The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: Ending Climate Change Requires the End of Capitalism as We Know It.

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Is the end of capitalism the answer to climate change?On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, environmental activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot debates MIT scientist and bestselling author Andrew McAfee on the motion Be it resolved, ending climate change requires the end of capitalism as we know it.SOURCES: PBS, NBC News, Whitehouse.govBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not in imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesman to statesman like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation to arm you, the listener,

with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, ending climate change requires the end of capitalism as We know it. I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.

And all you can talk about is money. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The UN deadline of achieving net zero global emissions by 2050 is quickly becoming an unrealistic goal. Many countries are failing to impose drastic measures to conversexious. combat rising emissions. Some believe capitalism is to blame. Perpetual economic growth requires an increase in production, consumption, and use of fossil fuels. To prevent a climate change disaster, free market capitalism must give way to a new ecofiscal reality that privileges the planet over profits. Defenders of capitalism think the opposite is true. I think capitalism

has to be a part of the solution. We need to come up with innovative ways to run the world on clean fuels rather than dirty fuels. That's business magnet and billionaire Richard Branson. Many, like Branson, argue that while capitalism has contributed to climate change, it is also uniquely positioned to solve it. Harnessing the dynamism of the market through the pursuit of profit will allow corporations and individuals to create new technologies to build a more sustainable future. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments

by debating the resolution, be it resolved, ending climate change requires the end of capitalism, as we know it. Arguing for the motion is guardian columnist and environmental activist, George Mombiott. Arguing against the motion is MIT scientist and bestselling author, Andrew McCaffee. George, Andrew, welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to this debate, and as per tradition, we're going to put two minutes on the clock

and ask the speaker who is arguing for the motion to provide us with their opening remarks. So, George, that's you. Two minutes on the clock. You have the microphone. Thank you, Rajad. Well, I'm going to make things difficult for myself by arguing that ending climate change requires the end of capitalism full stop, never mind the as we know it bit. And the reason for that is that I feel capitalism has three innate characteristics which drive us towards destruction. And it doesn't really. matter what kind of capitalism it is, whether it's Keynesian, whether it's neoliberal capitalism, whether it's corporate capitalism, whether it's crony capitalism. The problem is not with the adjective,

but with the noun. And those three characteristics are, firstly, that it generates and relies upon perpetual growth. That growth is the aggregate of the drive to generate profit and accumulate wealth, if growth stops, capitalism is deemed to fail. And that growth means that any efforts we make to prevent climate breakdown mean that we're constantly running down the rising escalator. And you can take the case of the UK, for example, which it has to be said has made some pretty good efforts. We pass this sweeping climate change act. We've got a net zero target. We've replaced nearly all our coal burning, with gas burning. We've insulated our oil. our homes, we've changed our light bulbs, but still we've basically flatlined. We've achieved

no substantial cut when you take into account all our consumption emissions, all the embodied emissions that we're importing from other parts of the world and aviation and shipping and the rest of it. Why is that? Because everything we're trying to do gets counteracted by growth, which just means that we're constantly cancelling out our own good efforts. Then the second characteristic is this belief which really lies at the heart of capitalism and has been there ever since John Locke formulated it possibly before, which is that our right to own natural wealth equates to the amount of money that we've got in the bank or that we can borrow.

So if you've got a certain amount of money, you can own as much land, as you want, as much atmospheric space as you want by buying a private plane, as many homes as you want, you can buy your bluefin tuna sushi. In other words, you can take as much natural wealth away from other people as you like. And that is light growth, a fundamental and innate characteristic of capitalism. You take away that right to turn money into natural wealth, and it's no longer capitalism. Then the third characteristic is the one which really ensures that people go along capitalism, it's also inherent to it, is a characteristic that without which you can't, it's not really capitalism. And that is that everyone can pursue and can expect to find private luxury.

