Class News
Gus Speth ’64 on transformational change in a time of crisis
December 1, 2023
Gus Speth published two articles on the search for paths to transformational change in a time of crisis. These articles are reproduced below.
Gus Speth
Gus is a fellow at Vermont Law School and a Distinguished Next-System Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative. A former dean of the Yale School of the Environment, he also co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He is the author of six books, including the award-winning The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability and Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.
Clearing Skies: Opening a New Path on Climate and the Future
Adapting to climate change does not address the societal systems and values that spawned the current crisis. What’s needed is “systemic adaptation” that fundamentally changes our economy, our politics, and our priorities in ways that put community and the planet first.
James Gustave Speth
Yale Environment 360
Published at the Yale School of the Environment
November 28, 2023
Of the many climate struggles going on today, the great one, played out in hundreds of arenas around the world, is the struggle to rein in and then halt the buildup of greenhouse gases. Gaining ever-more attention is the struggle to adapt to the climate impacts already upon us. But there is a new struggle that needs to be joined now: the struggle to learn from our mistakes — the Big Mistake of climate catastrophe. What is it about our society, our economy, our politics, and our culture that has let this giant failing happen? What is it that has led us to this tragedy?
There are a set of readily available answers to this question, the conventional wisdom of the matter. Soulless corporations bent on ever-increasing profits at any cost and on controlling both natural resources and political reality to ensure that their paths stay clear. Pliant consumers susceptible to advertising’s great skill and endlessly, obliviously enjoying the historically unprecedented benefits of cheap energy.
These answers have the ring of truth. But it is critical, particularly for today’s children and the generations after, to understand at a deeper level what has driven the climate emergency. If we can identify the underlying factors and forces that have caused the Big Mistake, then we can say with conviction that these are things that must be different in the world we want for today’s kids and future generations.
Here is one way a framing this challenge. If tactical adaptation is the practical preparation for climate change’s impacts, then what I would call “systemic adaptation” is the design and adoption of the societal changes needed to correct the fundamental flaws that have brought the climate crisis to our doorstep. Systemic adaptation looks beyond tactical measures like preparing for floods and extreme heat, and it asks what type of societies will fare best for people and the planet in the future. It is time, past time, to take up systemic adaptation with great seriousness.
It is not for lack of knowledge, technology, or thoughtful policy proposals that we face a climate crisis. I would argue that we have this crisis for four fundamental reasons.
First, America decades ago unleashed a virulent, fast-growing strain of corporate-consumerist capitalism. This system of political economy — the basic operating system of our society — greatly rewards the pursuit of profit, growth, and power and does little to encourage a concern for people, place, and planet. “Ours is the Ruthless Economy,” said economists Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus in their well-known text Macroeconomics. And indeed, it is.
Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange
Such an economy begs for restraint and guidance in the public interest — control that must be provided mainly by government. Yet the captains of our economic life, and those who have benefited disproportionately from it, have largely taken over our political life. Corporations have long been identified as our principal economic actors; they and their well-to-do spawn are now also our principal political actors. The result is a combined economic and political system of great power and voraciousness pursuing narrow economic interests without serious climate and other constraints that responsible democratic government might have provided.
In today’s economy, output, productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth has required vast amounts of energy, to this day largely fossil energy. Growth is measured by tallying GDP at the national level and sales and profits at the company level, and pursuit of GDP and profit are dominating priorities in economic and political life. GDP, of course, simply adds everything up, the good, the bad, and the ugly. There is no deduction for climate change’s vast social and environmental costs.
Profits can be increased by keeping social, environmental, and economic costs externalized, borne by society at large and not by the company. Profits can also be increased through subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory loopholes, and other gifts from government. Today, the annual U.S. government subsidies to the fossil industry are estimated at $15 billion. Together, these external costs and subsidies lead to dishonest prices, which in turn lead consumers to spur on the businesses that do damage to people and planet and to buy more fossil fuel.
There are other sociopathic features of today’s capitalism, like the skirting of regulatory requirements and the prevalence of corporate and individual crime, but the system of money and finance deserves special note. Perversely, it is taken for granted that banks and others in the investment business should seek high financial returns, not (with rare exceptions) high social and environmental returns. One result is that today the big banks are financing, among much else, the destruction of the planet’s climate.
