 We still have time to stop the most catastrophic outcomes. It's not too late. Although growth has been the bedrock of economic policy for more than a century in many countries, there is another way forward. We need to grow free time rather than output. And the key to doing that is to use productivity growth to reduce hours of work. Reductions in working hours are a key mechanism for controlling GDP and energy demand. To see why, let's start looking at trends in working hours in a selected group of countries. I've chosen a small number of wealthy countries, plus China and India. First, you may have already noticed that some of the most successful emissions reducers, Germany and France, are also the biggest hours reducers. By contrast, China and India, where emissions are growing rapidly, are increasing their average hours of work. There's more and more evidence that average hours of work and emissions move together. I did a study of this question a little over a decade ago for wealthy countries and found that a 1% decline in average annual working hours led to a half a percent decline in emissions. My former student and collaborator Jared Fitzgerald and his co-authors found that for every 1% decline in hours, energy consumption in wealthy nations was reduced by about four tenths of a percent. This relationship is even larger across U.S. states. Fitzgerald, Andrew Jorgensen and I found that a 1% decline in weekly hours results in emissions reductions ranging as high as two-thirds of a percent, depending on the model we estimated. So what accounts for these findings? There are two factors at work. The first is what I've called the scale effect, and it's the linchpin for using hours reductions to reduce emissions. By scale effect, we mean the size or scale of the economy. Consider that for any given labor force with a given technology, the number of hours workers are producing affects the size of the economy. If a worker can produce X number of widgets in an hour, then raising or lowering their hours will affect the number of widgets produced. Now think about that economy-wide. More hours equals more production. Fewer hours equals less production. So if a country reduces its working hours, there will typically be an impact on its production level. Since production, that is GDP, is tied to emissions, emissions will typically fall too. Now there are some caveats here. People can work harder and fewer hours and make up the difference, eliminating the scale effect. But that's limited. There's only so much more intensively people can work. If a country is on a long-term trajectory of reducing hours, it's likely it'll also be producing at less than its maximum. Now the second impact is called the composition effect, and it takes place at the level of the individual household. When people have long hours of work and by extension not much free time, they shift their purchasing and activity decisions. As it happens, they often shift in the direction of more carbon intensiveness. For a time-stress household, getting somewhere in the fastest way is often important. The slowest way to get places, walking, banking, often public transit, are low carbon, while the faster ways, car and plane, are high carbon. The absolutely speediest supersonic planes when they were in use or private jets are super polluting. There's a link between time-poverty and carbon-intensiveness that's also at play. Time-stressed households spend more on convenience, say by buying prepared food, while time affluent houses may even be able to garden. There's a carbon difference there. Now let's get back to those countries which are reducing hours over time. Even if productivity growth isn't positive every year, almost all countries generally experience increases in productivity over the medium to long run. Now the interesting thing about productivity growth from a climate point of view is that it can be used for two things. It can certainly be used to produce more output, and as we know, when that happens, it creates more emissions. But what if, instead of working the same number of hours and producing more, countries opt to take that productivity growth and use it to reduce hours of work? Output stays the same, but it's produced in less time. As you can see, that's what most countries have done since the 1970s. They haven't used all their productivity growth to reduce hours. They're also producing a lot more, but they have used some of it. Germany, France, the Netherlands, and also Italy and Austria are the countries who have done this to the greatest extent. They've taken between a quarter and a third of their productivity growth to reduce average hours of work. Not all countries have done this. The U.S. has taken just seven and a half percent of its productivity growth the shorter hours, and Sweden hasn't taken any at all. India and China are going in the other direction, and their carbon footprints have soared over this period. While there's still a lot more to learn about the linkages between carbon emissions and hours of work, a growing body of evidence suggests that instead of continually expanding the size of their economies, wealthy nations should think about getting rich on another dimension. Time. One reason is that once they reach a certain standard of living, additions to income start to do less to improve well-being than they once did. Partly that's because increasingly income growth is concentrated among the very wealthy, for whom more money doesn't affect well-being nearly as much as it does for lower-income households. But it's also because as anyone gets richer, each additional dollar