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The Economics of Living on Earth

A new concept tries to account for humanity's connection to the entire planet.

By , a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, and , a columnist at Foreign Policy and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Sign up for Adam’s Chartbook newsletter here.
A satellite view shows two large plumes of smoke extending from land south out to sea.
A satellite view shows smoke from the wildfires in Los Angeles on Jan. 9. Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025

Ecological ideas have seen a resurgence, most recently in the form of a concept called “the planetary.” A group of thinkers across various disciplines, including at the Berggruen Institute think tank, have expanded some of the traditional ecological ideas to include new developments in technology and natural science. Those thinkers have tended to place less emphasis on the planetary concept’s economic implications.

What does the new concept of the planetary stand for? Can our political institutions be reformed in accordance with this concept? And is interplanetary exploration an ecological project?

Ecological ideas have seen a resurgence, most recently in the form of a concept called “the planetary.” A group of thinkers across various disciplines, including at the Berggruen Institute think tank, have expanded some of the traditional ecological ideas to include new developments in technology and natural science. Those thinkers have tended to place less emphasis on the planetary concept’s economic implications.

What does the new concept of the planetary stand for? Can our political institutions be reformed in accordance with this concept? And is interplanetary exploration an ecological project?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: What exactly differentiates this new planetary perspective from the ecological perspectives that have already been in circulation? What sort of new developments are represented in this new concept?

Adam Tooze: What the planetary captures is the sense of this holistic interconnection on this given singular rock that we inhabit, that itself is washed with water and is so beautiful when seen from the outside. And it comes in different permutations. In fact, the first use of planetarity was by Indian social theorist Gayatri Spivak, who’s my colleague at Columbia, a postcolonial literary theorist who actually coined the term as a kind of antagonistic term. And I think this is another key thing about thinking in terms of the planetary. Thinking in terms of the planetary is not just an effort to think of the whole, to think the awesome implications of us being on this spaceship—Earth—but also to think against something else. And in Spivak, for the first time, this is formulated as thinking against, in her case, the colonial vision of the world as a globe that inspired the Western exploration and conquest of the planet from the late 15th century onward. So that vision of the globe as the domain of power, the domain of exploitation. For her, planetarity was a conception of the whole that refused that power blackmail. In other words, “There it is, now manage it. There it is, now own it. There it is, control it. There it is, run it. Like, husband it, manage it.” Planetarity for Spivak was a way of saying, “Yes, I see this thing, but no, I refuse. I refuse the power.” She in fact spoke about praying for planetarity rather than managing it. So this was in 1997.

Like 10 years later in the work of the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the planetary is understood, I think, again in oppositional terms. So for him, too, the planetary is not globalization. But in Chakrabarty, what we really see is a mapping of the planetary in which the idea is essentially that we, for the first time, understand that human action on the really large material, environmental scale has to be situated alongside other natural forces that are driven by their own logic. In other words, you can’t deforest the Amazon without this having blowback effects on you. You can’t burn all of the oil, and gas, and coal that we have discovered under the crust of the Earth without utterly changing the climate envelope within which you operate. So this is an oppositional term, too, in Chakrabarty, but now with an opening toward, if you like, a new science of the planetary, which is associated with ideas like the Gaia theory, right? Put into circulation again about 50 years ago, it’s this idea of the planet as a massively live interconnected system.

And if you look at the folks contributing to the Berggruen Institute volume—there’s a book that came out of that conference, very quickly done—you see a third version which is associated with all the technocratic visionaries like Benjamin Bratton and people like that who say, “Ok, fine, this is true, but we want to put the spaceship, the satellite for which you see this, back into the picture.” In other words, “Ok, fine, we grasp that there is a difference between the global and the planetary, but we also have to think of the human development, the evolution, the dialectical progress of humanity, which actually allows us to see this.” And if we’re able to see it now in a way that we were never able to see it before, there is, as it were, an implication which wraps around in exactly the opposite direction that Spivak originally intended, which, in her case, was a renunciation of all kind of power and control. And in people like Bratton, the planetary is figured as the appropriate domain for government, right? This is the level at which now we know—now our power, our knowledge, our technology has taken us into space. How can we not? We can’t not know. We can’t unknow what we’ve seen. So this is the challenge that lies in the future.

