This isn’t so much a book review, as a discussion of the book Earth for All. I recommend you read the book yourself. It’s not too long, well under 200 pages, and is written in a very accessible style. Earth for All – A Survival Guide for Humanity (2022) was published by the Club of Rome, the same group that brought us The Limits to Growth in 1972.
The authors start by laying out five extraordinary turnarounds needed for global equity and a healthy planet. They are:
1. Ending poverty
2. Addressing gross inequality
3. Empowering women
4. Making our food system healthy for people and ecosystems
5. Transitioning to clean energy
Nothing revolutionary so far, these track the UN Sustainability Development Goals rather broadly. There are a few items I wish to highlight to engender further discussion.
- Dedicating 2 – 4% of global income to sustainable energy and food security
- Policies Ensuring the wealthiest 10% take less than 40% of national incomes
- Establishing citizen funds to distribute a Universal Basic Dividend.
The authors acknowledge that these changes will be disruptive. So be it, let’s be disruptive. If they were easy, they would have been done already.
Dedicating 2 – 4 % of global income to sustainable energy and food security.
I wrote about this recently this month (Climate Change Will Take Away Your Money).
The European Commission's long-term strategy "A Clean Planet for All" strategy posited a cost of addressing climate change at 2.8% of GDP, while the IEA projected a need for 3% of GDP investment until 2050 to combat climate change effectively. The world's GDP is about $101 Trillion (nominal, 2022). That means what is needed to mitigate climate change is about $3 trillion per year.
Addressing climate change (and other ecological overshoot issues) won’t be cheap. But dedicating a small portion of global income is the investment worth making, and in finance parlance, the action with the biggest return on investment (ROI). The World Economic Forum estimates that climate change costs the world $16 million per hour. To put things in human cost terms, the actuaries have gotten in on the fun and estimate that a baby born this year (2024) will lose $500,000 over its lifetime due to climate change. We already know that not acting on climate change will cost more than acting, so let’s get going.
Policies ensuring the wealthiest 10% take no more than 40% of national incomes.
Such policies are meant to ensure a more egalitarian distribution of resources and opportunities. There is a happy medium between one person controlling all wealth and all people mandated the same income. Past a certain point (40% is settled on by the book authors) the wealthier in a society can control the government and the institutions of the state to ensure that their interests always come first.
According to the World Inequality Database, we have a long way to go before less than 40% of wealth is controlled by the top 10%. The table below shows what percentage of that nation’s wealth is held by the top 10%.
It is important to note that wealth is not the same as income (the metric used in Earth for All). The wealthy often don’t have very high incomes from a typical job. Their wealth comes mainly from assets and investments. Either way, these numbers are far away from the 40 percent ideal.
You can see from the map below, that the concentration of wealth is the norm. In fact, no country on Earth from what I can see has less than 45% of wealth concentrated in the top 10%.
Universal Basic Dividend
One way the authors offer to address this inequality is a Universal Basic Dividend, so that the commons of a nation cannot be hoarded by those with the most wealth and power, but shared equally. We should factor in the risk involved in putting up the money to exploit those assets (sunk costs of a mine, oil well, etc.) However, we also need to factor in whether the investment of that mine, oil well, or other “societal common” should be exploited at all, and if so, to what extent.
I’m not going to pretend to have the policy answer to that question here. But surely we as a society can figure out a risk-sharing and incentive-sharing model that works to provide society with resources, but not at the expense of that society. Too often today, the costs of initial investments are public (the government incentivizes digging the oil well with subsidies) the profits are privatized, and the negative externalities (climate change) outweigh the short-term positive externalities (fuel to use in transport).
Here is how such a universal basic dividend could work:
1. The Private Sector is charged for extracting and using resources that should be seen as under the stewardship of all society. This can include fossil fuels, land freshwater, the ocean, minerals, the atmosphere, forests, etc.
2. The fees collected are put in a national Citizens Fund and the revenue is distributed back to citizens equally through a universal basic dividend.
Scenario Analysis
The authors talk about two distinct scenarios for the future.
- Too Little Too Late
- The Great Leap Scenario
The too little too late scenario is what we are in now, with some countries making piecemeal changes that don’t add up to meaningful action.
The authors introduce a Wellbeing Index juxtaposed against a Social Tension Index to show how each scenario plays out. Wellbeing is characterized by a society in which dignity, nature, connection, fairness, and participation are valued and set as goals. A society characterized by high social tension is characterized by a decline in well-being, trust, and equality within societies.
The Great Leap scenario would require governments to act to reshape markets and drive long-term visions for societies. The authors agree with me and many others that neither individuals nor markets on their own can get us the change we need.
As always, decide for yourself.
Earth for All is worth a read, and worth your time. There is far more in it than I touch on here, but I’m highlighting the big ideas in there that could turbocharge humanity into making real progress in digging us out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.
Setting aside 3% of global incomes to tackle our environmental problems today, so that they won’t be much more expensive tomorrow, fairer taxation systems that show us that we truly are in this together, and a universal basic dividend that allows us to all own the commons would be a great start, providing us the first few rungs on the ladder we need to get out of the hole we have dug ourselves.
So, let’s get to that.
Wouldn't it be revolutionary if it were to come to pass! What is remarkable is that this is all written, in beautiful detail, in so many places, but none of it implemented, EVER.
Despite my rusted on pessimism about the world, I am grateful you keep drawing our attention the fact there is a clear path to follow. The thinking has been done. We just have to start the journey. We can tweak it as we go.
Would a universal basic dividend tied to resource extraction actually incentivise the public even more to support business as usual vs degrowth?
You would maybe have to have a system where the dividend increased over time, and was multiplied by a factor representing the actual sustainability of extracting resources.
So if an industry was a big polluter they paid ever increasing dividends then multiplied further. Whilst regenerative activities had their pay outs cut right down maybe even to 0 if fully 100% sustainable. Extra money in the pot past a set dividend per citizen amount could be dedicated to grants for nature restoration and the transformation of industry to less impact or lower scale. (Eg Pay for sunk costs of oil rigs)
The high costs to polluters would be represented in higher prices of their product, and disincentivise purchase vs regenerative options. The cap on universal citizen dividend would prevent a positive connection between extraction and income, and discourage consumerism. Whilst a set layed out increase of the dividend over time (beyond inflation that the cap is in line with) but which probably eventually levels out, would provide the resources to finance broader global redistribution as well- which could also be set as an automatic part of the system.
You pollute, you pay, people don’t benefit MORE from pollution, that money goes to regeneration, sunk costs to prevent the pollution regardless and increasingly larger proportions end up being transferred from wealthy to poor.
I don’t think this would ever get implemented as a globally agreed system - but if poorer countries (or blocks of) that would immediately benefit adopted their own versions of the model which prevented resource extraction at their own detriment, and wealthy countries did so based on pressure from their citizens and each other and a need to deal with the sunk costs of former governments, it might be possible to have many interlocking models that worked for each country, making places more or less desirable to live and do business.
I’m sure I’ve not just come up with this... and I’m sure I’m missing a lot of the picture. But something like it would make political economics actually interesting to citizens and revolutionary to status quo.
🤞🏼🏄🏼♀️🌏