For at least a generation, climate scientists have been warning that we, the human race, will face increasingly severe consequences as long as rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions continue to heat the planet. By 2023, these consequences are before us everywhere, in all regions of the globe. As of July 2023—i.e. only midway through the year—a report from Global Citizen conveys this reality starkly.Footnote1 Some highlights of the report include the following:
“Deadly Flooding Wipes Out Entire Neighborhoods in Libya”.
“Hundreds of Millions Across the U.S, Europe and Asia Hit by Severe Heat”.
“Evacuations Ordered after Monsoon Flooding in India”.
“Catastrophic Flooding Swamps Vermont”.
“Tropical Storm Mawar Hits Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and Taiwan”.
“Wildfires Blaze through Canada”.
“Cyclone Macho Devastates Myanmar”.
“Cyclone Freddy Ravages Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe”.
“A Heatwave Sweeps Over Asia”.
In October 2023, a New York Times article titled “Climate Change is Forcing Families into a New Kind of Indefinite Hell,” reported that:
The August wildfire that roared through the town of Lahaiana in Hawaii burned so hot that some of the dead were effectively cremated, their bones combusting into unidentifiable ash. Other bodies may have been lost in the Pacific Ocean, into which many of those fleeing the inferno were forced to plunge….Climate change has supercharged the kind of deadly weather that creates disappearances.Footnote2
Working within these overarching imperatives of transforming the global energy and agricultural systems, we can also identify a set of more specific political economy questions that need to be answered for advancing a viable global climate stabilization project. The list of such questions is long. They include, among many others, the following:
How exactly should the global energy and agricultural systems be transformed?
What policy tools are most effective for accomplishing these transformations?
What will be the broader economic impacts of these transformations, with respect, for example, employment creation, poverty reduction, and broadly-shared economic well-being?
How should we finance the massive level of investments that will be required to accomplish these transformations?
What should be the standard of fairness for establishing how to raise sufficient levels of climate stabilization financing?
How should we manage the phase out of fossil fuels and corporate industrial agriculture?
What happens to the workers and communities whose livelihoods are currently dependent on these fossil fuel industries?
How can economic sectors whose production methods are, at present, heavily dependent on fossil fuel inputs, such as the steel and cement industry, most effectively transition into alternative production methods?
How can economies that face other major economic challenges maintain an ongoing focus on the climate stabilization project while concurrently addressing these other challenges?
This special issue of the Japanese Political Economy, “The Political Economy of Climate Change,” offers answers to many of these major questions. Of course, the 7 papers in this special issue can cover only a limited amount of territory. It is also true that there can never be only one answer to these, or, for that matter, any other question taken up by political economists. This is because all political economy researchers—including the authors of these 7 papers—examine the specific questions that they pursue using a combination of tools and analytic perspectives that will vary from author to author.
The result in this special JPE issue is a series of papers that, collectively, provide valuable analytic insights and empirical findings concerning the most fundamental environmental, social, and economic question of our time. This question is: how can we advance a global climate stabilization project that is (1) actually is capable of stabilizing the climate and (2) doing so in ways that also support broadly-shared well-being, especially for working people and the poor throughout the globe.
Robert Pollin’s paper, “The Political Economy of Saving the Planet” explores features of a Global Green New Deal program, focusing on three central matters related to the operations of the global energy system. These are: phasing out global fossil fuel consumption by 2050; investments in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy sources, averaging about 2.5 percent of global GDP per year, including both public and private investments; and just transition support for workers and communities that are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry global energy system. Within these broad topics, Pollin also examines prospects for large-scale job creation through clean energy investments; how to provide cheap and accessible financing to support these investments; and how to ensure global fairness as a core feature of the global Green New Deal.
In “The Political Economy of the Environment in an Era of Climate Crisis: Shigeto Tsuru Revisited,” Toshikazu Yamakawa builds from the methodology of Shigeto Tsuru, who was a pioneer in the political economy of the environment in Japan. Yamakawa explains how Tsuru’s framework is distinctive through focusing on (1) the distinction and unification of the real-physical and value-institutional aspects of environmental questions and (2) the socialization of flows. Yamakawa further describes how Tsuru’s framework was extended by Kenichi Miyamoto to develop what he termed ‘environmental damage’ theory. Based on these approaches, Yamakawa then examines Japan’s current decarbonization policies. In particular, Yamakawa analyzes the inadequacy of carbon pricing policies in Japan as well as, more broadly, what he describes as Japan’s “carbon captive structure of political economy.”
