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Last September Secretary-General António Guterres said, He went on to claim that winning requires bold collective shifts in how people live on the planet. The climate crisis has always had human economics at its heart. It was not just the growing population of humans, but their industrial output in a capitalist economy that caused the exponential growth the Club of Rome’s 1972 report warned of. With and faster than ever that report is looking more and more prescient. Do we need to abandon capitalism to win the race?

Limits to Growth versus Models of Doom

I first heard this question as a college student only a few years after the Club of Rome hired a team of MIT researchers to probe the edges of the economics of population growth and industrial output. My professor at the University of California-San Diego, , had co-authored the first paper to use the term “” the year before I was born. His action on this issue inspired a whole generation of climate change activists and leaders, including most .

In his 1979 class on Science, Technology and Public Affairs, Professor Revelle had us read not only the Club of Rome arguments about the planetary limits but also the critique: . What I remember about the lively debates in that class is the sharp divide over whether we needed to scale back on human consumption or could rely on innovations like shifting to renewable energy to square the circle of capitalism and the human-driven acceleration of natural resource depletion. In short, the pro-limits side called for turning away from capitalism and their Models of Doom critics argued for meeting the climate challenges within the capitalist system. That friction lives on today in the debate between “green growth” and “degrowth”.

Green growth versus degrowth

Advocates for green growth embrace capitalism as we have come to know it. The term was coined in 2005 at the . It joins discussions of sustainable development by the and the first to answer the challenges issued in the : finding solutions to environmental concerns that take account of politics, social structures, and human inclinations. The aims to promote more sustainable growth through internalizing environmental costs; improving ecological efficiency in production and consumption; and encouraging the development of markets for green products, services, and technologies. The objective is to “decouple” growth from environmental impact.

This in response to the 2008 financial crisis and it has stuck. International organizations (from the to the and the ), governments (from the Republic of Korea to the EU to China), and tanks have adopted and institutionalized its logic with indicators and formulas for measuring progress, including dividing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by Domestic Material Consumption (DMC). Green growth is central to the , established in 2015.

Growth skeptics, though, argue that green growth will not address the earth’s ecological crisis. claim that supposed progress toward decoupling does not account for actual conditions. For instance, evidence of declining DMC/GDP in advanced economies does not account for material inputs that come from other places and thus undercounts the actual material. Despite indicators suggesting progress, . To make headway against climate change, these analysts argue, we must question the system of capitalist growth.

This important debate is drawing more and more attention – over 2,000 people signed up to watch green growth advocate Sam Fankhauser and degrowth proponent Jason Hickel in the fall of 2022 with thousands more watching the YouTube video. Neither binary position, however, offers a truly viable and desirable way forward—something Fankhauser and Hickel even admit in their exchange.

Pragmatic alternatives

Despite, or even because of, this debate, there is growing momentum for pragmatic ideas that offer alternatives to the green growth versus no growth binary. These ideas hold promise for a new model of capitalism that enables both planetary sustainability and human well-being.

center on how problems, or pushback from the world, can spur change. First theorized by American philosophers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pragmatism means more than simply practical. It sees the human world not as pre-determined but rather as “.” Crises can disrupt what people see as normal and make them aware of their interdependence. This can help mobilize around a new purpose. 1927 book.

Pushback from the world can make people “think”. Thinking for pragmatists is more than simply consulting principles or preferences. It is weighing all our varied inputs to do what we think is right. Thinking depends on openness to inputs and the capacity to rearrange our perceptions to create something new. . It is thus open to perspectives. And it is by its nature . Indeed, it embraces uncertainty as necessary for creativity.

Some of the pragmatism has emerged quietly. American journalist, climate change thinker, and �鶹������ý National Fellow that the impact of the legislation passed by Congress late last year will be much more positive because it doesn’t meet the same headwinds it would have a few years back. While some argue that the $369 billion in climate and energy spending called for in the new law is much too small, Wallace-Wells contends that it doesn’t need to be as large as he would have thought even in 2019 when he wrote his hair raising book, . “.” The combination of green growth economics, increasing environmental awareness, and government action like the Inflation Reduction Act have made it likely that . As Wallace-Wells reminds us, though not yet enough, this is still important progress.

The political and cultural shifts Wallace-Wells notes are not only focused on what we have to sacrifice to address climate change. New ideas are gaining traction that open windows to a different understanding of human potential with implications for a more holistic, people and nature-centered, model of capitalism. argues that if people faced natural constraints rather than trying to conquer them. What if people opted for more leisure time and rather than focusing exclusively on material?

Pragmatic “thinking” and Human-Centered Capitalism?

These ideas intersect with those of human-centered economists like as well as . They open the way for recentering what Amitav Ghosh, in his acclaimed book, , calls “vitalist” modes of thought that revere the meaning and agency of the natural world rather than looking at it only as something to exploit. It isn’t necessary to choose between seeing the climate crisis as challenging the good life as the Limits to Growth argument did or leaving it alone as the green growth model does. We could instead see the climate crisis as an opportunity to make lives better. According to economist , it is an opportunity to transform our society in a way that is also fairer and socially sustainable. Could a capitalist economy be built on human thriving rather than growth? Could human and ecological thriving be compatible?

We don’t have to use our imaginations to answer these questions. Many have researched capitalism’s of forms, and their intersection with . In the wake of the financial crisis, economists such as have unveiled neoliberalism as resting on myths around the “true” capitalist spirit. In fact, she argues, capitalism has manifested many different spirits in different times and places. If capitalism has changed before, it can change again.

Mazzucato’s advice focuses on attention to mission and building a —one that is inclusive, sustainable and driven to address concrete problems. Her focus on mission is relevant not only to climate change but also to the other global problems it interacts with, like the pandemic. Others have written similarly about how global crises could be a spur to change. Margaret Levi, for instance, wrote that that she hoped could shift the normative prescriptions upon which the political economy works. Susan Sell also saw and opening pathways to change.

We can witness pragmatic “thinking” in the experiments that Mazzucato and others have informed. In a , explains that in Mazzucato’s efforts with the British government to address healthy aging, participants struggled with the definition of “healthiness.” Initially, they considered the scenario of an Alzheimer's patient who is completely independent in the home and assisted by cutting-edge technologies. But the mission leader questioned that goal. “Why obsess about independence? How about nurturing co-dependency instead?" Similarly, on the future of mobility, advisor and musician Brian Eno questioned the assumption that getting from A to B quicker was the goal. “How about going slower and appreciating life?”

Pragmatic thinking about the climate crisis Instead, it encourages attention to the interconnection of issues (and crises) to prompt open reflection about what the problem really is. This approach thus opens the potential for to how humans might thrive with more attention to the various elements of human life.

Pragmatic economic thinking has connected with progressive politicians in the US and elsewhere and its ideas informed initiatives like the . There is also evidence that technocrats within governments, like central bankers, have taken a where they acknowledge that they shape and make markets. And capitalists themselves have taken note. From the Business Roundtable’s 2019 redefinition of the to ’ increasing focus on social justice and the climate crisis.

None of these moves suggest the wholesale rejection of capitalism that some degrowth advocates have called for. But the shifts promise something more than just green growth. They portend, at the very least, a different capitalism. Whether these shifts develop in a way that addresses climate and related problems will depend on whether and how they alter the , including financialization and the ever-growing role of digital space. We cannot know whether these changes will meet the climate challenge but we should not dismiss the possibility that their can carve out space for a more human and ecologically attentive political economy, whatever we choose to call it.