capitalism and the environment

8/9/2019 Capitalism and the Environment

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Capitalism and theEnvironmentBy Mick BrooksMonday, 21 August 2006Global warming the population time bomb nuclear energy pollution environmental issues are always in the news. There is even a party the Green Party that claims to put the environment at the centre of its concerns. The Green Party claims to

be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend thetraditional issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional

political discussions and divisions.

This is poppycock. Environmental issues are vitally important to us inhabitants of the planet earth. But the environmental problems, and the potential environmentalcatastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist system.

Anyone who has read a standard account of the problem of global warming, for instance,

will realise that it is possible, apparently through carelessness, to wipe out human life onearth. Hold on, and take a deep breath! Dont capitalists also live on the planet? Is it intheir interests that human life, including not just their profits but even their very existence,should be extinguished?

Of course its not in their interests. But things that happen under capitalism dont justreflect the interests of the individual capitalist. Events follow the logic of the system.

This is how Marxism explains environmental degradation, As individual capitalists areengaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest,most immediate results must first be taken into accountWhat cared the Spanish planters

in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained fromthe ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees whatcared they that heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the

present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, mosttangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actionsdirected to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character.(Engels Part played by labour in the transition from ape to man ).

We know the Greek islands supported a much bigger population in antiquity than they doknow. We know they were once covered in trees that prevented soil erosion. We have

seen how the goats prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece (Engels op. cit. ) The people who cut down the trees and introduced grazing animals were not stupid. They cutthe trees down to make ships or just burned them to clear the land. They introduced goats

because that was an easier way to make a living on their thin soils than ploughing theland. Short-term rational decisions produced environmental disaster in the longer term.

We have seen that environmental degradation is not confined to capitalism. Marxexplained why. In a letter to Engels discussing a book by Fraas, he observes, The whole
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, . . Lets get specific.Probably the biggest danger facing the world today is global warming This is better calledclimate change since, according to the predictions, not all parts of the globe will becomeuniversally warmer. There is a consensus among scientists that climate change ishappening. This consensus is overwhelming.

google . www .globalwarming .org , . , It is true that if you in

global warming you may get a contrary impression. Prominent among the hits is, whichrubbishes the notion of climate change. It is promoted by the Cooler Heads Coalition andupdated by the Competitive Enterprises Institute. We know where theyre coming from!The carbon fuel industries are spending vast sums of money to muddy the water on thisissue. They just buy scientists like you might buy a KitKat. And their influence extends tothe White House, inhabited by a man who made his fortune from oil and who instructs hisunderstrappers to ignore or falsify the scientific evidence.

Back to the facts. First the earth as a whole is getting warmer. Secondly, this is partly because of human action we dont know how much. OK, the earth has always gonethrough hotter and colder periods (ice ages), but more and more greenhouse gases (the

most important of which is CO2 (carbon dioxide) are being pumped out into the upper atmosphere. These operate like a greenhouse or blanket in that they let warmth from thesun in, but then trap it in the atmosphere. So the earth gets hotter. The science is complex.As the critics say, if all the warmth escaped from the earth no life would be possible. But,

particularly since the 1980s, the earth has been warming up at a faster rate than ever before. And emissions from us, in the form of burning fossil fuels that give off greenhousegases, are to blame.

The US National Academy of Sciences has issued a report, Climate change science: ananalysis of some key questions which concludes, the changes observed over the lastseveral decades are most likely due to human activities. The earth as a whole is now

warmer than it has been for the past 400,000 years. It is an observable fact that glaciersand polar ice are melting. This has a knock-on effect in that the dark water of the icecaps is melted and no longer traps heat. The permafrost on the tundra melts and no longer locks in CO2.

Other human activity makes the situation worse. At present capitalists are gnawing awayat the Amazon rain forest, burning it away just like the Spanish planters in Cuba but on amuch larger scale. The aim once again is short-term gain in the form of soya crops,
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logging or cattle ranching. Already some of the denuded land has become exhausted. TheAmazon rain forest is home to an estimated half of the worlds species. And biodiversityis a good thing in itself. How many unknown medicinal plants have we alreadyexterminated? On top of that the forest is a sink, as the trees hold CO2. As they are cut

down or burned off that CO2 adds to climate change.

The statistics dont seem so extreme an overall increase in temperature of 0.6-7% in thetwentieth century. But over half of this increase has happened in the past thirty years andis in part attributable to human activity. Already it has led to droughts, extinctions of species and rising sea levels leading to localised flooding. Its going to get worse.

Overfishing

Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net betweenimmense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa. This

fantastical assemblage, like something from a Mad Max movie, would scoop upeverything in its way: predators, such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangeredherbivores, such as rhinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthog and wild dog. Pregnant females would be swept up and carried along, with onlythe smallest juveniles able to wriggle through the mesh.There are no markets for abouta third of the animals they have caught because they dont taste too good, or because theyare simply too small or too squashed. The pile of corpses is dumped on the plain to beconsumed by carrion. This efficient but highly unselective way of killing animals isknown as trawling. (Charles Clover The end of the line: how overfishing is changing the world and what we eat, Ebury Press, 2005).

It shouldnt be allowed, but its happening. When the Grand Banks fishery off Newfoundland was discovered it was said (with just a little exaggeration) that you couldwalk across the water on the backs of the fish without getting your feet wet. Now theGrand Banks are closed and Atlantic cod is an endangered species. Its happened to the

blue marlin. Its happening to the bluefish tuna. And dragnets destroy the whole foodchain at the bottom of the sea. So the Grand Banks, closed in 1992, have never recoveredas a fishery. Overfishing is a prime example of how capitalist greed confronts us withenvironmental disaster.