In “Turkey: Challenges and Strategies toward De-Carbonization and Sustainable Development under the Age of Finance,” A. Erinç Yeldan describes the key challenges and structural constraints as well as potential strategies toward decarbonization and green transformation in Turkey. Yeldan documents how the current mode of global finance serves as a barrier to Turkey mounting an effective green industrial policy. He considers this problem against the backdrop of Turkey’s speculative-led growth patterns—i.e. the dominance of “financialization”—as well as the economy’s ongoing fossil fuel-based production cycle. Given the logical of financialization in Turkey, Yeldan highlights the major obstacles Turkey will inevitably face in mounting a viable set of green abatement policies.
In “Greenhouse Gas Suppliers 100: A Ranking of Corporate Producers of Greenhouse Gas Precursors in the USA,” Michael Ash, James Boyce and Richard Puchalsky presents the first comprehensive database of corporate suppliers of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas supply stocks into the U.S. economy. By aggregating publicly available data on individual facilities that produce greenhouse gases to the corporate owners of these individual facilities, Ash, Boyce and Puchalsky establish the corporate concentration of greenhouse gas activity. Among their key results, they find that only 10 U.S. corporations are responsible for supplying fully 42 percent of all the fossil fuels that generate greenhouse gas emissions when these fuels are combusted. Further, focusing on coal companies alone, they find that the 10 largest sources of emissions are responsible for 66 percent of all emissions from coal. With petroleum corporations, the largest 10 sources of emissions are responsible for 73 percent of all emissions from oil and gas. In short, very small numbers of corporations are responsible for the fossil fuel supplies that produce most of the emissions generated within the U.S. economy.
Nozom Kawabata’s study “Evaluating the Technology Path of Japanese Steelmakers” examines the technological pathway adopted by Japanese steelmakers in the competition to developing green steel production methods. Kawabata analyzes documents from a range of sources to show that Japanese steelmakers that rely on conventional high-emissions generating blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace technologies have been slow to transition to low and or zero-emissions technologies. These alternative technologies include the electric arc furnace method and the direct hydrogen reduction process. At the same time, Kawabata shows how the Paris Agreement and the Japanese government’s carbon neutral declaration are creating effective pressure on the Japanese steelmakers to reassess their resistance to adopting these low- to zero-emissions technologies. However, the transition by Japanese corporations to green steelmaking technologies may be inducing these firms to relocate their operations to offshore locations where production costs using low-emissions methods will be lower.
In “Living System as the Core of Material Circulation between Nature and Humans,” Makoto Maruyama examines the work of the political economist Yoshiro Tamanoi on how living systems can operate on a sustainable basis. Maruyama shows that Tamanoi builds from the later writings of Karl Marx to develop the concept of a ‘living system.’ According to Maruyama and Tamanoi, a living system is one which can absorb heat and matter in states of low entropy and then dispose of heat and matter in states of high entropy. Maruyama emphasizes that the late work by Marx on non-Western communities, such as the Russian Mir, can provide insights on how to establish ecologically sustainable communities that are able to sustain this metabolic balance over time.
In “The Z-factor of the Climate Crisis,” Rohit Azad and Shouvik Chakraborty develop a framework through which countries are assigned relative responsibility for financing the transition to a zero-emissions global economy. Their solution is for the countries of the global North to finance the green transition in the global South based on the historical level of emissions generated in each respective country in the North and South. The extent of each country’s financing responsibility is measured through what they term a “Z-factor.” According to their approach, countries in the global North that have produced relatively high levels of emissions historically (i.e. high “Z-factors”) will pay for both their own emission reduction projects as well as well as those of countries in the South whose historic Z-factors are low. Azad and Chakraborty propose the creation of an International Carbon Fund to determine the extent of each country’s relative responsibility for financing the project of achieving zero emissions on a global scale according to their Z-factor framework.
Overall, again, the 7 papers in this special JPE issue provide a range of political economy insights and evidence that can become useful tools in advancing a viable and fair climate stabilization project—in other words, in supporting the global struggle on behalf of nothing less than sustaining life on earth as we know it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).