Environmentalist assumptions that, at the very least, should be the subject of debate are unquestioningly accepted. Environmentalism has become central to the mainstream outlook, rather than the particular property of green parties or organisations.
One of the things that most annoys me about this grotesque cult of ex-Trotskyists now making their living as PR men for oil companies, real estate developers, etc. is their refusal--then and now--to take up the ideas of ecosocialists like James O'Connor or John Bellamy Foster. At a conference at the New School a couple of years ago cosponsored by spiked-online and libertarian Virginia Postrel, I commented from the floor that they lacked the guts to confront Marxist ideas on the environment. For the Furedi-ites of the LM days, environmentalism is a kind of neo-Malthusianism that holds back "progress". It supposedly seeks to slow down "development" so that snail darters can live. In other words, it is the same bullshit as Rush Limbaugh but with a thin veneer of Marxish jargon. Nowadays, you get the Rush Limbaugh straight from the bottle on spiked-online.
This development isn't just important at the level of ideas. A gloomy view of economic development plays an important role in holding back human potential. At its starkest, the acceptance of the idea that economic growth has to be curtailed is a tragedy in a world where billions of people still live in dire poverty. According to the latest available figures from the World Bank, 2.7 billion were living on less than $2 (£1.10) a day in 2001 of which 1.1 billion lived on less than a dollar (1).
Of course. But capitalist economic "development" won't change any of that. The big bourgeoisie aims to extract oil from Africa in order to keep the G7 economies humming. When environmentalist organizations took up the cause of the Ogoni people and Ken Saro-Wiwa, the ineffable James Heartfield charged them with holding back progress on the Marxism list 6 years ago. It simply amazed me that somebody as well-read in Marxism as Heartfield could not come to grips with a class analysis of Nigeria and the oil companies. I now understand that James was grooming himself for a new career.
The discussion of global warming provides a striking example of how this works. Almost everyone accepts that climate change means that the world needs to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases. Yet this would almost certainly mean holding back economic growth, meaning that a large part of the global population will remain poor. There is hardly any discussion of how to deal with global warming while generating substantial economic growth at the same time. Indeed it will be argued that economic growth, far from being the problem, is central to humanity's capacity to handle climate change.
Of course there is discussion. But it is entirely neglected by the corporate stooges gathered around spiked-online.
Yet, no matter how urgent it is for life on the planet as a whole that greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere be stopped, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol significantly to address this problem suggests that capitalism is unable to reverse course—that is, to move from a structure of industry and accumulation that has proven to be in the long run (and in many respects in the short run as well) environmentally disastrous. When set against the get–rich–quick imperatives of capital accumulation, the biosphere scarcely weighs in the balance. The emphasis on profits to be obtained from fossil fuel consumption and from a form of development geared to the auto–industrial complex largely overrides longer–term issues associated with global warming—even if this threatens, within just a few generations, the planet itself.
full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/1001jbf.htm
There are two recurring themes running through the environmentalist approach to economics. First, an obsession with the need for limits. The environmentalist debate, in numerous different ways, assumes that strict limits must be put on economic activity. Such premises ignore or at least downplay the power of human creativity. Economic activity does indeed often throw up problems - such as pollution - but it also, it will be argued, provides the means to overcome them.
No, "economic activity" cannot in and of itself solve these problems. Social organization around the pivot of production for human needs will.
Underlying both assumptions is a misanthropic view of humanity (2). Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature. Instead, environmentalists argue that humans should accept their place as a mere subsidiary of the natural world (3). In practice this means reconciling humanity to poverty, disease and natural disasters.
I guess Engels was a misanthrope:
"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly."
There is environmentalist confusion between the mastery over nature and the destruction of nature. Control over nature means reshaping the natural world to meet human needs - for example, developing medicines to fight against disease or building dams to prevent flooding or generate electricity. This is not the same as destroying rain forests or making animal species extinct.
A rather sanguine and undialectical view of hydroelectric dams and no surprise coming from the likes of spiked-online.
Nature has sometimes been destroyed as a side-effect of economic growth. But the aim of economic development is to benefit humanity rather than to destroy the natural world. It is important to remember that richer societies are in a much stronger position to create a positive environment for human beings than poor ones.
The aim of economic development is to benefit humanity? How silly of me to have ever doubted those Exxon ads on the op-ed page of the NY Times.
The remainder of this essay will examine the key tenets of environmentalist economics in more detail. It will argue that, in addition to being undesirable, the environmentalist worldview is based on fatally flawed assumptions.
For an alternative to this long-winded and terminally stupid piece, I recommend my own review of a book written from the standpoint of environmental economics:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/czech.htm
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