Audio Transcript: In conversation with Professor Tim Jackson - Part 2

In conversation with Professor Tim Jackson - Part 2

Welcome to the second podcast in our series of conversations with Professor Tim Jackson on revisiting consumption for a climate friendly future. Today, we're going to focus on the changes needed to support a shift to more sustainable consumption. Tim, welcome back. It's great to have you here for a second podcast conversation. As part of the connect with climate change series, a partnership between ScottishPower, and universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. We discussed what consumption would look like could look like in a sustainable society. So having envisaged this, and we see that from a wellbeing perspective, this is a future where for many of us, we've arrived, where the emphasis on growth has been replaced with a focus on prosperity for people and planet, and on delivering good lives for citizens. I see for many of us, and I do want to turn to the issue of equality, which you highlighted in our later conversation. But for now, I'd like to consider how we get there to think about the kind of key actors the necessary actions, so Tim, to reflect on what and who needs to change to take us to the sustainable future?

Yes, I think again, I always I like to proceed carefully along these routes, you know, it's common, and there was quite a lot of this during the pandemic of sort of people coming up with wish lists of policies in so the universal basic income, for example, was quite a favourite amongst lots of people. Let's implement the universal basic income, it has cross party support from lots of different political parties make sense in a, in the context of a pandemic, particularly when you have to protect livelihoods. Maybe we transition the furlough scheme into a universal basic income, and that will sort of solve everybody's problems for us. Now, you know, I think the universal basic income is an important tool in a toolbox, I'm not sure that it exhausts everything that we need to do. And likewise, people used to say, well, if carbon is the problem, carbon has a shadow price. If we internalise that shadow price in the economics of the market through a carbon tax, then we can let the market optimise everything else. And I have the same reaction to that idea.

A carbon tax is a crucial tool within a toolbox, but it's not ultimately where you kind of start, particularly when you're looking at institutional structures that are driving us into dysfunctional situations. So those tools actually tend to be very difficult to apply in a situation where you're driven by, you know, for example, the primacy of the market, the sensuality of competition, as a as a key element in human behaviour, and the sense that nothing that you can't measure with money matters. So, I do think that, you know, when we're thinking about how to move in the right direction, it's really important to understand what those driving principles, those visions of ourselves have been within capitalism and understand where they're limited. And I think, you know, that relationship to competition is one of those key features, I talk about it in post growth quite a lot, particularly when I talk and it's one of the chapters, which talks about the work of, of Lynn Margulis, who was an evolutionary biologist who really challenged the roots of that competent, competitive metaphor, and it is a metaphor for human behaviour by showing just how important cooperation and collaboration had been within our evolutionary background.

And, you know, it was an extraordinary challenge. She was a woman, out of her time, she was a woman, talking against the mainstream view, she was a woman, talking mostly to men, and articulating, you know, a thoroughly different underlying principle from the one that we had accepted as the cornerstone of not, just how economies work, but what human beings are. And what she was saying was not, you know, look, competition doesn't exist or it doesn't matter, but that it isn't everything, that we can't organise everything around the assumption that we're just simply competitive, rational, self-maximising utility calculators, as sits inside most of our views of economics.

We have to think of ourselves actually as having evolved to prioritise collaboration and competition to be collaborators, as well as competitors to be people who whose care extends beyond the self towards others, towards our community and towards our environment. And then you know, recognising that this is a critical part of the human experience, and one that was responsible for our success as a species, then it's about building the institutions that protect that part of our human psyche, the build, the institutions, which are collaborative, which are cooperative, which see enterprise itself as the foundation for cooperation, which build the structures that financially support cooperative enterprises, which build the legal structures that talk about fiduciary duty, not as a competitive duty to a minority of shareholders, but actually something which is in the benefit of the best interests of society over the long term.

So, what I'm describing rather than a simple silver bullet, a one size fits all fix to our problems. And there are lots of lots of those kinds of policy measures. What I'm describing is a process for thinking through the fundamental things that have to change thinking about how that means we must transform bits of our market, how it means we must transform our wage policies, how it means we must transform our environmental protections, how it means we must transform our financial regulation, and all of these things, just from that simple, simple example. It's a very fundamental example. But it's relatively simple of how we prioritised competition and neglected collaboration. That gives us the roadmap if you like the way forward to build these different institutional structures, it tells us if we follow that guide, where policies should change and how they should change.

I really like this idea of collaboration and cooperation as a way to think about the different, you know, activities and the logics across the multiple stakeholders, if you like that influence our consumption landscape, you know, as a multi actor space with various responsibilities, power balances, and thinking how these different groups intersect. I wondered if I could just turn your focus on to the consumer and terminal and much earlier book material concerns you said we must place on the consumer at least some of the responsibility for making the economy sustainable. And there's been quite a bit of discussion around response symbolising consumers. And just to focus on for a moment other rule us consumers, could you talk a bit about what these responsibilities are, and perhaps how far they extend?

