[A-List] Green Left: Why the market system cannot solve global warming

[glparramatta <glparramatta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36163


 Change the system - not the climate!

Norm Dixon
26 January 2007

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has helped dramatise the enormity 
of the global environmental crisis. The scale of the threat posed by 
industrially induced global warming, and the short time in which to take 
meaningful action to prevent catastrophic consequences, makes the 
question of how to combat global warming arguably the most urgent one 
facing humanity...

...Gore focuses on individual actions, makes few serious demands on big 
business and endorses the largely voluntary market-based measures, such 
as emissions trading, that are contained in Kyoto. He, like most 
mainstream environmental groups and the major Green parties, place the 
onus of solving global warming onto individuals, while relying on the 
capitalist market, nudged along by so-called “green” taxes and 
legislative regulations.

Such views reflect a well-meaning but utopian belief that if enough of 
us decide to drastically reduce our demand on the world’s resources, big 
business and governments will respond to “market signals” and adapt to a 
slow-growth or no-growth economy.

It is a good thing to organise our lives to live more ecologically. But 
that alone will not be enough to halt the crisis. It certainly cannot be 
the main strategy as it will let the real culprits off the hook and 
divert precious activist energy away from challenging the underlying 
systemic dynamic driving ecological degradation.

What is required is the rapid, far-reaching reorganisation of industry, 
energy, transport and mass consumption patterns, and the massive 
transfer of clean technology to the Third World. This is simply not 
possible under capitalism.

As Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster explained in Monthly Review in 
1995 ( 
<http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1&2/foster.html>http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1&2/foster.html), 
behind most appeals for individual “ecological morality”, “there lies 
the presumption that we live in a society where the morality of the 
individual is the key to the morality of society. If people as 
individuals could simply change their moral stance with respect to 
nature and alter their behaviour in areas such as propagation, 
consumption, and the conduct of business, all would be well. What is all 
too often overlooked in such calls for moral transformation is the 
central institutional fact of our [capitalist] society: what might be 
called the global ‘treadmill of production’.”

Continues: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36163

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See also this article from Canada:

CONFRONTING THE CLIMATE CHANGE CRISIS
by Ian Angus

Any reasonable person must eventually ask why capitalists and 
			their governments seek to avoid effective action on climate change. 
			Everyone, including capitalists and politicians, will be affected. 
			Nicholas Stern estimates that the world economy will shrink by 20% 
			if we don’t act. So why don’t the people in power do something?

The answer is that the problem is rooted in the very nature of 
capitalist society, which is made up of thousands of corporations, all 
competing for investment and for profits. There is no "social interest" 
in capitalism — only thousands of separate interests that compete with 
each other.

If a company decides to invest heavily in cutting emissions, its profits 
will go down. Investors will move their capital into more profitable 
investments. Eventually the green company will go out of business.

The fundamental law of capitalism is "Grow or Die." Anarchic, unplanned 
growth isn’t an accident, or an externality, or a market failure. It is 
the nature of the beast.

Continues: http://www.socialistvoice.ca/Soc-Voice/Soc-Voice-110.htm