Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism?
Wednesday, 15 January 2014 09:09By Richard Smith, Truthout | News Analysis
(Photo: Ian Britton / Flickr)This article is a lightly revised and updated version of the article originally published as "Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism?" in Real-World Economics Review, issue 53, June 26, 2010, pages 28-42. Also See: Green Capitalism: The God That Failed, by Richard Smith.
Given the relentless growth of global GHG emissions (currently growing at 2 percent per year, up 70 percent from 1990) and ever-higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere (currently at 400 parts per million, up 30 percent from 1990), climate scientist Kevin Anderson at the Radical Emissions Reduction Conference (December 10-11, 2013, at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom) concluded that "Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future." The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that "the current state of affairs is unacceptable. ... Energy-related CO2 emissions are at historic highs" and emission trends are "perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius, which would have devastating consequences for the planet." In similar vein, PricewaterhouseCooper, the UK government chief scientist, and a growing body of academics and researchers are allying current emission trends with 4-degree Celsius to 6-degree Celsius futures.1 Tyndall scientists drew the only possible conclusion:
We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non-radical option. Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions - they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption - the rationale for this conference.2
How much do we need to cut and how quickly to prevent runaway warming? With the declared aim of keeping average global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the Kyoto Protocol required industrialized countries to cut their average greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 5.2 percent below average 1990 levels. For the biggest emitters, this would require cuts on the order of 80 percent to 95 percent by 2050.3 But we have blown right past the Kyoto targets. Instead of falling, developed country emissions have grown, some sharply. One study shows that from 1990 to 2008, emissions from developed country grew 7 percent, led by the United States, whose emissions grew by a whopping 25 percent in just 18 years.4 Meanwhile, China's emissions have doubled in just the past decade, and China is now the world's leading GHG polluter, in large measure because it's producing stuff Americans and Europeans used to produce for themselves - but under less salubrious environmental standards. So we're farther behind than ever, global emissions are soaring and, if we continue on this business-as-usual trajectory, we're headed for that "4 degrees Celsius world" before the end of this century.5 That's why James Hansen, the world's leading climate scientist, quit his job at NASA to devote himself full time to activism, education and getting himself arrested in front of the White House trying to impress the president and the public at large that we need "radical," "deep" GHG emissions cuts - "urgently" because we face a climate emergency.
So Where Are the "Radical" Solutions?
But the problem is how can we ever make deep cuts in consumption of energy (or anything else) in a capitalist economy? An economy in which we all depend upon growth to provide jobs and higher living standards? This is where the "Radical Emissions Reduction" conference fell flat. When the focus turned from the climate science to social science, no one could suggest anything like the sort of truly radical changes, indeed systemic changes, we would have to make to meet the climate emergency we face. Instead, participants rehashed the same tired anodyne nostums that have failed to change anything of substance over the past 30 years - "lifestyle" changes, "shaming people" into consuming less, and the like. Andrew Simms of the New Economic Foundation called for "green jobs" to get "more growth without increasing consumption" (as if!). Naomi Klein, the keynote speaker, called for a "radical movement" to push for "radical emissions reduction." But no one asked the obvious question, which is what would happen to the economy if we actually forced the fossil fuel companies to cut production by 90 percent? Seven of the ten biggest companies on the Fortune Global 500 are oil companies and auto manufacturers. If these companies had to cut production by 90 percent, or even 50 percent, that would mean immediate bankruptcy, economic collapse, global depression and mass unemployment. And not just the auto-oil industrial complex. Fossil fuel use permeates the entire economy: industry, transportation, farming, construction, services, fashion, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, the plastic junk industrial complex, the internet ... you name it.6 There is virtually no sector that is not significantly dependent upon fossil fuels. This means that given capitalism, given our dependence upon these "job creators," the public is never going to support cutting emissions on anything like the scale we need to save the humans - unless someone out there is promising them alternative employment. But who would that be? This is capitalism, not socialism. So growth and the environment seem to be completely at odds. What to do?