We're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and so we all think that we're going to achieve the private luxury that some people have. But if we did so, we would drive the living world into a death spiral. The only reason that some people can enjoy private luxury today is that other people don't. And if everybody lived as a rich lived today, then we would unquestionably destroy the whole biosphere. We would have six, seven, eight degrees of global heating, and that would be curtains for just about all life on earth. And yet, you take away that promise You say no private luxury is not for all, it's only for a few, and the entire justification for capitalism has collapsed. So, in other words, it's not any variant of the system that is the problem. It is the

system in whatever form it might take. George, thank you for that. A concise and powerful opening statement. Andrew, the microphone over to you. Two minutes on the clock. Let's have your opening words. George and I, actually, I am sure, agree. on some really fundamental things. First of all, that global warming is real. It's bad. It's caused by us human beings and our economic activity. And we are not doing nearly enough about it. Where George and I part company, I think, is on his view, which he just beautifully articulated, that fighting global warming is inherently incompatible with capitalism. And I categorically disagree with that. The main reason I disagree with that is that we have shown over the past half a century that capitalism is perfectly

compatible with taking better care of the environment in some really fundamental ways. Starting about 50 years ago, in the rich world, in the capitalist rich world, we finally got serious about air pollution. And air pollution is the right thing to focus on here because global warming is caused by greenhouse gases, which are a very widespread, pernicious form of air pollution. So what's our track record with air pollution? We put in place the Clean Air Act, starting in 1970, and the United States, we put in place amendments to it in the U.S. and other countries around the world. And the victory over air pollution is not complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it is astonishing how much cleaner the air is in ardently capitalistic countries than it was half a century ago. We were just breathing much, much cleaner air than was the case then. George might respond to that that what we did was outsource our air pollution to poor countries around the world.

It's a beguiling argument. It's just dead flat wrong. We continue to drive cars in the rich countries. We have an outsource driving to the store to China. We continue to engage in heavy industry. We continue to have a large transportation sector. We continue to make a lot of steel and cement in the rich world. These are all formally very, very polluting activities. We put in place some very, very, smart constraints. And in particular, we activated the thirst for growth that George talked about. And the thirst for growth in capitalism is a thirst for profits. And all of your profits are eroded when your costs go up. So the brilliance that we've achieved so far is to make pollution expensive and to watch the engine of capitalism start to work to minimize that expense, to minimize those costs. Now, our main failing is that we have not applied the playbook that we works very, very well to the dire problem of pollution caused by greenhouse gases and therefore global warming. I am not here to say that we are going to solve this problem or that we are on

track to solve this problem. What I am here to say is that we know the playbook for solving this problem and in no sense does it turn away, does it cause us to or force us to turn away from what we know works and in particular from increasing prosperity and living in in free societies that continue to grow while taking better care of the planet in this really important way. There is no fundamental incompatibility between capitalist economies, free market societies, and taking better care of the planet. Thank you, Andrew. Two clear, succinct visions on this resolution. Divergent, different. So let's get into some rebuttals here. George, what have you heard specifically from Andrew that you want to take issue with? Well, thank you. I thought,

was a very good and nuanced presentation, and I appreciated a lot of the points that he made. And it is true that to an extent we have got to grips with air pollution. I think we'd both agree that there's still far too much of it. And particularly in Europe, we suffer from diesel pollution. It's true that we have outsourced a good deal of it. We haven't outsourced all of it, but we have outsourced a huge amount. I mean, and a lot of our heavy industry has gone to China and elsewhere, where they are suffering horrendous levels of air pollution, such that it now, according to the UN, kills more people than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis alone. So capitalism has by no means conquered it. It has partly outsourced it. But the more important

issue is that we're not actually here to talk about local air pollution. We're here to talk about climate breakdown. And there, unfortunately, we absolutely have not got to grips with it. Far from it. In fact, in some respects, we're going backwards and going backwards quite fast, as we see particularly the sort of hyper-capitalist nation, such as the United States, tearing up their climate commitments and saying, no, the money comes first. The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of. of other countries, leaving American workers who I love and taxpayers to absorb the cost