Second, our political economy evolved and gathered force in parallel with the U.S. role in the Cold War. The post-World War II era and the rise of the U.S. security state powerfully affected the political-economic system, strengthening the priority given to economic growth, giving rise to the military-industrial complex, and draining time, attention, and money away from domestic and international needs. This deflection of attention and resources continued with the rise of military operations in the wake of the Cold War’s end and, more recently, with the response to international terrorism and near endless conflicts around the globe. A 2019 Brown University analysis concluded that the U.S. military was the largest institutional source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
Shoppers crowd Macy's in Midtown Manhattan on Black Friday, November 25, 2011
Third, a weak, flawed democratic system has also made the Big Mistake possible. The U.S. political system is corrupted by money, focused on the short time horizons of election cycles and guided by a discouraging level of public discourse on important issues like climate change. From our revered Constitution to today’s campaign finance, the federal government is and has been stacked against climate action. The Great Compromise made by the Founding Fathers gives disproportionate power to states rich in resources but few in people, as does the Electoral College. Supreme Court decisions viewing “corporations as people and money as speech” further empower the corporate sector.
Climate change has been a difficult issue for our political system. It is scientifically complicated, and until recently its impacts have not been acute or immediate, so the problem has been thought a speculative, uncertain matter for the future. Huge swaths of the public distrust science and “pointy-headed experts.” The stage has thus been set for the intentional spread of misinformation and for an entire political party in climate denial. Climate action has been further stymied by neoliberalism and its convenient insistence that markets can better manage things than government. The politicians who do acknowledge the climate problem have seen little to gain in expending political capital. No president has set a course to guide the country off fossil fuels, although the Biden Administration has tried.
Fourth. The final, and in many ways the most fundamental, flaw leading to the Great Mistake are a set of dominant cultural values and habits of thought — an outmoded and now dangerous consciousness. Today’s values have allowed us to totally miss the point that the climate crisis is a moral failing. American values are strongly materialistic, anthropocentric, individualistic, and contempocentric. Consumerism and materialism seek to meet human needs, even non-material ones, through ever-increasing purchase of goods and services. Consumption is the biggest variable in the GDP equation. Today’s individualism wars against community and social solidarity. The habit of focusing on the present and discounting the future leads away from a thoughtful appraisal of long-term consequences, as has happened in economists’ models of the future costs of climate change. Future generations? What have they done for us?
In considering climate change, the most relevant failure of our value system is its view of nature and our place in it. Today’s thinking sees humanity as something separate and distinct from nature, and superior to it, rather than as offspring of its evolutionary process and as close kin to wild things. Nature in this view is humanity’s to dominate and exploit, lacking both intrinsic value independent of people and rights that create the duty of ecological stewardship. The idea that the economy is nested in the natural world and should behave like it is largely absent. For greenhouse gases, nature is a ready, free disposal site.
Climate protesters demonstrate outside the White House, October 12, 2021
Perhaps there are other paths to today’s climate crisis, but I see these four as the main ones leading to the Big Mistake, at least for the United States. When one considers them, it is clear why systemic adaptation is needed. Taken together they are destructive of people and planet, and unless change occurs, they will continue to be. The emerging climate catastrophe is their most obvious and threatening manifestation, but it is far from the only one.
Yet as daunting as the challenge of systemic adaptation appears, there is some good news. Both practical thinkers and dreamers have turned attention to identifying the initiatives needed to change fundamentally these four drivers of destruction, indeed, to replace them with alternatives aimed at a flourishing planet and flourishing people. Bookshelves are actually full of good ideas in this regard — some reformist, some radical, some near-term, some more distant. These include moving away from GDP as the measure of our economic health and shrinking the parts of the economy that depend on resource extraction, as well as implementing new strategies for building equitable community-based wealth. And there is plenty of room for more ideas as fresh minds turn to the matter.
There are positive, encouraging signs and, even more, avenues for civic engagement. Doubts about the current order are surfacing, and calls for transformative change grow louder. Economic democracy is in the air, as evidenced by the growing interest in public and worker ownership and co-ops. A rebirth of protest is stirring in America. Activism is increasing, including labor advocacy and activism among the young, the marginalized, and the victims, including climate victims.
Climate legislation, notably the Inflation Reduction Act, challenges the hold of market fundamentalism. The conventional wisdom that markets are good and government bad is being questioned. The rising menace of climate change is underscoring the imperative of a strong, effective government of, by, and for the people.
