Guest post: Easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on There might be some coal under there.
For everyone out there who doesn’t understand the problem, I have a message for you: The economy is man-made. The environment is not. Which one do you think we could manage to remake if they conflict? And which one can we absolutely not live without?
Exactly. Beautifully formulated. Or to paraphrase Bill McKibben, as difficult as it may be to change the economic system, it’s almost certainly going to be easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds. My first question to anyone who argues that protecting the environment is going to harm the economy is “Compared to what?” After all, there can be no prospering economy on an uninhabitable planet. If doing whatever it takes to keep the planet habitable means the economy is screwed, then it’s screwed either way, and all the covfefe in the world is never going to save it.
I’ve been reading up on things like degrowth and steady state economic models lately, and, historically speaking, the all-destroying perpetual growth model has only been with us for the blink of an eye. If people could live without it in the past they can live without it today. Of course modern technologies and standards of living haven’t been with us for very long either, but there is no law of nature that says technology can only be used to keep the economy growing for ever. Imagine if increased efficiency meant we got to work less rather than produce more. Sounds great to me. And to those who argue that perpetual growth is necessary to lift people out of poverty, I can’t resist sharing the following quote from the book Enough Is Enough by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill:
Economic growth has been cited by the World Bank as the “essential ingredient for sustained poverty reduction.” But for every $100 of global economic growth that occurred between 1990 and 2001, only 60 cents went to people below the $1-per-day line. In other words, to get the poorest people of the world an extra $1 required a $166 increase in global production and consumption. Someone is profiting from economic growth, but it’s not the world’s poor.
It never is. In fact, it appears that they are the ones likely to lose most heavily from the environmental degradation that results from constant economic growth. The richest of the rich will always be able to afford to insulate themselves from the worst effects; but the poorest of the poor are the ones losing their homes, their land, and their lives.
I’m not sure it’s not possible to have continued growth and an environmentally/physically sustainable economy. I am not sure that “growth” has to mean growth in terms of natural physical stuff being removed from the planet and rearranged into artifacts using polluting methods and then eventually becoming rubbish (more pollution).
Anyway, here is a video called “The Story of Stuff”. They discuss different kinds of economic models of the sort that Ophelia refers to above. It’s about ten years old now, but the organisation that made the video seems to have continued building their project and making more videos.
http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/
And…the poor are often invoked as excuses for not doing anything. Every regulation proposed, someone will exclaim that the regulation will hurt the poor. I hear this from the left as often as from the right; the right uses the poor without caring about them, and the left uses the poor to excuse their behavior while perhaps remembering to think about them between the whole foods purchase and the fair trade sandals that cost more than many people make in a year.
You can in fact have both a growing economy and good environmental standards.
The thing about the economy that a lot of people miss is that a strong economy is basically everyone, not just the richest chunk of it. If you have to pay people to properly maintain your factory – that money isn’t vanishing into a void, it is going into their pockets where it will then be spent on the stuff that they need.
Not only that but regulation creates those jobs, and creates sub-industries which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, with mining, what happens when the mine runs out? Well in a well regulated country the mine has to fund land recovery – which requires people to do it.
Which means that in an area where a mine has run out of whatever was being mined environmental regulation provides for at least some continued employment – generally at a cost to people who would otherwise not spend the money as effectively.
The main motive for investment is to turn a profit. If you have a situation where there is no redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, over time the demand for goods will drop as the money pools in the hands of the rich (Because there is only a certain amount of stuff one person can want), which means you will get a corporate emphasis on cost cutting rather than growth because there is no room for that growth.
Which in turn means that there will be even less demand for goods as people lose their jobs and supply is constrained to cut those costs further, which in turn means that all of the investment the American right talks about isn’t going to happen because there is no demand, and thus the best potential for growth is – sticking your money in a bank account.
The net cost to the economy for regulation is pretty much nothing, and generally it works out at a profit. The net cost for de-regulation however?
That is when you end up with money going stagnant, essentially taken out of the system. Not only that, but a lot of regulation is basically designed to reduce cross contagion from bad business practices.
One business going under can have a domino effect where multiple industries collapse, bankruptcies screw the supplied and the supplier, and what causes bankruptcies in America?
Health issues mostly – and those are made much worse by poor environmental regulations. Hurricanes and fires are also not good.
The very basis of Republican economic thought is a complete clusterfuck which undermines economic growth, in favour of growing the bank accounts of the rich. Having people becoming too rich is a symptom of a sick economy, because that means money is going stagnant.
Money needs to constantly change hands for the economy to grow, at least if what you care about is the actual economy rather than the bank accounts of like eight people. Regulation is thus largely a good thing on a macro-economic level.
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