Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato

Author:Mariana Mazzucato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Business
Published: 2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Mission: a Green New Deal

Greening the economy demands and deserves nothing less than a moonshot worthy of the mission. It is not a question of picking a series of outcomes that are only worthwhile for some market participants and disadvantage others. Solving climate change must be transformative across the entire economy. Public, private and civil actors alike will have to shift their mindset from short-term gains to long-run outcomes and profits, particularly against the background of financial stability and transition risks that form the landscape of climate change. Industrial strategies don’t just need different goals: they need missions.

Imagine if we were to bring the courage, spirit of experimentation and willpower of the moonshot to bear on the greatest problem of our time: the climate emergency. Imagine having leaders who proudly declare: ‘We choose to fight climate change in this decade not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.’14

Around the world, there is increasing talk about the need for a Rooseveltian scale of investment to battle climate change. The notion of the Green New Deal consciously evokes the New Deal policies that began to lift the USA out of the Great Depression. A Green New Deal is about transforming production, distribution and consumption across the economy. It must be underpinned by long-term, patient finance which is willing to take risks and able to mobilize and crowd in other investors. This is key, as business investment reacts to the perception of where future opportunities lie: the climate emergency can be both a carrot and a stick to create a new direction of opportunities for the global economy. But where do we begin?

The mission map above on carbon-neutral cities (Figure 7) shows that a green transformation is not just about renewable energy. It’s also about achieving a cross-sectoral approach to innovation whose goal is to build a diverse portfolio of mission projects that engage multiple sectors and spur experimentation by as many different types of organizations. Similarly, the mission map on the future of mobility (Figure 9) spans different sectors that could alter how citizens travel, from innovations in the way that disabled people access ramps to new forms of public transport, public data practices and e-governance.

But, crucially, vision and leadership are needed. In 2019 we saw public figures on two continents take this on in two different ways. In the USA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Congresswoman for New York, and Ed Markey, a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, introduced a Green New Deal to kick-start a new type of US growth based on missions that would eliminate all US carbon emissions. In Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, announced the launch of the European Green Deal, which advocated policy initiatives aimed at making Europe climate-neutral by 2050.15 ‘This is Europe’s man on the moon moment,’ she declared.

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