Mainstream (capitalist) ecological economists have tried to deal with problem of capitalist growth in one of two ways: Either, with Herman Daly and the anti-growth "steady-state economics" school he founded - which today includes the UK's Tim Jackson (Prosperity Without Growth, 2009), Andrew Simms and Victoria Johnson at the UK's New Economics Foundation, and the French décroissance (de-growth) school led by Serge Latouche - these theorists have imagined that capitalism can be reconstructed so that it stops growing quantitatively (or even contracts) but continues to develop internally - much as, Daly suggested, we ourselves stop growing physically at adolescence but continue to develop our capabilities, intellect, skills, etc.7
Or, with the pro-growth "green capitalism" school led by Paul Hawken, Lester Brown, Frances Cairncross - which today includes Nicholas Stern, Paul Krugman and others - these theorists have imagined that capitalism could grow more or less forever but that growth could be rendered benign for the environment by imposing carbon taxes, by forging a "green industrial revolution" to "decouple" growth from pollution ("dematerialization") and by relying on consumer demand to pressure industries to go green.
Pro-growth or anti-growth, both approaches assume that capitalism is sufficiently malleable that capitalist fundamentals can be "inverted" such that corporations can, in one way or another, be induced to subordinate profit-making to "saving the Earth."8 But what unites both schools of thought is their a priori rejection of alternatives to capitalism, their rejection of any kind of economic planning or socialism. So Jonathan Porrit, former chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, ex-Green Party co-chair and one-time director of Friends of the Earth, spoke for the mainstream when he declared that "Logically, whether we like it or not, sustainability is therefore going to have to be delivered within an all-encompassing capitalist framework. We don't have time to wait for any big-picture ideological successor."9
I contend that both these strategies were misguided and doomed from the start because, as Milton Friedman used to say, "Corporations are in business to make money, not to save the world." Saving the world would require that corporations subordinate profit maximizing to ecological concerns. But how can they do this? Companies can embrace environmental reforms (recycling, green products and the like) so long as this saves or makes them money. But they can't sacrifice earnings, let alone put themselves out of business, just to save the humans, because they're not responsible to the humans, to society. They're responsible to their shareholders. And shareholders (who might even be you and me) as investors are capitalists rationally looking to make money, not to save the world. I dissect the problems with the pro-growth "sustainable development" models elsewhere.10 Here I'm going to elucidate the contradictions and irrational assumptions of the anti-growth school through a critique of the theories of its leading protagonist, Professor Herman Daly.
I argue that Daly, Jackson, Latouche and the steady state/degrowth school are indeed correct that continuous economic growth, even so-called green growth, is unsustainable on a finite planet. And they're also right that slowing down - producing less, foregoing producing goods and services we don't really need - opens up the prospect of greater freedom, a better life. The French, naturally, put it best:
The recipe for de-growth lies in doing more, and doing better, with less. ... Far from necessarily implying such sacrifices, the ecological conversion of our societies holds out the promise of more joie de vivre, and for today, rather than for tomorrow: healthier food, more leisure time and more conviviality.11
But Daly, Jackson and the rest are mistaken to assume that we can get a sustainable "steady state" economy or "de-grow" the economy "within a capitalist framework." I contend first, that the idea of a steady-state or de-growing capitalism is based on spectacularly untenable assumptions, starting with the assumption that growth is optional rather than built into capitalism. I argue that irresistible and relentless pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent upon all but a few businesses, and that such pressures would prevail in any conceivable capitalism.
Secondly, this paper takes issue with Daly's thesis, which also underpins his SSE model, that capitalist efficiency and resource allocation is the best humanity can come up with. I argue that this belief is incompatible with an ecological economy, and therefore it undermines Daly's own environmental goals. I conclude that because capitalist growth cannot be stopped, or even slowed, and because market-driven growth is driving us toward collapse, ecological economists would do well to abandon this distraction and get on with the project of developing a compelling and plausible vision of a post-capitalist eco-socialist economy and to join with eco-socialists to help organize for such a resolution before it's too late to bother trying.
I. THE END OF GROWTH?
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten