1 How Do We Transition To a Post-Covid Sustainable World System? Glen T. Martin Getting through the economic and political chaos caused by the corona virus pandemic may be the least of our worries. The planetary climate is heating up steadily every year and the synergistic effects of this process will inexorably lead to the breakdown of the ecological balance of heating and cooling that keeps the Earth stable and temperate, which allows all higher lifeforms to flourish. The breakdown of this balance means that we will have passed so many environmental tipping points that the process of heating becomes unstoppable. Our planet will become a super-hot cinder block, possibly by the end of the 21 st century, causing the extinction of all higher forms of life. The pandemic has hurt the economy seriously, but the economy prior to the pandemic was hurting the ecology of our planet. The “free” capitalist fossil-fuel driven economy prior to the pandemic was worse for the world than an epidemic that will likely be under control within a year or so, allowing the world to get back to “normal.” However, “normal” is a disaster for the future of humanity and the ecological health of our beautiful planet Earth. The epidemic has interrupted this “normal.” After the epidemic we need new economic, political, and cultural practices that provide the necessities of life to all people without destroying the environment that makes it possible to supply these necessities. Capitalism never provided these necessities in the first place. It funneled the wealth of the planet into the pockets of billionaires and millionaires while causing severe deprivation among at least 50% of our human brothers and sisters. Social scientist Christopher Chase Dunn speaks of “the absurdity of material deprivation in an age when the technological problems of providing basic needs are obviously solved” (1998, 340). The capitalist system itself is an “absurd” system. Climate scientist James Gustav Speth writes that “most environmental deterioration is a result of systematic failures of the capitalism that we have today and that long-term solutions must seek transformative change” (2008, 9). We need, he says, to move to a “post-growth” society and create markets that work for the environment rather than against it. This, of course, must be a planetary phenomenon, for sustainable economic practices in one or just a few countries are not going the save human-kind from extinction by what environmentalists such as Joseph Romm (2018) and David Wallace-Wells (2019) call our coming global “heat- death.” Climate scientists have near unanimous agreement concerning this projected scenario of planetary climate collapse unless there are rapid, drastic changes in the way global economics is practiced. Many advanced economists like Kate Raworth (2017), Richard Heinberg (2011), and Herman E. Daly (1996) have articulated the very doable parameters of a sustainable, non-growth economics. In this essay, I argue that putting sustainable economics into practice will require ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth (www.earth- constitution.org). Only a united humanity with one environmentally conscious economic policy for all people and nations will suffice in time to restore and reverse (as much as is still possible) our descent into planetary heat-death. Political unity under the Earth Constitution is not only essential for putting everyone on Earth on the same economic page, it is also essential because the present system (of run-away growth capitalism) is integral to the existing political system of militarized sovereign nations. Chase Dunn writes that: The world-system has now reached a point at which both the old interstate system based on separate national capitalist classes and new institutions representing the representing the global interest of capitalists exist and are