Writing in @ProSyn, @MazzucatoM warns us of a looming wave of "climate lockdowns" - harsh limits on our normal activities triggered by runaway effects of the neglected climate emergency:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/radical-green-overhaul-to-avoid-climate-lockdown-by-mariana-mazzucato-2020-09

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Those of us in the American west have just lived through one of these lockdowns, as the pandemic made it potentially lethal to see others indoors, while the wildfire smoke made it likewise untenable to do anything outdoors as our skies turned postapocalyptic blood-red.

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As Mazzucato writes, the crisis is made up of three entwined strands, each worsening the other:

I. The climate crisis

II. The health crisis

III. The economic crisis

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For example: covid comes from climate change.

Zoonitic plagues come from environmental degradation and habitat destruction, which sends animals into places with no predators, along with their diseases (for which there is no local resistance).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227607/#:~:text=A%20close%20and%20tragic%20antecedent,caused%20more%20than%20750%2C000%20deaths.

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And the botched covid response comes from economic dysfunction, which created our patchwork, underfunded health-care system and the incoherence of our low-paid "essential workers" - as well as our states' preference for bailing out shareholders, rather than workers.

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Add to that, our inadequate labor protections, from the meat-packing-plant outbreaks to LA's blazing covid flareups, caused not by mask-refusal, but by employer-refusal - jobs where precarious workers have no real protections, either for their health or their paycheck.

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So: climate change exposes us to pathogens, pathogens burn through our civilization because of wealth-concentration, labor precarity, and anemic public services.

Climate, disease and economics - three strands, hopelessly snarled together, impossible to untangle.

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And any of them can trigger lockdowns: moments, even months, when our everyday activities grind to a halt, maybe even disappearing forever.

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Mazzucato warns that a failure to act will result in sharp changes: state-ordered halts to private vehicle use, oil extraction, meat consumption, etc, and not in a managed way that ensures the people involved in these activities don't have their lives destroyed.

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She identifies three green economic transformations we need to make to avert this crisis-management style of adaptation:

I. Abolish shareholderism in favor of stakeholderism: force firms to reckon with communities, workers, and climate.

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This means no more bailouts without conditions - public ownership stakes, limits on future activities, from pollution to tax-evasion.

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II. Use finance appropriately and adequately: At the national level, create job guarantees, ban the use of the most environmentally damaging materials and processes.
Reorient finance around 25-year horizons instead of 5-10 year ones.

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III. Replace outmoded economic theory and faulty assumptions: revive the entrepreneurial state, that "innovates, takes risks, and invests alongside the private sector" while "crowding in innovation from multiple actors to achieve public green goals."

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While we're doing this, let's "evict fossil-fuel interests and short-termism from business, finance, and politics" with divestiture by banks and universities.

Mazzucato reminds us that radical change is coming, and the choice is whether or not we manage that change.

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Mazzucato made her reputation with her 2013 book "The Entrepreneurial State," which documents the extent to which private-sector innovations are nothing but repackaged, publicly funded work - work that, ironically, business is anxious to de-fund.

https://marianamazzucato.com/entrepreneurial-state/

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She's had quite a storied career, as the New York Times documented in a fantastic profile in 2019:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucato.html

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For an even better introduction to her work, check out "Rethinking Capitalism," her open access lecture series for University College London, which has been called "The Feynman Lectures for Economics."

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/study/current-students/degree-pathways/rethinking-capitalism

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