is typically worth less to them. By contrast, shorter hours of work remain capable of yielding big improvements in well-being. Polling in the US over many years shows the continuing popularity of giving people more time off work. This has been especially true since the pandemic, when people all around the world have found the stresses of this crisis leave them craving more time to decompress and experience life outside of work. So here's the basic plan for wealthy countries. Get busy with a crash program to transition off fossil fuels, starting with a ban on all new extraction projects, massive support for clean renewables, and a build-out of all the necessary infrastructure. That's a tall order, but one that's possible, and one that some countries, even states within the US, have already begun moving towards. That'll include energy use and transportation, agriculture and food are important too. We need climate-friendly food production and a shift away from carbon-intensive diets rooted in meat and dairy. At the same time, start powering down in the sense of controlling demand for energy, not via recession but through a gradually decreasing number of hours worked. This will turbocharge the energy transition in the sense of adding oomph to emissions reduction. It will mean that technological progress in decarbonizing no longer gets eroded by increased production, which is something that has happened in past decades. Progressive reductions in working hours are like a strong tailwind pushing us along the pathway of emissions decline. Now while we need to jettison the growth imperative, there is an imperative that we do need, the equality imperative. For decades, climate policy and the climate conversation mainly paid attention to one kind of inequality between present and future generations. Now that's an essential difference, but there are others which are also essential. We're not going to get a robust climate response unless key cleavages of unfairness are addressed. These include inequity across the globe, across race, income, gender, immigration status and indigeneity. One way to see why this is the case is to remind ourselves that we are in a climate crisis because of inequalities of power and resources. They are not merely an unintended consequence of the climate situation. Why do I say this? A fundamental inequality is that between humans and other species. Climate destabilization is being foisted upon other species who have little ability to prevent their own destruction. What about among humans? The inequality between the carbon legacy nations, the Western European imperial powers plus the US and Canada, is central to the development of the climate crisis. These countries embarked on imperial expansion, conquering and devastating populations in Mesoamerica, Africa and Asia, enslaving tens of millions of Africans and undermining livelihoods and well-being around the world. As fossil fuel use expanded, it became important in the expansion and perpetuation of this imperial oppression. A key feature in the aftermath of formal imperial rule was the continued wealth and global influence of the former imperial powers and the weakness of former colonies around the world. This imbalance, which persists to this day, has allowed the greenhouse effect to morph into the climate emergency. Why is that? The countries which will be most severely affected are those who historically did least to cause climate change. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, much of Asia, Central America. They're also not fossil fuel powerhouses themselves, with a few exceptions. Inequality of influence and wealth lies at the heart of the crisis. Global South countries are poor, lack the resources to protect themselves against climate destabilization, and will be worst hit. Indeed, I venture to suggest that if the countries of the global north were in line to suffer the level of devastating effects being seen and predicted for the global south, we would have already had a vigorous program of decarbonization. Now there's also inequality within countries where a similar dynamic is at work. It has been starkly in evidence in the United States in recent decades, with Hurricane Katrina as the prime example of how inequality is at the core of the climate dilemma. This hurricane, an unprecedented disaster which hit in 2005 in New Orleans, disproportionately harmed the low-income black population of the city's ninth ward. According to one estimate, the majority of deaths were among blacks who lacked the resources to leave the city. This is a disempowered and poor group, characteristics which are similar to many communities that are on the front lines of climate impacts. Again, if it were wealthy households who were unable to protect themselves from the impacts of climate change, it's likely the government would be doing more. What's the equation for this? Disproportionate impact plus disproportionate powerlessness equals climate inaction. The key here is that this is the reverse of the Pogo analysis, which I discussed earlier. Rather than everyone with an equal stake, we are living in a world in which the wealthier pollute and the less wealthy bear the burden, in which pollution is caused disproportionately by whites and its impacts borne disproportionately by black and brown populations. That inequality lies at the heart of why we are experiencing climate destabilization. Research I've done with colleagues has looked at this inequity. We measure inequality as the concentration of income and wealth among the top 10%. After controlling for their income levels, fossil fuel