Ecological economic growth is something new under the sun. It’s key to stopping and reversing climate change and building an ecological civilization. We have the tools to respond effectively to climate change, humanity’s greatest challenge, while building a sustainable, prosperous and just ecological civilization that will long endure. Business and politics as usual is failing to effectively respond to the gathering cluster catastrophe. On the left, popular sentiment is that capitalism is the irredeemable problem.But as the history of the USSR and cohorts made clear, it’s far from reassuring to believe that the absence of private ownership, private property and capital markets will produce ecological and social justice.

It’s a fantasy to proclaim, step one, snap fingers abolish corporate capitalism, and in ten to twenty years somehow radically transform the global economy while eliminating anthropogenic carbon emissions. This is likely a recipe for failure. A short term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions driven by an unplanned expression of “degrowth”.

Instead we will explore how we can take steps immediately toward building a prosperous and sustainable ecological civilization and do this cost effectively and profitably based on clear new ecological market rules and new ecological investment tools. This means a market system reshaped by ecological needs, by law , by democracy.

On the one hand,our lives are shaped and endangered by business as usual, a global industrial system ruled by market and political power acting as if blind to the ecological externalities of pollution and the social externalities of injustice. If this is our only choice we are doomed to face the worst ravages of climate change.

On the other hand, politically, ecologically and socially we have the ability to make social, political and choices to pursue sustainability based on ecological market rules,law and regulations as the basis for an ecologically stable and just global market and political system. An ecological civilization cannot be based on the well being of a tiny group of billionaires pursuing fever dreams of becoming trillionaires. Our richest man provides a good example of Lord Acton’s understanding, at the height of the British empire in 1887, that the same moral standard must be applied to all and that, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Absent the occasional fortuitous and rare presence of a philosopher king,the welter of ever contentious events are best resolved by discussion and democratic choices. Decision making is shaped by the pursuit of freedom and community and guided by the concept of subsidiarity which means final decisions made closest to where they have an effect, for example by local as opposed to national decisions . For example, in the Town of Warner NH with 2,939 people, the choice of responses to mitigation of climate driven floods threatening farm land and road system is up to the Town. The Warner model may be a useful example, but what's useful in Warner may have scant relevance to the Gila River tribal community of 14,260 in Arizona. Nationally and internationally there may be broad mandates but details are in the hands of the locals.

In a broad sense, the embrace of freedom and community and the practice of subsidiarity is rooted in the U.S. in a Jeffersonian ideal of independence, democracy, self-management, community and local cooperation combined with Tom Paine’s understanding of the need to take measures to justly remedy inequality as arising from inequality and unfairness from birth.

This means a deep awareness of the pursuit of both freedom and community as interdependent and essential dynamics to guide an ecological future. Without freedom, community becomes autocracy. Without community, freedom becomes license.

In ecological terms, the deficiencies of freedom and community lead us on the path toward ecological destruction and the violation of fundamental ecological norms. In social terms, violations of freedom and community is the basis for injustice, for an ever deepening concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the rich and worsening ecological pillage.

Given the gravity of the rapidly worsening ecological catastrophe at hand it should not be all that difficult to create markets and a structure of law that says you cannot piss in your well, or destroy the global climate system through carbon dioxide pollution. But clearly self-evident truths have not yet been sufficient to move the global system to effective action.

Now is the time that we must seize the moment and reshape our futures, locally and globally, because the consequences of inaction are the path to economic, political and social failure, collapsing nation states, resource wars for food and water, epidemics, crop failures, mass migration of the desperate, the great dying.

If global free markets and capitalism shall have a future it must be through the pursuit and practice of ecological economic growth. This is a future where a global economy can become many times larger and where ecological damage becomes many times smaller as polluting business as usual becomes ecologically restorative business as usual.

For starters, we must undertake the prompt global replacement of fossil fuels by renewables, the global trade in information of all kinds in a renewably powered web, a zero pollution and zero waste industrial ecology, a restorative agriculture, forestry and aquaculture that sequesters enormous amounts of carbon from ocean and air in soil and biomass. Together, these efforts will sever the connection between economic growth and worsening pollution and ecological pillage, and instead make economic growth mean ecological improvement.

Ecological economic growth arises from the necessary reform of a global market system through new market rules, laws, regulations, through democratic and social interventions to strengthen both freedom and community and the global ecological and social commons. It is a system designed to make economic growth mean ecological improvement and the restoration of the natural world in the context of social and ecological justice. Its goals are the pursuit of sustainability, building global markets that strive for zero pollution and zero waste, and, at the same time, result in enormous increases in sustainable economic activity. A paradigmatic example of sustainability in motion is replacing the global fossil fuel imperium with efficient renewables within the context of social and ecological justice and a global convergence on sustainable norms.

Building an ecological civilization is informed and guided by taking into account two philosophical category errors. First, economic growth measured by GDP, the increase in dollars, conflates ecological damage with any economic surplus. The next (n+1) dollar of economic growth, in reality, can have catastrophic ecological consequences or almost none at all.

Second, the continuation of pollution and ecological pillage as usual is conflated most often simply with profit driven destructive technological choices, and not, at bottom, with the value placed on the health and well being of the living world. Ecological consequences are physical and real. Economic and monetary consequences are shaped by market rules and customs and systems of valuation reflected in accounting. If we value and monetize the increasing health of the ecosphere this will support dramatically different consequences than if we do not.

Perhaps the most notorious and ecologically self-destructive practice of current accounting systems is the use of the annual discount rate to reduce the future value of ecological sustainability to tiny numbers 100 years in the future and render investments in sustainability financially useless. In fact, the health of the ecosphere is the basis for both human life and all economic activity. A global market system that is not rooted in this reality is following the path toward self-destruction and mass extinction that we are still pursuing.

In practice, an ecological civilization means, first, economic growth leads