environment: 350 capitalism economics sustainability
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 9, Day 30: “The Ideology Of The Cancer Cell”
The Iowa City Press-Citizen discusses “Moving Planet,” in the wake of Saturday’s planet-wide action:
The event was held in conjunction with the nearly 2,000 other Moving Planet rallies around the world over the weekend, including eight in Iowa, sponsored by the global environmental organization 350.org.
Carsner urged rally goers to call upon local business to invest in renewable energy, and demand that their elected officials initiate better energy standards and make it more conducive for homeowners and small businesses to generate clean energy through wind and solar power.
“We think there is plenty we can do on a local level,” said Carsner, the head of the Iowa City Sierra Club group. “… We think it’s important to take action, it’s important to gain information and it’s important to be part of a movement.”
I’m continuing with the “let’s reform capitalism” theme. Heh heh heh. Sent September 26:
The people all over the globe who joined Saturday’s “Moving Planet” action are giving voice to the most urgent need of our times. It’s not just that we must address climate change — the greenhouse effect is a symptom of a deeper problem that we have barely begun to think about.
Our economic thinking is based on the idea that continuous growth is both possible and desirable. It is neither. When almost seven billion humans spend environmental capital far faster than it can be replenished, it is time to change our ways.
If humanity is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries, we need to stop consuming the Earth’s resources and start renewing them — which can only happen when our economic models are based on sustainability, not growth. This is the ultimate message of “Moving Planet,” and it’s one the world needs to hear — now, more than ever.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: disaster capitalism economics floods Montana oil spills Yellowstone Park
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 23: Shaken, Not Stirred
In the July 7 L.A. Times, the brilliant and prescient Naomi Klein turns her eye to the interlocked disasters currently unfolding in the American West, in this case Montana — with floods and oil spills competing for the attention of the rescue and cleanup crews.
“We’re a disaster area,” Alexis Bonogofsky told me, “and it’s going to take a long time to get over it.”
Bonogofsky and her partner, Mike Scott, are all over the news this week, telling the world about how Montana’s Exxon Mobil pipeline spill has fouled their goat ranch and is threatening the health of their animals.
But my conversation with Bonogofsky was four full days before the pipeline began pouring oil into the Yellowstone River. And no, it’s not that she’s psychic; she was talking about this year’s historic flooding.
“It’s unbelievable,” she said. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime. It destroyed houses; people died; crops didn’t get in the fields…. We barely were able to get our hay crop in.”
Everyone agrees that the two disasters — the flooding of the Yellowstone River and the oil spill in the riverbed — are connected. According to Exxon officials, the high and fast-moving river has four times its usual flow this year, which has hampered cleanup and prevented their workers from reaching the exact source of the spill. Also thanks to the flooding, the oiled water has breached the riverbanks, inundating farmland, endangering animals, killing crops and contaminating surface water. And the rush of water appears to be carrying the oil toward North Dakota.
This letter was subsequently published by the LA Times with some editing. Yay, me.
Naomi Klein’s discussion of climate change’s repercussions in Montana leaves unaddressed the concept of “disaster capitalism,” her crucial contribution to contemporary economic analysis. As climate change’s catastrophic effects become more widespread, our already-crumbling infrastructure will no longer be up to the challenge of an adequate response; the inevitable result will be more human misery — which will in turn trigger ever-more-egregious corporate encroachments on both the lives of individuals and their communities. We can confidently expect more lenient enforcement of existing emissions and pollution law in the wake of climatic crises, along with legislative weakening of troublesome and unprofitable regulations. And let’s not forget more tax breaks to help multinational corporations (many of which facilitated global warming in the first place) reap further benefits from the havoc they’ve helped bring about. “Disaster capitalism” was bad enough already. With climate change added to the mix, it’s a poisonous recipe for humanity.
Warren Senders
environment: economics MA Department of Environmental Protection real-estate sustainability
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 5: We Need This Land For Future Exploitation!
Something a little different today. The Fall River Herald News (MA) runs a guest editorial from a couple of real-estate guys, extolling the importance of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection — from an economic POV. Good stuff, especially for those people who aren’t persuaded by anything other than the slavering jaws of naked capitalism:
It’s not every day the real estate community and the environmental community share common ground.
Increasingly, however, we understand a healthy economy and a healthy environment are mutually beneficial. We also understand the commonwealth, like every other state, faces a fiscal crisis that must be met with painful budget cuts and a disciplined focus on economic development. But we must avoid cuts which undermine the very economic growth and job creation essential to our recovery.