So I think those are the three different ways in which the planetary is being thought right now, as a kind of radical rejection, as a kind of dualism in which we recognize that there is a global, but there is then a planetary logic which we don’t fully control but which we interact with. And then this third ultimate kind of technocratic vision, which says, “We can’t unsee that.” And so if we are going to reckon with these natural forces, we have to reckon with them seriously at the appropriate scale, so we need to do geoengineering, and we need to do whatever it takes at the scale of the planet to manage our collective survival.

CA: Is it possible to imagine our global governance institutions being reformed in a way that would make them more sustainable in this planetary sense? Take the trading system, for example—could that be reformed in a way that makes free trade sustainable from this planetary perspective?

AT: There are all sorts of proposals in this direction. They start with the very boilerplate, Davos, centrist kind of arguments the European Union would make, for instance. It wants carbon pricing all around, right? And it’s going to use carbon border adjustment systems (CBAMs)—carbon tariffs, if necessary—to force other people to recognize the externality of CO2 emissions. They want deforestation rules in trade agreements with trading partners. This is the most conventional kind of answer to your question. And then if you dig deeper, of course, there are folks who want to insist on the profound inequality of exchange between the developing and the underdeveloped world, which drives a large part of globalization, because basically the resources of the developing world, of the low-income world, are acquired very cheaply by the rich world. And so this drives globalization of an incredibly unbalanced, unequal, ultimately also unsustainable kind of shape. And so if you could change prices, if we could have a new international division of labor, a new international economic order, this would be a more sustainable form of globalization.

So that’s kind of, I think, the spectrum of views about globalization and trade. So on the one hand, have a bunch of new helpful rules, and on the other hand, fundamentally change the terms of trade between the resource-intensive poor countries, developing countries, and the advanced economies.

But I think standing back from this a little bit further, I’d have to say that though I understand why you go to globalization and trade as the zone in which to talk about reform, I don’t actually think it’s the main driver of the ecological challenges that we are seeing around the world, certainly not on the climate side. With deforestation and biodiversity loss, I think the case would be somewhat stronger because those are classically extractive and about this unequal exchange between the rich world and the developing world. But if you look at CO2 emissions, which are a much more generic kind of environmental damage, trade and globalization account for a significant but ultimately small part of the overall budget of CO2 emissions globally. And notably in the case of China, only in the early 2000s before growth really got big was trade and globalization the driver of China’s immense increase in CO2 emissions, which were driven overwhelmingly by coal consumption for the purposes of domestic urbanization. China urbanized half a billion people in the space of a single generation and rebuilt its cities entirely on top of that. And that’s what drove the CO2 equation into the massively dynamic, accelerating phase that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades.

And so as long as—and this goes back to the earlier point about development being the core of this—there are hundreds of millions, if not billions of people that still require the basic amenities of modern life—relatively regularized urbanization with proper infrastructure, electric power, and so on—and so long as our means of providing that are basically still the existing technologies of steel production, of cement production, and of generating electric power by burning coal, so long as that equation remains intact, that’s essentially the driver of massive imbalance. Not in every respect, like I say for deforestation, it’s a different story. But for CO2 and climate, that’s the central driver. And so trade matters. But it can only be one element of a much broader rebalancing that ultimately has to have its root in less planetary and actually more local dynamics.

And in the Chinese case, what’s particularly notable is that it is the quite local problem of air pollution as a result of coal burning that ultimately catapulted China toward the most rapid adoption of green power technologies we’ve ever seen. It’s still very much a work in progress because the scale of China’s coal expansion is so huge, but the rate of adoption is like nothing we’ve ever seen anywhere else before. And that has to do less with the planetary and more to do with smog, more to do with local phenomena that were very widely experienced also in the West. You know, a big London smog in the 1950s could kill hundreds of people. Los Angeles was suffering from smog. Many Indian cities still do today. And so there’s a kind of dialectic between the local and the global, which is very important.

