In the greenhouse literature, conversion strategies aimed at reducing the production of greenhouse gases (i.e. carbon taxes aimed to phase out fossil-fuels) go by the name of "prevention," while muddling along as the climate changes (i.e. building dikes against rising seas) is known as "adaptation." Environmentalists support prevention, while mainstream economists, following their own failing god, usually advocate "freeing" the market to reshape society (and nature) to the new climate. Usually, the debate is restrained, and the likely specifics of adaptation -- political chaos, for example, or ferocious storms -- disappear in a cloud of genteel generalization. And though everyone knows that some adaptation will be inevitable, environmentalists don't like to admit it, justifiably fearing that such an admission will help force prevention from the agenda. It's easier, after all, to breed drought-resistant crops (the Israelis are already doing so) than to convert to a sustainable economy; easier to insure against a possible rise in sea level by raising the height of offshore drilling platforms (Shell Oil is already doing so) than to reduce oil consumption.
Stephen Schneider has weighed into the prevention-vs-adaptation debate with the notion of "active adaptation," in which preventive measures are used to slow the warming and a planned post-greenhouse infrastructure is phased in as the existing infrastructure wears out. It's a fine idea, if a bit abstract, and he tries to make it practical as well by arguing that the adaptations necessary to stabilize the atmosphere -- conservation, reforestation, and all the rest -- would be economically beneficial in themselves, regardless of any threat of global warming.
The U.S. economics establishment, for its part, is wasting no time in combatting moves to make prevention strategies appear reasonable. The New York Times, in a front-page story by economics writer Peter Passell, entitled "Cure for Greenhouse Effect: The Costs Will Be Staggering," [18] sketched the drift of official opinion. "Crude initial estimates," Passell opines, indicate that for at least the next 50 years it will be cheaper to adapt to greenhouse warming than to attack its causes. He then presents a number of economists, all regally unconcerned by the "externalities" ignored by their models -- storms, starvation, extinction -- and suffering little strain extending their traditional views to emerging conditions. Harvard's Thomas Shelling argues that increasing costs for irrigation and flood control will raise the price of food by only 20 percent, that the quality of life 100 years from now will depend as much on technology and capital as on the amount of CO2 in the air, and that "if money to contain carbon dioxide emissions comes out of other investment, future civilizations could be the losers." In another article, Passell is even more sanguine. Citing Department of Agriculture estimates that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would cost $170 billion annually in reduced agricultural productivity, he concluded, "That's a lot of money. But it amounts to just 1 percent of current world income. As [Bush's Council of Economic Advisors] argues, it is in the same ballpark as the costs of government regulations that now distort food production and reduce its total value. To put it another way, freer markets in agriculture, the Council suggests, could more than offset greenhouse-effect losses." [19]
There are more examples, equally appalling. The anti-prevention economists tend to the political right, and generally see the economy as conforming to some idealized notion of free-market efficiency. In reality, the economy is anything but efficient, as is shown by the work of physicist and alternative energy analyst Amory Lovins.
A "LEAST COST" ENERGY ECONOMY?
Lovins, best known for his Soft Energy Paths [20], takes a position so far from the traditional standard that it's hard to believe he's describing the same world. While many economists argue that conversion to a post-greenhouse world is unaffordable, especially in the Third World, Lovins insists that it would be far cheaper to cut greenhouse gas emissions by increasing energy efficiency than to continue along the present path. Further, he sees energy efficiency as a prerequisite for sustainable development, and believes that "far from being costly, abating global warming should, on the whole, be immensely profitable. Improving energy productivity can save the world upwards of a trillion dollars per year -- as much as the global military budget."
Lovins isn't crazy. He's simply worked out the "inefficiencies" in world energy markets, in detail, and concluded that the world can be saved by being rationally frugal. Talking about a 1981 book, Least Cost Energy: Solving the CO2 Problem, which he coauthored, Lovins says, "We began by documenting the potential to save about three- fourths of the energy used in 1973 to run the West German economy... We then imagined, a century hence, an entire world industrialized to that level: a world of eight billion people, with a fivefold gross increase in the World Product and a tenfold increase in developing countries' economic activity. Yet if, in such a world, energy were used in ways that saved money with 1980 prices and technologies, total energy use would fall to a third of today's level... Of course, a world with eight billion people industrialized to a West German standard may be unrealistic or undesirable for other reasons. Our point was that an energy policy built on efficiency would enable the Earth to support a prosperous civilization that was not plagued by acid rain, global warming, urban smog, nuclear proliferation and deforestation." [21]
And what of Lovins' view that the market makes a good vehicle for such discipline? It makes his work interesting in two respects. First, by showing just how far today's economy diverges from one based on "least cost" energy, he proves the ideological nature of analyses that treat the existing economy as the product of "efficient" market forces. Second, his faith in the market prompts a key question: Why, after all, is our present society so monumentally inefficient? Is it, as Lovins believes, because powerful institutional forces prevent the market from imposing economic discipline? Or is it, as green radicals have long claimed, the very success of the market -- in particular its success in "externalizing" social and ecological costs -- that is to blame?
