Planning the Good Anthropocene

“What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable. Worse still, many things that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence remain profitable, and, without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to produce them.”

“This — the market’s profit motive, not growth or industrial civilization — caused our climate calamity and the larger biocrisis.”

“carbon-tax advocates ignore that their solution to climate change — the market — is the very cause of the problem.”

“How will a carbon price build a network of electric-vehicle, fast-charging stations? Tesla only builds them in cherry-picked areas where it can rely on profits. Like a private bus company or an internet provider, Elon Musk won’t provide a service where that doesn’t make money. The market leaves the public sector to fill the gap.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that while nuclear energy is clean, non-intermittent, and has a tiny land footprint, “without support from governments, investments in new . . . plants are currently generally not economically attractive within liberalized markets.” Private firms refuse to begin construction without public subsidies or guarantees.”

“we would need to build continent-spanning, load-balancing, high-voltage, smart transmission grids that can fend off variable renewable energy’s volatile swings. We need to plan this project on the basis of system reliability, i.e., need. A patchwork of private energy companies will only build what is profitable.”

“Many greens call for a retreat from scale, a return to the small and local. But this, too, misdiagnoses the source of the problem. Replacing multinationals with a billion small businesses would not eliminate the market incentive to disrupt ecosystem services. Indeed, given small businesses’ gross diseconomies of scale, disruption would only intensify.”

“Only a global, democratically planned economy can completely starve the beast, but this proposal raises some basic questions.”

“Can we impose global democratic planning all at once, in all countries, and across all sectors? Outside of world revolution, this seems unlikely. But we can keep that ideal as a lodestar, something to work toward over generations, steadily extending the dominion of democratic planning over the market.”

“should we fully eliminate the market? Wouldn’t that simply replace the rule of the market with the rule of the bureaucrat? Public ownership is insufficient — for both social justice and environmental optimization — and the fear of statism is rational.”

“democratic planning doesn’t have to entail state ownership.”

“Unless they believe democracy has an upper limit, even classical anarchists should be able to imagine a global, stateless, but still planned, economy.”

“We must ensure that any non-market mode of global governance adheres to genuinely democratic principles.”

“Could we seize logistics and planning powerhouses — the Walmarts and Amazons of the world — and repurpose them for an egalitarian, ecologically rational civilization? Could we turn these systems into a global “Cybersyn,” Salvador Allende’s dream of computational, democratic socialism?”

“Climate change and the wider biocrisis reveal that multiple local, regional, or continental-wide decision-making structures are obsolete. No jurisdiction can decarbonize its economy if others do not.”

“Even if one country figures out how to capture and store carbon, the rest of the world will still face an acidifying ocean. Similar truths hold for nitrogen and phosphorus flows, closing nutrient-input loops, biodiversity loss, and freshwater management.”

Commentator’s Note: Compare Likavcan on the need for “bioregionalism”

“Moving beyond environmental questions, we could say the same about antibiotic resistance, pandemic diseases, or near-earth asteroids. Even in less existential policy areas, like manufacturing, trade, and migration, too many interlinked nodes tie our truly planetary society together.”

“One of capitalism’s great contradictions is that it increases the real connections between people at the same it encourages us to see each other as monadic individuals.”

“the Anthropocene’s horror and its marvel.”

“Humanity so fully commands the resources that surround us that we have transformed the planet in mere decades on a scale that leviathan biogeophysical processes took millions of years to accomplish. But such awesome capability is being wielded blindly, without intent, in the service of profit, not human need.”

“Climate researchers sometimes talk about a “good Anthropocene” and a “bad Anthropocene.” The latter describes the intensification and perhaps acceleration of humanity’s unintended disruption of the ecosystems on which we depend. The former, however, names a situation in which we accept our role as collective sovereign of Earth and begin influencing and coordinating planetary processes with purpose and direction, ever furthering human flourishing.”

“Counteracting climate change and planning the economy are of comparable ambition: if we can manage the Earth system, with all its variables and myriad processes, we can also manage a global economy.”

“any democratic planning of the human economy is at the same time a democratic planning of the Earth system.”

“Global democratic planning is not merely necessary for the good Anthropocene — it is the good Anthropocene.”