Earth Day 2008: An Essay on History & the Environment

 

I abandoned my prepared speech as I saw more and more students lose interest in the documentary, talking with neighbors, or texting friends (the darkened assembly began to look like a star-studded sky on a clear night). When the overhead lights went on I asked students to stand and move around a bit. After order was restored, I simply said: "I know Al Gore is boring, but I don't think global warming is. I would really like to hear what you have to say about global warming and other threats to the environment. You can refer to the movie, or not, depending on what you want to say."

 

For the next hour, dozens of students stood at microphones scattered through the assembly and addressed the issues. No one disputed the fact of global climate change. Their major focus was on three vital questions: "What could environmentally conscious individuals do to reverse global climate change?"; "Will pro-environment policies address the problem of widespread poverty around the world?"; and "Does the United States have to choose between the environment and the economy?"

 

During the course of the discussion, I tried to respond to student questions. I argued that there is a difference between individual behavior and collective social action. While an individual "green" lifestyle is commendable and everyone who drives should drive a small hybrid car, only collective social action can change the way our society, and other societies, operate. The earth needs "green" people, but also a "green" movement. Because global warming is a trans-national problem that cannot be effectively addressed by individual countries, ending environmental destruction will require international cooperation and new levels of economic, social, and political integration. While this campaign will not automatically solve the problem of income disparity and intense poverty, it will create the international mechanisms needed to address these problems as well.

 

The question of whether the United States had to choose between the environment and the economy was the original topic I had planned to talk about, and it is not an easy question to answer. I think the United States, Western Europe, and the industrializing world (especially China and India) have to make serious economic choices, but former Vice President Al Gore and many others think global warming can be reversed without major structural changes, if we have the necessary willpower.

 

Act I. Scene I of Shakespeare's Macbeth opens with thunder and lightning. There are three shadowy figures, witches, on stage. The first witch asks her companions: "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?" A second witch declares they will meet "When the hurlyburly's done, When the battle's lost and won." The third witch adds, "That will be ere the set of sun." Before they leave the stage, the three witches announce in chorus: "Fair is foul, and foul is fail: Hover through the fog and filthy air."

 

The witches provide us with Shakespeare's insight into the troubled world of Macbeth. The conditions they describe still hold true today. How do we effectively respond to the destruction of human environments and potential global catastrophe in a world where fair is confused with foul, where we are manipulated to believe that foul is somehow fair, and more and more, pollution hovers through the fog and filthy air that we breathe and water that we drink? Environmental scientists warn us that we cannot afford to wait until the "hurlyburly's done." But many people, including some of the world's most powerful figures, are not listening.

 

It is not surprising that people are confused about what is happening to the environment. According to Gore, 100 percent of articles in scientific journals agree that climate change is real, but half the news stories, and President George W. Bush, keep referring to it as an unproven theory.

 

However, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, rising average temperatures, and the melting of ice caps in the Arctic Ocean, West Antarctic, and Greenland, illustrated by Gore in the documentary, are all facts, not opinions or theories.

 

While An Inconvenient Truth is an important movie and a needed wake-up call on global warming, I have three significant problems with it. First, as a thinking person interested in the topic, I do not understand why former Vice President Gore had to present all the data himself. Why didn't we hear from the scientists to whom he keeps referring?

 

The second problem has been noted by many of Al Gore's detractor: He exaggerates for effect. For example, he argues that if the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps melt, sea level could rise twenty feet in this century. Animated maps and computer simulations show that such a sea-level change would flood most of southern Florida, much of Manhattan, Shanghai, Bangladesh, and other densely populated regions, affecting hundreds of millions of people. However, the consensus among climate scientists at the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea level is likely to rise less than three feet in the 21st century—not an insignificant figure, but much less than Gore's extreme projection. Perhaps that is why Gore, rather than the scientists, tells the story of global warming in this movie.

 

The third problem is the most important one for me. Gore paints a very dire picture of climate change. His PowerPoint graphs on pollution and global warming show acceleration in recent years at such a dramatic rate that the lines are leaping off of chart. If Gore's analysis is right, and I think to a large measure it is, then the solutions he proposes are much too moderate and do not address the magnitude of the problems facing humanity.

 

The documentary is over an hour and a half long, but only the last five minutes are reserved for proposals about what can be done to reverse global warming. In these five minutes, instead of demanding radical and systemic change, Gore proposes much narrower reforms that center on personal lifestyle. He wants viewers to reduce their personal carbon emissions by carpooling, checking tire pressure, buying low-watt lightbulbs, adjusting thermostats two degrees up in summer and two down in winter; using less hot water; and planting carbon-absorbing trees. These are all good ideas, and will certainly help us feel righteous about our personal actions, but I doubt they will come close to reducing carbon emissions enough to stop global warming. They certainly do not address the past two hundred years of environmental degradation and its accumulated impact. The Kyoto protocol, the major international environmental accord reached during the Clinton-Gore administration of the 1990s, would only reduce carbon dioxide emissions back to 1990 levels at best. A weak and limited treaty, it is set to expire in 2012. The United States never signed it because President Bush felt it would hinder the national economy and objected to the fact that China and India, two of the world's largest polluters, are exempt from its rules.

 

If we are serious about reversing global warming, we need to ask upsetting questions, questions that Al Gore refused to address:

 

According to Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) and The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), "the driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism—the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. Globalization also has its own set of economic rules — rules that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy" (Friedman, 1999).

 

Friedman's underlying proposal is that if the countries of the world deregulate markets and allow profit-seeking capitalists to search for and maximize profits, standards of living will rise and economic and political problems will be resolved.

 

Whether you agree or disagree with Friedman's argument that unregulated capitalism will necessarily promote development, we know from both the past and present that it always comes with costs. There are always huge numbers of people—sometimes entire societies—displaced by economic change whose lives are irreparably damaged. You may not be the person to pay for change, but someone always does. Stockbrokers, bankers, and technicians may have made fortunes as the service and information industries came to dominate the U.S. economy. But what happened to all the auto and steel workers and coal miners who lost their jobs, and all the young people who never got jobs, because the United States deindustrialized?

 

Unregulated capitalism in the United States and around the world may continue to generate record profits, but what happens to the environment as factories are moved from country to country so they can use the air, land, and water as a dumping ground for toxic materials and avoid the costs of clean-up? When companies try to reduce the cost of production, the environment is one of their first targets. Even business leaders who would like to think of themselves as environmentally conscious know they face bankruptcy if they do not follow the same exploitive practices as their competitors. This system is difficult to change because of the enormous wealth and power of capitalist corporations and because of the prevalent ideology, which is that coordinated government planning and international cooperation to protect the environment will only make the problems worse. Some critics have argued that for the environment, capitalism is the equivalent of cancer—it eats away at the body that is sustaining it until the organism and the cancer die together.

 

I believe the capitalist economic system that predominates in the world today is unable to resolve the global climate crisis because of its commitment to short-term corporate profitability. Because no one owns the atmosphere and the oceans, industry is able to use them as free dumpsites for waste. To remain competitive, even centrally planned state-dominated economies, such as the one in China, treat the atmosphere this way.

 

The earth will survive human folly and recover, but it is not clear that human society will. It is past time, maybe even too late, but we need to seriously address the question whether capitalism can resolve the global climate crisis.

 

Free trade is never free, especially when it promotes pollution and environmental destruction. It is time to call it what it really is—foul trade—and to organize, collectively, and refuse to purchase foul trade goods. An international boycott of goods made in China—and of Walmart, the leading distributor of China's products in the United States—would be a good start. In a capitalist marketplace, our position as consumers will give us some leverage. We need to think globally, act locally—and act globally as well.