production, population, and a few other variables, we find that in countries where top 10 concentration is higher, emissions are higher. We've also found this relationship across U.S. states. My colleagues have also found that in places that are more unequal, other dimensions of air pollution, such as particulate matter 2.5, have more negative impacts on life expectancy and that economic inequality exacerbates racial inequality and pollution impacts. In order to seriously address climate change, we're going to have to put equity at the core. Decades of climate policy that have led to nothing or very little have failed on this score. We've had proposals for green new deals, Marshall plans for climate, and war mobilizations. When we went into World War II, knowing said, can we afford it? Well, we're fighting a war which is at the heart of our existence. These plans were all largely technological in nature, focusing on energy transition. A few years ago, that began to change and climate action in many parts of the world has been powered by a turn to equity. The equity imperative exists at every level, from cities and towns to states and regions to countries and the global community. That means national programs such as the new green new deals as well as a global green new deal. In my country, the U.S., our fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 means not only do we have to mitigate here at home, but we've got to mitigate in global South countries as well. The good news on that front as we run out of low-cost mitigation opportunities such as the shift from fossil fuels to wind and solar is that we can still find them in poorer countries who are less far along in that transition. But does limited energy use mean poor quality of life? The conventional thrust of economics suggests yes in the sense that it emphasizes the trade-off. And it certainly suggests that for poor countries, energy intensive growth is necessary to reduce poverty and improve quality of life. But sociologists and others have been asking this question since the 1970s and have come up with a different answer. Apparently, it's possible to have a high quality of life without a lot of fossil fuel energy. One measure of this is what my colleague Andrew Jorgensen has called the carbon intensity of well-being. How much do countries have to pollute in order to get a good quality of life? As it turns out, not too much. Most of this literature uses life expectancy as a good proxy for quality of life. It's correlated with self-reported well-being as well as other measures. To keep it simple, we'll use it too. If we compare countries across the world in terms of how much carbon they emit and how long their populations live, we see a wide range. Some places, such as the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates, have high values on both life expectancy and emissions. Others, such as Nigeria, are low on both. But now look at the countries in the top left-hand corner of the graph. They're the ones with high life expectancy and low carbon emissions. This area has been termed Goldenberg's Corner, named for the Brazilian physicist José Goldenberg, who raised the issue of the relationship between well-being or development and energy use years ago. There are a few things to notice about the countries in this corner. They don't represent just one kind of place or location that can achieve high life expectancy with little carbon use. Another piece of good news is that the amount of carbon necessary to achieve high life expectancy has been falling. In 1975, it took on average 7 tons of carbon to achieve a life expectancy of 75 years. 30 years later, it was only about 2 tons. It's technically possible to achieve high well-being without fossil fuels. That was true even before the big cost reductions in wind and solar. And of course, it's even truer now. So maybe the lifestyle of Jordan or Sri Lanka isn't all that appealing to wealthy residents of North America, Europe or Japan. But how about this comparison? Spain has five years higher life expectancy than the United States, half as much per capita GDP, and only a third the carbon emitted. Physicist and ecological economist Julius Steinberger has pioneered recent analysis of how to live well within biophysical limits. She and her colleagues have dived into the factors that are operating in Goldenberg's corner and also in other parts of the graph. They use a number of additional well-being measures including access to food, safe water and sanitation, education and a minimum income. They find that the quality of public services and electricity access are keys to human well-being, but so too are overall economic equality and the extent of democracy. Conversely, they also find, while there's a certain minimum amount of energy needed for well-being, high levels of fossil fuel extraction and GDP growth beyond moderate levels of affluence are detrimental to a country's well-being score. That's the story of extractivism and excessive growth. Finding that higher levels of GDP are not conducive to well-being may be surprising, especially giving the strong emphasis our world has put on growth. But when growth becomes highly unequal, it doesn't benefit most people. And these days, the wealthy now capture so much of total GDP. According to the World Inequality Database, the top 5% garner 46% of global GDP. We could reduce emissions almost by half without affecting the consumption of 95% of the world's population. It's an open secret in the economics profession what a poor proxy GDP has become for well-being. But this fact hasn't penetrated to the mainstream