Who is driving climate breakdown? Buckle up for some striking data... 🧵

1. First, global North countries are responsible for 86% of cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary.

China is responsible for 1%. The rest of the South and peripheral Europe is responsible for 13%.

These results arise from taking the safe carbon budget and dividing into national "fair shares" on a per-capita basis, and then assessing national emissions against national fair-shares. 2. This chart uses the same data.

The global South *as a group* is actually still within its fair share of the planetary boundary (350ppm), since the few "overshooting" countries are compensated for by "undershooting" countries.

By contrast, the global North has burned through not only its fair-share of the planetary boundary, but also its fair share of the 1.5C budget AND its 2C budget.

I was honoured to write this for @tri_continental Pan Africa:

"One of the most damaging myths about the ecological crisis is that humans as such are responsible for it. In reality it's caused almost entirely by the states and firms of the imperial core." thetricontinental.org/pan-africa/new… @tri_continental Because everyone always wonders about the China data, yes, as of 2019 (the final year of data in our analysis), China was responsible for only 1% of global emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. globalinequality.org/responsibility…

About Spain's tourism problem... it seems intractable but the solutions are actually quite straightforward.

First, we need to recognize that tourism is not a good allocation of real resources and labour. It means producing goods and services that do not themselves directly benefit the local population. In fact, they are actively harmful to locals... gobbling up public space, destroying neighbourhoods, driving housing prices up, worsening climate change, etc.

It is much more rational and beneficial to allocate all this labour toward creating things that people actually need, like public services, affordable housing, renewable energy, and so on.

So, why do tourism at all? Two main reasons.

One reason is to get foreign currency. In this sense, tourism is basically an export (but where the export factories are plunked disastrously right into the middle of your historic downtowns). Why do exports? To pay for imports.

The solution here is simple: reduce unnecessary imports. Reduce luxury goods imports (these only benefit the rich), reduce car/SUV imports (build up your public transit system instead), etc. There are many options here. This reduces pressure for obtaining foreign currency.

A second reason to do tourism is to create jobs. This one seems like a strong argument but in fact it's not.

The obvious solution here is to implement a public job guarantee. Not only does this solve unemployment (a major problem in Spain), it mobilizes labour around socially and ecologically useful things that benefit society, rather than allocating labour to useless things like serving tourists.

In other words, there are simple alternatives to the two main reasons people cite for needing tourism. Any political party that realises this can ride the current wave of popular discontent and translate that energy into real, practical social improvements.

This is not to say that tourism should be abolished, far from it. But it's clear to everyone that extreme dependency on tourism is socially and ecologically destructive and it has to stop. And for anyone wondering how to go about the practical business of actually scaling down the tourism industry, the answer is the same as for reducing any damaging industry (eg, fossil fuels, luxury goods, SUVs, etc): credit guidance! jasonhickel.org/blog/2024/8/20…

I'm excited to announce this new paper we have in The Lancet Planetary Health.

We show that the world is not moving towards a just and ecological future for all. Growth in energy and material use is occurring primarily in countries that do not need it and is not occurring fast enough (or is declining) in countries that do need it.

The capitalist world economy is not delivering for human needs and ecology. A substantial redistribution of energy and material use is required—both within countries and between them. Here's the paper: thelancet.com/journals/lanpl…

And some key findings:

1. Globally, we use *a lot* of energy and materials. In fact, we use at least 2.5x more than would be needed to ensure decent living standards (DLS) for all.

DLS includes universal healthcare, education, modern housing, nutritious food, sanitation systems, transit, fridge-freezers, phones, computers, etc.

Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce this new project: a website dedicated to research and data on imperialism and inequality. You're going to love this... (links in thread below): It includes 14 topics and more than 100 interactive graphs, drawing on recent research published by our team and others, including on unequal exchange, gender, climate, military power, financial flows...

