberal). The revolution they seek to overturn is the French Revolution. Liberty, equality and fraternity: the holy trinity of this revolution is under attack from all sides. The French Revolution brought to an end the dark feudal era. If neoliberalism continues its ascent, history books may as well place us at the tail end of an all-too-brief era of enlightenment.
After decades of nurturing the neoliberal script, the IMF did a little introspection in 2016. Three of its researchers published a paper entitled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” They concluded that the recipes of freedom of money to flow where its owners want it to flow, coupled with government austerity measures had together stoked inequality. The biggest surprise was how long it took for the penny to drop. But for the authors, this rising inequality is just unfortunate, not a serious problem. According to them, inequality is bad “because it stands in the way of further economic growth”.
Two years later the IMF came with another confession, saying that, “The growing economic wealth and power of big companies—from airlines to pharmaceuticals to high-tech companies—has raised concerns about too much concentration and market power in the hands of too few.” The authors claim that “some rethinking of policy is needed”. And by the end of 2018 the IMF basically said that the UK was broke because it privatized too much.
These kinds of admissions are weapons in the hands of environmentalists who look at the big picture and the issue of power. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced that the n-word is taboo even in many environmental organizations. I have been laughed at for proposing to use it more often. Too politically loaded, goes the counterargument. It will push us into a radical corner, exclude us from serious political debate and policy influence. But neoliberalism is an economic theory that simply does not understand how nature works and as it is such a dominant theory, it is the source of a massive range of bad decisions with a negative impact on nature. Attaching a monetary value to things that just cannot be reduced to financial terms is a case in point. How do you calculate the value of an amoeba, an ant, the bees? Climate change is the biggest black hole in the neoliberalism universe. It’s a market failure. What’s the price of annihilating most life on earth, possibly including humans, during the twenty-first century? Of course, you can discuss the strategy on when and where to use the n-word itself and it will not help in many lobbying contexts, but I concluded you simply can’t ignore the elephant in the room if you want to be serious about trying to steer humanity away from the current route towards the abyss.
Given the obvious failures of their theory, how have neoliberals been able to sell austerity, deregulation, privatization and more free trade with as an aim, more GDP growth? Neoliberals offer individual freedom in spades. Examples: the freedom to pollute and evade taxes. But they don’t explain that what they offer is more like a trade-off between freedom and security. The influential ecological thinker Dirk Holemans writes in his book Freedom & Security in a complex world (Dutch: Vrijheid en Zekerheid): “On the way to more individual freedom, we have lost much of the security that led to modern civilization...With the neoliberal period, the nation state lost power and meaning, largely becoming a servant of the demands of multinationals.”
At his death, US media and top politicians called Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism, the man of freedom. He’s also the hero of Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt, who wrote a book about him. But the first leader who applied Friedman’s recipe was General Pinochet, immediately after wresting control of the government from democratically elected leader Salvador Allende. The second great neoliberal thinker, Friedrich Hayek, schooled Pinochet directly. The shock doctrine of fast privatization combined with harsh austerity was combined with cruelty on a massive scale – to control the protests resulting from the coup and shock doctrine. Hayek came away from their meetings saying that he preferred a neoliberal dictator to a democratic government without neoliberalism. Since then, this troubled continent and the world at large have seen a great deal of shock therapy. So far for the “freedom” in neoliberalism.
The millions who read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine know that neoliberalism delivers the exact opposite of freedom. She gives examples ranging from juntas in South America to Boris Yeltsin of Russia, who attacked the country’s parliament with tanks. From the UK’s Iron Lady to George Bush in Iraq and the US itself. Wherever they went, neoliberal leaders prescribed the same treatment: shock. Military, economic and sometimes even literally: electric shocks. The CIA started back in the 1950s to test the use of electrical shocks to torture and brainwash people. This enhanced interrogation technique (read: torture) was still in use in the Iraq war. Shocks were needed to rein in people’s freedom and limit the power of public representatives. 9/11 opened the door to the Patriot Act, which allowed for the existence of Guantanamo Bay. Klein tears to pieces the myth that deregulated capitalism and freedom go hand in hand and that free markets complement democracy. She shows that fundamentalist capitalism – what neoliberalism boils down to – has consistently been implemented “through the most brutal forms of compulsion”.
