Mark Paul challenges the economic and environmental injustices of neoliberalism in a climate crisis

Mark Paul is an assistant professor and a member of the Climate Institute at Rutgers University. His research looks at the causes and effects of inequality, and tries to work through some of the material remedies for inequality in the context of neoliberal capitalism. He’s written a great deal on the climate crisis, focusing on economic pathways to crash decarbonization that also take into account the need for economic and environmental justice. His first book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights was published in May of this year. This is now a moment when the existential threat of climate change is felt really intensely across the world. The remaining carbon budget for a 50% likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5, 1.7, and 2C has dwindled in the years since the first COP in 1995. Assuming that our 2023 emission levels continue at their current record-setting rate – and the Global Carbon Project has said that total CO2 emissions in 2023 reached a disturbing 40.9 gigatons – we will burn through the budget for keeping global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. In 15 years, the carbon budget for 1.7C will be gone too. In planetary terms, that’s a split second. We need crash decarbonization now because, as Paul has pointed out, “climate change is not a problem for future generations—it is a clear and present danger.” So much time has been intentionally wasted, and due to that deadly strategy of delay, Paul says that “we have four times the work to do to decarbonize the planet and dwindling time to do it in.” A lot of the work, within a capitalist economy, is going to take the form of fighting for the appropriate level of investment. It makes all kinds of economic sense to phase-out fossil fuels, and yet because the system has incubated and grown in the toxic stuff, we’re stuck in it. Mark argues that if we wait just one decade more to really make the disruptive changes that are needed to decarbonize the fossil economy, we “will drive up the costs associated with decarbonization by 40-70%, which amounts to well over $3 trillion in additional costs.” One of the questions I had to ask him, though, was why is this still such a hard sell? It often feels Sisyphean to try to communicate projected losses in a system that demands and yet resists change. How to frame it in a resonant sort of way? How do we dislodge the presentist attachment to the status quo? There are some answers in this interview, and obviously some real questions remaining. Some of it centres on the question of growth, which Mark seems to feel is often the wrong question. Shrinking the economy, he suggests, needs to be taken seriously from the perspective of its social costs. I’m sympathetic to that because there is the political problem of ensuring that a mass mobilization for climate action doesn’t leave people behind. So, for that reason, we also spend time talking about the divisive ways that putting a price on carbon has been tried, and some of the ways it could be done progressively. He says that “a simple carbon tax is, as a form of a consumption tax,” very regressive. It is going to unfairly hit low-income people harder when it should be a luxury tax that targets the wealthy specifically. On this, I would quote Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity, where she writes that the world must be shared, and with the non-human parts of this world maybe especially. She says that the world, in fact, “offers finite freedom, adequate abundance, modest meaning, and limited happiness. Partial, finite, adequate, modest, limited—and yet worth working on, with, and for.”