climate conversation, which is still focusing on so-called green growth on the assumption that we should and can solve climate with minimal changes to capitalism in its national and global variants. Economists contributed mightily to this reining assumption. First, by pushing an agenda that said we should delay emissions mitigation because it's costly and not worth doing now. And later, by focusing almost exclusively on a single market-based approach, tax and carbon. In the process, they rejected much of what we need to do to address climate destabilization successfully. And indeed, efficiently, a mandated shift to wind, solar and other clean renewables, democratic control of investment flows, a just transition and centering equity. It's time to reject business as usual, even with a green hue, and to start building a new economy that puts the well-being and indeed the survival of people and other species at its core. In the United States, the pandemic has succeeded in enriching billionaires to a historically unprecedented extent. U.S. billionaires had a wealth surge of 1.8 trillion during the pandemic, their collective fortune skyrocketing by 62%. Elon Musk alone gained 150 billion. Meanwhile, millions around the world suffered losses of jobs, income, housing, health and life. These inequalities are racialized and globalized, a system which works to enrich a few at the top while the majority pays the price is dysfunctional and inhumane. This failure is becoming ever more evident. A global survey in 2020 found that 56% of respondents around the world now feel that capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good. This feeling is shared across age, gender and income groups. If, as I've argued, inequality is a key driver of climate disruption, then disrupting inequality is obviously at the core of how we should respond. Standard economic approaches such as taxation and spending are essential. So too is restructuring labor markets to give workers more power via unions and labor laws. The wealthy, nations and households need to grab less and live more responsibly. Taking so much is no longer viable. At the beginning of the pandemic, many countries rightly adopted we're in this altogether ethic of shared responsibility. We need that to successfully approach the climate and biodiversity crisis. And it's true we are all in this together. Groups which have been historically exploited, such as the descendants of enslaved persons and populations in colonial countries deserve reparations. Rich countries need to pay up on climate finance, not just what they promised at Paris in 2015, 100 billion a year, but more to mitigate and adapt in poor countries. Within countries, we need people to pollute only their fair share, not the multiples of carbon which the wealthy are currently responsible for. But there's more than just the distribution of income and wealth that we need to address. One key lesson is that we can't just rely on private actors and markets. The enormous externalities associated with global climate disruption mean the state has to be at the center of response with regulation, financing, infrastructure provisioning, and support for a just transition. Economics, especially over the last 40 years, has had a bias against state action and that's part of why we're in the mess we're in. But we've also got to address control of the state, which means addressing the distribution of power. The political economy approach links economic and political power and shows how concentrations of wealth allow elites to control state policy. The core of climate inaction is attributable to that control. Both within countries and globally, a small group has been able to prevent humanity from effectively responding to this crisis. If we really are going to reach net zero in a few decades, it will take democracy, people power to do it. That message comes out loud and clear in the work of another Economics Nobel Prize winner. Earlier, I talked about the shortcomings of the climate modeling of William Nordhaus, who won the prize for that research. A far more useful body of work is from Eleanor Ostrom, the first woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ostrom, who is trained as a political scientist, she was rejected from Economics PhD programs, in fact, studied the conditions under which humans have been able to sustainably manage common resources like forests and water systems, in some cases, over hundreds of years. Her work is a direct challenge to the dominant view, not just in economics, but in western social sciences, more generally, that this is too hard to do. But Ostrom found that where societies are not unreasonably inequitable and where everyone has a voice, sustainable management can be robust and enduring. The cases she studied around the world were all characterized by more or less small D democracy. The people who rely on the resources are empowered to make decisions about them. If we take that principle and apply it to planetary commons, to atmosphere, biodiversity, oceans, it suggests that with a rising tide of authoritarianism around the world, fighting for democracy has become a matter of tremendous urgency. Authoritarian leaders around the world are preventing action on climate change. In my country, we've got to get the government back from the fossil fuel interests and the anti-democratic billionaires like Charles Koch. As the last few years of youth climate strikes and climate and ecological activism around the world have shown, it will take a large and vigorous social movement to spur our governments to act. We have no time to lose.