Why eco-austerity won’t save us from climate change

[Demeter]

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/nov/04/why-eco-austerity-wont-save-us-from-climate-change

Despite the anti-capitalist rhetoric of green-left writers like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, and the anti-corporate street protests of environmental NGOs, could it be that their small-is-beautiful, degrowth, localist, organic, anti-GMO and anti-nuclear approach to solving climate change and biodiversity loss is in fact working in service of neoliberalism (while not even doing much to help the planet either)?

Ever since The Population Bomb, the 1968 bestseller by serial-Chicken-Little and anti-natalist Paul Ehrlich, warning that four billion would die of starvation by the end of the 1980s, and the Club of Rome’s 1972 report Limits to Growth that predicted civilizational “overshoot and collapse” within decades, neo-Malthusians have been telling us we need to degrow the economy and retreat from a Western, consumerist, high-technology, unsustainable way of life, or else Hobbesian doom is all but a fortnight away. Updated for the era of the genuinely exacting challenge of global warming and biodiversity loss, a retreat from economic growth is argued to be necessary today because “We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet”. Yet all this talk of “we” in the developed world (or, as some hair-shirt wags put it, we in the over-developed world), of “our” overconsumption, of an undifferentiated mass of big spenders, ignores the billowingly large class differences that exist in the global north and the decades-long bludgeoning of workers’ standard of living.

Throughout the post-war period of powerful trade unions, full employment and a strong welfare state that the French nostalgically call Les Trente Glorieuses, workers’ pay across the West rose in tandem with growth. But since that time, wages and benefits have stagnated or declined in most sectors. If the median US household income had kept pace with the broader economy since 1970, it would now be $92,000 instead of $50,000. From 1990 to 2009, labour’s share of national income declined in twenty-six out of thirty developed economies, according to the OECD. Overall across advanced economies, labour’s share dropped from 66.1 percent to 61.7 percent. And as poor as many are in the developing world, the gap between them and the workers of the global north is less than the gap between the latter and the one percent. That is to say: us ordinary folks in the supposed rich countries are closer in wealth and have far more in common with third-world workers than we do with our own bosses.

So who exactly is this “we” that is doing all the overconsuming? Almost everyone I know is just struggling to get by. We don’t need the “Buy Nothing Days” of the trendy anti-consumerist Adbusters magazine, but rather some “Finally-Able-to-Buy-Lots-More Days”...It is not growth, but unfettered free markets that are the problem. Capitalism depends on growth, but growth does not depend on capitalism. Naomi Klein’s jumbling together of the two says more about the contemporary left’s atrophying knowledge of the ABCs of socialist economics than it does about the problem that the current mode of production poses to ecological services...It is true that the right-wing Pollyannas say: “Don’t bother your pretty little head; technology will save us.” The green left Cassandras meanwhile run around screaming: “Technology can’t save us; we’re doomed!” The socialist meanwhile says: “So long as we plan and regulate the economy carefully, we need never run out of anything, no matter how large we grow.”

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Leigh Phillips is a science writer and author of Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts, which has just been published by Zero Books.

ASIDE FROM HIS ADVOCACY OF NUCLEAR POWER, WHICH IS AN ECOLOGICAL DEATH TRAP AND DEAD END, THE AUTHOR'S BASIC INSTINCTS ARE GOOD

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[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. We may be struggling to get by, but still, looking around the house, there are a lot of

things I didn't REALLY need, and I'm sure if I had kids, there would be an awful lot more. Kids are masters are getting parents to overspend on stupid pieces of plastic the kids will play with briefly, then demand something newer. My 'don't really NEED' that purchases have, admittedly, dropped sharply in the last decade, but even so, some frivolous spending occurs, if only to keep me out of total depression. Case in point - my coffee maker died a couple of weeks ago. Do I really NEED coffee? Especially since, as a result of getting gout, I need to avoid caffeine and switched to decaf. What's really the point of coffee without caffeine? So I haven't replaced it, and didn't really NEED it in the first place.

Looking around my living room, if I got rid of everything I almost never use, and certainly don't 'need' to live, half the living room would be gone, remnants of the past when I had more money and spent it more frivolously.

[Demeter]

2. Worse yet is looking around the house

and seeing stuff that used to be strong and serviceable, and long-lived utility has been replaced with cheap imitation junk that breaks if you look at it hard. People used to have heirlooms, now we have landfills.

[MisterP]

3. I smell Living Marxism ...

[Demeter]

4. kick

[calikid]

5. kicking for the weekend

[starroute]

6. How can you support nuclear power and still have good basic instincts?

The only reason I can see for supporting nuclear power is because it seems to offer a way we can avoid giving up our ethos of overproduction and overconsumption. So if he (?) supports it, everything else he says become suspect as well.

It's true that recycling and other feel-good ways for individual citizens to believe they're saving the planet aren't going to work as long as our collective way of life remains profoundly destructive. But the major changes we need will also spell an end to our personal toss-it-in-the-landfill ways.

The one form of growth that isn't environmentally destructive is growth in creativity and personal services -- which is where we may all end up anyway as robots take over the business of making stuff. That's the one area of human endeavor that can raise the quality of life for everyone without creating instantly disposable junk.