To put the ideas on world trade upside down one needs to understand which ideology stands in the way of doing that. To understand why neoliberalism has caught on since the 1970s, one needs to understand the even bigger picture of what it is supposed to deliver: economic growth. It would not be correct to blame all our problems on neoliberalism. The biggest company in the world, probably ten times more valuable than Apple and contributing to global warming like no other, is a state-owned company: the Saudi oil company Aramco. But the Exxons and the Aramcos of this world all have a greater and more mysterious god, one that seems to sit very comfortably on its throne. It is a god worshiped by both neoliberals, oil-oligarchs and communists alike and it’s that god that is killing us like nothing else. The god I’m talking about is expressed as the GDP of today compared to the GDP of 3 months or one year ago. But to keep things simple, let us just give it the name that we’ve been hearing all over again, for decades on end: Growth (capital G intended).
Myth 3: Economic growth is the key to progress
A 20 percent increase in the death rate of Americans over the age of 65 would cause our per capita growth rate to accelerate.189
This morbid quote comes from The Economist. Following this logic, it is also good for GDP growth if the government denies those aged over 65 access to hospitals and gives them a free cyanide pill. It would be a win-win situation: GDP increases through savings in social security and a booming cyanide industry would also add to GDP.
As if that is not troubling enough, the quote comes from an article on climate change. Basically, a magazine that avidly promotes GDP growth now writes that global warming will kill those that do not contribute to GDP but are a cost to society. In other words: progress.
Fans of Growth do not count deaths by the dozens, but by population percentages. They don’t blink for a little bit of generational genocide. The folks I am talking about pray to Growth. The great creator and destroyer of wealth is now GDP and any pause in its growth is reason for played up mass hysteria and even more human sacrifices by the leaders who worship this god.
While neoliberalism is an ideology to radicalize capitalism, with institutes such as the World Bank and the IMF to enforce implementation, the growth religion is even bigger, vaguer and more elusive. It is the one god that unites leaders from Washington to Beijing.
It is easy to overlook that in historical perspective, that is a remarkable feat. After all, Growth is a newcomer. While God and Allah have been widespread and dominant for centuries or even millennia, the religion around Growth was just a peripheral phenomenon at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Two centuries later, Growth is the dominant religion in almost all countries on earth. On Sundays, people in Belgium used to go to church to be with God. Now they go to shops on Sunday to contribute to Growth. Consumption is sold to us as a mark of good citizenship. We must all do our bit for Growth. TV news reporters are grim faced when they announce a period of reduced consumer confidence. A drop on spending is like a bad weather forecast. Shopping is a civil duty.
Growth is fueled not only on ever more consumption, but also ever lower labor costs. As there is no bottom for this, it has been taken to extremes. In Germany, the drive to lower labor costs created millions of €1 per hour jobs. Few people realize that no other rich country has added so many working poor to its labor force. There are already 7.5 million people working in Germany for €400 a month. In 2016, the Germans went a step further, offering asylum seekers work for just €0.80 per hour. Millions of people are gently and less gently forced to work for (almost) nothing to fuel German GDP and exports. That should ring a bell with anyone who paid attention in history classes.
There have been times when a few establishment figures have questioned the neoliberal orthodoxy. Sicco Mansholt was one of the first European Commission presidents. In his position as the boss of Europe, he had a rather sudden change of mind, after reading the Meadows’ report Limits to Growth to the Club of Rome. All of a sudden and to the astonishment of his cabinet, he started advocating against GDP growth as a policy objective. He proposed new barriers to imports of environmentally unfriendly products. He wanted to increase what TTIP wants to decrease: the flow of goods across oceans. Most people who know about Sicco Mansholt will know about what he did as the powerful agriculture commissioner: getting the EU from a food importer to a food exporter, in the process also creating the first and unfortunate butter mountains. But rather less known is what he did in his last and controversial year in the European Commission, when he was leading it. Frank Westerman’s widely acclaimed book The Republic of Grain covers the transformation of Sicco into a statesman that acknowledged the science that told him that there are limits to growth and to trade.
The hegemony of the growth cult has obscured our historic view on this. Going back to Adam Smith, widely acclaimed to be the ideological founder of capitalism, you’ll discover that even he did not think an economy could grow forever. He wrote that capitalism would be only a temporary phase en route to a sufficient-for-all economy. But how long is temporary?
