Climate Change
Jun. 7th, 2026 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith‘Happiness is not just about GDP’: ambitious plan or utopia?
Some will question its credibility. But the alternative future to the one imagined in the World Justice Report is far more bleak.
Academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival.
It's good to lay out a detailed plan. It gives people something to talk about, even if the actual path turns out differently. Having several plans to compare is better, so this is a useful addition.
In our increasingly dystopian world, who wouldn’t want to at least be open to a utopian antidote? The World Justice Report, published on Thursday, outlines how to build a prosperous, equitable world within safe planetary boundaries. It’s a push from the modern eco-socialist left in a global battle for ideas that will shape the future.
Based on past social achievements and future energy transformation, it indicates that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet could, by the end of the century, work less and earn more while keeping temperatures down and avoiding much of the current destruction of nature. It is an ambitious, comprehensive and upbeat plan, and a stronger argument around which to build a political campaign than abstract goals of “net zero” or “decarbonisation”.
Both working less and earning more are things that conventional business will fight to the death. I suggest that it would be more attainable to go around them instead of through them -- for example, to make more use of tools we already have such as worker cooperatives, collectives, credit unions, etc.
By incorporating important concepts of “sufficiency” and “planetary habitability”, it also addresses the fundamental question of how to reduce the material impact of economic activity – a topic long ignored by the traditional left.
To stop the environmental degradation, it is necessary to quit converting wilderness into human use areas, and to quit moving human areas from more to less nature. So for instance, if you want to make a new factory, don't put it on what is now wilderness or cropland. Put it where there used to be an old factory or a parking lot. A lot of towns have lost their major employer and would be thrilled to have a new one move in.
Another valuable approach is what Strong Towns calls "gentle density." This includes affordable housing mostly of the "missing middle" type like duplexes, garage apartments, cottage courtyards, etc. However, it also includes "accessory commercial units." These include things like a garage business, workshop, den turned to home office, front porch shop, and so on. The same mixed-use zoning also allows flipping a building back and forth between residential and commercial as needed -- the mechanic's garage turned into a home, the house set up as a thrift store, that sort of thing. In central Illinois, most towns still have that kind of mixed-use approach; it's common to see a home business or a small apartment building in the midst of single-family homes.
This works, and it has a lot of benefits. Particular to climate change, it reduces the number of car trips that people need to make for going to work or running everyday errands. If you have a job, a corner store, a café, a hairdresser, and a couple of random catchalls like a clothing boutique and a thrift store all within walking or biking distance of home, that greatly minimizes your need for a car. Less driving means less carbon in the atmosphere, while increasing the quality of life because you go outside, are more physically active, and interact with your neighbors more. And unlike a carless street, people with mobility issues can drive where they need to go. It doesn't even cost taxpayers anything; you just shift the zoning and let landowners adapt structures as they see fit.
One argument people often raise is traffic. No, it doesn't increase significantly. Why not? Because these are small neighborhood businesses. A hairdresser with 2-3 seats instead of 20. A garage where you can drop off your lawnmower to have the blades sharpened. A handyman who will come fix your sticky door. A lady who sells houseplants from her porch. A woodshop where you can order a desk made of actual boards. Nobody drives across town for this stuff, unless it's in a neighborhood where they already have friends or family to visit. These places don't advertise; their customer base is people who live in the surrounding several blocks. That means customers rarely drive there. Also there's rarely more than one or a few people at the same time. They go, they shop, they chat a bit with the shopkeeper, they leave. Multiplexes tend to cut a notch so instead of parallel parking, the cars go side-by-side, one per unit; or if there's enough room, they put a driveway into a parking lot. Since these are usually corner lots, they have space for a little extra parking. The frequency is only about 1-2 per block, so you might have a duplex and a hairdresser, or a big house cut into apartments and a garage business. It's a very little extra density, for a lot extra benefits.
Drive around an older town or even older neighborhood, and watch closely. You probably have this kind of development in your locale, just people don't pay attention to it. They look at the newer stuff, and that's not where this is.
