In 1932 I was born into a world of 2 billion people. Nearly 80 years on there are 7 billion, more than three times as many. My own small country New Zealand has nearly tripled its population in that time. I confess to feeling anxiety about the capacity of the globe to sustain this level of population, let alone the further billions we can expect this century. Does that make me a populationist? That’s the term used by Ian Angus, editor of online journal Climate and Capitalism, and Simon Butler, coeditor of Australian Green Left Weekly, in their new book Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis to describe people who attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers. The authors don’t. They attribute climate change and other ecological challenges to the growth imperative of capitalism, and their book takes issue with those who see “overpopulation” as a cause of the threats to the environment.
Author: Bryan Walker
Let the sun shine in
Soon after writing the post in which I reported Carbon War Room CEO Shigar Khan’s prediction that within this decade incremental energy will all be coming from renewables I saw Paul Krugman’s latest column in the New York Times. He draws attention to the rapidly falling cost of solar power:
If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.
That, of course, is the point at which there’s no longer any question of continuing with new coal or even gas powered electricity generation.
Not that it’s a matter of simply waiting for that to happen. Krugman points out that it would likely already have happened if fossil fuels were priced to take into account the external costs they impose. And he sees the fossil fuel industry fighting hard to oppose and delay the transition.
The promise of renewables
No sooner had I finished reviewing Fools Rule, which recounts the determination of many nations to carry on with the further discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels in blunt defiance of the warnings of science, than I read Fred Pearce’s article in Yale Environment 360 detailing how the world is in fact burning more and more coal. He pointed to the irony of the forthcoming UN negotiations in Durban, South Africa, where the talk of how to kick the coal habit will take place in a country with high CO2 emissions and a thriving export industry in power-station coal. Not that he was singling out South Africa – the trend is shared over many countries. As if in confirmation our Prime Minister on the same day, during the leaders’ debate, affirmed yet again his government’s commitment to expand mining and drilling operations – in an environmentally responsible way, of course. He offered Australia as an example of the prosperity to be obtained thereby.
Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change
Canadian investigative journalist William Marsden doesn’t hide his anguish or his anger as he reports the maddening incapacity of political leaders and negotiators to come to terms with climate change. Nor should he. It’s a sorry story he has to tell in his new book Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change. Marsden’s book treats three sobering realities. One is the science. He writes of the utter desperation of scientists “as they pile proof upon proof only to see it disappear into the smoke of denial or crash against the excuse of political and economic expediency”. He fully grasps the scientific picture and the mounting threats it points to. Regarding the work of glaciologists as fundamental to understanding climate change, he has buttressed his acquaintance with the science by spending time with working scientists in the Canadian Arctic. Last year glaciologist Martin Sharp agreed to Marsden tagging along with his team working on the Devon Island ice cap. Consequently the book includes a lively narrative of the conditions under which those scientists work when on the ice. He leaves the reader in no doubt that the science is “overwhelming and frightening”.
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The Ecological Rift
Why do we continue with business as usual when we know that it is leading us to disastrous climate change? According to the authors of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth it is because our capitalist economic system is driven by forces which cannot stand back and weigh the consequences of their drive. The blind accumulation of private wealth at the expense of the environment has enormous momentum which the system is not geared to control.
The authors, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York are all sociology professors. They write from the broadly Marxist standpoint exemplified by the Monthly Review magazine of which Foster is the current editor. As might be expected, their attack on capitalism is not limited to its environmental devastation but also takes in its exploitation of human labour for private profit. One of the interests of the book, for me with only a superficial acquaintance with Marx’s thought, was its explanation of the unity which Marx saw in nature and society and which western Marxism failed to sustain. The authors point, for example, to Marx’s interest in soil science and awareness of the nutrient depletion accompanying a more industrialised agriculture. Nature as well as human society needed to be protected from the capitalist juggernaut.