Response to Bob Pollin

What a difference an election makes. At the end of our initial contribution we noted that progressive politics were changing, and with them the politics of climate change and growth. Writing in July of 2018, this turned out to be truer than we could have imagined. Just after the election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom we referred to in our final paragraph, joined forces with the Sunrise Movement to shift the debate on climate. Suddenly the conversation is about combining bold action on climate with a jobs guarantee, health insurance, and possibly even a Universal Basic Income. This “Green New Deal,” a far more radical and far-reaching agenda than earlier Green New Deals have been, has captured the imagination of many. It has become virtually mandatory for Democratic presidential hopefuls to sign. Furthermore, the need for urgency, which we stressed in our piece, is at the core of this approach. What you will not see in any of their messaging is growth-centricity. As we have argued, progressive politics are changing. The focus is increasingly on basic human needs, jobs, and income, not the behavior of a flawed and problematic economic indicator. There’s a lot of agreement between us and Robert Pollin. Areas of concurrence include the shift to non-carbon energy sources, increases in efficiency, a carbon tax, and just transition policies. These aspects of the problem are standard and widely accepted as necessary. There’s also agreement that poor countries cannot be asked to bear the burden of emissions reductions any more than is absolutely necessary. There are small points we would argue about if we had more space (such as the size of rebound effects, the idea of energy demand saturation, or how difficult a 10 percent GDP reduction would be over 20 years, at 0.5 percent a year, when population is stabilizing). But the big issue is whether in the Global North, achieving the demanding emissions reductions that are required is compatible with high levels of economic growth. Since we wrote our piece, not only have the politics of climate changed, the data have gotten worse. Anthropogenic carbon emissions in 2018 were up sharply, registering a 2.7 percent increase globally, in large part due to economic growth. Yet Pollin claims that “Economies can still continue to grow—and even grow rapidly, as in China and India—while still advancing a viable climate stabilization project as long as the growth process is decoupled from fossil fuel consumption.” Is that decoupling forthcoming? We discussed our own and others’ findings on decoupling in our piece, so we won’t repeat that evidence here except to say that the modest evidence of relative decoupling in the Global North is likely due in considerable part to the shift of energy intensive 831106 RRPXXX10.1177/0486613419831106Review of Radical Political EconomicsSchor and Jorgenson research-article2019