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***** Monthly Review 52.7 "Capitalism's Environmental Crisis -- Is Technology the Answer?" by John Bellamy Foster
The standard solution offered to the environmental problem in advanced capitalist economies is to shift technology in a more benign direction: more energy-efficient production, cars that get better mileage, replacement of fossil fuels with solar power, and recycling of resources. Other environmental reforms, such as reductions in population growth and even cuts in consumption, are often advocated as well. The magic bullet of technology, however, is by far the favorite, seeming to hold out the possibility of environmental improvement with the least effect on the smooth working of the capitalist machine. The 1997 International Kyoto Protocol on global warming, designed to limit the greenhouse-gas emissions of nations, has only reinforced this attitude, encouraging many environmental advocates in the United States (including Al Gore in his presidential campaign) to advocate technological improvement in energy efficiency as the main escape from the environmental mess.
There are two ways in which technological change can lower environmental impact. First, it can reduce the materials and energy used per unit of output and, second, it can substitute less harmful technology. Much of the improvement in air quality since the nineteenth century, including its aesthetics, resulted from the reduction in the smoke and sulfur dioxide emissions for which coal-burning is notorious. Solar energy, in contrast to other present and prospective sources of energy, is not only available in inexhaustible supply (though limited at any given time and place), but is also ecologically benign. Environmentalists in general therefore prefer a shift to solar energy. Such considerations have encouraged the view that all stops should be pulled out on promoting technologies that increase efficiency, particularly of energy, and use more benign productive processes that get rid of the worst pollutants.
I want to concentrate here on the energy efficiency part of this. The issue of the materials used and the production technology are much more intractable problems under the current regime of accumulation. One of the reasons for this is that current productive processes often involve toxins of the worst imaginable kind. For example, we know that the proliferation of synthetic chemicals, many of which are extraordinarily harmful -- carcinogenic and teratogenic -- is associated with the growth of the petrochemical industry and agribusiness, producing products such as plastics and pesticides. (This was the central message of Barry Commoner's Closing Circle.) Yet attempts to overcome this dependence on toxic production create a degree of resistance from the vested interests of the capitalist order that only a revolutionary movement could surmount. In contrast, straightforward improvements in energy efficiency have always been emphasized by capital itself, and fall theoretically within the domain of what the system is said to be able to accomplish -- even what it prides itself in.
In the past, it was common for environmentalists to compare the problems of the "three worlds" using the well-known environmental impact or "PAT" formula (Population x Affluence x Technology = Environmental Impact). The third world's environmental problems, according to this dominant perspective, could be seen as arising first and foremost from population growth rather than technology or affluence (given the low level of industrialization). The environmental problems of the Soviet bloc were attributed to its inferior technology, which was less efficient in terms of materials and energy consumed per unit of out-put, and more toxic in its immediate, localized environmental effects, than in the West. The West's chief environmental problem, in contrast, was attributed neither to its population growth nor its technology (areas in which it had comparative environmental advantages), but to its affluence and the growing burden that this imposed on the environment. The ace in the hole for the wealthy capitalist countries was always seen to be their technological prowess -- which would allow them to promote environmental improvements while also expanding their affluence (that is, growth of capital and consumption).
What likelihood then is there that new or newly applied technology will be able to prevent environmental degradation from expanding along with the economy?
The Jevons Paradox
In order to answer this question it is useful to look at what ecological economists call the Jevons Paradox.* William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is best known as a British economist who was one of the pioneers of contemporary neoclassical economic analysis, with its subjective value theory rooted in marginal utility. Jevons first achieved national fame, however, for his work The Coal Question (1865). Jevons argued that British industrial growth had relied on cheap coal and that the increasing cost of coal, as deeper seams were mined, would generate economic stagnation. Substituting coal for corn, within the general Malthusian argument that says population increases faster than food supply, he observed: "Our subsistence no longer depends upon our produce of corn. The momentous repeal of the Corn Laws throws us from corn upon coal" (The Coal Question, 3rd edition, 194-195). Jevons argued that neither technology nor substitutability (that is, the substitution of other energy sources for coal) could alter this. Jevons was fabulously wrong in his calculations. His main mistake was to underestimate the importance of coal substitutes such as petroleum and hydroelectric power. Commenting on Jevons' argument in 1936, Keynes said it was "over-strained and exaggerated" (Essays in Biography, 1951, 259).
But there is one aspect of Jevons' argument that has attracted the admiration of ecological economists. Chapter Seven of The Coal Question was entitled "Of the Economy of Fuel." Here he argued that increased efficiency in using a natural resource, such as coal, only resulted in increased demand for that resource, not a reduction in demand. This was because such improvement in efficiency led to a rising scale of production. "It is wholly a confusion of ideas," Jevons wrote,
to suppose that the economic use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, the new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption according to a principle recognized in many parallel instances....The same principles apply, with even greater force and distinctiveness to the use of such a general agent as coal. It is the very economy of its use which leads to its extensive consumption....Nor is it difficult to see how this paradox arises....If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each. And if such is not always the result within a single branch, it must be remembered that the progress of any branch of manufacture excites a new activity in most other branches and leads indirectly, if not directly, to increased inroads upon our seams of coal....Civilization, says Baron Liebig, is the economy of power, and our power is coal. It is the very economy of the use of coal that makes our industry what it is; and the more we render it efficient and economical, the more will our industry thrive, and our works of civilization grow (140-142).
Jevons went on to argue in detail that the whole history of the steam engine was a history of successive economies in its use -- and each time this led to further increases in the scale of production and the demand for coal. "Every such improvement of the engine," he observed, "when effected, does but accelerate anew the consumption of coal. Every branch of manufacture receives a fresh impulse -- hand labor is still further replaced by mechanical labor" (152-153).
The contemporary significance of the Jevons paradox is seen with respect to the automobile in the United States. The introduction of more energy-efficient automobiles in this country in the 1970s did not curtail the demand for fuel because driving increased and the number of cars on the road soon doubled. Similarly, technological improvements in refrigeration simply led to more and larger refrigerators. The same tendencies are in effect within industry, independent of individual consumption....
... Here it is important to acknowledge that capitalism is a system that pursues accumulation and growth for its own sake. It is a juggernaut driven by the single-minded need on the part of business for ever-greater accumulation of capital. "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!" wrote Marx in Capital (vol. 1, chapter 24, section 3). The only real checks on this process are those generated by mutual competition and impersonal market forces, and, over the long run, periodic crises....
It is this singleminded obsession with capital accumulation that distinguishes capitalism from all other social systems, explaining why it can never stand still. A "stationary capitalism," as Joseph Schumpeter observed, is a "contradictio in adjecto" (Essays, p. 29). Competition, of the sort that forces upon capital continual transformations in the means of production in order to maintain and enhance profitability, provides the essential motor behind this drive to accumulate. This is what Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, called capitalism's tendency toward "creative destruction;" its creation through innovation of new and more efficient forms of production and distribution, and at the same time its destruction of previous forms of production and distribution. Caught up in this unrelenting process of accumulation and creative destruction, the system runs roughshod over each and every thing that stands in its path: all human and natural requirements that interfere with the accumulation of capital are considered barriers to be overcome.
The exponential growth of capitalism and the increasing consumption of raw materials and energy that goes with it have resulted in a rapidly compounding environmental problem. It is this that lies behind what the Worldwatch Institute, in its State of the World 1999, called "the acceleration of history" -- by which they mean the increasingly rapid transformation of the planetary environment and destruction of ecosystems....
[The full article is at <http://www.monthlyreview.org/1200jbf.htm>.] *****
Yoshie