Certainly the captains of industry skip out on the bill whenever they can, but this doesn't prove the market compels them to do so, for today's economy is structured as much by militarism and state subsidy as by direct market force. What part, then, does the market play? Is this even an important question, or is it enough to know that countries and corporations alike find profit and comparative advantage in wasted energy? If some new energy policy could change the rules of the game, making it more profitable to pursue a solar transition than to continue along the present disastrous path, would that policy stand a chance of being implemented? Lovins believes that it would, and perhaps he's right. But is such an energy policy possible, given the degree to which the rich and powerful have bound their interests to the fossil fuels? Is it possible soon enough?
THE POLITICS OF EMERGENCY
Like ecological crisis in general, the greenhouse crisis compels us to ask, first of all, what will work. Unfortunately, this isn't a simple question, even in the best of cases -- and judging by the rush to parlay the greenhouse crisis into a rebirth for nuclear power, it doesn't appear that much rational, clear-headed pragmatism will come of this emergency. Just how much room remains for cheap maneuvering is clear from the wave of articles we've suffered in the last few years on a "new generation" of "passively safe" reactors. The anti-nuclear battle, it seems, will have to be fought once again, and this time the battle lines will not be clearly drawn. Senator Wirth caught the spin of greenhouse nuclear boosterism just right when he argued, a few years back, that it's time for the country to get over the "nuclear measles." "The environmentalists will come around," he added. "They can't help but come around." [22]
And some environmentalists have come around. William Reilly, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, is one of them, and so is Schneider, who finds himself compelled to advocate "inherently safe" nukes -- in a book published by the Sierra Club! [23] Thus, environmentalists take up the spirit of emergency, but sometimes only deepen the fogs of false necessity that obscure the real choices. Lovins, with his insistence on simple economics, is rather clearer, noting that "investing in nuclear power rather than in far cheaper energy-efficient technologies will make global warming worse." [24] It's a point that alone justifies the end of the nuclear industry. It also shows how, amidst apocalyptic storms, the "least cost" argument can be a welcome tonic -- the more you spend on nukes, the less you have for fluorescent bulbs, weatherstripping, solar research and mass transit.
It's from the strength of such simple economics, ultimately, that "Third Wave Environmentalism" draws its charms. The Third Wavers, from the Worldwatch Institute to the Environmental Defense Fund to the EPA, seek to yoke the market to the goal of ecological reform -- and to avoid stickier political issues -- by arguing that the best hope lies in modulating existing markets with new taxes (like carbon taxes) and in creating new markets in abstract goods like tradable "pollution rights." With such markets in place, both companies and countries could profit by controlling pollution, for any unused space in their pollution allocations could be sold to the highest bidder. The goal of such devices is to "internalize" ecological costs into the economic calculus, and to thereby avoid the absurdities that occur when bureaucracies attempt to micromanage economies. In other words, Third Wavers want to use the market to force the larger economy to adapt to natural limits.
The historical background here is crucial -- traditional pollution-control measures have failed, and just about everyone admits it. Further, in the wake of the Eastern Bloc catastrophe, state-centered "planning" is held in poor repute indeed. The Third Wavers,
without faith in democratic forms of planning (if they have even heard of them) see the market as the sole alternative to bureaucratic command-and-control. These days, there are even radical Third-Wavers, dreaming of markets that, though still capitalist, have become both ecologically efficient and democratically accountable. [25] It's a desperate dream, to be sure, for it relegates popular opposition to the margins of a market-oriented politics. "Substantive democracy" is just not in the cards. Democracy may be possible, even necessary, but ecological realism demands that the old dream of liberation yield to the "socialization of the market."