The man who told me about what Sicco Mansholt did, Joan Martinez Alier, is a pioneer himself. Back in 1989, Alier was one of the founders of the International Society for Ecological Economics. Thousands of anti-neoliberal economists are now part of it. He taught me to look at the economy in a completely different way, one that is remarkably simple, yet transformative.
In its essence, Joan explained there are three “layers” in the economy. There is a hocus-pocus layer floating high above the real economy. This is the flashy, get-rich-quick world of the City of London and Wall Street, a shady realm of venture and vulture funds, credit default swaps, smoke and mirrors made to disguise the fact this is about using other peoples’ money to make more money, regardless of the impact on the real world. Because this hocus-pocus economy is all about blowing bubbles and then profiting from them and then again from their bursts, this economy has a habit of crashing down to earth from time to time, on the heads of many victims in the real economy, in the real world. When the housing bubble burst in 2008, 6 million US citizens lost their homes – to give just one example.
Below that layer you have the so-called “real economy” of goods or services, brands and packaging, the products as in the literal meaning of the P in GDP. These are the things most people can name. But what most people don’t realize is that in this economy, every oil leak or traffic accident is a plus. It doesn’t look at capital and interest in an ecosystem sense. It doesn’t internalize the real total external costs in the price of its products, who stand miraculously independent of the full costs of pollution they cause. Not that it can and must do that. No, the problem is rather that the wrong conclusions are taken from there. Rather than acknowledging that you can’t put a price on killing people or reducing biodiversity and must thus take any measure needed to avoid an economic process that does that, economists operating in this so-called real economy will keep claiming it is only a matter of internalizing the cost in the product. Again: what’s the cost of extinction then?
But the fundaments on which all of the above depend is what Joan called the real-real economy: the products and services provided by ecosystem earth. The earth produces and absorbs, gives and takes. The water cycle, the carbon cycle: it is the earth’s processes that people make use of and depend on. The GDP economy is a bad guide to the state of this earth economy because it often gives positive values to matters that are negative for the real-real economy. Earth’s economy has cycles (with also rapid changes) that we don’t understand fully and can hardly predict. What we do know and witness is that there are limits to how far these cycles can be stretched, influenced, altered. Many of the earth’s cycles are like strings: you can stretch them until they suddenly break. The task of the ecological economist is to study this earth economy and how and where humanity is stretching it beyond its limits.
This fascinates me. Joan teaches me how geography and economy come together or how nature laws – he often cites the laws of thermodynamics – can counter subjective opinions, wishes and delusions, such as the idea that indefinite GDP growth is possible on a planet with finite resources. As he says: “the industrial economy is not circular, it is entropic”. I am familiar with that as I was originally trained as a physical geographer. In a world of warped ideologies and blatant lies, it gives me some peace of mind that there are still scientific certainties we can fall back on. We must use them to expose the lies and myths of our times. And then to build a new narrative.
On holiday in Barcelona, I leave my family at the beach to visit Joan at his home. The streets around his apartment are dotted with strange shops. Chinese stores sell clothes from the cardboard boxes they were shipped in. The overflowing neon lit garage-shops stand in stark contrast to the sight just above the stores: stately apartments with rounded balconies and beautiful wooden shutters. A century ago, this is where Barcelona’s textile barons lived, when the city still made its own clothes.
Sharing this small observation with Joan was all he needed to get started on the ills of the world economy. “While trade flows need to go down to put the brakes on the sixth mass extinction, we are actually seeing the capacity of the Panama Canal being doubled. A Chinese investor even wants to dig another mega shipping channel across Nicaragua.” I remind Joan of our previous conversation about Sicco Mansholt. How does someone in an ideological straightjacket rise through the ranks of the elite to reach the very top of political power and at the same time understand that an ecological economy is our only real option? Joan clarifies that Mansholt did not come to power as an ecologist but became one after he landed the job, especially after reading the well-known Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome.190 When published in 1972, it was the first major hard-science based study that showed with graphs and numbers that we were moving towards a total collapse of society if the economy continued to grow. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. The paper’s predictions match the deterioration we see unfolding today. The collapse they predicted in 1972 by the middle of the twenty-first century is in fact right on their schedule.“There is much more material today to have a contemporary Sicco that suddenly understands the real problem we have, also publications from the European institutions themselves”, Joan argues. The European Environment Agency (EEA) wrote, based on a huge amount of data, the two excellent reports Late lessons from early warnings.191 They notice that new technologies and products might bring surprisingly bad effects (asbestos, tobacco smoking) and that various crises are linked.
