In 1972, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Club of Rome developed a scientific model under the title The Limits to Growth that considered the way that humans and the planet interact with each other, the researchers determined that society was heading toward collapse by the mid-21st century, driven largely by over-exploiting limited planetary resources. 

A study published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in November 2020 and is available on the KPMG website concludes that the current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040.

As part of her masters’ thesis at Harvard University, Gaya Herrington, Sustainability and Dynamic System Analysis Lead at KPMG, decided to undertake the research as a personal project to understand how well the model stood the test of time.   Herrington analyzed the model using ten variables to check in on how predictive it has been: population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint. By taking the model’s projections of these indicators and up-dating and comparing them to empirical data, she was able to determine how closely the scientists were able to predict our reality, as well as figure out what trajectory we are currently on.

 It produced two possible scenarios. 

There’s the comprehensive technology (CT) scenario, in which economic decline starts at about now with a number of negative outcomes, including a short-term dip in food production and wild swings across a number of categories, including industrial output, as population levels out. The good news, is that society doesn’t collapse under these circumstances. Our habit of draining resources comes to an end as new technology develops, and food production eventually recovers.

Things aren’t so optimistic with the second possibility known as the business-as-usual scenario. This one assumes that we make basically no changes to our current behaviour. This scenario projects that economic growth will start sputtering out soon, hitting a wall around 2030. But instead of a brief blip or stagnation, the business-as-usual trajectory sees things starting to collapse.

Population, food production, industrial output, and other categories all take a steep decline around 2040, with pollution skyrocketing as we rapidly exploit and burn the planet’s remaining available resources with complete disregard for the consequences. The world is hurtling toward economic disaster and societal collapse.

 At the World Economic Forum in 2020 delivered in her capacity as a KPMG director, Herrington argued for ‘agrowth’—an agnostic approach to growth which focuses on other economic goals and priorities.  

“Changing our societal priorities hardly needs to be a capitulation to grim necessity,” she said. “Human activity can be regenerative and our productive capacities can be transformed. In fact, we are seeing examples of that happening right now. Expanding those efforts now creates a world full of opportunity that is also sustainable.” 

There is according to Herrington a third option, the ‘stabilized world’ scenario, a new stable and prosperous civilization operating safely within planetary boundaries, a deliberate change brought about by society turning toward another goal than growth. Socialists would call this the steady-state zero-growth proposal.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled about $41.52 trillion in the first quarter.

 Yet the bottom 50% of Americans only controlled about $2.62 trillion collectively, which is roughly 16 times less than those in the top 1%. 

Overall, the net worth of households and nonprofits rose to $136.9 trillion during the first quarter, a 3.8% increase from the end of 2020. But those gains weren’t distributed equally.

Net worth is essentially a calculation of all of a person’s assets — including cash in checking and savings accounts, financial investments and the value of any real estate or vehicles owned — minus all their debt, including credit card balances, student loans and mortgages.

The recent gains in household wealth, in particular, can be largely attributed to stock holdings, which were up about $3.2 trillion, according to the Fed. The rise in home values also played a role, with real estate holdings increasing by $1 trillion.

The wealthiest 10% of Americans, for example, own about 89% of stocks and mutual funds held in the U.S. as of the first quarter of 2021. The bottom 50% of U.S. households hold around 0.5%.

The divide between the wealthiest Americans and the bottom half of U.S. households has widened over the last few decades. In the first quarter of 1990, the top 1% had roughly six times the wealth as the bottom half of Americans. 

How much wealth top 1% of Americans have (cnbc.com)

  In Africa, and with Latin America and Asia facing unrelenting health emergencies, the number of health worker deaths from Covid-19 in May was at least 115,000, according to the World Health Organization.  The true figure is likely to be far higher.

In richer countries, the share of foreign-trained or foreign-born doctors and nurses has been rising for two decades. But the pandemic’s double blows of death and migration are leaving behind knowledge gaps in already fragile health systems, where poor pay and conditions are driving staff to leave. The global south has long supplied many of the human resources for health systems in the northern hemisphere. And as the UK, the US and Europe have struggled under the weight of their respective pandemics, demand for imported medical expertise has intensified.

Across the world’s wealthiest countries, nearly 25% of doctors and 16% of nurses were born abroad, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  Nations from where staff were being enticed “were already facing severe shortages of skilled health workers before the Covid-19 pandemic”.