Can Third-Wave environmentalism work? The test must come in the real social world. Could a global market in CO2-emissions rights, as Bush has half-seriously proposed, really help? The first problem is determining just how much CO2 each country would have the "right" to generate in the first place. If any matter was ever complicated, this is it, but it's fair to say that, in general, the issue is split between the North and the South, with the North preferring quotas based on GNP and the South preferring quotas based on population. This is a rather basic disagreement, and it's hard to imagine it being overcome without social changes that go far beyond those imagined by Third Wave reformers.
In fact, it's difficult to be optimistic about the prospects for any kind of regulation, direct or market-mediated, as long as the core institutions of society -- the market, militarism, property and wage relations, the fossil-fuel economy -- are taken as surface phenomena amenable to easy manipulation by bureaucratic agencies. Consider Los Angeles again, or any traffic-clotted U.S. city. What institutions were central to its construction? Well, there's the auto-industrial complex, for starters, but also the real-estate market. How shall they be regulated? Fossil Fuels Policy Action, a small and not particularly Third Wave organization, proposes a "paving moratorium." [26] It's a simple, lovely idea, and we may perhaps measure our condition by checking to see if we can take it seriously.
THE THIRD WORLD
The greenhouse debate has split the planet between the industrialized nations and countries like China and India that claim that, since they currently generate only a fraction of the greenhouse gases, they should be substantially aided for cooperating in ways that will impede their development. As things stand, their claim is more than reasonable. The habits of the average North American release five tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, while the global average, an average that includes North Americans, is only half a ton.
From an ecological perspective, everything depends on the Third World following a post-greenhouse path. If it doesn't, conservation gains in the industrialized countries will be swamped by deforestation and increased greenhouse gas production in the Third World -- where the rate of growth of energy production, much of it based on burning dirty coal, is twice the global average. Unfortunately, helping the Third World carve out a radical new development path is no more than a rhetorical priority in the North, where all the real effort is going into the post-Cold War scramble for position.
At least environmentalists now understand this situation, something that was not true as recently as five years ago. In fact, both the left and the liberal wings of the environmental movement now see Third World debt as an ecological issue -- along with pollution, population, energy production, agriculture, and the rest of it. Today, all serious reviews of the greenhouse crisis agree there's no real solution that doesn't define a new kind of development, one attractive enough to derail the considerable momentum of heavy-metal industrialism. All of which serves to complicate life for liberal politicians like Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who recently became the first U.S. Senator to write (with coauthor Jack Waugh) a greenhouse book, World on Fire: Saving an Endangered Earth. [27] Its most interesting moment comes when Mitchell tries to wedge "sustainable development" into the political agenda. He makes the main point, that "even dramatic improvements in energy efficiency will not be sufficient to protect the environment -- if they are confined to the industrialized world," then goes on to call for "retiring the debt of developing countries" and for "technology-transfer, subsidies and loans" designed to "take developing counties beyond the levels of efficiency justified on the basis of free market prices." Brave words, these, from a Senator who toured the Persian Gulf before the war, posing with Bush and adding a much-needed bipartisan gloss to his threats of war.
Public relations, as always, is part of the problem. The "development community" -- the World Bank and its kin -- is abuzz with talk of "sustainable development," but thus far the reality has been considerably less inspiring than the rhetoric. It's the same story with the debt crisis. Certainly the Brady Plan for "debt relief" aims not to lift the debt now crushing the Third World, but only to reduce it enough to avoid open revolt, and thus to continue the agonizing process by which the debt crisis is indefinitely, and profitably, protracted. The workings of the debt-management machinery are familiar enough -- new loans and a new market, this time a market in discounted debt. The discounts reflect domestic austerity and international "confidence," and the debt market that sets them seems natural enough in a market-fixated society. Will it, however, ease the burden enough to allow humane development paths? This is an altogether different matter. Much of the Third World is sinking into ecological and social chaos, yet the international response is constrained by the prerogatives of the banks. The banks! This will change only when, in the words of one New York Times commentary, a Washington "consensus" develops that "the problems afflicting [the] debtors pose a threat to regional political and economic stability." [28] How, under such conditions, can the Third World be asked to sacrifice for the common good?
The bottom line is that the Third World is profoundly constrained by economic and political dependency on the cores of international power. The industrial nations, with their control of capital and technology, hold the keys to a global post-greenhouse economy. If ecological disaster is to be avoided, they must act soon, decisively and in a way that doesn't simply seek to modernize the terms of Third World dependency. It's difficult to see this happening without a successful and radical campaign for ecological conversion here at home.
