A lesson from Hurricane Irma: capitalism can’t save the planet – it can only destroy it. By George Monbiot
'The environmental crisis is an inevitable
result not just of neoliberalism – the most extreme variety of capitalism – but
of capitalism itself. Even the social democratic (Keynesian) kind depends on
perpetual growth on a finite planet: a formula for eventual collapse. But the
peculiar contribution of neoliberalism is to deny that action is necessary: to
insist that the system, like Greenspan’s financial markets, is inherently
self-regulating. The myth of the self-regulating market accelerates the
destruction of the self-regulating Earth...'
'You can now buy a selfie toaster, that burns an image of your own face on to your bread – the Turin Shroud of toast. You can buy beer for dogs and wine for cats; a toilet roll holder that sends a message to your phone when the paper is running out; a $30 branded brick; a hairbrush that informs you whether or not you are brushing your hair correctly. Panasonic intends to produce a mobile fridge that, in response to a voice command, will deliver beers to your chair...'
There was “a flaw” in the theory: this is the famous admission by Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, to a congressional inquiry into the 2008 financial crisis. His belief that the self-interest of the lending institutions would lead automatically to the correction of financial markets had proved wrong. Now, in the midst of the environmental crisis, we await a similar admission. We may be waiting some time. For, as in Greenspan’s theory of the financial system, there cannot be a problem. The market is meant to be self-correcting: that’s what the theory says. As Milton Friedman, one of the architects of neoliberal ideology, put it: “Ecological values can find their natural space in the market, like any other consumer demand.” As long as environmental goods are correctly priced, neither planning nor regulation is required. Any attempt by governments or citizens to change the likely course of events is unwarranted and misguided.
But there’s a flaw.
Hurricanes do not respond to market signals. The plastic fibres in our oceans,
food and drinking water do not respond to market signals. Nor does
the collapse of insect populations, or coral reefs, or the extirpation of
orangutans from Borneo. The unregulated market
is as powerless in the face of these forces as the people in Florida who
resolved to fight Hurricane Irma by shooting it. It is the wrong tool, the wrong approach, the
wrong system. There are two inherent
problems with the pricing of the living world and its destruction. The first is
that it depends on attaching a financial value to items – such as human life,
species and ecosystems – that cannot be redeemed for money. The second is that it seeks to
quantify events and processes that cannot be reliably predicted. Environmental collapse
does not progress by neat increments. You can estimate the money you might make
from building an airport: this is likely to be linear and fairly predictable.
But you cannot reasonably estimate the environmental cost the airport might
incur.
Climate breakdown will behave like a tectonic plate in an earthquake
zone: periods of comparative stasis followed by sudden jolts. Any attempt to
compare economic benefit with economic cost in such cases is an exercise in false precision. Even to discuss such
flaws is a kind of blasphemy, because the theory allows no role for political
thought or for action. The system is supposed to operate not through deliberate
human agency, but through the automatic writing of the invisible hand. Our
choice is confined to deciding which goods and services to buy.
But even this is
illusory. A system that depends on growth can survive only if we progressively
lose our ability to make reasoned decisions. After our needs, then strong
desires, then faint desires have been met, we must keep buying goods and
services we neither need nor want, induced by marketing to abandon our
discriminating faculties, and to succumb instead to impulse... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/13/hurricane-irma-capitalism-growth-economics-environment-financial-crisis