The report also fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s. One of the architects of that system, the British chemist Robert Watson, who is also a former chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me that if he could go back in time and change anything, it would be to add more social scientists. Initially, he said, the “pure scientists” from the fields of physics and chemistry naively believed the data alone would be enough to persuade governments to act, but they later came to wish they had taken more account of social dynamics, economics, politics and psychology.
Nerds find facts compelling. The vast majority of people really don't. This frustrates me. But it does match my observations as an activist, which is that proofs and protests don't motivate people to do things, but storytelling does.
“There’s been this illusion of what we call a classless ecology, the sort of green growth illusion that everything is going to be solved by producing more and more and without worrying about the distribution, without worrying about sufficiency, without worrying about structural sectoral transformation. And this illusion has made green policy very unpopular for many lower income, middle income voters.”
A big part of that problem is precarity. America consists mostly of people who are just barely hanging on. They might have a home and a car and kids in college, but they are one paycheck from disaster and they know it. There is no fat to cut. So anything that sounds to them like an extra bill meets vehement resistance. It's the same reason disaster retrofitting lags so much. Sure everyone would love to have a home that is resistant to earthquakes, fire, etc. but they cannot scrape up an extra $10,000 or $50,000 to make that happen. The money just isn't there.
Where you do see progress is programs that are free, cheap, or give kickbacks for doing green things. Frex, a lot of towns will reimburse or even actually pay residents to replace their lawn with native plants. This helps wildlife and, once established, requires little or no maintenance, watering, or agrochemicals. Some towns are building an integrated stormwater system that includes paying for residential rain gardens. Some states have tax breaks, rebates, or other perks for whatever is their best most of green energy, like solar panels or windmills. That works fairly well, but to make it really take off, you need to forbid the power companies from ripping off people who connect to the grid -- they pay wholesale prices for the excess they take, but charge retail prices for what the household takes. It needs to be one fair price for the energy, because people getting screwed complain loudly, which discourages other people from participating.
It is also an exercise in human idealism and imagination, both of which are under ever more pressure from social media algorithms, AI and the transactional cynicism of far right politicians and business executives.
This is where solarpunk comes in. That whole genre exists to promote a better, greener future and inspire people to work toward it.
Although based on well-established metrics for GDP, inequality and climate science, it widens the definition of prosperity and heightens the importance of “sufficiency” to show that quality of life is more valuable than quantity of material goods.
To succeed at this, you need to understand what kinds of things improve health and happiness, then create supports for those -- things like human interaction and access to nature. And that's pretty much the reverse of modern society.
This echoes ancient philosophies of a “golden mean,” Indigenous beliefs in the inextricable connection between human and natural wellbeing, as well as experiments in Bhutan of an economy based on “gross national happiness”.
Bhutan is certainly on the right track, because typically you get what you measure and you don't get what you don't measure. Other countries might prefer a different metric based on their particular values, but if you don't track quality of life somehow, you won't get it.
Indigenous beliefs are accurate; humans evolved in nature and require it for health and happiness. But that requires intimate interaction with nature on a frequent basis in order to develop. Right now, a majority of humans live in urban environments. Fixing this means either making cities a lot more green -- which would be great, but a lot of work -- or moving people out of cities to greener places. Refilling smaller towns would help a lot. This is more feasible now than in the past because working from home has much more potential than it used to.
“We try to capture the reality that happiness is not just determined by economic metrics. Preserving a habitable earth does not just have a monetary benefit. You can make life better if you have more time to spend with family or in nature,” Cornelia Mohren, the Environmental Coordinator of the World Inequality Lab, said.
True. But that time has to come from somewhere. If you work from home, walk or bike to work in a few minutes, then you can cut most or all of your commute. However, that requires that your friends and family also have time to spend with you, which not only means the changes need to be widespread, but people need ways to stay in the same neighborhood or at least town instead of moving long-distance every few years. Connections with both land and people require time and consistency to develop.
“Sufficiency does not mean degrowth,” she says. “It is about less working hours, a different composition of consumption, and more health and education.”