And where is that campaign? Stalled as usual, though conversion activists remain optimistic about "the long run." There are, to be sure, grounds for optimism -- if the US economy continues its decline, as is likely, pressure for a green "New Deal" of some sort will build. But will it be green enough to stop the warming? Think concretely. What authority would enforce the depreciation of oil company stocks? If this is politically impossible, then what politics and what market structure could motivate the redeployment of the capital now tied up in fossil fuels? Over what time period? What about the overall infrastructure, so much of which wouldn't fit into a post-greenhouse world? Who would take the loss? The government? Is the financing of a solar transition in the Third World to be left to the World Bank? What, finally, will it take to get something more than fatal half- measures?
ECOLOGY AFTER THE COLD WAR
Earth Day 1990 brought a spasm of liberal self-congratulation, a "Good Earthkeeping Seal of Approval," and a victory in the dolphin battle -- but little by way of structural reform. Still, 1990 will remain as a milestone, marking the passing of the Cold War as clearly as it marks a watershed in environmental history. The next decade may not be a happy one, but it will see the emergence of a new kind of ecological politics.
Not that there isn't already a radical green politics, or that it hasn't already marked the political landscape. But, far too often, the radicals place their faith in abstract ideals like "nature" and "personal responsibility," and are innocent of any coherent, sensible explanation for ecological crisis. Fortunately, a mature red/green politics is also, finally, emerging -- "fortunately" because the need for it is acute. Why do we go to war for oil? Why is economic growth so chaotic and compulsive? Why does technology always seem to betray its promise? These questions simply find no good answers in the moral and biocentric catagories of traditional environmentalism.
The ecology movement has been deeply marked by the silences and fears of Cold War culture, and it will take time for it to learn the significance (and limits) of the socialist tradition. Many if not most ecological radicals still see "politics" as synonymous with self- serving compromise, and "capitalism" as merely an ideological category of a justly moribund left. Their view -- that communism and capitalism are only variations on a system of exterminist industrialism -- is not without merit, but it's hard to see it as the basis of an adequate politics, if only because its name for the beast, "industrialism," suggests inadequate correctives.
It is a measure of the times that, in the last few years, an essay called The End of History [29] and a book called The End of Nature both took proud places in the march of literary events. In the first, a State Department functionary named Francis Fukuyama invoked Hegel's philosophy of history to claim the "triumph of liberal democracy" as an event of such significance that now "there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history." In the second, a young man described the likely outcomes of greenhouse warming, then went on to dismiss all politics as insignificant, and to compose an ode to despair.
McKibben tells the tale of environmental radicals throughout the developed world, who can squeeze neither their fears nor their hopes into the old moulds. That they reject "socialism" along with official environmentalism is not altogether bad news, for the "real" socialism we have known has no just claim to our loyalty. But neither is it good news, for environmentalism, radical or otherwise, has a distance to go before it can take up the challenges of the ecological crisis.
The distinctive culture and ideas of the greens -- deep ecology, romantic naturalism, the claim to be "neither right nor left, but out front," animal rights, direct action, the too-simple Luddism that sees only evil in advanced technology -- are easy to ridicule. But recall that the ecology movement evolved in a world where socialism, and left radicalism in general, were lost in the shadows of the Eastern Bloc, and that by virtue of its independence it has been able to claim key cultural and technological problems as its own, and to develop its own increasingly radical language. Left greens should remember this, even as they call upon their traditions to study the economic and political aspects of the crisis, deepen the notion of radical democracy, and mark the currents in these all pervasive and almost invisible capitalist waters.
The coming devastation will breed a vast hatred. It may even be that the ideas of the green hard core -- ecological misanthropy most notable among them -- are poised for a breakout into larger domains. Fortunately, this is not the only possibility, and radical outrage is not likely to remain eternally constrained within the anti-communist frameworks of Cold War analysis. The ecology movement is full of those just now discovering the pleasures of romanticism, and believing it the essence of true revolution. Far more important than their illusions, though, is the probability that capitalism -- like the atmosphere -- may soon cease to seem a part of a natural, eternal world.
It's hard to be realistic about the ecological crisis without yielding to the formidable logic of a very grim situation. Still, it is wrong to follow McKibben in attributing the tragedy of the times to some inescapable trajectory towards an ecological holocaust. It is, rather, because our trajectory is not inescapable, because there is so much that could be done, and because so little of it is being done that this is such a dark time. This paralysis is the real tragedy.
