GLOBAL WARMING AND MODERN CAPITALISM

The Nation
October 6, 2008

By James Gustave Speth

[This article is adapted from James Gustave Speth's The Bridge at the
Edge of the World (Yale University Press, 2008).]

I grew up in a small town on the Edisto River in South Carolina in the
1940s and '50s. As a boy, I often swam the Edisto, though at first I
could not buck the river's current. But as I grew older and stronger,
I was able to make good headway against it. In my environmental work
for close to four decades, I've always assumed America's environmental
community would do the same--get stronger and prevail against the
current. But in the past few years I have come to the conclusion that
this assumption is incorrect. The environmental community has grown in
strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to
deteriorate. The current has strengthened faster than we have and
become more treacherous. It is time to consider what to do besides
swimming against it.

It is no accident that environmental crisis is gathering as social
injustice is deepening and growing inequality is impairing democratic
institutions. Each is the result of a system of political economy--
today's capitalism--that is profoundly committed to profits and growth
and profoundly indifferent to nature and society. Left uncorrected, it
is an inherently ruthless, rapacious system, and it is up to citizens,
acting mainly through government, to inject human and natural values
into that system. But this effort fails because progressive politics
are too feeble and Washington is more and more in the hands of
powerful corporations and great wealth. The best hope for change in
America is a fusion of those concerned about the environment, social
justice and strong democracy into one powerful progressive force. This
fusion must occur before it is too late.

Sadly, while environmentalists have been winning many battles, we are
losing the planet. Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are
gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics is about an acre a
second. Half the planet's wetlands are gone. An estimated 90 percent
of the large predator fish are gone and 75 percent of marine fisheries
are overfished, fished to capacity or depleted, up from 5 percent a
few decades ago. Twenty percent of the corals are gone; another 20
percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing about 1,000
times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of
extinction in 65 million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Each
year desertification claims a Nebraska-sized area of productive
capacity worldwide. Toxic chemicals can be found by the dozens in
essentially every one of us.

Earth's ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was
discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide
levels up by more than a third and have started the most dangerous
change of all--planetary warming and climate disruption. Earth's ice
fields are melting. Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen, making
it biologically active, at a rate equal to nature's; one result is the
development of hundreds of dead zones in the oceans because of
overfertilization. Withdrawals of fresh water consume more than half
of accessible runoff, and water shortages are multiplying here and
abroad. The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry
season: the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges and Nile, among many others.

The United States--responsible for about 30 percent of the carbon
dioxide added to the atmosphere--is, of course, deeply complicit in
these global trends, and four decades of environmental effort have not
stemmed the tide of decline. The United States is losing 6,000 acres
of open space every day, and 100,000 acres of wetlands every year.
Forty percent of US fish species are threatened with extinction, a
third of plants and amphibians, 15 to 20 percent of birds and mammals.
Half of US lakes and a third of the rivers still fail to meet the
standards that the 1972 Clean Water Act said should be met by 1983,
and a third of Americans live in counties that fail to meet EPA air-
quality standards. We have done little to curb our wasteful energy
habits or our steady population growth.

All we have to do to destroy the planet's climate and biota and leave
a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing
exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or
the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at
current rates, impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at
current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won't
be fit to live in. But human activities are not holding at current
levels--they are accelerating dramatically.

The world economy has more than quadrupled since 1960 and is projected
to quadruple again by mid century. At recent rates of growth, it will
double in fifteen to seventeen years. It took all of human history to
grow the $7 trillion world economy of 1950. We now grow by that amount
in a decade. Societies face the prospect of enormous environmental
deterioration just when they need to be moving strongly in the
opposite direction.

The escalating processes of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment
and toxification--which continue despite decades of warnings and
earnest effort--are a severe indictment of capitalism. Capitalism as
it is constituted today produces an economy and politics that are
highly destructive to the environment. An unquestioning commitment to
economic growth at any cost, powerful corporations whose overriding
objective is to grow by generating profits (including profits from
avoiding the environmental costs they create, from amassing deep
subsidies and benefits from government and from continued deployment
of technologies designed with little regard for the environment),
markets that fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by
government, government that is subservient to corporate interests and
the growth imperative, rampant consumerism spurred by sophisticated
advertising and marketing, economic activity so large in scale that it
alters the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet--all
combine to deliver an ever growing world economy that is undermining
the ability of the planet to sustain life.

