'Habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible' - report

Proposals call for heavy wealth taxes on billionaires, shorter working hours, major dietary shifts, and a reallocation of investment away from industry and mining towards education and health

'There’s a huge cultural, intellectual, political battle that is going on. And we all have a role to play.' File picture

Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality, and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival.

The report by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) aims to be the most comprehensive attempt yet to navigate the polycrisis that is pushing the world towards climate breakdown, political extremism, and ever greater economic and social tension.

It offers a set of bold policy proposals, including hefty wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change in diets, and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors, such as industry and mining, to education and health.

If these and other measures are taken, the report says, the incomes of 89% of the world’s population would double by 2100 and global heating would be kept below 2C above the preindustrial average.

The authors say their vision provides a positive alternative to the grim projections from far-right techno extractivists, nationalists, and billionaires who claim the future will inevitably bring more fossil fuels, climate disruption, and inequality.

“There’s a huge cultural, intellectual, political battle that is going on. And we all have a role to play,” said Thomas Piketty, a co-director of the WIL and a professor at the Paris School of Economics.

“The ideology which we see with [Donald] Trump and all the little Trumps that we have all across Europe and all across the world is simply not going to deliver. At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of co-operative redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the climate, but also on social grounds.

The Global Justice Report, published on Thursday, tries to overcome the shortcomings of mainstream approaches to the polycrisis, including the overly materialistic emphasis of traditional leftist parties, the questionable efficacy of the economic degrowth proposed by many ecologists and the lack of social impact studies by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report aims to rectify those limitations by incorporating inequality studies, climate science, and proposals for creating a political coalition capable of reforming the world’s financial architecture.

This “plan for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries” is the product of 45 authors based on databases compiled by more than 200 researchers from around the world.

At its core is the concept of sufficiency — the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions that degrade the natural world on which all life depends.

To achieve this, the authors envisage three steps:

• More than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week;
• Encouraging people to eat less red meat, which is the main driver of deforestation and ecological destruction;
• Refocusing the economy towards low-consumption activities by more than doubling education spending to €8,400 (£7,250) a person and healthcare spending to €14,400.

“A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible,” states the report. “What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.” 

The report will be unveiled and discussed at the World Inequality Conference on June 4-6 in Paris.

Guardian

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