Clive Hamilton (@CliveCHamilton) tweeted at 7:03 AM on Tue, Sep 29, 2015:
"The Earth is indeed fucked unless somehow the market system can be prevented from working so well"
CLIVE HAMILTON's new piece
http://t.co/lHL4SQRNSZ
(https://twitter.com/
Cogito
Creative Self-Destruction and the Climate
In his 2006 landmark report on how we should respond to the climate crisis, Nicholas Stern characterised global warming as an ‘externality’, a damage to others due to market activity whose cost is not met by those who cause it.
Indeed, Stern characterised climate change as ‘the largest ever market failure’. In other words, the problem of global warming arises because the market system is not working well enough, and if we could find a way to correct the fault then the problem would be solved.
It was a geophysicist, Brad Werner, who in 2012 argued precisely the opposite case – that we are in this mess not because the market system is not working well enough but because it is working too well. Werner’s startling presentation to the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union was titled ‘Is the Earth F**ked?’ and he posed in public the question climate scientists and others who follow their work had been asking in private. His answer was bleak, or just possibly inspirational.
Building on the fact that humans now constitute a force of nature so powerful that we have caused the Earth to enter a new geological epoch, Werner approaches the question of the sustainability of humankind through a dynamic model known as a global coupled human-environmental system.
The activities of humans are captured in a module called ‘the dominant global culture’, which essentially describes the globally integrated market system of resource-use and waste generation driven by the relentless need to grow. He also included a representation of the political institutions that facilitate the smooth operation of the system.
The essential problem, Werner argued, is that there is a mismatch between the short time-scales of markets, and the political systems tied to them, and the much longer time-scales that the Earth system needs to accommodate human activity, including soaking up our carbon dioxide and other wastes.
Technological progress and globalization of finance, transport and communications have oiled the wheels of the human components of the planetary system allowing it to speed up. But the pace of the natural system carries on as it always has. The problem is not Stern’s market failure but market success.
System compatibility
Brad Werner’s conclusion is that the Earth is indeed f**ked, unless somehow the market system can be prevented from working so well. What we urgently need is friction; sand must be thrown into the machine to slow it down. Only resistance to the dominant culture will give some hope of avoiding collapse.For Werner, prevailing political customs, including system-compatible ideas like cost-benefit analysis, global agreements and carbon prices, are embedded in the established structure of the human component of the planetary system.
Only activism that disrupts the dominant culture—including ‘protests, blockades and sabotage’—provides an avenue for a negative answer to his rude question. It is a kind of geophysical model of Naomi Klein’s recent call to arms.
In an important new book, Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations, Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg, both academics with the University of Sydney, give us a detailed and fascinating analysis of what global corporations do to keep the wheels of the system spinning; a phenomenon they term ‘creative self-destruction’.
This extends beyond how business activities contribute to the climate crisis, to how the ‘dominant global culture’ persuades those inclined to throw sand in the wheels to express their anger in more system-compatible ways. That is, they show how critique of corporate responsibility is incorporated and converted to the continuation of ‘business as usual’.
The stakes could not be higher, on both sides.
When Bill McKibben calculated that limiting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels requires that 80 per cent of proven reserves of coal, oil and natural gas be left in the ground untouched, but that doing so would destroy the balance sheets of several of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, he showed us in the starkest possible way the fundamental incompatibility of the current structure of economic power and the survival of the world as we know it.
The hard truth is that these corporations would sooner see the world destroyed than relinquish their power. As Wright and Nyberg show in fascinating detail, it is not that the executives who run them are evil; they simply function the way the system dictates and the system, as we find over and over, is structured to keep the global capitalist system growing.
The executives have no choice: if they cannot stomach it then they must leave and be replaced by people with fewer scruples or an enhanced ability to deceive themselves, to believe the stories their own PR people make up.
Corporate governmentality
Wright and Nyberg seek ‘to outline the processes through which corporations are shaping humanity’s response to the climate crisis’. Their analysis is revolutionary in a way because it explains to us that these shaping processes are much deeper and subtler than we realised, and include how corporations manipulate our very identities and emotional responses to the predicament we face.The oleaginous rhetoric about sustainable business practices, green consumerism and green growth churned out by the clever people in marketing has proven highly effective. Even some environmental organisations believe we can somehow consume our way out of the crisis and persuade themselves that the only way to change the system is by working with it (and taking corporate money in the process).
Ecologists and conservation biologists have been convinced that they have to speak the language of the market to be heard and so busy themselves with ‘putting a price on the environment’ so that the externalities can be internalised.
Governments fall over themselves to laud corporations as ‘wealth creators’ who must be allowed to get on with the job (political donations help oil the wheels of that machine too), even if the job in question is killing our world.