Unfortunately, the EEA has zero political power. There are also people in the European administration that get the point, people who know that the current strategy does not work and will lead to mayhem. They are waiting in the corridors for when the political momentum for systemic change comes. We, you, me and many others must make sure that such political momentum will come. You do not have to be an Einstein to realize that you cannot solve a problem with the thinking that caused the problem. Do not believe the growth apostles. So-called green growth as a solution to our problems is what we have been trying for the past 40 years. It’s what got us in this mess, not out of it.
When I steer the conversation towards the Paris climate agreement, Joan points to the lack of justice for the Global South. I ask him what he thinks about what the much-read environmental journalist George Monbiot said about the Paris agreement: “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.”192 Joan agrees with the latter.
The ecological debt which consists of the damages inflicted upon the Global South is beyond question. In Paris, the world missed a unique opportunity to agree on a global tax on fossil fuels. Already in 1992, Italian environmental commissioner Carlo Ripa di Meana proposed to levy $10 on every barrel of oil. When he did not get it, he resigned. This simple but powerful measure needs to be put back on the table, especially now that the oil price is so low.
James Hansen, the NASA scientist who in the 1980s first raised the alarm about climate change, called the Paris agreement a fraud. He too says it is incomprehensible that no carbon tax emerged.193 When the oil price rebounds, it will be much more difficult to sell a tax to the general public. The case for a carbon tax should be a no-brainer. The Belgian government estimates that a carbon tax of €40 per tonne would stimulate 80,000 new jobs, 2 percent economic growth, an increase in the available income for families and cleaner air.194
Another way to make fossil fuels more expensive is to disrupt the global supply chain. Joan’s career was built on providing academic backing and political advice to environmental activists – mostly to those from the global South.
For signs of hope, do not look to the Paris agreement. Look at Ende Gelände in Germany, where thousands of people stormed a coal mine and stopped production. Also look at Blockadia or the Idle No More movements in the US and Canada and the success of the activists stopping the Keystone pipeline. We should block fossil fuel extraction and transport and then explain well why we do it. Two Nobel Prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, are on our side. Both are also against TTIP. They mainly use social arguments. Krugman is against TTIP because it will destroy small businesses. Even more interesting than that are the arguments of ecological economists against TTIP, such as those of Professor Alf Hornborg. He can argue TTIP away with figures that reveal global ecological unequal trade. He recounts our history in a very different way.
My school career went from economics to geography to conflict studies. For me, Joan brings all these worlds together into a single coherent theory on the state of play in the relationship between humanity and the ecosystem we call planet earth – and how we got here. His economics stack up a whole lot better than the theories I was taught 20 years ago. It is all so obvious and clear now. Neoliberalism in particular and the growth religion more generally ignore geographic and bio-economic reality and in doing so have created an increasing number of acute local but also deepening global conflicts that affect every human being to a greater or lesser extent.
We should not have to argue about facts. But at a time when politicians increasingly deny them, it has become necessary. Post-truth politics has become a depressing phrase of our times, one that is hard to avoid. Take Yanis Varoufakis. In his 6-month term as Greece’s Finance Minister, he tried to implement a policy to rescue his country’s economy in line with obvious facts. Facts acknowledged by just about all major economists of our time, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Piketty. The issue they all agree on is simple: Greece will never really recover without debt relief. But politics denied this economic reality.Things get even worse when even physical reality is denied. We have reached the point at which a contemporary politician must be able to stand above the laws of thermodynamics. More free trade thus gets precedence over a climatological Armageddon that will reduce humanity to a few tribes of cavemen plus a couple of hold-outs for the superrich, if allowed to continue spiraling out of control. The substandard nature of most private media is creating a poorly informed majority who select representatives able to deny even the existence of gravity. After all, people keep joining the Flat Earth Society and they truly believe that gravity does not exist, that the earth is flat and that every proof that gravity does exist is just a ploy from NASA.195 One poll showed that in France, 10 percent are now flat earth-ers.196
Facebook reinforces this mass ignorance. We consume and share the stories we want to believe without realizing that we are creating a walled garden, a lopsided universe where false news can spread faster than a rumor that Princess Diana is actually alive. And so it is that any Tom, Dick or Harry can get elected, based on fake news spread by people paid to advance a hidden agenda.