in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production. I would say that for the three reasons that I mentioned, even the most conscious nations, such as Germany, for instance, are also failing and failing very badly. And in Germany, Angela Merkel, who has this great global reputation as a green head of state, has actually again and again put the interests of the car industry and even the lignite industry, this tremendously dirty fuel, above the interests of the living world and future generations. And that does seem to be an inherent characteristic of the system, that the power of lobbyists, the power of money, again and again seems to defeat,

our long-term interests. And we're very clearly failing, even if every nation which has made a pledge under the Paris Agreement were to uphold that pledge, which unfortunately now seems highly optimistic, we're on course for between three and four degrees centigrade of global heating. And that is global catastrophe. That basically means the end of being able to feed ourselves, the end of most of the world's ecosystems, the end of habitability for the majority of the world's people. And that's despite vast international efforts. But those efforts are constantly fighting against that rising escalator. They're constantly fighting against those inherent tendencies of accumulation and inequality within capitalism. And they're constantly fighting

against the promise of private luxury, which is a promise that cannot possibly be fulfilled without ecocide. George, thank you for that rebuttal. Andrew, same opportunity for you, a chance to go back, reflect on George's opening remarks, what he's just said in rebuttal to yours. Thank you. One of the great advantages of this digital age that we live in is that listeners to this podcast can kind of fact-check both of us in real time. There's just huge amounts of great information available online about the things that we're talking about. So for example, George reiterated that we have outsourced a lot of our pollution generating activities to low-income countries. Go check that out. You can look at manufacturing activity over time in the United States.

You can look at miles driven. You can look at the amount of real estate, the square footage that needs to be heated and cooled every year. All of those are unambiguously going up. So George says we've outsourced a huge amount of the problem. I think we've outsourced a not quite negligible, but a minor, a very small amount of the problem of pollution generating have we outsourced from the rich world. We have just dealt with the pollution. George also said that we have not yet in the rich world turned the corner at all on carbon emissions. There's a great website called Our World and Data. You can go look up carbon emissions over time by country. And in particular, you can look at lines over time that include the carbon

embedded in the goods that we import from other countries. What you will notice from that is that the U.S. is on a really impressive downward trajectory in total tons of carbon emitted, even taking those imports into account. I believe the U.K. is also on a downward trajectory and several other of the richest countries are as well. To repeat myself, I am not saying that these trends are going down quickly enough. They are not. We need to take more action. But it is false to say that we continue to spew. more greenhouse gases year after year in every country in the world. The rich world has learned to

decouple those emissions from its overall prosperity increases. We just need to accelerate that decoupling. In Georgia's really nice opening summary of the problems with capitalism, he highlighted ownership and he highlighted private luxury. And those are both real features of the system. Property rights are pretty strong in capitalism. But even with those strong property rights, I do not have the right, no matter how rich I am to go emit CFCs into the atmosphere. That is forbidden to me. In America, I do not have the right, no matter how rich I am to hunt whales, to hunt otters, to hunt manatee, we have put important parts of the environment and the ecosystem and important activities outside the realm of permissible activities, no matter how wealthy you are. So property is strong.

We also put very effective limits on property, and we know the playbook for doing that. And then finally, instead of private luxury, I would just use a synonym, which is prosperity or a higher standard of living. And when you do that, you start to realize that it is a universal human aspiration. And some of the most vulnerable and poorest people in the world have the same goals as we rich people do, which is to have a higher standard of living, to provide better for our families than our children. And I don't think that's an aspect of capitalism. I think that's an aspect of being a human being. and trying to turn that off is probably a fool's errand

and has led to some of the totalitarian nightmares, I believe that we witnessed during the 20th century. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved, ending climate change requires the end of capitalism as we know it. If you like this podcast, make sure to check out our other episodes, including debates on everything from the U.S. election to social media to whether billionaires should exist. all free to download or stream on our website, monkdebates.com.

