"Let them eat pollution": capitalism and the world environment

Monthly Review, Jan, 1993 by John Belamy Foster

Summers' argument for dumping toxic wastes in the Third World is therefore nothing more than a call for the globalization of policies and practices which are already evident in the United States, and which have recently been unearthed in locations throughout the capitalist world. The developed countries ship an estimated 20 million tons of waste to the Third World each year. In 1987 dioxin-laden industrial ash from Philadelphia was dumped in Guinea and Haiti. In 1988 4,000 tons of PCB-contaminated chemical waste from Italy was found in Nigeria, leaking from thousands of rusting and corroding drums, poisoning both soil and ground water. There can be few more blatant examples of the continuing dominance of imperialism over Third World affairs.

This same frame of mind which sees toxic pollution less as a problem to be overcome than one to be managed in accordance with the logic of the free market, is evident in the approach adopted by orthodox economists to issues as fateful as global warming. Writing in the May 30, 1992 issue of The Economist, Summers illustrates this perspective and the general attitude of the World Bank by stating that,

The argument that a moral obligation to future generations demands special treatment of environmental investments is fatuous. We can help our descendants as much by improving infrastructure as by preserving rain forests...as much by enlarging our scientific knowledge as by reducing carbon dioxide in the air. ....The reason why some investments favored by environmentalists fail...a [rigorous cost-benefit] test is that their likely effect on living standards is not so great .... In the worst-case scenario of the most pessimistic estimates yet prepared (those of William Cline of the Institute for International Economics), global warming reduces growth over the next two centuries by less than O. 1 percent a year. More should be done: dealing with global warming would not halt economic growth either. But raising the specter of our impoverished grandchildren if we fail to address global environmental problems is demagoguery.

The problem with such arguments is that they are based on forms of economic calculation that consistently undervalue natural wealth and underestimate the dependence of the economy on ecological conditions. The rebuilding of infrastructure cannot be equated with preserving the world's tropical rainforests since the loss of the latter would be irrevocable and would mean the extinction of both a majority of the world's species and the world's greatest genetic library. The absurdity of William Cline's attempt to quantify the potential economic damages of "very long-term global warming" up through the year 2,300--to which Summers refers--should be apparent to anyone who considers the obvious impossibility of applying economic values to the scale of climatic change anticipated. Thus the Cline estimates are based on a projected rise in global mean temperatures of 10 degrees to 18 degrees C (18 degrees to 32 degrees F) by the year 2300. The cost of this to the U.S. economy, Cline expects us to believe, will be long-term damages equal to 6 to 12 percent of GNP under the best assumptions, 20 percent under the worst.3 All of this is nonsense, however, from an ecological standpoint, since a temperature rise of 4 degrees C would create an earth that was warmer than at any time in the last 40 million years. In the midst of the last ice age the earth was only 5 degrees C colder than it is today. Viewed from this standpoint the question of whether or not long-term damages would equal 6, 12 or 20 percent of GNP must give way to the more rational question of whether human civilization and life itself could persist in the face of such a drastic change in global temperatures.