Are capitalism and environmentalism compatible or irreconcilable?

Question

are there any mechanisms within the capitalist system , for example carbon pricing, which will be effective enough to deal with global warming? Is consumerism essential to todays stage of capitalism and will it be possible to consme enogh to keep the economy going without continuning to add to global warming

Answer 1

That is a particular concern for the American economy, since as a country we spend so much more than we produce.  Other countries only tolerate this situation while we continue to buy their products and services and support their economies.  Their refusing to fund our debt would damage our buying of their products.  There are signs that China and others may reduce their funding of our debt, and with rampant war spending and enourmous subsidies to the oil industry, the U.S. Dollar has suffered a precipitous slide over the past 7 years.

The first major hit we're taking is due to our failure to conserve gasoline to keep demand more in line with supplies.  We've known that the issue was coming since the 1970s, and simply raising MPG standards would have gone a long way towards balancing supply and demend.

The next big hit will be the double whammy of investing in technology and carbon offsets to reduce global warming, and suffering damages from its growing and accelerating effects.  

Capitalism has successfully responded to regional threats such as (much of the) air pollution in the U.S. and global challenges such as the CFC threat to the ozone layer.  

With global warming however there is a serious disconnect between the causes and the observed effects.  With population growth comes deforestation and new land put into use for growing crops, which are metabolized by people and their carbon is exhaled as carbon dioxide.  To produce our crops and engage in our other daily activities we burn fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases, some of which have an atmospheric persistence of thousands of years.  We also produce black carbon soot pollution through cooking fires (literally billions of them every day) and through industrial production.  The outcome, years or decades later, is a collection of symptoms that are difficult to individually ascribe to the specific causes.  

At the end of the day however Capitalism doesn't work if its consumers are having trouble surviving, such as growing and buying food, so it is starting to embrace the need to respond before we're firmly on the path to extinction.

One major problem that prevents all currently discussed solutions from working is that major contributors to our population, soot and carbon problem, such as China and India, are currently uninterested in participating in a solution.

China has taken steps towards capitalism as an economic growth strategy in recent years, but it remains to be seen whether or not they understand that global warming threatens the total collapse of their recent progress.

Ironically on the challenge of global warming, environmentalism offers capitalism the mechanisms by which to survive.  At some point we passed an invisible limit at which the planet was able to absorb uor impact and carbon and soot emissions.  We don't know if that limit was reached when the planet had 1.6 billion people and coal-powered industries and home heating and the upward trend in global temperatures had just started, or if the limit was passed in the 1970s before we added the latest 3 billion and the warming started to accelerate.  The challenge capitalism faces therefore is to develop technology and implement  incentives and penalties that might enable 7 to 9 billion of us to live with the environmental impact of 1.6 to 3 billion.  

Either capitalism will embrace sustainable development and we'll all fight the challenge of global warming voluntarily (including China and India), or we'll soon have 7 billion desperate people on this planet fighting over increasingly challenged resources.

Edit -

The books Jerry Lee provides links to are fascinating.  Scroll down to read some passages:

The Environmental Endgame: Mainstream Economics, Ecological Disaster, And Human Survival

http://books.google.com/books?id=8PnclYI...

Answer 2

I heard it again.................."distribution of wealth". There is no such thing in a free society. Wealth is earned. Only in a socialist or Communist society is wealth distributed. Well.......not really distributed but reduced to its lowest common denominator. The remainder is squandered by the elite. Kind of like our democrat party. They tax everything above poverty and use that money to  buy votes to remain in power. This describes the environmentalists. They are anti-capitalists more than environmentalists.

Answer 3

Capitalism is the only solution for pollution.  If you pollute and reduce the value of others property then you must correct the problem.

Collective ownership leads to "The Tragedy of the Commons", a well documented flaw in collective ownership.

Answer 4

http://books.google.com/books?id=8PnclYI...

seems to say that they are *not* compatible or reconcilable.  

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=l...

attempts to find something better than capitalism and communism.  The author seems to say that nothing else can compete and win against capitalism (when both are allowed), but there seem to be "ParEcon's" started on the net anyway.  

The Native Americans did not seem to suffer a tradgedy of the commons.

Answer 5

I would rather speak of MARKET APPROACH, MARKET MECHANISMS and FREE MARKET.

A market basically is the system where goods or services are exchanged. It consists of a supply and a demand and results in transactions at a certain price.

A market is a tool. Although it can emerge spontaneously, a market can also be created. This is for example the case for emission markets like the ones created in the US during the Reagan administration against acid rain (NOx and SOx emissions).

The economy is the production and distribution of wealth.

Pollution is the creation and spread of damage to the environment and goes against the economy and the creation of wealth. As such, it damages the economy. The cost of pollution is too often put upon people and not on the activity which results in the pollution.

Anyway, market mechanisms can often be used. They can lead to a higher efficiency (lower cost for the society to achieve the result).

When you speak about consumerism, do not forget that non-material goods are wealth too:

- education

- health

- peace

- quality of life

- happiness

- etc.