It is astonishing how gullible we all are. In the history of greenwash rarely has there been a more cynical corporation that the oil company BP, which in July 2000 rebranded itself ‘Beyond Petroleum’, announcing it would over time transition out of fossil fuels and into renewable energy.
Today it has sold out of its small investments in wind power and solar energy and is investing heavily in the development of shale gas, oil sands in Alberta (the worst kind of fossil energy), and, we must not forget, new oil fields under the melting Arctic.
Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations a very welcome corrective to the beguiling world of mistaken ideas we carry around, ideas that have us sleepwalking into disaster.
COMMENTS:
Michael says:
Thanks Clive, great article.
I think “green washing” has been taking place on an enormous scale.
In the end the we’re being pushed in to tinkering with the edges of our economic system, rather than address the fundamental issues of energy usage and over-consumption of resources.
A perfect example for me is “Earth Hour”. This little exercise in green-washing encourages people to change a few light-bulbs and reduce climate action to an issue of “consumer choice”.
Rather, people should be more involved in shaping political and social solutions to climate change.
4 hours ago
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Anthony Nolan
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According to Werner “Only activism that disrupts the dominant culture—including ‘protests, blockades and sabotage’—provides an avenue for a negative answer to his rude question.”
Quite right too which is why the Federal Government has recently and laughably identified green activists as potential sources of terrorism. Green activists should resoundingly reject the idea that damage to property carried out to stall, slow or stop damage to the environment, where it is conducted so that there is no risk of harm to persons, constitutes terrorism.
The major argument is that the Civil Rights movement in the US or Ghandi’s program for Indian independence achieved their ends without resort to violence. They did, but in the US the Black Panthers and the Weathermen were offering the establishment a pretty unattractive alternative to negotiating change with peaceful movements. In India, by the 1940’s, especially with the ‘Quit India’ movement of 1942, violent insurrection was the rule rather than the exception.
Global insurrection is required. Unruly, ill prepared, spontaneous mass insurrection with no central program and no object other than to obstruct the market’s pillaging of our home. There’s a bracing idea.
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4 hours ago
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John Salmond
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In reply to Anthony Nolan
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In reply to Anthony Nolan
bullshit; there has been not the slightest green activism to justify LNP unleashing authoritarians on us in name of “combating terror”.
But there most certainly SHOULD be green protests, blockades and sabotage - terrorism if you will - over the destruction of the climate on which our kids' lives depend
3 hours ago
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Michael Marriott
logged in via Twitter
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In reply to Anthony Nolan
All social movements that call for justice are disruptive - which in turn is why the political, economic and social establishment fight reactionary battles.
It’s worth noting that we’re fighting the same people on a host of issues: climate change, marriage equality, tax reform etc.
Some time ago I said we were “locking in a march of folly” by betting our future on fossil fuels and unfettered market driven capitalism:
*“What we are seeing is a counter-reformation: in short an attack on the last 50 years of progressive politics, government regulation and even secularisation. It is nothing more than a campaign of revenge against those that dare question the privileged world view of the few.
They have looked for the enemy, and have seen us: progressives, liberals, greens, the LGBT community, indigenous Australians, the irreligious and scientists.
We have dared (dared!) to suggest the ethical circle of concern be drawn ever more broadly to include not just women, gays and minorities but even non-human species. Perhaps even the planet itself.
This may explain the cause of the barely comprehensible rage that finds expression in the denial movement, anti-gay marriage stance of conservatives and resurgent right-wing parties of Europe.
From the rage of the Tea Party against “leftist elites’ and News Corporations relentless war on the mildly progressivecentre right Gillard government, the politics of hate and division seem to rule….“*
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3 hours ago
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Michael Marriott
logged in via Twitter
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In reply to Michael Marriott
And:
*Elites will frequently pursue policies contrary to their own self-interest, deluding themselves they “had no choice” or that it “really was in their interest”. Thus some argued – and continue to do so – the invasion of Iraq was in America’s best interest. The Soviet’s invaded Afghanistan believing it was in their national interest to do so.
The Trojans rather liked the look of that marvellous looking wooden horse parked just outside their walls, thinking it would make a splendid addition to their collection of public art. Irony or folly, sometimes there is little difference between the two.
In Australia the march of folly is playing itself out once again.
It is driven by the desire for short-term economic and political gain. In other instances it’s about winning the “culture wars” that have raged between the old left and right since the mid-1980s*
3 hours ago
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Ray Butler
logged in via Facebook
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logged in via Facebook
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Corporate methodology is an outstanding innovation, it is actually a key solution, it only depends on what you use it for, if it the fiscal accumulation of a select privileged few then naturally it is about as healthy as a hole in the head. But Corporate methodology is not a conscious being, it doesn’t decide how we use it.