Well, let's get into our conversation, George and Andrew. I'm really looking forward to this. And maybe, George, to come to you first, because if we look at some of the global solutions that are being proposed right now to combat climate change, they seem to have embedded in them powerful market mechanisms, or at least assumption that the market can be a tool to lower emissions. I think of cap and trade.

I think of a carbon tax, which has been debated extensively here in Canada and throughout much of the Western world. What is your feeling about these big kind of macro policies that policymakers of governments are embracing right now that really put the market mechanism, the profit motive at the center of the fulcrum that they want to use to affect change when it comes to climate? Well, I'd say my overall impression is that they keep failing. and they keep failing to be implemented at the level at which they need to be effective, and that applies whether you're looking at Australia's failed carbon tax or the European

emissions trading system. And the reason for that is the lobbying power of money. And there is a direct relationship between economic power and political power. The more economic power you have, the more political power you can wield. And we see. governments all over the world effectively in the pockets of powerful commercial lobbies and putting those interests above the interests of humanity and the rest of life on Earth? So, Andrew, come back on that because it is a powerful critique. You know, we have these systems that have been embraced in the United States, by Canada, around the world, cap and trade, carbon tax. Yet George accurately points out, you know, total emissions, or Canada as an example, are going

up, they're not going down. Yeah. And to reiterate myself, they are going down in some countries. Our viewers can verify this for themselves. But George's point stands, we are not taking effective action. We're not putting to work the playbook that we know is effective. And it consists of putting a price on the carbon so that businesses run away from it. I get very nostalgic for the days and we put in place a cap and trade system in the United States and other countries, I get really nostalgic for the Montreal Protocols, which ended CFC production completely, almost, around the world. To me, that shows that the problem that we're facing now is a problem of this moment in time that we're in. I don't mean to minimize that problem. It's a real one.

It's not a problem of capitalist systems, because those systems were capitalist back 30, 40 years ago, and we took the actions that we know work. So we have a particular problem here with global warming. And most of the incumbent industries are against having their costs increase. Great. I appreciate that. It's a tough problem to solve. To me, this necessitates greater action from the public, a demand to do the right things, a demand to put in place the playbook that we know works.

Because one of the things I say in my book, more from less, is that, look, we can't just rely on the business community to take one for the team and voluntarily increase their country. costs. That's really not how capitalism works. I talk about the two other forces of an aware public and a responsive government. That is what has been lacking in the fight against global warming. And it's not an inherent flaw of the capitalist system. George, we push you a little bit on what the alternative would be. If you're committed to the idea that capitalism, the profit motive, the pursuit of luxury, the extent to which wealth allows you to use and abuse the environment in your view, unilaterally of its impact on other people and on the planet itself, then what is the alternative to that system that still allows for human flourishing?

Because after all, I assume that you agree that human flourishing has to be part of the sustainable future. I very much agree with that. And I would define environmentalism as consideration for the lives of others. And of course, those others include other human beings. So it's fundamentally important that our well-being is sustained and enhanced, but I would say that's a very different matter from allowing GDP to keep growing or indeed allowing certain people to accumulate a vast and disproportionate amount of it. So the fundamental principle that I would put forward as

the alternative is what I call private sufficiency and public luxury. I hope I established that we can't all pursue private luxury because there's simply not enough world to go round. There isn't enough planet. But we can all pursue public luxury. You know, if everybody in London tried to have their own swimming pool and their own tennis court and their own library and their own art gallery and their own playground for their children, and London would cover half of England and England would cover half of Europe and there'd be nowhere for anybody else to live. But we could all have magnificent public swimming pools and public tennis courts and public libraries and art galleries and transport systems and the rest of it without overloading the living planet.

