Capitalism and Environmental Change - Research Paper Example

Capitalism and Environmental Change Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Discussion 3. Remedial Measures 4. Conclusion 5. Notes 6. References Introduction According to Andrew Simms1, most of the world’s governments are focused on the financial/banking crisis while a much more urgent ecological crisis is not been addressed (Simms 2009). The world is living beyond its environmental means, an astronomical ecological debt has accumulated due to prolific consumption of natural resources, and production of more waste than the biosphere can handle. This is manifest in the enduring environmental concerns such as dissipating soil nutrients or their sustenance, pollution, hygiene, loss of forest cover and desertification, water storms, adverse weather change, manufacturing wastes, multiplicity in species, the commodification of species, among others are some of the valid negative effects of capitalism (Foster 2002, 5). At the heart of this environmental degradation is capitalism, with its inherent emphasis on private enterprise, ownership, and free markets with minimal regulation by the state. However, as Robert Newman2 writing in The Guardian newspaper commented, “Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change” (Newman 2006, 1). Discussion According to Nobel Prize Economist laurellete Milton Friedman, capitalism is “the organization of the bulk of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market”. This treatise describes the capitalists’ total disregard of the environment in their unquenchable thirst and greed for unlimited wealth. The premise of Laissez-faire has rendered the planet a hunting ground for the commissaries of private industry wantonly consuming the planet’s non-renewable resources while excreting harmful wastes recklessly. As the authors of rival paradigm of socialism or communism Marx and Angels3 observed, “all creatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth—all living things must also become free” (Rudy 2001, 61). The scramble for resources and thirst for profits by capitalists continue to beleaguer and destroy the planet and its inhabitants as exhibited by the rapid consumption of fossil fuels. Although these resources were created steadily in over five million centuries by nature, the human species has contrived to gobble them up within the last two and a half centuries. A report by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)4 in 2002 highlighted the dire forecast that faces the planetary earth inhabitants (Socialist Resistance 2007). The people’s indifferent altitude and greed has led the authors to surmise dire scenarios for the planet. The anthropogenic pointer of human influence on the weather patterns is been experienced through rising global temperatures, surface and ocean heat which have not been previously demonstrated in the last 650,000 years. According to the IPCC Report, global temperatures have risen by 0.6c, which will eventually lead to a hotter planet to over 3c by the year 2100. Twelve of the past thirteen years when records were been kept have proven to be the warmest, with melting glaciers, unusual snow cover, and permafrost already evident in this millennium. The natural climatic conditions have therefore decreased in both hemispheres. Sea levels are reported as rising at the rate of 2mm annually among the planet’s oceans. Ben Anderson from the BBC Panorama, Brazil, and Guyana programme observing the environmental degradation in the Amazon rain forests observed remarked that, “fires burning down the rainforest are responsible for 20% of worldwide carbon emissions, the same amount as all the transport in the world combined” 5(Anderson 2008) These higher temperatures mean the planet will be unable to deal with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions hence further leading to a 44 percent rise of the same and consequently enhanced temperature rise by 1.2c by 2100. The IPCC has predicted unprecedented turbulent weather including enhanced storms, which will just escalate the situation, seal level ascension (by half a meter, deserts spreading, acidic oceans, and the already frequent fatal heat waves becoming even more prevalent. Many parts of the globe will become uninhabitable due this including large stretches of Africa, Asia, South America, and southern Europe. The planets’ inhabitants unchecked CO2 emissions over the last 250 years since the onset of the industrial revolution and capitalism have led to emissions that have have five times more effect on the climate than on solar radiation. However, the leaders of finance have just reacted in kind to these environmental threats. In Europe and much of the developed world, the capitalists have opted to profit from this looming calamity by initiating the carbon emissions trading partnerships known such as European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS)6 (Svensson 2003, 27). This concept is aimed at curbing greenhouse CO2 emissions by oil and gas conglomerates. This is projected to be achieved by trading in the excess gas flared or carelessly flared by the companies through specially arranged trading pacts. This concept however just displays the capitalist’s collusion to perpetuate detrimental policies that support their profit-minded shareholders at the expense of the environment. Although dubbed ‘Green Capitalism’, this market solutions or profiting from disasters has just been