The commonwealth’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is more than a protector of the environment.
The “climate change news” for today (5/24) is all Australia, all the time. I haven’t gotten into an Aussie newspaper yet (though I did make New Zealand once), so I did a search for something closer to home. Sent May 24:
The “conflicting interests” of the real estate and environmental communities vanish when things are viewed from the proper perspective. It is only in the past century that people began purchasing land in order to make a quick profit; the notion of real estate as a short-term, high-yield investment is a relatively novel one. It’s also an idea with profoundly damaging consequences for the long-term health of entire regions, for if the land’s owners never know the land as our forbears once did, nothing can prevent grotesquely destructive exploitation. Nothing, that is, except local regulations and the Department of Environmental Protection. Needless to say, both of these are under attack from budget-cutting proponents, which makes the authors’ cogent defense of the DEP’s core mission very welcome. The interests of real-estate investors and environmentalists necessarily coincide; both groups have an interest in keeping the land alive and beautiful for centuries to come.
Warren Senders
environment: Deficit reduction economics energy
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 12: Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Money
In a business section column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Andrew Ross skirts discussion of climate and energy, instead averring that (gasp!) the deficit is the biggest threat we face as a nation. Sigh. Time to drag out “quibbling over the cost of sandbags” again.
Sent May 3:
Mr. Ross’ analysis touches briefly on the elements that comprise the most significant threat to our country’s long-term security, but neglects them in favor of advocating for deficit reduction. Now, I’m all for reducing the deficit, and the Department of Defense, the biggest public sector spender, is ripe for massive cutting — but the plain and simple fact is that the devastating long-term effects of climate change will make deficit reduction (no matter where it happens) irrelevant. Without immediate steps to transform our energy economy and prepare for the consequences of climatic transformations we’ve already set in motion, no spending cuts will save us. Scientists have warned us over and over; we can no longer plead ignorance — and to resist spending on infrastructure development and disaster preparation will prove far more expensive in the long run. When floodwaters are rising is not the time to economize on sandbags.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: capitalism economics
by Warren
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Month 11, Day 29: Vaporware
The Irish Times discusses the unlikeliness of anything happening at Cancun. While the notion of economic and climatic catastrophe as two sides of the same coin is not new (either to me or to this letter-writing project), it’s still very tricky to shoehorn them both in to a single short piece.
It is a measure of humans’ limitations as a species that the terrifying implications of climate change are barely registering on our societal alarm systems. While Frank MacDonald notes that people are preoccupied “more pressing issues” — presumably the unemployment and economic turmoil to be seen everywhere in the world, it is incorrect to assume our planetary economic woes are unrelated to climate problems. The economics of nation-states and global commerce rest on two demonstrably false assumptions: never-ending supplies of cheap energy, and the feasibility and desirability of continuous growth. Even were it actually unlimited, fossil fuel’s hardly cheap once we include ancillary expenses (cleanup, environmental destruction, geopolitical brinkmanship), and an ever-expanding economy is definitionally impossible on a finite planet. The price we can expect to pay for having a civilization built upon illusions will be disastrous economic upheavals in the short run and catastrophic climate change in the long.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change economics Gulf of Mexico
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 22: Sticker Shock?
Business Week ran an AP story on the anticipated costs of climate change in the Gulf of Mexico over the next few decades. Trying to submit letters to print magazines is often problematic, simply because the contact information for LTEs is not easy to find. But I’m persistent. The flood/sandbag motif is new; I’m going to try and use that one more in the weeks to come.
I hope you are all planning on VOTING. For Democrats.
Looking into the future, it’s obvious to everyone but the tea-partiers and the conservative corporatists who fund them that climate change is the most significant threat humanity has ever faced. The scientific evidence is unequivocal; anthropogenic global warming is real and dangerous. Whether describing it in quanta of human misery (hundreds of millions displaced; millions of acres of cropland devastated) or in the dollars-and-cents language of the business sector, there can be no doubt that even if we act quickly, we’re in for a world of hurt. While action is going to be expensive, the short-term orientation of many in the business world leaves them unable to apprehend the costs of inaction. Those, it turns out, are orders of magnitude greater than the economic impacts of responding realistically and robustly to an imminent threat. When a flood is coming, only idiots quibble about the cost of sandbags.
Warren Senders
environment: Barack Obama economics Elizabeth Warren
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Month 9, Day 19: POTUS
Everybody’s talking about the Elizabeth Warren appointment. As a Warren myself, I think it’s fine news. And it provided me with a hook for another “capitalizm iz teh suck”-type letter. Yippee.