Less working hours would be great, but that requires either earning a lot more, or somehow meeting your needs with a lot less. This is not impossible but is difficult and exactly the opposite of modern everything. Different consumption is possible but would rely on a lot of other changes, for instance somehow producing quality products at affordable prices so people could use them longer instead of buying cheap things that quickly fall apart. More education would be great, if and only if 1) it is cheap or free, and 2) life permits most people to work at their level of education. What we have now is a college scam, which not only saddles young people with crippling debt, it also leaves most of them working jobs that don't match their education. When lots of people pay ruinous sums for education but then get stuck in dead-end jobs, they become resentful and feel cheated.
That will be challenged by the traditional left, which has long-tended to set goals of ever higher GDP, personal consumption and infrastructure spending, and the right, which baulks at any suggestion of planetary boundaries or lower material productivity.
Infinite growth in a finite system is fatal, and that's where we are now.
“We don’t want to force people to change their lifestyle. It has to come with a cultural shift in the way we perceive the good life,” Mohren said. “There are majorities, even in the US that support some form of global justice, that don’t just care about themselves, but about the world.”
Large change is necessary. Either people do it before a collapse or they will face the collapse. Frex, building in places that are prone to wildfires or hurricanes can only be sustained so long before there is just not enough money or material to rebuilt and people will be forced to move. It is better to adapt in advance, so look for ways to make that change appealing to people. If you try to force them, they will resist, because they have a job there, friends and family, or maybe they can't afford to move. Just creating jobs in more climate-resilient locations would naturally entice many people to move there. Another option is swapping property in an area that needs to be emptied (e.g. a fire chimney) for property that needs to be filled (e.g. a neighborhood revitalization project), which is something that some towns and states have explored but could sure use a national option for farther distances.
Piketty said past social mobilisations had shown how quickly improvements can be made. With pressure also likely to come from climate breakdown, he said it was important to initiate debates now so that alternatives are already in people’s minds and will become more palatable in the future.
“There will be crises. I think that’s for sure,” he said. “People need to get accustomed to the fact that big change will happen in any case.... We are not in a situation where things can just continue as they are forever.”
Sensible. But the manner of that change will make the difference between happy, functional citizens vs. people who are broken, dysfunctional, and perhaps violent.
Some will question its credibility. But the alternative future to the one imagined in the World Justice Report is far more bleak.
Academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival.
It's good to lay out a detailed plan. It gives people something to talk about, even if the actual path turns out differently. Having several plans to compare is better, so this is a useful addition.
In our increasingly dystopian world, who wouldn’t want to at least be open to a utopian antidote? The World Justice Report, published on Thursday, outlines how to build a prosperous, equitable world within safe planetary boundaries. It’s a push from the modern eco-socialist left in a global battle for ideas that will shape the future.
Based on past social achievements and future energy transformation, it indicates that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet could, by the end of the century, work less and earn more while keeping temperatures down and avoiding much of the current destruction of nature. It is an ambitious, comprehensive and upbeat plan, and a stronger argument around which to build a political campaign than abstract goals of “net zero” or “decarbonisation”.
Both working less and earning more are things that conventional business will fight to the death. I suggest that it would be more attainable to go around them instead of through them -- for example, to make more use of tools we already have such as worker cooperatives, collectives, credit unions, etc.
By incorporating important concepts of “sufficiency” and “planetary habitability”, it also addresses the fundamental question of how to reduce the material impact of economic activity – a topic long ignored by the traditional left.
To stop the environmental degradation, it is necessary to quit converting wilderness into human use areas, and to quit moving human areas from more to less nature. So for instance, if you want to make a new factory, don't put it on what is now wilderness or cropland. Put it where there used to be an old factory or a parking lot. A lot of towns have lost their major employer and would be thrilled to have a new one move in.
Another valuable approach is what Strong Towns calls "gentle density." This includes affordable housing mostly of the "missing middle" type like duplexes, garage apartments, cottage courtyards, etc. However, it also includes "accessory commercial units." These include things like a garage business, workshop, den turned to home office, front porch shop, and so on. The same mixed-use zoning also allows flipping a building back and forth between residential and commercial as needed -- the mechanic's garage turned into a home, the house set up as a thrift store, that sort of thing. In central Illinois, most towns still have that kind of mixed-use approach; it's common to see a home business or a small apartment building in the midst of single-family homes.
This works, and it has a lot of benefits. Particular to climate change, it reduces the number of car trips that people need to make for going to work or running everyday errands. If you have a job, a corner store, a café, a hairdresser, and a couple of random catchalls like a clothing boutique and a thrift store all within walking or biking distance of home, that greatly minimizes your need for a car. Less driving means less carbon in the atmosphere, while increasing the quality of life because you go outside, are more physically active, and interact with your neighbors more. And unlike a carless street, people with mobility issues can drive where they need to go. It doesn't even cost taxpayers anything; you just shift the zoning and let landowners adapt structures as they see fit.
One argument people often raise is traffic. No, it doesn't increase significantly. Why not? Because these are small neighborhood businesses. A hairdresser with 2-3 seats instead of 20. A garage where you can drop off your lawnmower to have the blades sharpened. A handyman who will come fix your sticky door. A lady who sells houseplants from her porch. A woodshop where you can order a desk made of actual boards. Nobody drives across town for this stuff, unless it's in a neighborhood where they already have friends or family to visit. These places don't advertise; their customer base is people who live in the surrounding several blocks. That means customers rarely drive there. Also there's rarely more than one or a few people at the same time. They go, they shop, they chat a bit with the shopkeeper, they leave. Multiplexes tend to cut a notch so instead of parallel parking, the cars go side-by-side, one per unit; or if there's enough room, they put a driveway into a parking lot. Since these are usually corner lots, they have space for a little extra parking. The frequency is only about 1-2 per block, so you might have a duplex and a hairdresser, or a big house cut into apartments and a garage business. It's a very little extra density, for a lot extra benefits.
Drive around an older town or even older neighborhood, and watch closely. You probably have this kind of development in your locale, just people don't pay attention to it. They look at the newer stuff, and that's not where this is.
The report also fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s. One of the architects of that system, the British chemist Robert Watson, who is also a former chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me that if he could go back in time and change anything, it would be to add more social scientists. Initially, he said, the “pure scientists” from the fields of physics and chemistry naively believed the data alone would be enough to persuade governments to act, but they later came to wish they had taken more account of social dynamics, economics, politics and psychology.
Nerds find facts compelling. The vast majority of people really don't. This frustrates me. But it does match my observations as an activist, which is that proofs and protests don't motivate people to do things, but storytelling does.
“There’s been this illusion of what we call a classless ecology, the sort of green growth illusion that everything is going to be solved by producing more and more and without worrying about the distribution, without worrying about sufficiency, without worrying about structural sectoral transformation. And this illusion has made green policy very unpopular for many lower income, middle income voters.”
A big part of that problem is precarity. America consists mostly of people who are just barely hanging on. They might have a home and a car and kids in college, but they are one paycheck from disaster and they know it. There is no fat to cut. So anything that sounds to them like an extra bill meets vehement resistance. It's the same reason disaster retrofitting lags so much. Sure everyone would love to have a home that is resistant to earthquakes, fire, etc. but they cannot scrape up an extra $10,000 or $50,000 to make that happen. The money just isn't there.
Where you do see progress is programs that are free, cheap, or give kickbacks for doing green things. Frex, a lot of towns will reimburse or even actually pay residents to replace their lawn with native plants. This helps wildlife and, once established, requires little or no maintenance, watering, or agrochemicals. Some towns are building an integrated stormwater system that includes paying for residential rain gardens. Some states have tax breaks, rebates, or other perks for whatever is their best most of green energy, like solar panels or windmills. That works fairly well, but to make it really take off, you need to forbid the power companies from ripping off people who connect to the grid -- they pay wholesale prices for the excess they take, but charge retail prices for what the household takes. It needs to be one fair price for the energy, because people getting screwed complain loudly, which discourages other people from participating.
It is also an exercise in human idealism and imagination, both of which are under ever more pressure from social media algorithms, AI and the transactional cynicism of far right politicians and business executives.
This is where solarpunk comes in. That whole genre exists to promote a better, greener future and inspire people to work toward it.