The UK launched its own incentive – a fast-track Health and Care Visa in 2020 to attract more health workers from developing countries – even as the government drastically reduced its foreign aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income, against OECD advice and putting global health systems at risk.

Johan Fagan, an ear, nose and throat disease specialist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said policies such as the UK’s fast-track visa would spur further migration.

“These countries aren’t training enough of their own healthcare professionals and are exploiting the workforce in developing countries,”

The Philippines is the largest contributor of nurses to wealthy countries. India provides the highest number of doctors and the second-highest number of migrant nurses.

The Filipino Nurses Association UK has raised concerns about the disproportionately high rate of deaths among NHS and social care staff from the Philippines, saying that the nationality had the highest mortality of all ethnicities, at about 20%. The group set up a special helpline for Filipino health workers and their families as a result. In the US, more than 30% of nurses who have died of Covid were Filipino, though they make up just 4% of the country’s registered nurses. 

In Zimbabwe, a country with one of the highest doctor emigration rates, Dr Charles Moyo said Africa would face a healthcare crisis if the tide of health worker losses was not stemmed.

“The healthcare system is already strained by limited resources and by Covid. If more manpower is lost, the entire healthcare system could collapse,” he said.

Migration and Covid deaths depriving poorest nations of health workers | Global development | The Guardian

Each new day brings another panacea for our environmental emergency. Whether it is some proposed plan from political leaders or recommendations from the scientific community or the radical demands from the grass-root ecology activists, those of us in the Socialist Party despair at the assumption that the crises can be fixed without addressing the core problem – the economic system of capitalism.

The latest reform initiative is the formation of the Global Alliance for a Green New Deal is inviting “progressive” politicians from legislatures in all countries to work together on policies that would deliver a just transition to a green economy.

Governments may well introduce laws and implement policies to curb the assault on the environment. At best they can act only as palliatives, bringing temporary respite. Legislation and regulation most certainly cannot turn capitalism into an environmentally friendly society. The reality is that capitalism is incapable of solving one single social problem facing humanity, never mind curing climate change. We are more than capable of running our world on renewable energy, of feeding a world population twice the present size and housing every person on the planet, providing them with health care and education. To leave caring for the environment to governments or to hope that Big Business will see sense and turn to sustainable production methods is to misunderstand what the capitalist mode of production is all about. If we are to consciously harmonise our interaction with the rest of nature the only way which this can be done is through the common ownership of the means of production, by and in the interests of all people and the world they live in. A non-exploitative and non-hierarchical society based on the common ownership of natural and industrial resources enabling us to realise our full human potential is a description of socialism as we understand it.

 There is no shortage of renewable energy resources on this planet. There is more energy available than mankind could possibly use. Total ecological and energy benignity is of course an impossible dream, but in socialism full discussion on all aspects will democratically take place before decisions on such matters as fuel and power, which have such all-pervading implications, are taken. With the competitive drive for profits removed, there will no longer be any incentive to produce untried products whose long-term or even short-term effects are toxic. Make no mistake, in the socialist alternative locked labs, secret research will be as impossible as money or markets. Socialism will be a society in which decisions will not be made by an owning minority or a state, nor will decisions be subject to the anarchic fluctuations of the market. Instead decisions on. for example, energy production, will be made by the whole of the community concerned. With the means of production the common heritage of all the people of the world, the scientific knowledge and technological skill which society now possesses can be used for the one purpose of satisfying human needs in accordance with the long-standing socialist principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. 

An important advantage that socialism would enjoy would be the freedom to select and use production methods strictly on their merits. It would not matter that a desirable method might use more labour than an undesirable one. The selection and use of production methods will be free to take into account a broad range of needs, including the enjoyment of work itself, care of the environment, conservation of materials, social safety and animal welfare. Capitalist society accentuates the demand for minerals in a manner that a sane society would think ludicrous. If there were fears of world shortages of minerals it would be doubly criminal to use them in the production of articles to kill, to restrict the freedom of, and to assist the exploitation of man by man.  