Dear President Obama,
Your recent appointment of Elizabeth Warren is good news for all of us normal people who have been hoping against hope that your administration would follow through on its promises to help America’s suffering middle class citizens.
There is another promise which needs to be kept and built upon. The rescue of our middle class won’t amount to a hill of beans if the environmental wealth of our country and the world is so depleted and damaged that it can no longer sustain our population. Although it is not usually framed that way, climate change is as much an economic issue as an environmental one; it is obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that market capitalism is based on profoundly and fundamentally flawed assumptions. At first, the ethos of naked and unrestrained greed merely damaged our nation’s financial systems — but in the years to come we will increasingly see its effect on the natural world which makes our lives possible.
If greed is good, then short-term profits outweigh long-term sustainability; to hell with our grandchildren and their grandchildren, as long as we have a good quarterly profit! But contrary to the thinking of your economic advisor Mr. Summers, a finite planet cannot support infinite growth. We cannot continue to lay waste to the environment in the name of economic instant gratification!
This is why it was so terribly disappointing that your advisors turned away Bill McKibben and his small group of student activists when they tried to get you to reinstall solar panels on the White House roof. There are responsibilities that accompany citizenship in a world superpower — and your determination to turn the White House green would have helped all of us understand them. Instead…well, it’s just another opportunity lost in the name of a “deliberative process.”
Too bad. Especially since we don’t have another decade in which to procrastinate. We must act immediately if we are to have any impact. And not only must we stop burning coal and oil, we must rethink the economic models that have led us to this pass. Whether we like it or not, market capitalism has been a disaster for the planetary systems upon which all life depends. If we don’t end our reliance on this deeply flawed way of thinking, we may, instead, just end.Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: China economics trade policies
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Month 9, Day 10: Writing Without Understanding
The NYT ran an article about China’s trade policies and the response of the US Steelworkers’ Union to some of their subsidies. While I tend to glaze over when I read about international economics, this article made a good hook for a letter. If we hadn’t been asleep at the switch, America would be offering to share technology with the Chinese. Instead…
I welcome our coming national move to third-world status.
Questionable trade practices or no, China’s readiness to pick up the slack in renewable energy is an object lesson to American entrepreneurs and politicians. By procrastinating on the restructuring of economic incentives to encourage the development of new sustainable sources of power, we have sacrificed our nation’s role as a technological leader and a worldwide source of innovation. If we are lucky, the next decades will include cooperative programs with China and other countries that have taken the lead in the development of green technology. With an increasing likelihood of catastrophic effects from global climate change in the near future, it is absolutely critical for our long-term species survival that we learn to share technologies and techniques across national boundaries. International cooperation on renewable energy initiatives is the only way we can accomplish the most essential element of a long-term strategy for coping with climate change: global reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
Warren Senders
environment: economics United Nations
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 4: Fair is Fair.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a short AP story on the UN Climate Commission’s position regarding financial aid to poorer countries.
The United Nations has the correct position on additional funding to poorer nations to aid them in coping with climate change. The facts are inescapable: the poorer the country, the lower their per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Compared with the CO2 released into the atmosphere by the United States (five times more than our share of world population), Pakistan’s is little more than a rounding error. While climate change’s effects will be felt everywhere in the world, it is the industrialized West which is overwhelmingly responsible for the increasing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
We tell our children to accept responsibility for damage they cause. We grownups must do the same, and face the fact that our fossil-fueled conveniences are destroying the world in which we live — and that it is unfair to make the poorest of the world’s people pay for the destruction the wealthiest have brought them.
environment: economics sustainability
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 30: Ka-Ching!
The Chicago Tribune appears to have discovered that sustainability is good for business.
What is mind-boggling is that this epiphany is not rewarded with a resounding, “Well, duuuuhhhh.”
But I guess everybody has to start somewhere.
It should not seem counterintuitive that ecologically sensible practices are good business practices as well. Environmental destruction is the worst possible corporate strategy — because ultimately all wealth is a function of our relationship to the natural ecosystems of which we are a part. Most contemporary economists assert that infinite economic growth is both possible and desirable, ignoring the fact that we live on a finite planet. As Edward Abbey famously said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
The survival of our economic system is predicated on the survival of our species; even the largest multinational cannot outlast humanity. That’s why it makes absolute sense for business to embrace the disciplines of sustainability at every level, whether it’s implementing a careful recycling policy, adhering to green building practices, or supporting strong legislation to fight global climate change. Can someone tell the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?
Warren Senders