Private media following the agenda of their adverting sales team, social media echo chambers and merchants of doubt that invade both as well as the academic community; all of this is leaving us with our collective head in the clouds – far removed from reality on earth…It has led to the situation where the most trivial fart becomes a mighty thunderstorm in record time, with everybody chipping in their opinion based on rumor and fake news. During my student days I had a summer job at the Royal Meteorological Institute where I learned an important lesson: the higher in the stratosphere cumulus clouds get, the bigger and heavier the hailstones that fall to earth.
We are going exponentially higher in a countless number of ways but some of them were brilliantly summarized in a now famous peer reviewed paper titled The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.197 Will Steffen and his team put together socioeconomic and ecological trends from the last 250 years. All 12 socioeconomic and all 12 ecological parameters show, to a greater or lesser extent, some form of exponential rise. Sometimes older data is missing and sometimes the increase is more gradual, but it becomes obvious at a glance that from around 1950 onward, growth of almost everything became exponential. Where the impact on ecosystems used to be primarily local, it is now global. In sum, we are all together in one big boat today, one that is getting increasingly top heavy, unstable and yet going faster and faster. The question should not be if we should be throwing stuff overboard to stop our boat from going under, but what. Yet most policymakers and economists are still busy loading the boat, despite our peril.
A year after our meeting, Joan and I meet again, this time in the Hotel des Colonies in Brussels. The hotel took its name just after Belgium received the Congo from Leopold II, as it used to be his private playground. Under his brutal dictatorship, the population declined from 20 to 8 million. Neither Stalin nor Hitler came close to what Leopold inflicted. But Joan and I skipped the historical debt of Belgium to Congo in favor of a talk on private and sovereign debt.
At the beginning of October 2016, the press revealed that Deutsche Bank was on the verge of bankruptcy. This mother of all banks is much bigger than Lehman Brothers ever was. It is the most systemic bank in Europe, meaning its fall would have the highest ripple effect throughout the whole European economy. What would happen if the shit really hit the fan? I wanted to know from Joan what the ideal plan would be to turn such a mega crisis into an opportunity for radical change.
If a bank like Deutsche falls, that’s the right time to go back to state-owned banks. They might even keep 80 percent of the money they are given by customers on their accounts, instead of 10 percent now. Debt repayment is always used as reason why we need GDP growth. But now that repaying all our debts is never going to happen, we have to be open about it. It is likely that you need to write off about half of all debts that exist today. You should read the book Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Defaults on debt are a regular and recurring event in history. Look, there are three ways to deal with the debt issue. Neoliberals would have us save up to pay off the debt. The green Keynesians would say that, at such a moment, you should invest more so that you can pay back by adding growth and then repay it all. Ecological economists say they are both living in a fictional world; that the debt is not repayable and that you need to have a major debt restructuring. The sooner the better.
If you dare to say this out loud, as Varoufakis did, the financial inquisition of rating agencies and the banks who pay them will be on you like a tonne of bricks. For the time being, most politicians rail against debt restructuring as totally absurd. Roland Barthes wrote in 1957 that: “Modern civilizations also have their mythologies.”
A handful of rich businessmen are dreaming up some potty solutions. Billionaire Elon Musk wants to build a colony on Mars. Billionaires Richard Branson and Larry Page want to mine asteroids. Jezz Bezos is a space rocket man. Together they propagate a dangerous myth; that if we mess this earth up we can start again somewhere else – out there. In this blue sky or rather worm hole thinking, the earth is not a miracle where life is possible but something we can reconstruct elsewhere. The arrogance of those who think humans can live without water is mind-boggling, yet reels in hordes of supporters. When humans sense danger, they react in one of three ways: freeze, fight or flight. The people dreaming about going to live on Mars are probably of the flight-kind. But swapping planets does not differ much from jumping into a deep and dark abyss while just hoping for a soft landing. It appeals to the there’s-a-solution-for-every-problem kind of people but it’s just a distraction, a totally delusional and in fact dangerous idea – as it lures quite a few people away from even trying to solve the problems in this house that we call earth.
