‘We can’t pretend the ecological crisis is separate’: the economist thinking differently about climate breakdown

James Meadway, once a Labour adviser and now a podcast host, says the separation between climate and economy has to end James Meadway is an economist who is not at all impressed with economics. Formerly an adviser to John McDonnell when he was Labour shadow chancellor, Meadway has plenty to say about what mainstream economics gets wrong. But one of his central gripes is the way it treats the environment. “We cannot simply pretend that … the entire ecological crisis is a separate and distinct thing from what’s happening in the economy,” says Meadway, who now works on climate finance. And yet that is precisely what happens.

This critique informs the podcast, Macrodose, which Meadway presents and which has recently turned one year old. Its tagline is “Your weekly fix of climate economics”. Every Wednesday, in 15 minutes or so, Meadway analyses the key economic stories of the week. Part of the aim is to make economics more accessible because, he says, it is often thought of as something so difficult that “you have to be really clever to do it”.

Macrodose also grew out of Meadway’s increasing frustration with how the environment was either neglected altogether or mishandled by economists. What you have is reporting on these extreme weather events, he says, gesturing to one side, and then separately, motioning “over here”, the discussion around what’s going on in the economy.

Meadway has a matter-of-fact tone that makes him sound pretty convincing, and the podcast has had close to 200,000 listens across more than 60 countries, with an average audience of roughly 7,000 a week. So suited is his voice for the disembodied world of podcasting that it’s a little odd to sit in the offices of Planet B – the company that produces the podcast – and listen to him speak in person.

Meadway gives numerous examples of the disconnect between economics and the environment in popular discourse. For example, a large part of the recent surge in inflation was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he says, but it was also “pretty insistently, certainly over the last summer, things like various major water transport riverways in Europe drying up because it was so hot”. He points to the Panama Canal, where a drought means fewer ships can use it, so they either have to wait or go all the way round South America. This drives up the cost of transporting goods and this has a knock-on effect on prices in the shops. We can expect more of this, he warns.

In one episode, he explains that some financial institutions are starting to catch up to this but that their response is still lacklustre. He laments the fact that most of the discussion is focused on putting up interest rates to deal with inflation – Meadway thinks this is a “disastrous” idea that will make no difference “to how much water there is in the Rhine”, one of Europe’s rivers that dried up over the summer.

Meadway started thinking about the climate because it was unavoidable; it was everywhere he looked. And he thought it unsatisfactory that economics was not addressing it enough or in the right way.

But this hardly came as a surprise. As a student, he arrived at the London School of Economics eager to understand why some people are incredibly rich and others are not, but instead his undergraduate economics degree was three years of “relatively difficult maths” that had “absolutely no immediate reference to a whole list of real-world problems you might face”.

Others agree. In 2014, economics students around the world wrote a manifesto criticising the narrow way economics was taught, pinpointing a “lack of intellectual diversity”. Beyond universities, the BBC was criticised by a group of economists in 2020 for inappropriately describing the country’s economy like that of a household. A subsequent report found “too many journalists lack understanding of basic economics or lack confidence reporting”.

​​After the 2008 financial crisis, Meadway says that the economics curriculum has improved. Still, aside from ecological economists – he mentions EF Schumacher – as a discipline, he says, it remains “kind of useless on things like climate change”. Most likely you’ll still be taught that the environment is an externality to the economy.

What exactly does that mean for the way many economists understand the ecological crisis? Meadway gives the example of CO2 emissions: if you accept they are harmful, you might increase the price of carbon, believing this will change how the economy operates and in turn affect the environment. Carbon pricing, as it’s known, has been roundly criticised by certain academics and economists for, among other things, failing to work and failing to meet the scale of the challenge. The problem, Meadway explains, is that it treats the environment as subordinate to humanity’s actions; as if it’s at “our beck and call” to be “exploited” at will. “Once you have floods and wildfires,” he says, “that is the environment imposing itself on us, it’s not intellectually credible to start to think only that we have a problem to deal with. In fact, the problem is dealing with us.”

Meadway is not just telling listeners that industrial capitalism is responsible for anthropogenic climate breakdown – he describes this as accepted by “pretty much everyone” – but on focusing on the feedback this produces. What happens after we’ve “merrily burned” huge amounts of coal and oil and polluted every river and sea on the planet, he asks.

This doesn’t just puncture economic orthodoxy – Meadway’s critique is also aimed at parts of the left that are committed to maintaining current levels of consumption, just in a supposedly environmentally sound way.

The idea that we can all have an electric car is, according to him, just not possible: “There is not enough copper on the planet … We can’t get the lithium to produce the batteries, these things can’t actually happen.”

Or consider semiconductors – the focus of one Macrodose episode. Semiconductors are essential to almost all electronics on the planet but producing them requires huge amounts of water, he explains. When there was a drought in Taiwan, where one of the factories that produces 90% of the world’s semiconductors is based, it had to restrict production. There is not an “endless bounty that we can magically exploit”, Meadway says.

Radicals as well as the mainstream need to accept “the relationship of humanity to nature isn’t a simple hierarchy”, he says. What we are seeing is “the effects of environmental crisis” being “mediated through the structures of capitalism”.

This certainly feels a long way away from how most UK politicians talk about the subject. Given this is a world he used to inhabit, I wonder what he would now say to Labour, the party he used to work for. His number one piece of advice: “Stop talking about growth”. They do it to sound “economicsy”, he says, but it’s “totally unspecific” and that growth is actually quite hard to achieve. Growth cannot be relied on to “produce the goods it used to produce for all of us”, he says, so “you have to start having an argument about redistribution” instead.

“We’re just not going to have so much growth in the future because of the climate crisis,” he says. If we run out of food and there are extreme water shortages, where is the growth going to come from, he asks. “There isn’t some technology we can invent that can make that happen.”

Meadway wants Labour to “get the basics right”, such as explaining who they’re going to tax to fund public spending and detail what they are going to spend the money on.

Does he, then, think degrowth, which argues for reducing and changing current forms of production and consumption in a way that lessens environmental destruction and minimises inequality, is the way forward? Almost before I’ve finished asking the question, he wryly replies that it needs a rebrand – it’s a “terrible name”, he says – but he does think the movement and the people around it are thinking in the “right way”.

“We actually have to deal with this now,” he says, adding that we have to do that in a way that is just and protects most people from the worst effects of what is happening. That is what we should all be focused on.

Cover photo: The Panama Canal was forced to reduce the amount of ships that could use it due to a drought, slowing down shipping and harming the global economy. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images