Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe
by John Bellamy Foster
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This takes us to the social question. The problem we face when it comes to the appropriate response to impending climate catastrophe is not so much one of climate science -- beyond understanding the environmental parameters in which we must act -- as social science. It is an issue of social conditions and social agency. We live in in a capitalist society, which means a societyin which the accumulation of capital, i.e., economic growth carried out primarily on the terms of the 1 percent at the top (the ruling capitalist class), is the dominant tendency. It is a system that accumulates capital in one phase simply so that it can accumulate still more capital in the next phase -- always on a larger scale. There is no braking mechanism in such a system and no social entity in control. If for some reason the system slows down (as it is forced to periodically due to its own internal contradictions) it enters an economic crisis. That may be good temporarily for the environment, but it is terrible for human beings, particularly the bottom portion of the 99 percent, faced with rising unemployment and declining income.
Overall, capitalism is aimed at exponential growth. It cannot stand still. The minimum adequate growth rate of the system is usually thought to be 3 percent. But this means that the economy doubles in size about every 24 years. How many such doublings of world output can the planet take?
Hence, there is a direct and growing contradiction between capitalism and the environment, a contradiction that becomes more and more apparent as the size of the capitalist economy begins to rival the basic biogeochemical processes of the planet. Naomi Klein has rightly characterized the age we live in as "disaster capitalism" because of its dual economic and ecological crises -- and due to the increasingly exploitative means the rich employ to enable them to prosper in the midst of increasing destruction.7
There are two predominant ways of addressing the climate crisis and the environmental problem generally. One is to look for technological ways out -- often seen as being spurred by the creation of carbon markets, but the onus is on the technology. The argument here is that through the massive introduction of various advanced technologies we can have our pie and eat it too. We can get around the environmental problem, it is suggested, without making any fundamental social changes. Thus, the pursuit of profits and accumulation can go on as before without alteration. Such magic-technological answers are commonly viewed as the only politically feasible ones, since they are attractive to corporate and political-power elites, who refuse to accept the need for system change. Consequently, the establishment has gambled on some combination of technological miracles emerging that will allow them to keep on doing just as they have been doing. Predictably, the outcome of this high-stake gamble has been a failure not only to decrease carbon emissions, but also to prevent their continued increase.
more....
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/foster291011.html
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