Freshly launched! Here's the link: globalinequality.org

I did this interview for @rosaluxglobal with several brilliant colleagues. We talk about liberalism, socialism, strategy, and the urgent need to overcome the capitalist law of value. I think you'll like it: rosalux.de/en/news/id/535… "We live in a world of immense productive potential, and yet we face deprivation and ecological breakdown. Why? Because under capitalism, production only happens when and where it’s profitable. Social and ecological needs are secondary to the returns to capital."

US politicians commonly claim that the US has been a "beacon of democracy" for the past 250 years, at home and abroad. Let's have a look a the evidence. 🧵 Links at the end. The US was an apartheid regime at its founding, and governed as an oligarchy.

US states generally limited voting to white males who owned property (about 6% of the population). Working class people, women, and people of colour overwhelmingly did not have the right to vote.

Social democracy is not a viable alternative to capitalism. It is a tempting prospect, but ultimately suffers from violent contradictions that cannot be sustained.

Social democracy tries to establish a compromise between (a) capitalism, and (b) socialist demands for fair wages, good public services, and environmental protections. But the latter represents a real problem for capital. It increases input prices, and increases workers’ bargaining power, and makes capital accumulation very difficult to achieve.

One way to resolve this tension is to abandon capital accumulation and transition to a post-capitalist economy where production is democratically organized around human well-being and ecology (in other words, socialism).

But social democracy, which is ultimately committed to capitalism, takes a different approach. It resolves the tension through imperialism. Social democratic states appropriate cheap labour and nature from the global South, from an external “outside”, thus allowing them to offer good wages and public services at home while also maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation.

Even states that may seem neutral or benevolent, like some of the Scandinavian countries, benefit from a massive net-appropriation of labour and resources from the global South through dynamics of unequal exchange, which enables them to sustain the social democratic compromise.

Crucially, while this option is available to states in the imperial core, it is generally not available to states in the periphery. In the periphery, when capitalists face progressive demands from unions and environmental defenders, they don’t have the option of conceding and then relying on imperialist appropriation to maintain accumulation. There is no “outside” for them. Their only option is to crush the progressive demands. Indeed they often do this with the direct support of the core states.

This is why so many capitalist states in the South are characterized by violence and repression. It is not because they are somehow intrinsically given to violence… it is because capitalism *requires* violence. By contrast, the core states can have nice human rights at home because they externalize the violence that capitalism requires.

Social democracy offers only the illusion of a solution. An illusion for some, that is. The Congolese coltan miners and Bangladeshi sweatshop workers that supply Western multinational firms are of course under no such illusion.

The only real solution is to overcome capitalism and achieve a post-capitalist economy. It is 100% possible to have a functioning economy that ensures human well-being and ecological stability *without* needing imperialism. But it requires abandoning capital accumulation. "The North net-appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw materials, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour from the global South in a single year": sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

China is overturning mainstream development theory in astonishing ways.

China's GDP per capita is only $12,000. That's 70% less than the average in high-income countries.

And yet they have the largest high-speed rail network in the world. They've developed their own commercial aircraft. They are the world leaders in renewable energy technology and electric vehicles. They have advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, aerospace engineering...

China has a higher life expectancy than the USA, with 80% less income.

We were told that this kind of development required very high levels of GDP/cap. But over the past 10 years China has demonstrated that it can be achieved with much more modest levels of output.

How do they do it? By using public finance and industrial policy to steer investment and production toward social objectives and national development needs. This allows them to convert aggregate production into development outcomes much more efficiently than other countries, where productive capacity is often wasted on activities that may be highly profitable to capital, or beneficial to the rich, but may not actually advance development.

Of course, China still has development gaps that need to be addressed. And we know from some other countries that higher social indicators can be achieved with China's level of GDP/cap, by focusing more on social policy. But the achievements are undeniable and development economists are taking stock. I saw some US neoliberal commentator argue that China's industrial policy and credit guidance is a constraint on development. This is just total denialism. Whatever your ideological priors, the reality is that China's industrial policy is *extremely* effective.

Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2024, on unequal exchange, ecosocialism, and post-capitalist transformation.

As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵 1) This is my top highlight. We found that the global North net-appropriates more than 800 billion hours of labour from the South per year. This occurs because Southern wages are 83–98% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill in the same sector. nature.com/articles/s4146…

People often assume that capitalist globalization is closing the wage gap between workers in the global North and global South.

