In a recent essay, “Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution,” in one of the leading scientific journals, Nature, physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, a researcher for an investment management company, asked rhetorically, “What is the flagship achievement of economics?” Bouchaud’s answer: “Only its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises.”1 Although his discussion is focused on the current worldwide financial crisis, his comment applies equally well to mainstream economic approaches to the environment—where, for example, ancient forests are seen as non-performing assets to be liquidated, and clean air and water are luxury goods for the affluent to purchase at their discretion. The field of economics in the United States has long been dominated by thinkers who unquestioningly accept the capitalist status quo and, accordingly, value the natural world only in terms of how much short-term profit can be generated by its exploitation. As a result, the inability of received economics to cope with or even perceive the global ecological crisis is alarming in its scope and implications.
Bouchaud penetratingly observes, “The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work done in the 1950s and 1960s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science.” The capitalist ideology that undergirds economics in the United States has led the profession to be detached from reality, rendering it incapable of understanding many of the crises the world faces. Mainstream economics’ obsession with the endless growth of GDP—a measure of “value added,” not of human well-being or the intrinsic worth of ecosystems and other species—and its failure to recognize the fundamental ecological underpinnings of the economy, has led to more than simply an inability to perceive the deterioration of the global environment. In fact, the problem goes much deeper. Orthodox economics, like the capitalist system that it serves, leads to an “Après moi le déluge!” philosophy that is anything but sustainable in orientation. As Naomi Klein has said, there is something perversely “natural” about Disaster Capitalism.2
The inherent incapacity of orthodox or neoclassical economics to take ecological and social costs into account was perhaps best exemplified in the United States by the work of Julian Simon. In articles and exchanges in Science and Social Science Quarterly and in his book The Ultimate Resource published at the beginning of the 1980s, he insisted that there were no serious environmental problems, that there were no environmental constraints on economic or population growth, and that there would never be long-term resource shortages. For example, he infamously claimed that copper (an element) could be made from other metals and that only the mass of the universe, not that of the earth, put a theoretical limit on how much copper could be produced. The free market if left unfettered, he contended, would ensure continuous progress into the distant future. These and other dubious assertions led ecologist Paul Ehrlich to refer to Simon as “an economist in Wonderland.”3 Apologists for capitalism continue to occupy Wonderland, because it is only in Wonderland that environmental problems either do not really exist or can be solved by capitalism, which can also improve the quality of life for the mass of humanity. Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and political scientist (now an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School), picked up Simon’s torch, publishing his salvo aimed at environmentalism, The Skeptical Environmentalist,in 2001. Lomborg argued, for example, that attempting to prevent climate change would cost more and cause more harm than letting it happen. Lomborg’s book was immediately praised to the skies by the mass media, which was looking for a new anti-environmental crusader. Soon after the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, environmental scientists documented the countless flaws (not all of them inadvertent) in Lomborg’s reasoning and evidence. Scientific American devoted part of an issue to four articles by leading scientists sharply criticizing Lomborg. As a result of its serious flaws, the book was rejected by the scientific community. Yet, despite the adamant rejection of The Skeptical Environmentalist by natural scientists, all of this seemed only to add to Lomborg’s celebrity within the corporate media system. The Economist touted the book and its conclusions, proclaiming it to be “one of the most valuable books on public policy,” having dispelled the notion of “looming environmental disaster” and “the conviction that capitalism is self-destructive.”4 Time magazine in 2004 designated Lomborg as one of the 100 most influential people in the world; while in 2008, Britain’s Guardian newspaper labeled him as one of the “50 people who could save the planet.”
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Indeed, with a level of carbon concentration much less than this, 500 ppm (associated with global warming on the order of 3.5°C or 6.3°F), the effects both on the world’s biological diversity and on human beings themselves would be disastrous. “A conservative estimate for the number of species that would be exterminated (committed to extinction)” at this level, according to James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “is one million.” Moreover, rising sea levels, the melting of glaciers, and other effects could drastically affect hundreds of millions, conceivably even billions, of people. Hansen, the world’s most famous climatologist, argues that in order to avoid catastrophic change it is necessary to reduce atmospheric carbon to a level of 350 ppm.22 Yet, the Stern Review itself, despite being designated as a “radical” and “fear-mongering” report by Lomborg, targets an atmospheric carbon concentration stabilization level of 480 ppm (550 ppm in carbon equivalent), which—if never reaching Nordhaus’s near 700 ppm peak (over 900 ppm carbon equivalent)—is sure to be disastrous, if the analysis of Hansen and most other leading climatologists is to be believed.23 Why such a high atmospheric carbon target? The answer is provided explicitly by the Stern Review itself, which argues that past experience shows that anything more than a 1 percent average annual cut in carbon emissions in industrial countries would have a significant negative effect on economic growth. Or as the Stern Review itself puts it, “it is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than about 1 percent a year except in instances of recession.”24 So the atmospheric carbon target is determined not according to what is necessary to sustain the global environment, protect species, and ensure the sustainability of human civilization, but by what is required to keep the capitalist economy itself alive.
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http://www.monthlyreview.org/090501-york-clark-foster.php
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