>I just can't see it. Run out of what, exactly? Forests? Hardly. Oil?
Known oil reserves are rising, not falling. Water? more than three
quarters of the earth's surface is water. Clean air? It is getting
cleaner.
Old growth and (and densely wooded) acreage is dropping drastically. And these are the tyupe of forest which peform services such as carbon sequestration, watershed retention and bio-diversity maintenance -- all of which are beneficial to human beings. In terms of water salt, and water polluted past the point of safe usage does not count. We see conflicts already developing in many parts of the world over water for agriculture and industry. (Not providing adequate water for home usage --drinking, cooking and sanitation is simply cruelty. Home usage does not begin to match industrial, commericial and agricultural usage.) Is there enough clean water for all? Certainly -- if agriculture uses sprinkler systems and drip irrigation rather than ditch irrigation, if industrial cleaning and cooling is done is a water thrifty manner.
Similarly, whether or not we are running out of oil, we certain face Greenhouse limits on industrial fuel consumption. Even your new ideological friend Bjorn Lomborg admits this.
In terms of air getting cleaner: this is plain wrong for developing nations. And even in inudstrialized nations, it is right for only half the pollutants. Look at the figures in World Resource 2000-2001, and you will find increase in about 50% of the air pollutants measured>
>The only rational meaning to such a proposition could be that we might
have occasionally come close to the limits on resources *at the current
level of technological development*. But to assume that the known level
of resources is the same thing as the absolute level of resources would
be to make the same mistake as Malthus and the Club of Rome.
Unless you can reliably predict when technological breakthroughs will come about, it makes sense to make careful use of resources close to that limit. It especially makes sense when using sensibly is cheaper than gathering new resources.
>FURTHER is capitalism really uniquely wasteful?Waste is a famously subjective category, too.
Capitalism is superior to feudalism in almost every category I'm aware of. (Even the wastefulness I complain of is a product of success rather than failure.) It seems rather odd to defend it agaist improvement or replacement of this ground. And yes Stalinism (and I would argue Lenimism in general) tends to produce the same kind of waste capitalism does or worse. Any system that combines capitalist or better levels of production with highly uneven power will tend to give benefits of industrialization to the powerful, while putting the costs on the powerlessness.
In terms of waste being "subjective"; I should have been clearer. Take the example of building a new set of flats in London suburb.. We can build them with thin walls, and great roaring furnaces. Or we can install good insulation, triple paned windows, heat exchanging vents, and much smaller furnaces. In either case the flats can be warmed to any temperature the inhabitants are likely to enjoy.. But in the latter case not only are the flats cheaper to heat, they are cheaper to build as well. This is because the cost of the extra-insulation and so forth is more than made up by the savings of installing smaller furnaces. Ask any friend you may have in the building trades to confirm this. By any reasonabl standard building the thin walled flats is wasteful.
>'Externalities' is an interesting concept, but one that it strikes me is
loaded with capitalistic bias. I would be loathe to use it without
trying to critique it first...
Manipulate any way you want. It remains that costs of production are not being counted as costs of production. Feeding baked loaves of bread to cows is an error in capitalist, Stalinist, or for that matter socialist societies (if such exist). Generally when it happends, it means that costs are being overlooked.
>
>>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.
>I'm sorry but this does not seem persuasive. If capitalism is wasteful,
and resources are limited, then the logical conclusion is not a popular
struggle against capitalism, but an elite campaign to restrict
consumerism: environmentalism.
And I'm sorry, but this is not pursuasive. The logical conclusion for workers, and for those supporting working class interests is a poplular struggle against the wasteful aspects of captialism. And in fact this actually happens. Patrick Bond has cited some case. I can add that all over the world workers and peasants struggle against dams that would drown their homes, against toxic waste dump that would poison their children, against mines that would destroy their communities. This is dismissed by elites as NIMBy (not in my back yard); in fact is a responsbile democratic defense by workers against attempts to subsidize capitalist production with their lives.
>
>>But environmentalism does have one weakness that might exacerbate these
>If Gar means that the moral exigency of world collapse tends to minimise
rather than emphasise different class interests, then of course he's
right. But that is indeed the problem. Environmentalism is one of those
bogus ideologies that 'transcends' class differences, so often thrown up
by middle class people who dread social conflict.
Are you saying that there NO problems in which the classes may have intesecting interests -- innoculation against disease for example which protects members of all classes only if members of all classes receive innoculations. But you pointed out the class conflict quite clearly here. Elites want to save limited resources by reducing consumption in the sense of make workers lives worse -- turning down the thermostat, not watering their gardens, and so forth. It is in the intrest of the working class to limit the use of resources by using them more efficiently to provide the same resources -- insulating buildings, creating higher milage cars and better and more convenient trains.
>Well, that certainly seems to be true of the environmental movement
which is not just overwhelmingly elitist in its outlook but in its
membership as well
I would want to see some figures justifying this. My personal experience is that the grassroots membership (as opposed to the leadership) of the environmental movement tends to be overwhelmingly working class...