Cornel Ban and Jacob Hasselbalch in Phenomenal World:
Energy transitions the world over are at an impasse. With the Trump administration’s scrapping of the Inflation Reduction Act and the mobilization of the European Far Right against existing climate legislation, the future of an effective market-based environmentalism that delivers real climate mitigation on time has been thrown into profound doubt. As the climate clock ticks, liberal democracies are being driven toward either a defensive and vague green liberalism or an aggressive and illiberal retrenchment of fossil capitalist growth.
Amid worrying climate forecasts, and unresolved political struggle for the future of the advanced economies, it is now more important than ever to envision a feasible course for the green transition. While some economists on the left have begun to invoke ideas such as “democratic economic planning” or “ecosocialist planning” to describe institutions that might achieve this transition, the planning imperative—determining national and international goals on the size and composition of gross output of various economic sectors, and achieving the levels of public and private spending necessary to induce the desired supply responses—does not demand a revolutionary restructuring of national economies as a prerequisite for emissions reductions.1 Rather, as we have argued recently, existing states can plan the coming energy transition despite the power of private capital—multinational corporations, credit rating agencies, sovereign bond investors, and global institutional investors—constraining them. In fact, planning may be the most direct route to states reclaiming power over private capital for public purposes.
Our suggested approach is more indicative in nature. It is responsive and complementary to political institutions, rather than supplantive of them in the way so many twentieth-century programs for the transition to socialism attempted to be. It is a continuation of the longstanding tradition of indicative planning in post-war societies, largely forgotten during the era of neoliberalism.
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