>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.
On the contrary, I am (as I have so often before) claiming that in a great many ways the immediate interests of the classes coincide - as they do in the general increase in the productivity of labour and its consequences for improvement.
But political ambition that takes cross-class solidarity as its basis, generally ends up disguising the competing class interests, to the advantage of the ruling class and the disadvantage of the ruled. This is the origins and development of environmentalism.
>From the Club of Rome in the 1970s, the ecology movement has groped for
a political language that transcends class, and finds it in the general
disaster scenarios that green politics thrives on. Characteristically
the empirical content of the supposedly impending catastrophe comes
after the ideological need to believe in it.
So for example, in the 1970s, it was the prospect of a second ice age that motivated the catastrophists. Now, on the basis of a lot of ill- understood science, they have opportunistically reversed their position to say that, rather, it is global warming, not cooling that is the problem.
In political terms this need to believe in the impending disaster corresponds to the inner life of the petit bourgeois, for whom all social progress is equal to a catastrophic loss of power in the face of unintelligible forces. In other ages the catastrophes that have motivated the middle class have been the prospect of 'race suicide', 'the red menace' and the 'nuclear winter'. The rational basis of such beliefs is less important than the psycho-social need that they fulfil.
In reply to my scepticism, Gar proceeds:
>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
Well, this is just an attempt to evade the fact that, in spite of everything that the environmental movement have been saying, the forested areas of the world have been growing, most especially in the developed world. Now that the greens have been rumbled they protest that 'this kind of forest is not the right kind'. Plainly no happy news would ever satisfy such a complaint, because it is not meant to be solved, just give grounds for complaint. The specific answer is that other types of forest, too 'perform services' such as carbon sequestration, water retention etc.
>In terms of water salt, and
>water polluted past the point of safe usage does not count.
No, plainly it does not count to you. But to those who are interested in solving problems rather than wallowing in self-indulgent doom-saying, sea water, as the origin of all fresh water is very much to the point.
>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.)
This is an argument backwards from the conclusion to the proposition. Gar attributes conflict to water shortage. But the conflicts (such as in the Middle East or Turkey) over water are in fact about the artificial creation of water shortages as a means of conflict, not vice versa.
> 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.
Sheer assertion. These methods might be necessary, but not necessarily.
>
>Similarly, whether or not we are running out of oil, we certain face
>Greenhouse limits on industrial fuel consumption.
Again, more assertion, based on an argument that is looking increasingly threadbare.
>In terms of air getting cleaner: this is plain wrong for developing
>nations.
Duhh! Good case for development, then! Yes indeed, burning cow-dung - responsible for a great proportion of respiratory illnesses in S Asia - is bad for you. People in the third world need the industrial development that will produce cleaner emissions so jealously clung onto by first world governments.
>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>
Yes, such statistics as a rule emphasise 'pollutants' that are much less harmful than those that have been removed. In London in the forties and fifties hundreds of people each winter would die from respiratory illnesses due to the smog. Today, that does not happen.
>
>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.
First, we are not remotely near any such limit. Second, many of the technologies that could be applied already exist.
>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.
Funnily enough, I have just finished writing a book with a friend in the building trade, Ian Abley, Sustainable Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age, published by John Wiley in December.
The answer to the question is not as straight forward as you think. It all depends on the expected life of the house, and so on. But for the most part, insulation is the norm these days, not the exception. There are as you rightly indicate, a great many new materials that will contribute to more efficient fuel use, which will be showcased in Sustainable Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age.
>
>
>>'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.
OK, I would not want to be too doctrinaire, but it is a common mistake critics of capitalism make to rest their analysis on a concept that merely reproduces capitalist exigencies. This was the point that Marx made against Prudhon's ethical case against capitalism.
It seems to me that 'externalities' is a concept whose purpose is to reconcile value production with broader exigencies of capitalist social reproduction. So those things that individual enterprise creates, but that tend to generate problems for capitalist social reproduction are called 'externalities', like drug-dealers tendency to generate social disorder and thieving in their clientele. It does not follow that the War against Drugs is anything but a war to save capitalism.
You say 'costs of production are not being counted as costs of production', like an accountant trying to balance the books. But you are just confusing two distinct meanings of 'costs of production' - for capital, or for human emancipation. To assimilate the one to the other hardly helps the case.
>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.
Does it happen often? In Britain, as you know, we like to feed our cows on dead cows - a cost-cutting exercise with rather negative consequences.
>
>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.
This is the case for the reform of capital from wasteful to parsimonious. But wake up and smell the coffee. The ruling class agrees with you. They want to cut the waste, too. In fact they want to restrict working class consumption.
>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...
According to the British Social Attitudes Survey 'those in the professional and managerial class and those with O-level or equivalent qualifications or above, are much more likely than working class people or those with lower qualifications to have engaged in some form of activism'. Furthermore, they added 'we find that young people are less likely than older ones to undertake direct action, which is somewhat surprising'. (British Social Attitudes 14th Report, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997, p132)
According to an opinion poll published in Germany in March 2000, 67 per cent of the electorate regard the Greens as a 'superfluous organisation'. With as many as 40 per cent of young Green voters estimated to have defected to other parties, the Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, said 'In the end we may come to be regarded as a one- generation project'. (London Guardian, March 18, 2000)
-- James Heartfield