But it's not happening. In fact, the North-South wage gap is *increasing*. And this is not due to sectoral differences. It is occurring across all sectors, even as the global South's share of industrial manufacturing and high-skilled labour in the world economy has increased dramatically over this very period.

This Bloomberg report is a stark reminder: we cannot rely on capital to achieve green transition. Capital is not investing enough in green energy because it's not as profitable as fossil fuels. The solution? We need a public finance strategy and fast.

bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-… Public finance, together with a credit guidance framework. Central banks have the power to force capital to stop making climate-destroying investments and direct investment instead in necessary activities: foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/16/cli…

I strongly disagree with these remarks. They are empirically incorrect, but also illustrate a terrible reactionary tendency among some environmentalists that must be rejected. The claim is that ecological collapse will undermine industrial production, so we should not pursue development to meet needs in the South.

For instance, we should not ensure refrigerators for people b/c this would inhibit their ability to migrate away from uninhabitable zones!

In this new paper we calculate the unequal exchange of labour between the global North and global South. The results are quite staggering. You'll want to look at this... 🧵

nature.com/articles/s4146…
First, a crucial point. Workers in the global South contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, and 91% of labour for international trade.

The South provides the majority of the world's labour in all sectors (including 93% of global manufacturing labour).

New paper: "How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?"

Is it possible to realise this vision without exacerbating ecological breakdown? Yes! But it requires a totally different approach to the question of growth and development. 🧵
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Some narratives hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the GDP/cap of high-income countries. But this would have severe ecological consequences. It forces a brutal dilemma between poverty reduction and ecological stability.

I'm excited to announce the latest release of the Sustainable Development Index, now with data through 2022. Costa Rica tops the list!

sustainabledevelopmentindex.org As usual, middle-income countries that have strong public provisioning systems tend to perform best. This model allows countries to deliver relatively high levels of human welfare with relatively low levels of resource use.

People would better understand North Korea’s disposition toward the US if they remembered that US forces perpetrated an industrial-scale bombing campaign that destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, civilian infrastructure, and 85% of all buildings. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were incinerated. The US dropped more bombs on North Korea in the early 1950s than they did in the entire Pacific theatre during WW2, making North Korea one of the most bombed countries in the world. You don’t easily forget such a thing.

We have *extraordinary* productive capacities. We can do virtually anything. Renewable energy? Integrated public transit? Regenerative farming? High-quality affordable housing for all? DONE. But we are prevented from doing these things because they are not profitable to capital. Medicines to end preventable diseases. Universal public healthcare. Insulated buildings. High-efficiency appliances in every household...

We live in a *shadow* of the society we could have because we do not have democratic control over finance and production.

Major investors like BlackRock and JPMorgan have pulled out of Climate Action commitments because they can achieve higher profits doing fossil fuels and emissions. A clear reminder that capitalism cannot achieve green transition with the necessary speed. ft.com/content/ab26da… Renewables are cheap. Rapid decarbonization can be achieved. But affordability and feasibility are not what matters to capital. What matters is profits. They will invest in whatever is most profitable, and all of us are hostage to their insane logic.

Did capitalist reforms reduce extreme poverty in China? New empirical data suggests the opposite. In the 1980s, socialist China had some of the lowest rates of extreme poverty in the periphery, while the capitalist reforms caused poverty to increase. theconversation.com/chinas-capital…
Scholars have long argued that the World Bank's $1.90 method suffers from a significant limitation, as it does not tell us whether people can actually afford essential goods (food, shelter, clothing, fuel), whose prices may move differently to the rest of the economy.

Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2023, on climate change, capitalism, colonialism, degrowth and post-capitalist futures. As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵 1) This one is my top highlight. Rich countries have dramatically exceeded their fair-shares of the carbon budget for 1.5°C. In a zero-by-2050 scenario they will owe $192 trillion to global South countries in compensation for atmospheric appropriation. nature.com/articles/s4189…