The profit-led economic considerations of capitalism will be a thing of the past.  In a socialist society, the world will function as one productive unit, it may not be necessary actually to construct a worldwide grid. With the probability of people living in smaller communities with modern energy-efficient communications reducing transport requirements, we may well see these communities self-sufficient in energy, although some provision for emergencies will be required. The environmentally benign, renewable methods are in many ways better suited to smaller-scale operations, as shown to a certain extent by the instances where they are making headway at present. 

Royal Dutch Shell published its annual environmental report in April and boasted that it was investing heavily in renewable energy.

The same day, Shell issued a separate report revealing that its single largest donation to political lobby groups last year was made to the American Petroleum Institute, one of the US’s most powerful trade organizations, which drives the oil industry’s relationship with Congress.

 Shell said it is committed to installing hundreds of thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles around the world to help offset the harm caused by burning fossil fuels. Contrary to Shell’s public statements in support of electric vehicles, API’s chief executive, Mike Sommers, has pledged to resist a raft of Joe Biden’s environmental measures, including proposals to fund new charging points in the US. He claims a “rushed transition” to electric vehicles is part of “government action to limit Americans’ transportation choice”.

Shell donated more than $10m to API last year alone. Most other oil conglomerates are also major funders, including ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, although they have not made their contributions public. Shell and other major oil firms are using API as cover for the industry. While companies run publicity campaigns claiming to take the climate emergency seriously, the trade group works behind the scenes in Congress to stall or weaken environmental legislation.

An Exxon lobbyist in Washington was secretly recorded by Greenpeace describing API as the industry’s “whipping boy” to direct public and political criticism away from individual companies.

How a powerful US lobby group helps big oil to block climate action | Oil | The Guardian

 Little more than seventy years after the British settled Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) in 1803, the indigenous community had been virtually wiped out. Yet this genocide at the hands of the British is virtually forgotten today.

 ‘The Last Man’ is the first book specifically to explore the role of the British government and wider British society in this genocide. It positions the destruction as a consequence of British policy and ideology in the region. Tom Lawson, Professor of History at Northumbria University shows how Britain practised cultural destruction and then came to terms with and evaded its genocidal imperial past. 

Although the introduction of European diseases undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the indigenous population, Lawson shows that the British government supported what was effectively the ethnic cleansing of Tasmania – particularly in the period of martial law in 1828-1832. By 1835 the vast majority of the surviving indigenous community had been deported to Flinders Island, where the British government took a keen interest in the attempt to transform them into Christians and Englishmen in a campaign of cultural genocide.

Lawson also illustrates the ways in which the destruction of indigenous Tasmanians was reflected in British culture – both at the time and since – and how it came to play a key part in forging particular versions of British imperial identity. Laments for the lost Tasmanians were a common theme in literary and museum culture, and the mistaken assumption that Tasmanians were doomed to complete extinction was an important part of the emerging science of human origins.

 By exploring the memory of destruction, ‘The Last Man’ provides the first comprehensive picture of the British role in the destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population.

The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania: Tom Lawson: I.B. Tauris (bloomsbury.com)

 There are currently 341,419 homes across England, Scotland and Wales that have been vacant for at least six months. 

The vast majority of vacant properties can be found in England, with 268,385.

Scotland and Wales have 47,333 and 25,701 long-term vacancies respectively. Scotland counts the highest proportion of vacant homes with 19 long-term vacant properties per 1,000 houses.

The majority of vacant houses in Britain have been empty for at least a year with the City of London having the highest proportion of empty houses in England – 42.4 in every 1,000 empty for at least six months. 

As many as 42,021 houses have sat vacant for two to four years in England, 13,785 houses for five to nine years and 7,580 properties for more than 10 years. 

Over third of a million homes are long term empty… (estateagenttoday.co.uk)

 Few have ever claimed that this capitalist system is fair and the vaccine gap between the global rich and poor is a prime example of its inherent inequality. The coronavirus pandemic has created nine new billionaires, six are linked to the successful mRNA vaccines.

It’s like a famine in which “the richest guys grab the baker,” said Strive Masiyiwa, the African Union’s envoy for vaccine acquisition. 

“This was a deliberate global architecture of unfairness,” Masiyiwa told a Milkin Institute conference. “We have no access to vaccines either as donations or available for us to purchase. Am I surprised? No, because this is where we were with the HIV pandemic. Eight years after therapeutics were available in the West, we did not receive them and we lost 10 million people.”