And what I would call upon there is not so much an expansion of the state, but of another sector which has been massively neglected by economists, one of the four pillars of economic life, which is the Commons. And a Commons is defined as a particular resource, a community which controls that resource, and the rules and negotiations that community creates to control it. And there's lots of excellent examples around the world, whether it's energy cooperatives or community broadband or the system of allotments that we have here in the UK, where everybody is entitled to a piece of land in a bigger patch of land, which is equally divided, and, you know, and you can grow your vegetables and fruit as you wish on that land.

And the Commons, I believe, has got a huge amount to offer as a total alternative to both capitalism and communism. It exists within a sphere of its own. It protects resources because an inherent intrinsic element of the Commons is that the resource has to be passed on intact. And either the resource itself or the product arising from it is shared equally. among the members of the community. So my emphasis would be to switch away from both market and state towards a commons-based economy. George, which non-capitalist countries do you think so far have been

the best stewards of the environment? I'm not sure there's any non-capitalist countries out there at the moment, and certainly the communist countries have been an absolute disaster. I mean, what I'm talking about is something which is not pursued to any great extent, certainly not as a dominant economic model anywhere on earth. So, you know, we have to, in these extraordinary times, look to new political models. And I think it's fairly clear when we see the catastrophic mismanagement of environmental resources in the former Soviet Union and we see our, I'm afraid, terrifying failure to get to grips with climate breakdown in capitalist nations, it becomes pretty clear to me that neither of those approaches is the right way to solve this problem.

So, Andrew, come back on this idea of a significant kind of curtailment of property rights as they relate to the individual and this idea of public comments, a more sustainable future where resources are accessed on a shared basis in order to decrease our individual environmental impact. Do you see that as a conceivable future for a greener world within which human beings flourish? No, I'm pretty skeptical about that because by what mechanism do we decide who gets what? How resources, real physical resources are allocated. When I hear about a commons, I imagine some kind of bureaucratic oversight board that makes decisions on behalf of its members or some kind of, I guess, egalitarian voting mechanism. And it kind of reminds me of the scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where a king Arthur is going

through the countryside and he comes across the peasant Dennis who's part of the egalitarian collective and he starts shouting these kind of Marxist slogans at him. That feels to me like the kind of comments that George is talking about here. I just don't know how it scales up. I don't know what it provides for the energy and the food of a country of how many tens of millions in the case of the UK or 300 million in the United States. we have systems that do a great job of providing for the welfare of their people. And this is the key point I want to make. These countries have also turned the corner on despoiling the environment. And year after year,

the footprint of the American economy on our planet is getting lighter, not heavier. Our resource use is going down. We're giving cropland back to nature. Our energy use has been just about flat for at least 10 years. we are turning that corner. And I want to be clear, there was a tradeoff. We used to think, with a lot of justification, that you could have a healthy planet or an increasing economy, pick one. I don't believe that tradeoff holds anymore. And easing that tradeoff or making that tradeoff vanish has had nothing to do with deeply exploring these alternative forms of assigning property and allocating who gets to make what decisions. They've happened squarely within a capitalist system and they've worked out quite well. Now, we need to do it better. We need to do more of it. We need to put global warming right in our sites and take action on it. But to repeat myself, we know the playbook for taking action. It doesn't involve these whole scale changes in how we organize economic activity that George is talking about. Well, obviously, as a Brit, I'm delighted whenever anybody from another country references Monty Python, we're probably more loyal than we are to the Queen. So thank you. However, I'm not sure I would. use that as my guide to how a Commons functions and what its characteristics are. I totally get that it seems like a bit utre and bizarre to be proposing this completely different economic system, but I would argue that the most utre and bizarre proposition of all is the one that we can carry on

with a current system which is on course optimistically to deliver between three and four degrees of global heating this century. And that's the optimistic interpretation, assuming everybody meets their Paris Agreement goals. And that basically does mean the end of life, end of human life, in most parts of the world, the end of most ecosystems and the collapse of food production. This is a totally implausible system. If we stick with the system we've got, the idea that we will emerge intact from this century and maintain our prosperity, and maintain our well-being just simply seems ridiculous. It's preposterous.

