Chapter 3: The Relationship between the Environment and the Economy
3.1. Environmental criteria and the planned economy
In contrast to the Soviet-style planned economy, which has many flaws as seen in the previous chapter, the new planned economy proposed here is carried out from a completely different perspective and with a completely different methodology.
First of all, in terms of perspective, the new planned economy places a focus on environmental sustainability. In other words, it is a planned economy that aims for the greatest possible sustainability of the global environment. In that sense, it is named a "sustainable planned economy."
A sustainable planned economy is not just a planned environmental policy, but an economy that is planned with indicators of environmental sustainability as normative standards, and is a type of planned economy. To put it simply, it is a planned economy based on environmental criteria as norms - an environmental planned economy.
A planned economy that is disciplined by such environmental indicators is out of the question in the Soviet-style planned economy, which placed an overwhelming emphasis on economic development - a developmental planned economy, so to speak - and as a result, the Soviet-style planned economy caused environmental destruction through the waste and consumption of resources caused by its development-priority policy.
In that sense, a sustainable planned economy should emerge as a new form of planned economy that matches the growing trend for global environmental protection that has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union, while taking the Soviet-style planned economy as a negative example.
Currently, there is no country (as far as the author knows) that has adopted such a sustainable planned economy as an actual policy, and even the Green Party and the environmental protection movement around it, which propose the most advanced environmental policies, do not go so far as to advocate a planned economy, but rather merely insist on promoting environmental policies that embrace a market economy.
This is in a parallel relationship with - and often overlaps with - social democracy as a modified capitalism that maintains the market economy while supplementing it with welfare policies, and is also an expression of the idea of environmentalism as a modified capitalism, but its limitations are already clearly evident in the lack of significant progress in tackling international issues such as man-made climate change.
In order to fundamentally solve the various global environmental problems, it is necessary to systematically regulate production activities in terms of both quantity and quality based on environmental standards, and the planned economy that makes this possible is none other than the sustainable planned economy.
👉The table of contents so far is here.
👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.