4 hours ago
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Janeen Harris
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In reply to Ray Butler
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In reply to Ray Butler
But it is organised. The corporates are not conscious. They are brain dead. Money rules doesn’t work. The solution depends on that organization working for humanity instead of exploiting it.
4 hours ago
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Ray Butler
logged in via Facebook
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In reply to Janeen Harris
I was more thinking society should use it, sovereignty as an Umbrella over Civil Subsidiaries, government is a public service and it already operates on corporate methodology, it would only need to operate like a professional corporation, not the joke economic corporations consider it.
3 hours ago
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Janeen Harris
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In reply to Ray Butler
Government is a public service? Try telling that to government!
3 hours ago
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Ray Butler
logged in via Facebook
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logged in via Facebook
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I think you confuse Cynicism with Sophism, or perhaps Pessimism.
4 hours ago
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Peter Ormonde
Peter Ormonde is a Friend of The Conversation
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Top bit of gear Clive - many thanks.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make things like cost-benefit analysis more realistic - more holistic - trying to incorporate these “externalities” like CO2 and biodiversity loss. Can be done - at least to a reasonable approximation - but no one important really cares.
Why? - the time-scale problem. 10 years is a lifetime to an investor - several of them in fact. Long slow costs and consequences can be - must be - safely ignored… leave that for the next generation.
Sad fact is we have a broken planet needing care and precise surgery and all we have as economists is a toolbox full of sledgehammers and demolition equipment.
3 hours ago
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Jane Middlemist
Jane Middlemist is a Friend of The Conversation
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In reply to Peter Ormonde
Jane Middlemist is a Friend of The Conversation
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In reply to Peter Ormonde
So sad - tragic really, Peter.
But your comment has the ring of truth.
2 hours ago
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MItchell Lennard
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Thanks Clive,
This is a good contribution that sits very well with Paul Bain’s article today on some observations of the physcology at work.
I have been convinced for some time that ‘market based’ approaches ultimatley will be contorted to be self serving rather than transformative…… but we have to start somewhere.
Paul today talks of the need for top down and bottom up resonses. For some years I hvae been working on bottom up approaches.
Im am developing low emmisipon energy systems and intend just to step around coporations. I will do this by offering lower priced energy than they can offer. It is a fundamental part of the bussiness approach that it does nort rely on government policy, ETS, taxes or any action from or co-operation with corporations. I just have to be able to supply energy at a lower price, and make people feel like they are doping soemthing positive by choosing that cheap option, and we will win.
In support of the business we are also exploring approaches that completly cut out banks and share markets …. again as its easier and quicker to go around coporations that are fascinated by self interest.
I will give my technology solutions to anyone who wishes to adopt them.
My apoproach is by no menas unique, people all over the world work on these ideas. Enova energy on the north NSW coast is an example of an organsiation attempting to use the market where it works and helps, and ignore it where it does’t.
There is no doubt that coporates and the quasi markets that they create and nurture are a significnat part of the problem…… but they are not immutable, we can go around them.
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2 hours ago
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Ross Barrell
Ross Barrell is a Friend of The Conversation
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In reply to MItchell Lennard
Ross Barrell is a Friend of The Conversation
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In reply to MItchell Lennard
Hi Mitchell. Can you supply a link to your organisation’s web site?
an hour ago
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MItchell Lennard
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In reply to Ross Barrell
High Ross,
Cant advertise on TC……… we ware formally launching 1st quarter next year…….
an hour ago
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Ross Barrell
Ross Barrell is a Friend of The Conversation
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In reply to MItchell Lennard
It’s ok, Mitchell. I did find Enova Energy - as easy a Googling the name. Looks very interesting. And searching on your name and “low emissions energy” brings up several articles. I wish you well. Be interesting to see what the big energy suppliers do in response.
23 minutes ago
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John Newlands
John Newlands is a Friend of The Conversation
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John Newlands is a Friend of The Conversation
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I have an inkling that market economics has a trick up its sleeve that may paradoxically help. Oil is currently priced around $50 a barrel due to slight overproduction. Oil is obviously getting harder to extract with the peak of US fracking and Canadian tar sands along with Shell’s Arctic drilling pullout. Sooner or later there must be a price rebound. If that correction is severe as we saw in 2008 (when it got to ~ $150/b) that could stun world markets and cause a slowdown, perhaps recession. The slowdown will drag coal with it without the need for carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes and the like. All because oil is currently priced too cheaply.
an hour ago
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Jack McCadden
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There is a stark example of where the success of capitalism stands as a environmental light adjacent to the desperation of poverty, on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic:
This contradicts the message of the article, which seems to be backwards is the only way forward.
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