Climate Change and the need for a New Economy

Earthrise NASA

We are living in historic times. We may be facing the end of human history. This is hardly in the way Francis Fukuyama meant it. It is not the success of an economic and political system over another at the end of the Cold War. This moment may be as momentous as the discovery of agriculture, or writing, at the dawn of human history. We need to change how we think about business, wealth and what is progress. There are reasons for this, and they are of our own making.

For the first time in our collective history, our actions are putting the planetary life support systems under great strain. We know this because we have scientific data. We know our intense burning of fossil fuels, starting in the dawn of the Industrial Age, is adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. The solutions to the crisis are not in business as usual. If we are to survive the Anthropocene, we will have to change a lot of how we do things in both business and politics. This includes how we behave regarding in-groups and out-groups. It may include a vast expansion of what we believe to be our kin.

There are many assumptions we live under. These will have to go. First, we need to change how we think of business cycles. We are not talking of the next quarter, or year, or ten years. Humans naturally have issues imagining things beyond a decade, let alone a lifetime. We…