NEW MEASURES OF PROGRESS

GPI 2.0 is gaining traction amongst sustainability researchers

Legislation update September 2023 : After garnering the support of NGOs and five co-sponsors, Rep. Omar is now exploring options for reintroduction of the GPI Act in 2024 or possible inclusion of key components of the bill in appropriations language. Stay tuned here for further updates as the reintroduction date approaches.  Original post July 2021: On July 30th, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced the GPI Act of 2021, directing the Secretary of Commerce to establish a new metric for measuring US economic performance, setting budget priorities and guiding policy– the Genuine Progress Indicator. If her bill becomes law, the GPI would effectively unseat Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the nation’s leading economic indicator, a reform long sought after by politicians, economists and civil society. Rep. Omar was joined by five House co-sponsors including Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Dwight Evans, Pramila Jaypal and Marie Newman. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and on the heels of one of the nation’s most fractured and contentious election cycles, the world of economic indicators may seem distant and esoteric, irrelevant to struggles Americans are facing every day. But the legislation is, in fact, revolutionary and transformative, signaling a long overdue shift in economic priorities away from the bottom-line profits of Wall Street corporations and towards improving economic conditions for those least well off and ordinary American households. With Biden-Harris now at the helm, this new metric should be a centerpiece of the administration’s economic policies. Despite its many logical failings and fallacies, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its state-level counterparts still reign as the most ubiquitous measures of economic performance. It works well for the world’s elites who own the means of production because when GDP grows it means more buying and selling from which they profit. But more buying and selling is not always a good thing. Sometimes it represents something that is truly beneficial (healthy food and experiences in nature) and other times it represents a cost we’d rather avoid (inflated health insurance premiums) or expenditures that reflect growing insecurity around us (guns and burglar alarms). GDP does not differentiate between costs and benefits; it considers all spending beneficial and as such provides an extremely poor measure of economic wellbeing.

As Congress accelerates work to pass two massive new spending bills – the budget Reconciliation ($3.5 trillion) and Infrastructure ($1.2 trillion) packages – lawmakers need to do the math to ensure that money is not thrown to programs that increase greenhouse gas pollution and reduce our ability to overcome the climate crisis. After all, one of the key selling points for each is their claimed climate benefits. Proponents of the Reconciliation package, for example, assert that some clean energy measures included in the bill, along with some in the Infrastructure package, would slash US carbon emissions by 880 million metric tons (0.88 gigatons) of annual CO2 emissions by 2030. However, as discussed below, the very recent elimination of the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP) from the Reconciliation package lowers the annual CO2 emissions reduction to only 0.38 gigatons by 2030. Moreover, buried within both bills are expenditures that would take us even further in the opposite direction – among them, massive subsidies for logging and highways that come with a steep carbon footprint. In combination with the elimination of CEPP, these climate-harming aspects of the Reconciliation and Infrastructure packages would actually increase net annual CO2 emissions by 2030 relative to current levels.

In a report commissioned by Greenpeace Canada, “Beyond Fossil Fuels: Sustainable Development Opportunities in Eastern Nunavut,” CSE’s John Talberth and Daphne Wysham explored the dilemma Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut is facing.

In a new study authored by Dr. John Talberth and Michael Weisdorf of Portland State University, CSE has demonstrated a new methodology for the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) that promises to accelerate its adoption...