Clover is a journalist for the Daily Telegraph , so dont expect a socialist analysis. But hesspot on when he tells how European countries subsidise the building of trawlers to make

the overfishing worse; how the fishing industry begs for handouts because of the crisis infish stocks which is of its own making; and how, having raped our own fisheries thesetrawlers sail to the coast of Africa to repeat the whole sorry business of overfishing. In the

process they destroy the livelihood of local fishermen who have fished sustainably off their coasts for generations.

Where do we go from here?


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Does the green analysis and programme help us to deal with environmental issues?Though the greens dont have a unified body of ideas, (some would regard themselves associalists) two common threads in their propaganda come up over and over:

"There are too many people on the planet."

"There are not enough resources."

These ideas come from a reactionary economist called Thomas Malthus who wrote at theturn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He wrote of nature providing us a feast,which was spoiled when too many people turned up to ruin the party. Malthus thoughtthat Britain was overpopulated. At the time he was writing there were probably less thanten million people living in this country. Half of those were engaged in agriculture andrelated activities. Now the island supports sixty million and less than 5% are needed togrow our food. OK, we dont actually grow all our own food. But we export manufactured

goods and, increasingly, financial and other services to pay for food, and other countriesdo the reverse as part of an international division of labour. The basic variable Malthuswas missing out was productivity. That means the earth can support a growing populationof humans over time. Malthus ideas were widely discredited with the steadyimprovement in working class living standards in the second half of the nineteenthcentury (which his theory suggested was impossible). Productivity rose and, through classstruggle, the working class gained some benefit form the increased wealth they were

producing.

Malthus basic theory on population still gets wheeled out again by doomsayers every sooften.

Note what else Malthus was doing. As a representative of the landlord class, he wasdeliberately ignoring the fact that society is divided into classes and some people get amuch bigger share of resources than others. He was blaming the poor for their poverty.

But isnt it true that resources are finite? Of course it is. But we dont know what they are.Take the case of oil. Its not even clear what the reserves owned by the big oil companiesare. BP wrote down a large chunk of its reserves a while back. In other words it declaredthat oil, which people thought had been in the ground for the last 300 million years, didnot really exist! Did this mean the worlds potential supply of crude had really shrunk? BPshareholders regarded the write down as just financial shenanigans. Certainly share priceswere hit. But assessing global resources, whether owned or just lying in the ground

waiting to be tapped, is much harder than adding up oil companies guesses at reserves. Nobody can agree a figure as to what the worlds resources are.

Heres the reason. If the price of oil doubles to $77 a barrel (which it is at the time of writing), a whole lot of oil reserves suddenly become economically viable profitable to exploit. At half the price (oil was $35 a barrel not so long ago) they are not reserves atall. Thats capitalism for you! For decades scientists have known how to extract oil from

bituminous shale. But under capitalism its not economic to extract it.


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Even if we accept the argument that we are up against limited resources now, what should be our response? Malthus, as an apologist for the rich, cleverly eliminated the inequalitiesin our society from his analysis. Surely the first thing we should do is to eliminate the

luxury spending of the rich, which gobbles up a disproportionate amount of earthsresources? The second thing we should do is run a worldwide inventory to establishexactly how much we have of all these resources.

Then we should look into producing and adopting alternatives. We need to sit down andthink very hard about the alternatives to burning fossil fuels as an energy source. We cantdo this under capitalism, partly because of the vested interests, such as the hydrocarboncapitalist in the White House, that dominate decision-making in most capitalist states.Dominant sections of the capitalist class are actually CO2-burning junkies. The other

problem is that wind and wave power and other sustainable energy sources are not takenseriously by capitalists who cant find a way of making money out of them. Therefore not

enough research has been done on their viability. Finally, if absolutely necessary, weshould implement a fair system of rationing until the alternatives come on stream.

How can we do this under capitalism? We cant. The price mechanism praised byeconomists is essentially reactive. When the price of petrol goes up, people will buy morefuel-efficient cars. But the fact that oil prices have gone up is actually a signal thatcapitalism has been squandering the earths resources. Our action plan on the environmentis really a plan for world socialism.

Wont world capitalism do something about the mess it has created in the meantime?Even the imperialists under siege in Mafeking introduced rationing (communism in

consumption) for the duration in order to survive.

They might. But the example of overfishing shows the problems. The capitalist state iscaptive to capitalist vested interests: the shipbuilding industry and the fishing industry cryout for subsidies. Competition, which involves the weakest going to the wall, is fine in thetextbooks, but its not for the likes of them. Capitalist countries fight each other moreviciously as resources become more difficult to grab. African countries have little muscleagainst the European Unions trawling fleet.

Outside the flat-earthers in the White House, there is a consensus that global warming is a big problem actually the biggest environmental problem the world faces by far. The

capitalist powers met at Kyoto and came to an agreement. The USA opted out. ButAmerica, with less than 5% of the worlds population, is responsible for a quarter of allcarbon emissions. So that makes the Accord pretty much meaningless. But a lot of thosecountries that agreed to the Kyoto targets to cut the increase in emissions (not cutemissions) have failed to meet them. It is actually quite difficult for a capitalist state tocontrol the activities of tens of thousands of capitalist firms who are responsible for givingoff CO2. And everybody agrees that Kyoto will not solve the problem. It is usually


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described as a first step, and that first step has never really been taken.

So world socialism really is the only way we can protect the environment, in other wordsour home, the planet earth

capitalism and the environment

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