CA: One of the implications of this planetary concept is an interplanetary context. And there’s obviously a growing interest in interplanetary exploration, even settlement at the moment. But is this growing interplanetary discourse informed by ecological ideas?

AT: I mean, this really is an extraordinary moment when we have to begin to take this stuff seriously. SpaceX is, you know, very, very long past being a joke anymore. It entirely dominates the satellite launch business. It is transforming the sky, literally the night sky around us. We should do an episode on Space X in particular. But thinking about the interplanetary dimensions of this, what’s really fascinating is that the two, you know, the two oligarch billionaires in the United States who are driving this hardest have really radically different views of the interplanetary future.

So the Elon Musk vision really is a planet B vision. So Musk, as far as I understand it, his idea is that it is incumbent on us—it’s a profound responsibility of the current generation to prepare for the possibility that the Earth will, in one way or another, become uninhabitable. And so as a backup and to force the development of technologies that will allow us even further extension of human settlement, we need—with all urgency and with real seriousness—to begin the development of space launch programs that give us a realistic chance of settling Mars. We need to move this from the realm of science fiction to the realm of concrete action. And so they are building these giant heavy lift vehicles, the Starship, which is by far and away the heaviest, biggest rocket that we’ve ever had at this scale. And he wants to assemble a fleet of a thousand of these, build 100 a year for 10 years, and then in the windows of opportunity, when Mars and the Earth are relatively close together—which comes around every 26 months—with bases loaded, with a thousand of these Starships waiting in orbit around the Earth loaded with colonists, then blast off essentially from the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere and embark on three-month journeys to Mars and begin the program of settlement there with a view to establishing a colony of about a million people by the 2050s on Mars as our backup space. And, obviously, on Mars they will have to rely on a very significant extent of local resources, crucially for the generation of oxygen. But it’s that kind of a vision. So plan B for the eventuality that the Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Jeff Bezos’s vision is radically different. It’s utterly fascinating. So Bezos rejects altogether this pessimistic view of the end of the Earth as an inhabitable planet. And, in fact, his vision is the opposite, which is that the priority has to be to move all the most polluting heavy industrial activities on Earth to orbit, into orbit around Earth. So, for him, the launchpad is the moon, essentially, not Mars. And the idea is to build a series of giant space stations, about a million people each in these space stations that will orbit the Earth, harvest the resources that are available to us in the relatively close orbit around the Earth and notably on the moon, develop industrial facilities there so as to make Earth more inhabitable and so as to break the constraint on the human population on Earth, which, you know, is kind of back tapping out at 8 to 10 billion. And Bezos’s vision is that there could be a trillion human beings, but clearly not within the limited space of the Earth. And so we need to build, starting between the Earth and the moon, a platform for a truly gigantic expansion into space.

So they’re both billionaires. They both want to leave Earth in various ways. They’re going to have their own private rocket programs, but they’re totally different visions. The Musk vision is a kind of residual plan B backup colony on Mars in the event of really terrible things happening on Earth, whereas the Bezos vision is build out space as a hinterland—you know, a safer, better hinterland for really large-scale expansion of existing, essentially existing human models into space. There’s a kind of, you know, around the edges, there’s rather different politics, as well. I think they’re both edging around issues of constraint. Musk’s vision for the politics of the Mars colony is not the same, I think, as Bezos’s vision for the politics of these space stations and then the ultimate expansion. But both of them are kind of breaching the planetary envelope—one in a more pessimistic way, a more survivalist kind of vision, the Musk vision. And Bezos’s is a cornucopian vision, essentially, of endless expansion in space, which is limitless, is no longer constrained.

Cameron Abadi is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. X: @CameronAbadi

Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics, and history. X: @adam_tooze

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