In a less outlandish manner, many more hold on to the vague belief that technological advances and efficiency gains will solve all our problems. Never mind that even the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a hotbed of technological advances, recently warned that technology alone will not save us. Demand for raw materials will continue to grow, despite efficiency gains, it confirmed.198 And no mined asteroid is going to make up for the finiteness of the earth’s resources.
The reality of our existence is rapidly catching up with us. Yet for too many, it feels easier to break the laws of nature than quit our unhealthy addiction to consumption, to stuff. With each passing year the writing on the wall is going to get more and more stark. Sometimes you can take that in a literal sense. The satirical graffiti artist Banksy hit the nail on the head when he defaced a blank billboard, scrawling an unsettling message: “Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock.”
The growth apostles, like so many religious leaders, prey on basic human needs for security, purpose and hope. They plug into such core needs of homo sapiens in order to sell a story that gives meaning to it all, despite defying all reason. To what extent do the apostles of GDP growth differ from the apostles of the Islamic State? In both cases, there is the promise of a paradise for those that follow the script, an unprecedented fantasy world that gives hope to those that feel frustrated, side-lined. The working poor that voted for Trump and those from the Paris and Brussels suburbs that went to Syria to fight probably share feelings of injustice, frustration and revenge. The mantras of their leaders are similar: if we just apply a little more orthodoxy to get to growth, or Allah, then your boat, or soul, will rise to paradise too! Charismatic leaders and their marketing gurus create a sense of purpose and a mythology and they both know how to use social media to reach their base.
Sometimes, the brain damage of the Growth cult really shocks me. Pretpark Nederland is a documentary on the outlandishness of consumer culture in the Netherlands. Viewers see a shopping center being passed off as an “authentic village” – to enhance the shopping experience. Nobody sleeps in the village at night, because all the houses are shops. In the docu we learn that one couple sleeps here: the shopping center manager and his wife. She puts on a happy face when asked what it is like to live in an artificial world. Without any hint of irony or humor, she happily proclaims: “Buying, buying, buying. That’s what we were born for, no?” Buying is the new praying.
I think that deep down a lot of us “know” there’s something horribly wrong with the average levels of consumption in the West but we tend to push the too uncomfortable thoughts away because if we let too many of them in, our heads would explode. The art of letting knowledge seep through while remaining sane, hopeful and if possible with bursts of happiness is one of the bigger challenges in modern day life. By reading until here, I can only hope you’ve mastered this art already.
Professor Tim Jackson summarizes the growth philosophy in his widely acclaimed book Prosperity without growth: “People are being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.” His vision of prosperity without growth resembles that of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science winner Amartya Sen and his idea of “development” as the capability to flourish – instead of the sum of all products and services delivered in a year. Jackson says that the capabilities to flourish are limited by the number of people on the planet and its finite raw materials. In short: the key question is how to get to prosperity for all within planetary boundaries. For that to happen, GDP will need to decline in some regions of the world, especially in Europe and the US. But that doesn’t mean we need a calamity.
Tim Jackson and Professor Joan Martinez Alier are part of a fast-growing economic discipline that gives me reassurance, purpose and hope: the academic degrowth movement. In contrast to the cult of growth, this economic discipline is aligned with the laws of nature – such as the law of thermodynamics. According to Giorgos Kallis, sustainable degrowth – which stands in very sharp contrast to the disastrous degrowth his native country Greece has experienced in recent years – will see a fair reduction of production and consumption so as to improve human well-being and ecological conditions.199 Riccardo Mastini defines degrowth as both spatial and generational justice. For me, degrowth is not about recession or austerity but mostly about more ecological quality, more resilience, more security. It’s about reconnecting to nature and to others. And about doing what we still can to maybe prevent or at least postpone a full collapse.
Either way, the degrowth school is seeing a rapidly rising number of peer reviewed publications. The number of participants in degrowth conferences is also growing exponentially. My first degrowth conference was in Barcelona in 2010. Some 200 people participated. When I joined the Leipzig conference in 2014 there were around 3000 participants. It portends an economy of the future that looks completely different at local and at global level. We will see shrinkage in mining, production, transportation, consumption and waste sectors, replaced by growth of partnerships, ecosystem services, care for people and planet, resilience and happiness, localized agriculture and currencies.