Inequity is everywhere. Haiti received its first delivery July 15 after months of promises — 500,000 doses for a population over 11 million. 

Canada has procured more than 10 doses for every resident yet Sierra Leone’s vaccination rate was just 1% on June 20.

Christian Happi, a professor at Nigeria’s Redeemer’s University and a member of CEPI’s scientific advisory committee, explained, global health experts soon came to realize that rich countries “could sign a piece of paper saying they believe in equity, but as soon as the chips are down, they will do whatever they want.” 

 European and American officials deeply involved in bankrolling and distributing the vaccines against coronavirus have told  Associated Press there was no thought of how to handle the situation globally. Instead, they jostled for their own domestic use.

There was a global purchase plan to provide vaccines for poorer countries, but it was so flawed and underfunded that it couldn’t compete in the cutthroat competition to buy. Intellectual property rights vied with global public health for priority. Rich countries expanded vaccinations to younger and younger people, ignored the repeated pleas of health officials to donate their doses instead and debated booster shots – – even as poor countries couldn’t vaccinate the most susceptible.

 Wealthy nations expected a return on their investment in the development of the vaccine.

On April 30, 2020, AstraZeneca took sole responsibility for the global production and distribution of the Oxford vaccine and pledged to sell it for “a few dollars a dose.” Over the next few weeks, the U.S. and Britain secured agreements totalling 400 million doses from AstraZeneca. They were home to the pharmaceutical companies with the most promising vaccine candidates, the world’s most advanced production facilities, and the money to fund both,

On May 15, 2020, Trump announced Operation Warp Speed. The idea of including clauses to ensure that vaccines would go to anyone besides Americans wasn’t even considered.  The U.S. repeatedly invoked the Defense Production Act — 18 times under the Trump Administration and at least once under Biden. The moves barred exports of crucial raw materials as factories were ramping up production of the as-yet-unapproved vaccines — and eventually, of the vaccines themselves. It meant those materials would run low in much of the rest of the world. 

COVAX had the backing of the World Health Organization, CEPI, vaccines alliance Gavi and the powerful Gates Foundation. What it did not have was cash, and without cash it could secure no contracts.

 “Operation Warp Speed signed the first public deals and that started a chain reaction,” said Gian Gandhi, UNICEF’s COVAX coordinator for supply. “It was a like a rush on the banks, but to buy up the expected supply.”

Many global health authorities hadn’t fully grasped the extent of pandemic nationalism and found it unimaginable that the country would block vaccines when the world was counting on them.  The World Health Organization created a technology-sharing platform to expand vaccine production. It foundered as not a single company agreed to share its blueprints, even for a fee — and no government pushed them to. The U.S. and other countries could have pushed companies harder to share their knowledge, if only for the duration of the pandemic.

The one organization that could have pushed for more technology sharing was the Gates Foundation, whose money to WHO nearly matches that of the U.S. government. Instead, Bill Gates defended stringent intellectual property rights as the best way to speed innovation. His foundation poured money and influence into the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, which also failed. Initially resistant, the Gates Foundation has changed its position in favor of sharing.

Dr. Clemence Auer, the EU’s lead negotiator for vaccine contracts last summer, said the question of compelling pharmaceutical companies to suspend their vaccine intellectual property rights to increase the worldwide supply of coronavirus vaccines never even came up. 

“We had a mandate to buy vaccines, not to talk about intellectual property, ” Auer said.“The global community should have had this discussion back in 2020 but that didn’t happen,” he said. “Maybe we should have done it last year, but now it’s too late. It is spilled milk.”

“…The governments that had resources went and bought the supplies,” CEPI chief executive Dr. Richard Hatchett told the AP. “COVAX was not in a position to do that.” Months later, when COVAX finally had the money to sign deals for global supplies, they were at the end of the line. The lack of capital available to vaccine makers to boost their capacity outside the small number of existing manufacturing hubs was also “a lost opportunity,” Hatchett said. “We approached the international financing institutions, including the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation about making those investments and they were not willing to do that,” he said. CEPI ended up investing about $1.5 billion, far less than what a major financial institution might have been able to commit.