another callous ghoulish ‘too little too late’ campaign. The capitalists despite the urging of the environmental groups have resisted the onslaught and damning evidence by claims of the global degradation as just a normal phase which will be resolve itself. The fact that the last major global catastrophe happened over 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age makes the possibility of its recurrence highly remote to the wealthy class. The tragedy however is that careless consumption will mostly hit the poorest planetary inhabitants the most. Historian E.J. Hobsawm7 observed in his article The Age of Extremes: “Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression” (Foster 2002, 4). Among the many arguments advanced by the pro-capitalist lobby, is the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC)8, which suggests that the relationship between per capita income and the use of natural resources with the associated greenhouse gas emissions has a U-shape. This represents an ascendency of waste/emissions (curve rise) which reaches its zenith and reduces as a country’s income levels improve and the consumption patterns change accordingly. This presumption does not factor the CO2 emissions that similarly ascend with consumption. Countries like the United States or the fastest growing economy, China continue to discount this premise of better environmental behavior. That country which has enhanced economic growth will have better environmental standards than the poorer states and on the contrary, these countries have continued to lead the planet in environmental degradation and CO2 emissions as well as displaying the wanton effects of capitalism. This reflects Marx premise that, “capitalism sapped the vitality of the everlasting sources of wealth—the soil and the worker” (Richmond 2007, 2). The pollution by the petrochemical industry in Houston, Texas is a reflection of capitalism at its vile machinations. The city leads from behind in implementing the Clean Air Act with reports of high toxic chemicals like olefins – ethylene and 1-3 butadiene – from refineries and petrochemical plants, while a task force identified 21 air pollutants that were definite health risks, 12 of which cause cancer and nine other serious ailments. The city has now infamously become known as the smog capital with further emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. According to Eric Schaeffer of the Environmental Integrity Project, the level of carcinogens emitted in the larger Texas area is so high that residents are literary affected by the appalling smell, and headaches are common even as the oil barons disparaging liken it to the ‘smell of money!9’ (Margonelli 2007, 1) Countries with moderate socialist tendencies like the Scandinavian trio of Norway, Finland, and Sweden on the other hand have managed to lead in exemplary environmental conservative policies and enhanced standards of living for a majority of their population. In the highly capitalistic societies however, wide gaps of income disparities are evident with just a few individuals enjoying the scarce natural resources at their disposal. This is aptly elucidated by the saying that, “Our wealth is approximately everything we ever acquired minus everything we ever consumed”10 (Richardson 2008, 4). An elevated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) therefore does not automatically translate to improved income levels for the majority poorer section of the population within the capitalist state or a better environmental conservation. Adverse climatic change is therefore a result of the world’s poor management of the environment. Scientists have projected that if global warming or temperatures continue rising by a factor of one to six degrees Celsius for the next hundred years, between one-fifth and one-third of all the life will be decimated including all flora and fauna on Earth. Similarly, swollen oceans will swallow up thousands of small islands and coastlands, which currently house over 60 percent of the planets population. There are a few redeeming qualities among the planet’s leaders, Evo Morales the Bolivian President has been at the forefront in advocating for an end to the capitalistic lifestyle and policies. In his address in Poznan, Poland, Morales he alleged that, “In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death ..., and life itself. Everything … can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even ‘climate change’ itself has become a business”11 (Morales 2007,1). Under capitalism, millions are wallowing in abject poverty while just a few ‘lucky’ individuals sample ostentatious luxury and indulge in wasteful consumption. