Most of us enjoy the fruits of capitalism, but far fewer of us consider our nation’s dominant economic system’s hidden costs with respect to environmental harm and general injustice.
Dr. Sarah T. Romano, assistant professor of political science and global studies, organized the forum “Capitalism and the Global Environmental Crisis,” a panel discussion yesterday afternoon. The organized discussion drew about 70 people, many (if not most) harboring doubts about a free-market-based economy’s ability to maintain the planet’s habitability, either physically or socially.
“A focus on the environment is not very conventional in a political economy text,” the professor said, though most economic activity, she added, “depends on the natural environment.”
Regardless of which economic system prevails, Romano said, “The world is grappling with how to confront and slow environmental degradation.” However, the environment is too often rendered invisible in economic and political discussions.
But it was hardly rendered invisible Wednesday afternoon, as student Lily Careb introduced the five guest panelists:
- Samantha Meserve, deputy director of the Renewable and Alternative Energy Division at Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.
- Curt Newton, a coordinator for 350 Massachusetts for a Better Future, as well as a part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “climate team.”
- Nafis Hasan, a representative of the Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who works on its Take Back the Grid campaign.
- Rebecca Keller, a finance professional who is a volunteer for Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
- Somnath Mukherji, development coordinator for the Association for India's Development.
Who owns the world?
Much of the discussion centered on what at least one panelist called the “commodification” of natural resources, and a call to examine who should own them, as well as the means of production: private, profit-seeking corporations, workers or the state.
Mukherji said capitalism today and in the past has relied on the exploitation of indigenous people’s land for natural resources, and such rapacious, “colonialist” behavior isn’t restricted to one nation (though, he and other panelists indicated, the United States has often led the way).
“Imagine a world without borders because those are fake lines, anyway,” he said, adding that the problem isn’t limited to the extrication of fossil fuels: even alternative energy sources, like solar power, carry a human cost.
“When solar happens in India, you need land for it,” he said, “indigenous people’s land.”
Mukherji also pointed out a more dramatic example of capitalism’s harm to India, the 1984 Bhopal disaster, a leak of highly toxic gas from the Union Carbide pesticide plant that killed several thousand people. What’s more, he said, three generations later, children are being born with congenital defects.
Who’s to blame?
Such disasters, as well as less lethal injustices, are too often a side-effect of capitalism, panelists and audience members expressed, with varying degrees of scorn for the economic model based on profit-reaping and reinvestment. Some favored a total abolition of capitalism, while others — while sympathetic — believed much can be accomplished within the United States’ present economic system.
Yet, with apologies to Shakespeare, the fault often lies not in our economic system, but in ourselves.
“We all love convenience,” said Newton. “We love to be comfortable, and cheap energy has been key.” However, the impact of fossil-fuel-driven industrialization, as well as corporate agriculture and personal consumption practices, are imperiling the planet. “We want to restore our livable climate to us.”
Keller, of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, indicated that carbon taxes, fees governments assess on corporations that burn fossil fuels, are an important though imperfect way to bring about change.
“If you want people to use less of something, raise the price of it,” she said, adding that carbon taxes can also prompt those consuming fossil fuels to investigate or develop alternatives, like cleaner batteries, hydroelectricity and solar energy.
Meserve, from the state Department of Energy Resources, agreed that the present system can be used to start to preserve the environment.
“Under capitalism you see a lot of research and development that helps push the technologies forward,” she said, touting the effectiveness of carbon credits, essentially permits (and limits) for fossil-fuel consumption, governed by international trade agreements, that can be traded in an open market. Carbon credits are designed largely as a reward to encourage sustainable industrial practices and, eventually, reduce fossil-fuel consumption.
“We have this market mechanism that has been working over the past 20 years,” Meserve said, though she hedged her optimism by pointing out that new, alternative-energy technologies are expensive and, as a result, available only to richer individuals, corporations and nations.
But that makes traditional energy even more expensive to those who can’t afford alternative energy infrastructure: It leaves fewer, less-affluent ratepayers to bear a larger share of the costs of traditional natural gas and the fossil-fuel-powered electrical infrastructure.
That’s one reason why Hasan believes it’s imperative to “take back the grid.”
Hasan read from his smart phone, while acknowledging that some of the materials for that phone are mined from the Democratic Republic of Congo — effectively helping finance terror and violence within that African nation.
“The goals … fall under the four D’s: decarbonize, decommodify, democratize and decolonize. We want to supplant the current fossil-fueled capitalist energy system with one that is carbon-free, organized for the public good (not profit), and under complete public control, and which repairs the harm caused to marginalized communities and the ecologies upon which we all depend.”
At least one audience member worried some were creating a “false binary” between untrammeled capitalism and outright state control of the means of production, ignoring the positive models of socialist democracies in Northern Europe, as well as atrocious environmental conditions in Soviet Union-era communist states.
Hasan, though, countered that some of the environmentalism in places like Finland is made possible by the same nations’ resource exploitation in other parts of the world.
The forum, which will air on Cambridge Community Television in January, had been scheduled for two hours, but stretched another 30 minutes. Though there were some disagreements, the panelists and audience members shared common cause.
“We’re all environmentalists in one way or another,” professor Romano said at the outset.