We can't carry on this way. And a recent UN report said that to have any chance of coming in at no more than 1.5 degrees of global heating, we need to be reducing emissions worldwide by 7.6% per year. And we know that beyond 1.5 degrees, things start to get really dangerous. So we're nowhere near, absolutely nowhere near that goal. And I would argue it's because of the dominant economic system, capitalism, everything we do to try to limit those emissions is being undermined and driven against by that economic system. So Andrew, listeners tuning into this conversation might want me to ask you for your responses, I think well understood, view that the rise of CO2

emissions tracks the rise of capitalist. That is no longer true. The American economy continues to grow our, not per capita, our total emissions, even after taking into account the carbon and imported products is now trending downward. It is incorrect to say that those two things are going up in lockstep. It is correct to say that we are not decreasing carbon quickly enough. And I'm going to do something really unpopular in a debate. I'm going to agree with my counterpart here. we have an unsustainable or a bad energy system. Our energy system needs to change. That is categorically different than saying our economic system as a whole needs to change. Let's fix the energy problem. Let's accelerate the energy transition away from coal, away from fossil fuels. That is going to

take place over the 21st century. Let's make that happen more quickly. How do we do that? Make the pollution expensive and make the innovation cheap. Put it. price on the carbon, cap and trade, carbon tax, whatever, subsidize, support energy innovation of all different kinds. And I'm going to say something else really unpopular. We have exactly one energy production technology on the planet right now that is potent, that is scalable, that is not intermittent, that is continuous. And here's the controversial part. It is safe. It's called nuclear, and we are running away from it in country after country. And it is an absolute catastrophe given the urgency of combating global warming. I'm all in favor of experimentation here. And in particular, these commons that George talks about, they're correct. They work really well in some places. Great. Let's give them a fair shot. Let's allow commons. Let's facilitate them and see what happens. To me, that is very, very different than saying let's mandate commons. Let's get rid of private ownership. And, and capitalism and replace it wholesale with something else.

I would never support that. By all means, let's experiment with alternate means of producing goods and services. So, George, I think two things there for you to respond to. Nuclear power is it a panacea? I know you'll have some views on that. And also, I guess, a fundamental view about human liberty and human freedom and how that is tied up with capitalism, but if you're doing away with capitalism, are we somehow curtailing human liberty, in your view, in the fight for climate?

I'll take these one at a time. To begin with, Andrew might be astonished to hear that, yes, I'm totally with him on Newcliffe. I feel particularly small modular reactors have tremendous potential, and that potential is not being tapped. And that's a real shame. And we need massive state R&D to bring those up to commercial viability, because I think we could get rid of a huge amount of fossil fuels if we did so.

And on the point about liberty, Andy says, well, you know, we've got to give the commons a fair shot. What capitalism has been doing for the past 300 years very effectively is through brute force, extreme violence, shutting down the commons, seizing their resources from commoners and forcing them into the capitalist system. Through colonialism, which was basically grabbing the land, labor and resources of other nations, and now through, similar means, be it trade deals, be it structural adjustment, be it debt, we continue to do the same thing. And capitalism has been waging war on the commons at a great expense of human liberty and in doing so has effectively shut down many of the economic and social options that people once had. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved, ending climate change requires the end of capitalism as we know it.