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol converged on developed countries and the emerging economies the undertaking of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to a minimum of five percent below their 1990 levels. This meager commitment has been largely ignored and the United States the largest emitter of CO2 refused to ratify the agreement. Some environmentalists have however called for a renegotiation of the pact to raise the pledged emission cutbacks to more practical levels as they claim the five percent reduction will be negligible or of no consequences due to the escalation of the climatic changes. The greenhouse gas emissions have been on an upward trend up to the year 2006 by as much as 9.1 percent higher than the benchmark 1990 levels. While the capitalist states are willing to dish out over four trillion dollars ‘bailout’ to the banking sector, to save the capitalist system from total collapse, the funds allocated to the ecological conservation efforts as a mere 13 billion dollars, which translates to approximately 313 times less. The fact that the token funding is disproportionately dispersed heightens the careless altitude of the capitalist leaders. The majority of the funding is directed at the rich countries that continue to vent waste and greenhouse emissions as opposed to the conservation of the ecology in the more disciplined conservatism nations. This includes over 80 percent of the Clean Development Mechanism projects, which is directed to only four rich nations. Capitalists are blind to the un-sustainability of their policies or the depletion of the Earth’s resources. A worrying visualization of calamity is that of the rapidly diminishing oil and gas reserves and analysts predict that fossil fuel reserves will reach their optimum peak by 2010. Joel Kovel 12in his book The Enemy of Nature, alludes to the pretentions of capitalists as they self-destruct observing that, “This degradation will have a contradictory effect on profitability itself …either directly, by so fouling the natural ground of production that it breaks down, or indirectly,” through the re-internalization of “the costs that had been expelled into the environment.” (Kovel 2002, 1).Capitalism has therefore eroded its own factors of production resulting in an economic crisis stemming from ecological factors. However, Foster argues that capitalism will still profit from environmental degradation as exemplified through waste management while still destroying the Earth to the point of no return. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Report of 2002 highlighted the phenomena of melting snowcaps but also drew a positive aspect to global warming by alluding to enhanced agricultural production due to the changes in the weather pattern hence capitalistically concluded that environmental changes will be taken on as they developed. This was a blatant lack of connection by the agency to the severe looming catastrophe facing the Earth by myopically grasping at a morsel amidst the plummeting planet. Remedial Measures President Evo Morales has however suggested some useful remedial measures to ‘save the planet’. These include a change in the capitalistic model to a system, which he labels as ‘complimentarity’. This is model calls for a more harmonious cohesion between the planets inhabitants, human and nature, which means a respect for nature and less gobbling up nature’s gifts. The developed nations must learn to control their luxurious and wasteful lifestyle, which has led to excessive consumption of fossil fuels. Alternative sources of energy are paramount for the Earth’s survival including solar energy, geothermal, wind-vane, and hydroelectric power. The recent developments into agricultural based fuels or bio-diesels should be discouraged as it leads to less food production for the many hungry populations. They also encourage forests’ destruction, biodiversity, and other poor crop husbandry policies as exemplified in Brazil. The five top polluters should be compelled by other nations to strictly adhere to the commitments of the Kyoto Protocol and even further reductions. This will mean obtaining fresh agreements of greenhouse reductions of approximately 40 percent by 2020 plus a further 90 percent by 2050. These commitments should be based on valid environmental conservation policies rather than profit driven techniques as exemplified by the EU ETS carbon trading. All the Earth nations must commit a minimum of one percent of their GDP budget augmented by further contributions by the heavy pollutants like the energy industry and manufacturing industries. Innovation, technology, research, and development should be doubled towards effective climatic conservation efforts. The government and private sector must through progressive policies allocate funding and labor towards attaining sustainable energy and reducing emissions. Similarly, the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the various UN bodies must be revamped and reorganized to guarantee free and fair trade, financing to all world economies. The current practice is unsustainable rather than offering inequitable policies that perpetuate the wasteful production and consumption habits especially on natural resources. Conclusion The planet is in a crisis of its own making. The recent spate of banking crisis and collapse of many pillars of capitalist structure reveal how unsustainable the system is. The corrosive nature of the capitalist state has been reflected in the wanton destruction of the planets natural resources, the perpetuation of poverty, endemic public health among other evils unleashed by nature because of poor management of the environment. Although time is running out, the planet’s inhabitants must urgently initiate positive measures aimed at realistically curbing the destruction of the only known inhabitable abode in the universe. Drastic cutback measures on greenhouse gas emissions, renovations into other sources of energy that are not harmful to the environment like solar, nitrogen, wind among others must be fully implemented. However, the most urgent step must be the change in the consumption and production patterns especially among the leading five major pollutants. Notes: Read More