Degrowth will see a drop in GDP, especially in countries where GDP is way too high to be anywhere in line with planetary boundaries. Instead of only innovating more and more technologies, there will be exnovation of technologies we can no longer afford – like fracking or the extraction of oil from tar sands. To get to the world we want, some of the things we do in the current world will have to go. This will sound disturbing to some, until we all understand that in this Great Transition, as some like to call it, we are switching from dirty to clean air, from loneliness and burn-outs to a thriving community life, from dependency to resilience. Professors Jackson and Alier are heretics to the growth church. Most so-called green politicians acknowledge in private that the pair are right, but rarely find the conviction needed to attack the growth orthodoxy openly. In 2016, Philippe Lamberts, a green member of the European Parliament, has pledged repeatedly that he will never call for degrowth. His platform? A degrowth conference in Budapest. It would be too repulsive. It is one thing for a relatively obscure figure to go against the grain. It is quite another for a prime minister, and we are a long way from seeing that happen.
But it does seem that the times they are a-changing. In early 2018 I co-organized a debate between degrowth economists, Philippe Lamberts and heads of units from several departments of the European Commission, including DG GROW. Not only did everyone seem to agree that we need to move beyond GDP growth, a poll among the audience – for the most part staff of the European Commission – showed nobody wanted the “jobs and growth” slogan of their commission. Instead, “People and planet” scored best.
In the autumn of 2018 I co-organized a major postgrowth conference in the European Parliament, with members of European Parliament from 5 political groups and European Commission representatives. The day before that conference I helped to get an open letter from 238 academics with postgrowth demands into mainstream media – front page – causing a national debate on the growth issue. Belgium’s Minister of Finance felt the need to react and Balgium’s largest trade union came out in support of the academics. The petition got 6000 signatures in no time, even though it is an academic letter calling for postgowth and not a call to save the last panda or whale.
Much still needs to happen, but a political ripening of minds is possible. A certain Mahatma Gandhi once said “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”. In 2018 this degrowth debate has gone to the stage where the vested interests are fighting back.
This possible momentum is hard to spot from outside a small bubble. Today, professors such as Joan Martinez Alier, Paul Verhaegen, Giorgo Kallis, Tim Jackson, Jared Diamond and Richard Heinberg are still like the floor staff told to man the shopping center doors on Black Friday. Their chances of calming the baying mob are slim. It does not help that their message rarely takes flight on Twitter, and is considered too negative for TV. And if it is not on Twitter or on TV, it might as well not exist. At least in the popular imagination. On the upshot: the number of degrowthers sure keeps growing.
When I am enjoying a more optimistic day, I share the opinion of Tine Hens. In her book Het Klein Verzet (The little resistance) she writes how for 30 years, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek formed a stubborn sect within uniform economic thinking. They spoke a lot, but few listened. Then the oil crisis struck, the economic tide turned and powerful people started to embrace their neoliberal principles. The neoliberals went from crackpots to kings. Friedman later said of his wilderness years: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the inevitable.” Why would this be different for degrowth economics? In ecological terms, we are in a deep crisis. It might require just one more freak storm to bring degrowth alternatives in from the cold. The crisis is here and we are ready with the alternatives. What remains is something that makes the majority see the crisis that we’re in for what it really is and then recognize the opportunity for positive change that we also have.
The fact is, the degrowth economists have been preaching for over 40 years. In 1973, German economist Ernst Friederich Schumacher published the ground-breaking book Small is beautiful. But small-scale islands of alternatives are not enough to turn the tide. Understanding has grown that a flourishing sub-economy is a step in the right direction, but in itself it remains insufficient to halt the collapse of our ecosystems that the much bigger players – like Big Oil – will keep bringing closer. As long as the sub-economy remains a niche of the GDP economy, it only marginally reduces the speed at which we are going to the wall. It only prepares a small part of the population for the shock to come. Hence, the attention has shifted from developing a niche and ignoring the rest to really attacking the mainstream with the aim of dismantling whole sectors of the economy that we just can no longer afford to have. As degrowth professor Tom Bauler told the people from the European Commission in our debate: “You have urgent work to do on exnovation, not just innovation.” Degrowth economists ask themselves how an economy based on small-scale exploitation, fair trade, sensible consumption and a circular economy in both material and energy can work out well for all of humanity.
Sometimes, their thinking is picked up in the mainstream press. George Monbiot wrote the article Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased.200 He claims that the current pursuit of GDP growth is like putting the furniture in the fire to keep the house warm just a little longer.