If you're enjoying this podcast, write a review on iTunes. We also welcome your ideas for debates and debaters. Send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. Now, back to the episode. I'm conscious of our time here and moving to closing state. shortly, but I think we need to talk a little bit about the COVID-19 global pandemic in the context of this debate. And I think maybe George, your view that we know this COVID-19 is quickly

turning into a crisis of capitalism, but do you see this connected to the crisis of the environment? Well, there's one obvious connection, which is that it arose from the devastating wildlife trade, which has been horrendous for ecosystems and for the survival of species, but also turns out to be horrendous for human health because it has spawned this deadly zoonosis, this disease arising from other animals and moving into the human population. We believe it came from bats via pangolins in the wet market in Wuhan. And so there's an obvious link there. But the other interesting thing is the extent to which all the things we're told were impossible, all things which were basically socialist. Universal, basic income, massive state intervention, forcing private companies to effectively

nationalize their operations, all these things suddenly become possible. Suddenly we find, oh yeah, we can do those things after all. And what was completely inconceivable, the sort of thing which Andrew has said when I was talking about the Commons is just like, sort of, that's just crazy In this case, suddenly, we find that we can do it. And if we can make that massive economic change on a dime, I mean, it's happened so quickly and to such an extraordinary extent, in order to get on top of this deadly pandemic, then we can and we should do the same to prevent an even greater threat, which is the destruction of our life support systems through climate breakdown.

Very provocative thinking. Thank you, George. What's your reply to it, Andrew? I mentioned earlier that the total footprint of the American economy and the American people on our planet is getting lighter year after year. That absolutely includes our use of natural resources. George says there is no evidence of absolute dematerialization anywhere in the world. I published a book just a couple months ago documenting the absolute dematerialization of the United States economy. And it almost doesn't matter what category. of resources you look at, whether they are metals or minerals or fertilizers or water for agriculture or cropland or timber or paper, Americans are using less of these things. Again, not per person, less in total year after year. And on the subject of putting people into a different form of economic life and of mandating that they turned their backs on increased prosperity in order to save the planet. Wow, my response to that is if we think we're having trouble getting people to sign up for a price on carbon, we are really going to have trouble getting them to sign up for a centrally planned,

permanent, ever-deepening recession. That's going to be a tough sell. I think you're really confusing prosperity with growth there. I mean, prosperity is human flourishing. Prosperity is making sure that everybody has their needs met and can lead a happy, fulfilling and good life. That's absolutely. not the same as having more and more money and more and more stuff. I think that's a really good point, but very often when I hear people advocate things similar to what you're saying, there's an assumption that we know when people have enough of something, when they have enough prosperity, and we're going to shut off the spigot to them after that. That very quickly starts to sound like a totalitarian nightmare to me. Well, I think enough is actually a really great concept, and it's one that we should be working on and working on very hard. And we do. defined by whom and enforced by whom and mandated by whom. Well, I mean, it's interesting. Let people make their own decisions. I mean, when it comes to the coronavirus, you know, we say, right, you know, we should have

enough of this virus. We should make a decision collectively. I'm sorry, that's facile. Putting disease in the same category as a rising standard of living doesn't make any sense to me. Well, I'm talking about how we can make collective decisions that we have. enough of something and that there's going to be payoffs in order to limit one thing, we're going to make sacrifices in other respects and we're going to change our lives. And we've done so spectacularly.

I think the fundamental difference there is that COVID is bad and human prosperity is good. We want less of one and more of the other. Again, I think you're confusing prosperity with GDP. GDP is bad. It's much more dangerous than the virus if it is driving us towards environmental collapse, which in my view it clearly is. I mean, we are on course. And I've written a book full of evidence to support my views. I encourage people to look at it, not just because I want sales. But I think we've agreed that we're on course for potential catastrophe. You know, even on the optimistic assumption that the Paris Agreement, commitments are met, and we have no more than between three and four degrees of global heating

this century. We agree on the need for an energy transition. I think we very much disagree on the path to get there. With the huge exception of nuclear, and if you and I are on the same team of Monty Python and nuclear power, we are fast friends. Let's move to closing statements, because, as you say, we've had a successful conversation forward. So, Andrew, I'm going to ask you for your two-minute closing statement.

and then I'll give George the last word. Let's look around the richest and most capitalistic countries in the world today. And that would include North America and most of Western Europe. And let's think about the environmental indicators that we would care most about. And for me, that would include, obviously, air pollution, water pollution, different kinds of pollution on land. That would include the health of different ecosystems. It would absolutely include the amount of land and water that we put under protection.

