The Berry | Whatever your political colours

[Patrick Rolfe]
Scientists have recently told the world that we have a matter of months to act before we reach the ‘tipping point’ at which runaway global warming causes massively destructive, exponential climate change. Yet every major economy in the world continues to burn fossil fuels, many at an increasing rate. The British government has just announced plans for a new wave of coal-fired power stations, and air travel continues as the boom industry it has been for the past decade.

Is there something fundamental about the human psyche, or human society, which makes us incapable of planning ahead to prevent disaster on a global scale? Are we just too incompetent, too competitive, too small-minded or too stupid to build a sustainable economy? History proves that we are not.

In the middle of the last century, the entire industrial world was able to pull itself out of deep economic depression to defeat the powerful threat of fascism, then to rebuild a decimated continent in less than two decades. More recently, our economic system has simultaneously expanded productive forces and lifted a billion people in Asia out of serfdom and poverty. Our societies and our economies are capable of truly amazing things. So why do we not face up to a threat that has the potential, in the coming decades, to kill one fifth of the human population?

The problem is capitalism. Sorry, but that’s the inconvenient truth.

Capitalism stipulates that the means of production – the factories, offices, transport systems and communication lines – are owned and controlled by individuals who do not themselves work in industry. Frequently this means that a very small minority of people own the vast majority of wealth and production, but it can mean, as in Britain, that a sizeable minority are small shareholders.

The goal of these owners is to make a profit on their initial investment. If their profit ceases, they sell their assets; and if all profit ceases, assets (that is, the factories, offices and communications which we all rely on) become worthless and the whole system collapses. Capitalism requires constant profit on investments, and the only way such profit can be maintained is through constant growth in production and in consumption.

Yet this ignores the fact that the earth itself is finite. It has finite resources (oil, metals, forests, soil nutrients) and finite space for us to put our waste. Energy use must constantly grow under capitalism, but somehow we need to consume less energy to combat climate change.

Our economic system cannot stop expanding, so can it be made more sustainable? The logic of capitalism makes this extremely unlikely. The operators of industry must compete with each other in order to attract investment: an energy company that seeks to produce wind power (not very profitable) rather than coal power (very profitable) will be pushed out of business if it has to rely on private investors.

Nor will the owners of industry change their ways as the consequences of climate change become increasingly obvious: catastrophe merely provides another opportunity for profit. Large landowners in Thailand, Indonesia and India have used the devastation wrought by the Asian Tsunami as an excuse to throw poor fishermen out of their homes, in order to build huge luxury hotels on stolen land. Business leaders in New Orleans stole land, demolished homes, took away workers’ legal rights, and gave themselves an enormous tax break in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Capitalism will not hesitate to make a fast buck from climate change, and the owners of industry will take every precaution to protect themselves from its disastrous effects. Mansions are already being built in Alaska, which will have a more temperate climate if global warming takes place.

Capitalism is incapable of tackling climate change, but human society is not. Truly democratic structures have already proved that they can act with an environmental conscience. A committee of workers at the arms company Lucas Aerospace produced plans in the 1970s to switch production at their factory from weapons to hydrogen fuel cells and integrated public transport systems. Workers at Vickers, another arms company, in the same decade designed a hydro-electric barrier across the river Severn, which could produce a substantial fraction of Britain’s energy. Builders’ unions in Australia have saved hundreds of parks and green spaces from being bulldozed and built on. Ordinary working people have the power to change the world through their labour, as long as they are not forced into constant expansion and irresponsibility by the capitalist system.

Al Gore, after releasing his popular film on climate change, called on young people everywhere to lie in front of bulldozers to prevent any more coal-fired power stations from being built. Hundreds of people heeded this call at the Climate Camp in Kent this summer, but there were not enough of them. The world will only change for the better, and our society will only become sustainable, when the people driving the bulldozers come to realise how much power they have, and turn their demolition machines on the economic system that threatens to destroy the earth.