I'd like to thank Bill McKibben, who's book pissed me off so much I had to write this, and the San Francisco Socialist Review Collective, which really bent over backwards to help me get it right.
NOTES
1) Susan Sontag, "AIDS and Its Metaphors," New York Review of Books,
October 27, 1988.
2) Lester Brown, et. al., State of the World, 1990: A Worldwatch
Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1990. Page 174.)
3) Francesca Lyman, et al., The Greenhouse Trap: What We're Doing to
the Atmosphere and How We can Slow Global Warming. (Boston: Beacon
Press, World Resources Institute, 1990. Page 159-162).
4) "Team of Scientists Sees Substantial Warming of Earth," New York
Times, April 16, 1990.
5) Stephen H. Schneider, Global Warming: Are We Entering the Green-
house Century? (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1989). Michael
Oppenheimer and Robert Boyle, Dead Heat: The Race Against the
Greenhouse Effect (New York: Basic Books, 1990). Bill McKibben, The
End of Nature.
6) Stephen H. Schneider, "The Changing Climate," Scientific American
September 1989. Page 79.
7) "Bush Asks Cautious Response To Threat of Global Warming," New York
Times, Feb 6, 1990. Page 1.
8) "Skeptics are Challenging Dire 'Greenhouse' Views," New York Times,
December 13, 1989. Page 1.
9) "Greenhouse Skeptic Out in the Cold," Science, December 1, 1989.
Page 1118.
10) "Vapor Trail: Observations Support a Key Aspect of Warming
Forecasts, Scientific American, March 1990. Page 24.
11) Warren T. Brookes, "The Global Warming Panic," Forbes, December
25, 1989.
12) "Bush Denies Delaying Action On Averting Shift in Climate," New
York Times, April 19, 1990.
13) See 50% More Production: The Failure of the 1990 Montreal
Protocol, a report of the Greenpeace Atmosphere and Energy campaign.
14) Dennis Hayes, "Highest Disregard," Mother Jones, December 1989.
15) See, "The Clean Air Act Won't Clean the Air," Greenpeace, November
12, 1989, "The True Cost of Oil," Earth Island Journal, Summer 1988,
page 22., and "Stagnant Politics, Dirty Air: Autos and the
Environment," In These Times, December 12, 1989.
16) "Controlling Oil's Two Great Threats," New York Times, December
14, 1990.
17) "LA Fights for Breath," New York Times Magazine, July 30, 1989.
18) "Cure for Greenhouse Effect: The Costs Will Be Staggering," New
York Times, November 19, 1989.
19) "Global Warming: Look or Leap?," New York Times, February 14,
1990.
20) Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace,
(Cambridge: Ballinger, Friends of the Earth, 1977).
21) Amory Lovins, et al., Least-Cost Energy. Reprinted by the Rocky
Mountain Institute, 1739 Snowmass Creek Road, Snowmass CO) 81654-9199.
22) Fighting the Greenhouse Effect," New York Times, August 28, 1988.
For a more recent, and very unabashed version of the same tale, see
"Nuclear Power: Do We Have a Choice?," the cover story of the April
29, 1991 issue of Time.
23) Reilly's support of nukes is a matter of public record, but see
for example "U.S. Reported Speeding Talks For Global Warming Accord,"
in the November 21, 1989 issue of the New York Times. For Schneider's
position, see Global Warming, page 245.
24) See Least Cost Energy; in fact, see the Rocky Mountain Institute's
catalog.
25) See Amory Lovins, "Making Markets in Resource Efficiency," Rocky
Mountain Institute, 1989. For an entry into the left discussion, see
Diane Elton's "The Socialization of Markets," in issue 172 of New Left
Review (Nov/Dec 88, pages 3-44), or look up "environmental protection"
in the index of Alec Nove's The Economics of Feasible Socialism,
(Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1983)
26) Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, Federal Square-E. PO Box 8558
Fredericksburg VA 22404.
27) George Mitchell with Jack Waugh, World on Fire: Saving an
Endangered Earth (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1991).
28) "U.S. Efforts to Aid Debtor Nations Bring 'Profound
Disappointment'", New York Times, July 24, 1989. Page 1.
29) "The End of History" was first printed in the Summer 1989 issue of
The National Interest.
BIO BLURB
Tom Athanasiou runs an online publishing group at Sun Microsystems. He is currently developing a book on ecological politics after the Cold War.