and put outside the capitalist system, it would include the health of various species, especially species that we almost push to the brink of extinction. In all of those areas, in the most capitalistic economies that the world has ever seen, most of the trends that we would all care about are heading in the right direction. Species are coming back. More land is under protection. More water is under protection. Pollution levels are going down while people are continuing to enjoy higher levels of prosperity. I'll use George's word instead of mine, prosperity. I think there's a very short set of synonyms there that have to do with affluence and have to do with growth, but prosperous and increasingly prosperous societies,

capitalistic ones, are able to take better care of the planet that we all live on. And to repeat myself one more time, this is not because they have outsourced their worst activities to low-income countries around the world. So to me, if the rich capitalist countries are doing a decent job of protecting the environment, that is the playbook that we should be following, that we should be expanding, and that we should be trying to encourage around the world. There are a couple of exceptions here that George and I have agreed on. We are not accomplishing the energy transition quickly enough. We are not doing a good enough job of protecting, for example, wild animals on the high oceans. We know the playbook for solving these problems. We're just not following it.

And again, I'll repeat myself one final time. If you think putting this playbook into practice is difficult in the economies and the societies that we've built up, try centrally planning them. Try selling a centrally planned government that tells you when you have enough prosperity and cannot have any more because you're now harming the planet. That is going to be a tough sell. I can't imagine how it would come to these countries with anything except force of arms, which I am not here to advocate for. Andrew, thank you. George, we're going to give you the last word, two minutes on the clock. Well, thank you, Andrew, for a really interesting and good-natured debate that I've enjoyed immensely. So it's true that what I'm calling for seems inconceivable. People say, well, you want a whole other economic system. Well, why don't we leave that until later? You know, leave that until we're sorted out these environmental crises. I'm constantly being told this. In fact, I've been told this for 35 years. and we have been leaving it till later and imagining that there will come a golden age when we can solve these crises and then we can adopt the new economic system. But it's been painfully clear

throughout those 35 years that we have not solved them and we are further from solving them than we've ever been because we are further down the path towards environmental catastrophe. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising, the global temperature has been rising, extreme events have been rising, and we're pushed closer and closer to the crucial tipping points beyond which there'll be very little that we can do, because we then have a sort of self-sustaining catastrophe as the planet begins releasing greenhouse gases, regardless of our efforts. And that puts us optimistically, as I say, on course for between three and four degrees. Optimistic scenario is total catastrophe.

That is the end of life on many parts of the world. It's the end of life as we know it. We get to six degrees. It could be the end of all life because they then get such rapid feedbacks that we could end up, but possibly with a situation like Venus. So my sort of difficult and inconceivable

switch towards the new economic system isn't nearly as difficult and inconceivable as carrying on as we are and allowing this catastrophe to materialize. And the question I feel Andrew has failed to answer is, why haven't these good things that he's talking about happened within the capitalist system? Why haven't we employed those mechanisms to get ourselves out of this death spiral? And we haven't, for the reasons that I began with, that it is an innate and inherent feature of capitalism to drive us towards these disasters

for the three reasons that I laid out. The growth, the translation of wealth into the right to grab, or money into the right to grab natural wealth, and the universal pursuit of private luxury, all of which are innate characteristics of capitalism. Well, George Monbiott, Andrew McAfee, this has really been a civil, substantive debate, the time of global crisis.

I think it's rewarding to me personally, but also I think just an example of how we can have these serious conversations, we can do so in a respectful manner and share real insight and understanding with our global Monk Debates audience. So thank you both for finding the time to do this today. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks for hosting this. While that wraps up today's debate, I want to thank our participants, George Mombia and Andrew McCaffee. You certainly gave us a lot to think about. The Monk Debates podcast is a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from

the U.S. election to the accuracy of COVID-19 data to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find detailed show notes on today's debate. Thank you for joining us and for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.