I really love it when people remember that I wrote material concerns, it was quite a long time ago, and I was feeling my way through these issues. I think that at that point in time focusing loose on enterprise and how entrepreneurs had to change. But remembering that ultimately, it is, you know, consumption and consumers and citizens who provide the demand that productions supplies. And so, you know, I think the concern around responsibilities in consumers making them overly responsible is correct, because consumers don't necessarily have the power to change production systems, they don't necessarily have the economic power to change financial markets, they don't even really have masses of political power to change political systems. And yet, a part of the principles of democracy is that individuals in society can express desires, which are political, which are economic, which are social, in character, and therefore it is correct to think of consumers and indeed, to think of citizens as being agents of change, not agents with limited power by any means, but agents with both responsibilities and rights to act in society towards the betterment of society.

And so, know, there are places where, for example, that can be quite influential. And I'm, you know, I'll just give you one example of a place which I hope is going to be influential, which is a recent campaign actually, to make people more aware of whether pension funds are invested and to give them access to the information that they would need to demand better pension funds and better pensions in the sense that those pensions are investing in the right way in society, and not investing in the things that harm society. So, this is a campaign actually led by Richard Curtis, who's a, as many people will know, is a film writer of some success, who's kind of turned his attention to a campaign called make my money matter. And it's a campaign that takes that principle very seriously, it takes seriously the idea that, that people do have places in society where they can, and should be able to make choices about the kind of society that we live in. And one of those places it turns out to be a really important place is where our money is invested, like you probably I, for a long time, had a pension, I still have the pension there, but I but I have slightly more access to what it's doing.

But I had a pension locked inside a university pension scheme, that gave me no transparency there whatsoever gave me no way of changing where that pension was invested. So that that ultimately could, you know, was probably for many years being invested in exactly the things around fossil fuel energy systems that I had spent my professional life trying to fight. That idea that our pensions or fundamentals, financial security can be invested in something that's undermining our own values. That's the place I think, where we have to rethink the ability of citizens and the ability of consumers to change that. And we have to give them not just responsibilities in relation to that, but rights in relation to that access to the choices that will make their money matter in ways that matter to them.

And I couldn't agree more, you know, it's important that we both shift consumer desire but also create an infrastructure for more sustainable choices. Because we know that as consumers citizens, we're not necessarily sovereign, we don't necessarily have those choices. If we're operating within a structural environment that constrains a more sustainable behaviours, we touched on Previously on COVID and naturally, in the book, post growth life after capitalism, you talk about the coronavirus pandemic. And so obviously, still very essential in our minds. And out of the tragedy of COVID. Were glimpses, perhaps not of actual dolphins and Venus as your highlight in the book, but of a return to nature and a reconsideration of what's truly important to us. And in the book, you highlight key people and moments in history. And you know, the example that I really liked that comes to mind is Robert Kennedy's campaign speech and in 1968. And, you know, you invite us in the book to learn from the past. And I wonder, do you think COVID, and the increased urgency around a climate crisis presents us rather, with an opportunity for change that's different from those opportunities in the past?

Yes, I do. I think if we dare to take it, this is a profound moment in time. And I think what we saw in the pandemic was very clear illustration of how much could be done differently, and more and it happened, more or less overnight, you know, more or less overnight. Governments had to support people's livelihoods, build hospitals, protect their incomes. Overnight, they had to reconsider reconfigure, supply chains, and get goods that we had not even thought about as being important, available in very short space of time. And overnight to find the financial resources to do that, that was a huge lesson, teaching us how much we could do differently, how much could be done differently in society a really important lesson. But the other aspect, though, of those stories that you mentioned in the book is that it can sometimes be too much of a pressure to think we have to change everything. Now it can be sometimes, you know, too much of a pressure to say this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. If we miss it, we're completely stuffed.

Actually, part of the book was rejecting that idea by pointing across time to these actually quite wonderful people and wonderful moments in time at which people had dared to think differently and almost saying, there is a resource here. There's a huge resource here that is not about our temporal moment in time, our opportunity now it's absolutely relevant to that opportunity. But neither is it going to go away that richness of thought those different ways of approaching what social progress means and, and who we are as human beings is an enormous resource that extends backwards through time, over centuries, sometimes millennia. And the stories of these people, which I hope, are themselves a resource for people who read post growth, those stories are a profound inspiration for us. Not just to seize this moment and this opportunity, but to build on it, whatever comes out of it, in the next few months, build on it into the next decades.

Thinking about time pressure, and that's very much something that we feel is on our minds right now. We're moving towards COP26 in Glasgow this year, are there kind of key questions that we need to ask ourselves in terms of moving forward?

I mean, I think in relation to COP, there are there are huge questions, you know, to me that the big question that COP, I hope will address, you know, sensibly is the whole issue around financial structures and financial institutions and getting a financial structure that's consistent with a net zero emission pathway that will allow us to remain within 1.5. And you know, that as a, as a kind of outcome from COP would I think, be a fantastic thing to have achieved, because it is those financial structures and the fact that they've been pointing in such perverse directions that has made it so difficult to confront our climate obligations, and shifting that, you know, even things like the make my money matter campaign in ways that would, would allow citizens to become involved and would allow companies to invest in the right way that would give financial institutions and banks the right tools and the right incentives to be shifting investments, out of fossil fuels and into a net zero future. All of that I think, is critical to the architecture of the success of COP26, and I would really like to see that taken forward at COP

Time, it's been a pleasure talking to you today. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you in our third and final podcast in this series.