In recent years, a divide has opened up on the Left over climate change and degrowth. In the “degrowth” camp, economic growth is seen as incompatible with a sustainable future on a planet with finite resources. Against this perspective, an increasing number of activists and intellectuals have united under the banner of “eco-modernism,” arguing that growth — powered by state-led economic planning — is indispensable to achieving a socially just transition. First, growth, whether economic growth or population growth, is not the cause of climate change or other environmental challenges. We have had many other environmental challenges in the past that we have overcome, or largely overcome — such as the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, lead pollution, and a great deal of air and water pollution in the West — and the solution to all of these did not come from halting growth, but instead from new technologies and economic planning in the form of regulation and technology policy. As recently as the 1980s, the ozone layer challenge was perhaps an even greater existential threat than climate change, for it threatened the very ability of macroscopic life o n land to exist. We didn’t solve that problem by halting growth in fridges and air conditioning units as well as other machines using the chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, that contributed to ozone depletion), but by regulating a transition away from the use of CFCs. Today, there are far more fridges etc. than ever before. Socialists want their public hospitals to be able to run 24/7 (and indeed many of their factories and other services essential to social well-being). We don’t want to wait for the sun to shine or the wind to blow for the ventilators and dialysis machines to be turned on. Indeed, the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions entered the atmosphere not since the Industrial Revolution, but since the 1950s, what geosphere-biosphere scientists call “The Great Acceleration.” This is coincident with the advent of the welfare state and the legalization and institutionalization of trade unions across much of the West. Socialism can in principle act much faster than markets.                                                                     The reason for this is fourfold.,,,,,,,First, any market actor that produces a commodity that is profitable but harmful to ecosystem services (such as coal, oil, or gas) has an incentive to continue production. This in turn spurs attempts by such companies to try and capture democratic decision-making — lobbying, bribes, corruption, and, as seen with Volkswagen, outright criminal activity. Meanwhile, a publicly owned entity, so long as it is properly insulated from market activity, can in principle just carry out what the electorate demands. Secondly there may be a range of goods or services that are not profitable, but are beneficial to maintenance and optimization of ecosystem services, and market actors have no incentive to produce them. This relates to the third problem: we may have straightforward technological solutions to decarbonize many sectors already (e.g. nuclear power and renewables for electricity), but there are a lot of sectors that are socially beneficial yet really hard to decarbonize, for example, there is cement. Finally, while some environmental problems are restricted to one or a few sectors — and thus the technology-switching doesn’t involve much coordination across different sectors (e.g. eliminating lead pollution primarily affected transport but few other sectors) — in the case of climate change, fossil fuels are the foundation of almost every sector, with a great many intertwined dependencies. This is called a “coordination problem,” and markets are very bad at solving them.......read more        https://jacobin.com/2023/01/against-degrowth-eco-modernism-socialist-planning-green-economy?utm_campaign=Carbon%20Brief%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20230109&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20Daily