Paralysis at the federal level is countered at least partially by impressive initiatives by some states and localities. Indeed, the greatest things happening in America today are at the local level where the future is being brought into the present in countless initiatives. Check out the New Economy Coalition or the Solidarity Economy movement or, more internationally, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and Doughnut Economics Action Lab.
You Say You Want a Revolution
Dreaming of new futures in the polycrisis
James Gustave Speth
Orion
November 2023
Decades ago, I was a reasonable person and I thought reasonable thoughts. One of them was that deep change — change that I could even then see was necessary — would grow from actions responding to the desperate problems that were accumulating all around us, now often called the polycrisis. The beginnings of real change would surface as demands for action responsive to these insults to human and natural communities. We would see demands for new policies, for example, to curb corporate abuses and grab their wrists as they reached for ever more control over our politics. We would see strident demands to address the vast social and economic inequalities. We would see demands to build on the hard-hitting clean air and water acts to attack the climate-ruining gases spewing from our runaway energy system. The push for all these and other focused efforts would entrain and carry along what we saw as “non-reformist reforms.” They would look like reforms, but they would contain the seeds of deeper, transformative change — like ditching GDP in favor new measures of societal well-being and progress, or curbing corporate spending on elections.
That would be the beginning. Responses to deprivations, discriminations, grave risks and threats would undergird a politics of steady change. The victims of the polycrisis and their allies would find their voices, as would champions for the environment. Meanwhile, I and others would focus on the needed policy analysis, working to define priority reformist policies as well as the far-reaching prescriptions for the deeper changes that would address underlying causes. I for one have written books full of policy prescriptions aimed at transformative change.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.
The efforts I have just described remain ongoing and are essential. But you will have noticed that their progress has been slow. Meanwhile, the ominous deepening of the polycrisis has led many people to flee the fetters of the practical world, at least in their dreams, and find comfort and hope in imagining a world that could be. Some of this is pure escapism, but often enough, these fetching worlds are rigorously grounded in biological and historical understandings. For example, one theme is that economic systems must mimic nature’s systems. Ecological economics, industrial ecology, the regenerative economy, and the circular economy all give concrete definition to this new thinking. Some believe that that grounding will lead eventually, inevitably to the emergence of a new and better world. Still others are dreaming of flourishing worlds of democratic eco-socialism.
The expression, “I will see it when I believe it,” can be used with derision, as a feature of the mythic world of “truthiness.” But there are some who now use the expression to mean that “if we first envision a future that works for people and planet, we can begin to make it happen.” Or as Victor Hugo wrote, “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” In one of his excellent novels Richard Flannagan asks, “What reality was ever created by realists?…What we cannot dream we can never do.”
Human consciousness is changing. New perceptions and realizations are taking hold. The current order increasingly lacks legitimacy, and new systems that can gain our allegiance are being dreamed up. Yes, the new, dreamed of worlds will not compete yet in today’s practical politics. But they should not be dismissed as woolly, wild-eyed, or impractical. They are the emerging blueprints of the future, the playing fields of radical hope, the dreams that stuff is made of.
One brilliant but often dismissed dreamer is Charles Reich. I was his research assistant when he was writing The Greening of America — he was writing while I was mostly grading papers. It is an important book for its analysis and for describing a new consciousness. Here is one thing he said there: “The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa.”
More and more people are searching for something beautiful, even if it is untethered from the past and present. If current trends continue and blossom, could we enter a world of consciousness-driven change—not piecemeal, practical, and incremental, but fresh, bold, and sweeping? What if enough people joined in John Lennon’s “you better free your mind instead” and the major force bringing the future into the present is a sea change in the public mind? The phrase “consciousness change” would have a whole new meaning.
“Dream on,” the skeptic says. “Yes, we will,” they reply.
NEW CONSCIOUSNESS
Decades of discourse
led by lawyers,
scientists, economists,
and we are stuck.
They can’t do what must be done:
reach the human heart.
The deep problems are
avarice, arrogance and apathy,
our dominant values gone astray.
We need not more analysis
but a spiritual awakening,
a new consciousness.
So bring on the preachers and prophets!
the poets and philosophers!
the psychologists and psychiatrists!
Bring on the writers, musicians, actors, artists!
Bring on the dreamers!
Call them to strike the chords
of our shared humanity,
of our close kin to wild things!
Call them to help find a new world!