The great demise of growth is coming pretty soon, either through an orderly victory of reason based on science or through the self-destructive inconsistencies of the current growth paradigm. The demystification of neoliberalism is a very sensible first step – but going from deregulated capitalism to old-school capitalism is not the solution to our problems. There are some hopeful signs that neoliberalism is being attacked, but often what comes in its wake is not what we want. Rather recently, Europeans were subjected to the neoliberal policies of Tony Blair in the UK, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, Louis Asscher in the Netherlands and François Hollande in France. By forgetting why they were founded, they and the big old socialist parties they worked for signed their own death wish by going down the neoliberal path. But today, the opposition to neoliberalism seems a lot stronger. In the UK two-party system, Jeremy Corbyn went back to the roots of Labour but in most other countries the parties left of the now neoliberal socialists have grown strongly – for example with Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. A left-wing Portuguese government steered the country to recovery in a manner starkly in contrast to the austerity seen in Spain. Anti-neoliberal progressive parties are recapturing the leftist void that the mainstream socialist parties created for them to step into: Syriza in Greece, GroenLinks in the Netherlands, the workers party in Belgium (PVDA-PTB), the list is endless and the pattern is clear. The big old socialist parties in Europe are learning the hard way that there’s no voter base for neoliberal socialism.
The problem we now face is that when the global neoliberal order is the house, more people flee through the right than through the left door. Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and the likes have been better at turning frustrations with “the system” into votes. In their world view, the biggest victims of globalization – those who need to leave everything behind in search for a life worth that name – are quickly rebranded as the common enemy against which the troops can be rallied. But the problems faced by many of the Western people who vote for them does not originate in some remote conflict-struck country, it originates right at home. In 2016, George Monbiot wrote what became the third most widely distributed article published by The Guardian that year, with over 700,000 shares: Neoliberalism, the ideology at the root of all our problems. Monbiot smoothly linked neoliberalism to the financial crisis, the ecological crisis, the unemployment crisis, the rise of loneliness and the rise of Trump. That was in April 2016, before Trump’s election. After it, the media was full of articles explaining how neoliberalism had undercut a generation or more and swelled the ranks of Trump’s base. It is worth observing that it is in the US rust belt that the elections dealt the greatest pro-Trump switch – which came as a major surprise to almost all the pundits and political commentators. These are the states that suffered most from neoliberalism, with loss of income and jobs leading to ghost cities.
The time to make these connections plain and obvious across the media is long overdue. Understanding the connection between neoliberal failures and the rise of fascism is a necessary step towards abandoning some twentieth century myths that threaten our very existence as a species. The way out of this mess is not to look for failed economic system ideas from the past, but to look forward to the twenty-first century. Keynes, Mao and Friedman all had one god in common: Growth. We simply cannot afford to sacrifice everything on its altar any longer.
But how to bring down a religion so pervasive it has become invisible? Some numbers are helpful in this struggle. Today, there is a scientific method to calculate the day we cross the threshold from sustainable to unsustainable consumption of natural resources for that year. After passing Earth Overshoot Day, we eat into our natural capital, making it harder to achieve sustainability the year after. We use some of the stock of natural materials formed on earth over the last 4 billion years. In 2018, everything we took from earth after 1 August was too much. Back in 1970 everything went well until 29 December. The sustainable year is getting shorter and shorter every year, and is simply inconsistent with the policy of pursuing perpetual GDP growth. How to push back overshoot day is a difficult question. But the real question is what economy we need to make sure it stays in the green zone until 31 December. That economy will no doubt have a whole lot less material flowing through it.
We must do that because the consequences of not doing it have also been quantified in great detail. The University of Melbourne judged in 2014 that the Club of Rome’s 1972 report was mostly correct.201 They confirm we are on track for a collapse of global civilization within this century. Other research shows that a policy aimed at economic growth is the driving force behind the long-term destruction of the conditions that make life on earth enjoyable and that without radical adjustments, the collapse is predicted by the middle of this century.202
Every year the growth apostles get together in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. A recent report presented in Davos zoomed in on how the growing inequality in the world is the greatest danger to continued GDP growth. Read that sentence a second time. Finishing with “Amen”. When wi ll there be a report in Davos about how the focus on GDP growth and the neoliberal policies that are associated with it are the greatest cause of rising inequality?