: We need to assign property rights to the enviroment. This way people who wanted to pollute would have to buy the right to do so from the State. If all the rights sell out, tough luck, you can't open that factory.
So if some prissy country doesn't like corporate investment enough to sell you a pollution right on your terms, take your multinational corporation to some country like Vietnam, a country especially anxious to please foreign investors, and have THEM pay YOU for YOUR right to pollute. This doesn't solve the pollution problem, it simply moves the problem to the countries that are cheap. And when the United States becomes cheap, the polluters will move here, and we Americans will rejoice, for we will finally have those all-sacred JOBS we've been indoctrinated, and systematized, into depending upon.
: The enviroment suffers because people take a communal attitude towards it. Because everybody is free to use it up, there is no incentive to take care of it.
People use up the environment rather than taking care of it because they've been indoctrinated into being capitalists, into placing short-term profit at the top of their list of priorities. Thus, environmental protection under capitalism requires the artificial invention of some capitalist "incentive," as if the possibility that we (even the polluters) could live in a society and a social world that will not be constantly threatened by oil shortages and environmental disasters, as if the possibility of a decent living for the world's children and grandchildren, were not incentives enough to override the short-term profit motive that is so deeply felt by polluters.
This environmental-abuse motive is not merely peculiar to capitalist societies. The old Soviet Union was a polluting society, too. Of course, the Soviets had their own form of indoctrination, that made their social actors prioritizing pollution above the social/ecological welfare.
The point is that indoctrinating people into some sort of economic ethic where they need "incentives" (where the incentive of a livable future should be an incentive enough for everyone to take positive action), without which they will behave badly, is not going to provide the world with a solution.
Ending the state of indoctrination will also mean ending the social state of dependency that creates the indoctrination -- it hardly means anything if we don't believe in polluters, if we need them for the jobs they provide.
Clive Ponting's volume GREEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD summarizes our predicament:
"Since the rise of settled societies some eight to ten thousand years ago the majority of the world's population have lived in conditions of grinding poverty. They have had few possessions, suffered from miserable living conditions and have been forced to spend most of their limited resources on obtaining enough food to stay alive. Although in all societies the elite have lived at a higher standard than the overwhelming mass of the population, they too only had access to a very limited range of goods and services for most of human history. However in the last two hundred years a sizeable minority of the world's population has achieved a material standard of living that would have been unimaginable for previous generations. But this relatively sudden and recent improvement has been obtained at a significant price -- a vast increase in the consumption of the world's limited energy resources and raw materials, widespread pollution from the industrial processes involved and a variety of social problems. In addition, it has raised major questions of equity about the distribution of wealth within individual countries and about the comparative standards of living in the industrialized world and the Third World."
Now either we can continue to ignore the social and environmental costs of industrial growth, in which case we will continue to experience them, or we can start to think about what creating a real sustainable society would entail. Which one shall it be?
None.
