James Heartfield said:
>There is something in the green philosophy that causes contempt for working people to re-occur as a theme. Green thinking is anti-mass, anti-industrialisation. It is hardly surprising that that tends to merge into hostility to the popular mass and the industrial classes.
James also said:
>Gar goes on to try to differentiate a non-malthusian environmentalism.I'm not sure that this can succeed. If you start out from the assumption that we have reached natural limits on resources, then you can only argue for restricting population.
These two points are critical to answer. I'm going to take the second first, because the answer to the second leads to the answer to the first.
There is a quite strong anti-malthusian basis for environmentalism. It is a view that we have plenty of resources to support a much larger population than we have - but not enough to do so in a horribly wasteful manner - and that in fact capitalism is using resources in a horribly wasteful manner. (Waste here is defined as overloading sources and sinks in such a manner that we will run out of them in the foreseeable future. I'm currently in process of writing an article to reply to empiric part of the anti-environmental case; I'll use this post to reply to the logic that environmentalism is inherently Malthusian and anti-mass.)
Why does capitalism tend to waste resources more in this particular manner? The economists on this list are extremely familiar with part of the answer - externalities. A great deal of what we think of as environmental damage consists of the natural tendency of capitalists to put their costs onto workers to the extent that they can get away with. Most forms of pollution save the polluter money by disposing of waste more cheaply at the expense of the health of those the pollution harms. Similarly exhausting common resources deprives someone else of the ability to use them - perhaps today, perhaps in the future.
The usual capitalist answer is that externalities are a minor portion of transactions, and anyway positive externalities balance negative ones. But here is one of many points where the genius of capitalism tends towards self-destruction; capitalism does not merely produce negative externalities; it tends to produce negative externalities at an ever-accelerating rate. As production rises negative externalities constitute a growing portion of the transaction, while positive externalities tend grow at a linear rate or below. Capitalists benefit and gain competitive advantage in proportion to the extent they can push their costs onto someone else, and also gain competitive advantage to the extent they can capture and charge for any public benefits they accidentally produce. (Additionally negative externalities are more likely than positive one to begin with. If you don't believe this, wield a large hoe at random in a neighbor's garden while blindfolded. I'll bet you strike a valued plant, a window, or a toe before you remove a weed. ) I think it was old whiskers who pointed out something along these lines in a study of soil fertility.
Similarly, capitalism tends to waste resources due to what someone or other referred to as "the anarchy of production". Take building insulation for example. In the U.S. insulating all new building at a rating of around R-64 would save energy at a cost equivalent of well under $7.00 a barrel of oil. So why don't builders insulate all new buildings to this degree and add the equivalent of say $14.00/bbl to the price of the building?
The problem of course is that when businesses buy or lease office space, when families buy or lease homes, energy efficiency can't be the determining factor. Location is critical. Families need access to work, schools, shopping. Businesses need access to customers, workers, and suppliers. And beyond locations is layout; businesses and families both want appropriate floor plans, materials, and quality of construction suiting their particular needs. And both must operate within budgets. Because energy efficiency in seldom a determining factor in the purchase, it does not add greatly to the seller's bargaining power. As a result, U.S. developers generally cannot recover the cost of constructing more energy efficient buildings than required by law, and generally don't build much more energy efficiency than this. (Note by the way that "green taxes" would not solve this problem. Insulation is ALREADY a cheaper solution than additional heating fuel.) In short, even in the absence of externalities capitalism provides perverse incentives to waste resources.
I will simply add that problem of externalities, and probably that of perverse incentives as well, does not apply only to capitalism but to any industrial society in which power is concentrated in small elite - i.e. non-capitalist dictatorships.
This leads to the first question James Heartfield asked - as to whether environmentalism in inherently anti-mass and anti-worker. Obviously environmentalists operating from premises I've outlined above have good reason not to be anti-mass or anti-worker, and in fact good reason to support egalitarianism and anti-capitalism.
This does beg the question of why so much of the environmental movement is in fact Malthusian. Part of the answer I gave was in the post James was replying to. In the U.S., at any rate the left does not for practical purposes exist. There are no progressive movements in the U.S. in which the majority does not take for granted the absolute necessity for capitalism, and the impossibility of any alternative. It seems a bit unfair to attack environmentalism for lack of superiority to other movements.
But environmentalism does have one weakness that might exacerbate these tendencies that afflict all U.S. movements at this historical moment. Paradoxically, perhaps one could say dialectically, this stems from a strength. Environmental problems affect mainly the working class. But they can't avoid affecting the rich to some extent as well. Not even the rich can drink exclusively bottled water, nor is bottled water free of contamination. Very few of the rich want to spend all their time mansions surrounded by pristine forests, and never sample the pleasure of the city.
As a result some capitalists, and a quite large number of members of the coordinator class, are attracted to environmental movement. Because they can give more money, more time, and often have more business skills they tend to gain influence out of proportion to their numbers.