COVAX finally delivered vaccines on Feb. 24, to Ghana, a load of 600,000 AstraZeneca doses manufactured by the Serum Institute of India and transported by UNICEF planes. By that date, 27% of the population in Britain had been vaccinated, 13% in the U.S., 5% in Europe — and 0.23% in Africa.

Winnie Byanyima, head of UNAIDS says the world has learned little in the decades since the AIDS pandemic was brought under control in the United States, only to kill millions in Africa because treatments were unaffordable: 

“Medicines should be a global public good, not just like a luxury handbag you buy on the market.”

A  push to lift intellectual property restrictions on vaccines and medicines has gone nowhere in the World Trade Organization.

Dr. Ingrid Katz, an infectious disease researcher at the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the key question is whether vaccines and essential medications are a commodity or a right.

“If it’s going to be a commodity, we’re going to keep walking down this road every time we have something like this,” she said. 

And if it is all going to rely on the generosity of rich countries, a lot of people are going to die. Four million have died already.

“It speaks volumes about where we are as a globe when you have the source of decision-making sitting with very few people who have a lot of wealth and are essentially making life and death decisions for the rest of the globe,” Dr Katz said. 

Vaccine inequity: Inside the cutthroat race to secure doses (apnews.com)

 UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council that the world  “hurricane of humanitarian crises” and cited Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria as examples of the “bloody surge in humanitarian crises”, compounded by a “relentless wave of attacks” on humanitarian and medical workers, and the imposition of ever-narrower constraints on humanitarian space, 

Civilians in conflict zones are paying the highest price, Antonio Guterres explained. Around the world, he said, security incidents affecting humanitarian organizations including shootings, assaults, sexual violence, kidnappings and raids “have increased tenfold since 2001.”

The secretary-general said in Yemen 20 million people are in dire need of humanitarian aid, and five million “are face-to-face with famine.”

He depicted a grim picture of civilian executions, arbitrary arrests, detentions, forced displacement and sexual violence against children, on a massive scale, in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

The UN chief spoke of “brutal attacks” in Afghanistan and Syria people are living “face-to-face” with hunger. He said there needed to be greater respect for international humanitarian law that does not “blur the lines” between military operations, political objectives and humanitarian efforts.

Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, echoed Guterres’ concern. Humanitarian budgets are under increasing pressure, he said.

There is “a dire lack of protection and assistance for those who need it most” and humanitarian workers are put “in mortal danger, far too many of them traumatized, missing, maimed or killed.”

This year the UN and its partners are seeking to assist 160 million people – its highest number ever.

World Faces A ‘hurricane Of Humanitarian Crises’, Warns UN Chief | Countercurrents

The AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch report examined compensation at S&P 500 companies, revealing that executives were paid 299 times the average worker’s salary in 2020. 

On average, CEOs received $15.5 million in total compensation last year while the average worker in a non-supervisory role earned $43,512.

CEO-to-worker pay ratios increased from 264-to-1 in 2019, while workers’ pay last year marked an increase of only $957 over the past decade.

“Inequality, the imbalance in our economy, is clear by this report that the pay of CEOs and working people continues to be a major problem in this country,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. “The only reason we’re reaching the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic is because working people stepped up,” Shuler said. “Our first responders, county and municipal workers, food and retail—think about the sacrifices—transportation workers, construction, manufacturing, communication workers… We hear so many business leaders calling those workers ‘essential’ and ‘heroes.’ But words are not enough.” She went on to say, “What every worker deserves is family-sustaining wages a free and clear path to stand together with our co-workers in unions.” 

Chad Richison of the online payroll company Paycom was the highest-paid CEO last year, receiving $200 million in salary and stocks. Kevin Clark, CEO of auto parts company Aptiv, took home compensation that represented the greatest gap between an executive and workers; Clark was paid $31 million last year while the average worker at his company made only $5,906, amounting to a 5,294-to-1 pay ratio. Other companies topping the list of highly-paid CEOs and high pay ratios included General Electric, Nike, Hilton, and Chipotle.

The AFL-CIO’s report was released as Americans for Tax Fairness (AFT) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) unveiled an analysis of Forbes wealth data which showed the collective wealth of the United States’ 713 billionaires grew by $1.76 trillion, or nearly 60% since the pandemic began in March 2020. 

Top CEOs Made Nearly 300 Times More Than Average Employee During Pandemic | Common Dreams News