Although based on well-established metrics for GDP, inequality and climate science, it widens the definition of prosperity and heightens the importance of “sufficiency” to show that quality of life is more valuable than quantity of material goods.
To succeed at this, you need to understand what kinds of things improve health and happiness, then create supports for those -- things like human interaction and access to nature. And that's pretty much the reverse of modern society.
This echoes ancient philosophies of a “golden mean,” Indigenous beliefs in the inextricable connection between human and natural wellbeing, as well as experiments in Bhutan of an economy based on “gross national happiness”.
Bhutan is certainly on the right track, because typically you get what you measure and you don't get what you don't measure. Other countries might prefer a different metric based on their particular values, but if you don't track quality of life somehow, you won't get it.
Indigenous beliefs are accurate; humans evolved in nature and require it for health and happiness. But that requires intimate interaction with nature on a frequent basis in order to develop. Right now, a majority of humans live in urban environments. Fixing this means either making cities a lot more green -- which would be great, but a lot of work -- or moving people out of cities to greener places. Refilling smaller towns would help a lot. This is more feasible now than in the past because working from home has much more potential than it used to.
“We try to capture the reality that happiness is not just determined by economic metrics. Preserving a habitable earth does not just have a monetary benefit. You can make life better if you have more time to spend with family or in nature,” Cornelia Mohren, the Environmental Coordinator of the World Inequality Lab, said.
True. But that time has to come from somewhere. If you work from home, walk or bike to work in a few minutes, then you can cut most or all of your commute. However, that requires that your friends and family also have time to spend with you, which not only means the changes need to be widespread, but people need ways to stay in the same neighborhood or at least town instead of moving long-distance every few years. Connections with both land and people require time and consistency to develop.
“Sufficiency does not mean degrowth,” she says. “It is about less working hours, a different composition of consumption, and more health and education.”
Less working hours would be great, but that requires either earning a lot more, or somehow meeting your needs with a lot less. This is not impossible but is difficult and exactly the opposite of modern everything. Different consumption is possible but would rely on a lot of other changes, for instance somehow producing quality products at affordable prices so people could use them longer instead of buying cheap things that quickly fall apart. More education would be great, if and only if 1) it is cheap or free, and 2) life permits most people to work at their level of education. What we have now is a college scam, which not only saddles young people with crippling debt, it also leaves most of them working jobs that don't match their education. When lots of people pay ruinous sums for education but then get stuck in dead-end jobs, they become resentful and feel cheated.
That will be challenged by the traditional left, which has long-tended to set goals of ever higher GDP, personal consumption and infrastructure spending, and the right, which baulks at any suggestion of planetary boundaries or lower material productivity.
Infinite growth in a finite system is fatal, and that's where we are now.
“We don’t want to force people to change their lifestyle. It has to come with a cultural shift in the way we perceive the good life,” Mohren said. “There are majorities, even in the US that support some form of global justice, that don’t just care about themselves, but about the world.”
Large change is necessary. Either people do it before a collapse or they will face the collapse. Frex, building in places that are prone to wildfires or hurricanes can only be sustained so long before there is just not enough money or material to rebuilt and people will be forced to move. It is better to adapt in advance, so look for ways to make that change appealing to people. If you try to force them, they will resist, because they have a job there, friends and family, or maybe they can't afford to move. Just creating jobs in more climate-resilient locations would naturally entice many people to move there. Another option is swapping property in an area that needs to be emptied (e.g. a fire chimney) for property that needs to be filled (e.g. a neighborhood revitalization project), which is something that some towns and states have explored but could sure use a national option for farther distances.
Piketty said past social mobilisations had shown how quickly improvements can be made. With pressure also likely to come from climate breakdown, he said it was important to initiate debates now so that alternatives are already in people’s minds and will become more palatable in the future.
“There will be crises. I think that’s for sure,” he said. “People need to get accustomed to the fact that big change will happen in any case.... We are not in a situation where things can just continue as they are forever.”
Sensible. But the manner of that change will make the difference between happy, functional citizens vs. people who are broken, dysfunctional, and perhaps violent.