Mainstream environmentalism has proved largely incapable of coping
with these forces. It works within the system--raising public
awareness, offering responsive policies, lobbying and litigating.
America has run a forty-year experiment on whether this
environmentalism can succeed, and the results are in. The full burden
of managing accumulating environmental threats has fallen to the
environmental community, both in and outside government. But that
burden is too great. The system of modern capitalism will grow in size
and complexity and will generate ever larger environmental
consequences, outstripping efforts to cope with them. Indeed, the
system will seek to undermine those efforts and constrain them within
narrow limits. Working only within the system will, in the end, not
succeed. Transformative change in the system itself is needed.

The fundamental questions thus are about transforming capitalism as we
know it. Can it be done? If so, how? And if not, what then? The good
news is that there are a variety of prescriptions to take the economy
and the environment off a collision course and to transform economic
activity into something benign and restorative. The most important of
these prescriptions range far beyond the traditional environmental
agenda.

Market failure can be corrected by government, perverse subsidies can
be eliminated and environmentally honest prices can be forged. The
laws, incentives and governance structures under which corporations
operate can be transformed to move from shareholder primacy to
stakeholder primacy. But even more vital is the need to challenge
economic growth and the consumerism it depends on. This challenge is
as relevant to addressing social problems as environmental ones.

The never-ending drive to grow the economy undermines families, jobs,
communities, the environment, a sense of place and continuity, even
national security--but we are told that, in the end, we will somehow
be better off. America has not applied its growth dividend to meeting
social and environmental needs. There is good evidence that increased
incomes do not lead to greater satisfaction with life. In affluent
countries we have what might be called uneconomic growth, to borrow
Herman Daly's phrase, where, if one could total up all the costs of
growth, they would outweigh the benefits.

Overriding commitment to economic growth--mere GDP growth--is
consuming environmental and social capital, both in short supply.
Affluent countries must become postgrowth societies where jobs and
work life, the environment, communities and the public sector are no
longer sacrificed to push up GDP.

There are many steps to slow growth while improving social and
environmental well-being, such as: shorter workweeks and longer
vacations; greater labor protections, job security and benefits;
restrictions on advertising; a new design for the twenty-first-century
corporation; strong social and environmental provisions in trade
agreements; rigorous environmental and consumer protection, including
full-cost pricing; greater economic and social equality, with
progressive taxation of the rich and greater income support for the
poor; heavy spending on public services and environmental amenities; a
huge investment in education, skills and new technology; and
initiatives to address population growth at home and abroad.

Instead of merely pursuing GDP growth, we need policies that address
social needs directly--that strengthen families and communities and
address the breakdown of social connectedness and the erosion of
social capital; that guarantee good, well-paying jobs (and green-
collar ones); that provide for universal healthcare and alleviate the
devastating effects of mental illness; that provide a good education
for all; that ensure care and companionship for the chronically ill
and incapacitated; that recognize responsibilities to the half of
humanity who live in poverty. There are many things that need to grow,
and policy should concentrate there. Such measures, wise in their own
right, should be seen as environmental measures too: central parts of
the alternative to the destructive path we are on.

Americans are struggling with the combined impacts of higher food and
fuel prices, crumbling financial assets, tighter credit and layoffs.
These problems are not the result of a slowdown in GDP growth, and
they will not be cured by more growth. Each is the result of
government failing to intervene in the marketplace--in financial
markets, in housing markets, in labor markets and elsewhere. As with
climate change, we are on the receiving end of misguided policies that
have led to deep structural maladies.

High prices are a problem not because they are high but because people
don't have the money, and alternatives (e.g., truly fuel-efficient
vehicles) are not readily available. In a gutsy article in July, Time
noted that $4 gas was curbing sprawl, reducing pollution and traffic
deaths, increasing fuel efficiency, and stimulating public transport,
bike sales and walking. Honest prices would be higher prices for many
things, but that does not mean Exxon should pocket the difference or
that equity issues should remain unaddressed.

Conventional wisdom on the clash of economy and environment is that we
can have it both ways, thanks to new technology. We do indeed need a
revolution in the technologies of energy, transportation,
construction, agriculture and more. But the rate of technological
change required to deal with environmental challenges in the face of
rapid economic growth is extremely high and rarely achieved. If
pollution is cut in half but output doubles, there is no net gain.
Housing, appliances and transportation can become more energy-
efficient, but the improvements will be overwhelmed if there are more
cars, larger houses and new appliances--and there are. There's a limit
to how fast and far new technology can take us.

Parallel to transcending our growth fetish, we must move beyond our
consumerism and hyperventilating lifestyles. In the modern
environmental era, there has been too little focus on consumption.
This is slowly changing, but most mainstream environmentalists have
not wanted to suggest that the positions they advocate would require
serious personal changes. This reluctance to challenge consumption has
been a big mistake, given the mounting environmental and social costs
of American "affluenza," extravagance and wastefulness.

The good news is that more and more people sense that there's a great
misdirection of life's energy. In a survey 83 percent of Americans say
society is not focused on the right priorities, 81 percent say America
is too focused on shopping and spending, 88 percent say American
society is too materialistic, 74 percent believe excessive materialism
is causing harm to the environment. If these numbers are correct,
there's a powerful base to build on.

Psychological studies show that materialism is toxic to happiness and
that more income and more possessions do not lead to a lasting sense
of well-being or satisfaction with life. What make people happy are
warm personal relationships and giving rather than getting. Many
people are trying to fight back against consumerism and
commercialization. They say, Confront consumption. Practice
sufficiency. Create social environments where overconsumption is
viewed as silly, wasteful, ostentatious. Create commercial-free zones.
Buy local. Eat slow food. Simplify your life. Downshift.

These prescriptions for change in the fundamental arrangements of
capitalism are difficult, to put it mildly. What circumstances might
make deep change plausible? A mounting sense of imminent crisis, wise
leadership, the articulation of a new American narrative or story, as
Bill Moyers has urged--all these would help. Most of all, we need a
new politics and new social movement powerful enough to drive change.

Environmentalists must join social progressives to address the crisis
of inequality unraveling our social fabric and undermining democracy.
It is a crisis of soaring executive pay, huge incomes and increasingly
concentrated wealth for a small minority while poverty rates approach
a thirty-year high, wages stagnate despite rising productivity, social
mobility and opportunity decline, the number of people without health
insurance soars, job insecurity increases, safety nets shrink and
Americans have the longest working day of all the rich countries. In
an America with such vast social insecurity, where half the families
just get by, economic arguments, even misleading ones, trump
environmental ones.

Environmentalists must also join those seeking to reform politics and
strengthen democracy. America's gaping social and economic inequality
poses a grave threat to democracy. We are seeing the emergence of a
vicious circle: income disparities shift political access and
influence to wealthy constituencies and large businesses, which
further imperils the potential of the democratic process to act to
correct the economic disparities. Corporations have been the principal
economic actors for a long time; now they are the principal political
actors as well. Neither environment nor society fares well under
corporatocracy. Environmentalists need to embrace public financing of
elections, lobbying regulation, nonpartisan Congressional
redistricting and other reforms as a core of their agenda. Today's
politics will never deliver environmental sustainability.

My point of departure was the momentous environmental challenge we
face. But today's environmental reality is linked powerfully with
other realities, including growing social inequality and neglect and
the erosion of democratic governance and popular control. So my
conclusion is that we as citizens must mobilize our spiritual and
political resources for transformative change on all three fronts. Our
best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about
environmental sustainability, social justice and political democracy
into one progressive force.

One area where fusion is beginning is the conversation between
environmental and social justice activists on solutions, including
green-collar ones, to the climate change threat. That's encouraging,
but it's a small part of what's needed. Mostly, everyone is still in
his or her silo. A sustained dialogue is urgently needed among the
three communities, to build a common agenda for action and a shared
commitment to build a new social movement for change in America. We
are all communities of a shared fate. We will rise or fall together.

==============

James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies, is the author of The Bridge at the Edge of the
World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to
Sustainability (Yale). In 1970 he co-founded the Natural Resources
Defense Council, which has become one of America's most well-endowed
and high-profile environmental organizations. He worked in the White
House under President Carter, chairing the Council on Environmental
Quality; when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected in 1992, Speth was
a senior adviser to their transition team. He spent the 1990s as the
administrator of the United Nations Development Program, where he
integrated environmental sustainability into the agency's poverty-
fighting mission. Thus, this article -- his call for a radical
departure from the movement's current strategy -- comes from the
ultimate environmental insider.