Environmental degradation outweighs and short-circuits technological fixes.

Monthly Review editor and University of Oregon professor of sociology John Bellamy Foster has written several books and numerous articles, beginning with Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), exploring the relevance of classical Marxist thought to grasping today’s existential environmental crises. Co-author Brett Clark is professor of sociology and sustainability studies at the University of Utah.

A small subset of the authors’ main claims will be highlighted here.

(1) There is indeed “an existential crisis in the human relation to the earth.” (1) Over the last 10,000 years planetary conditions fluctuated within relatively narrow and stable boundaries. The entire history of settled human civilizations has unfolded in this “Holocene” period of our planet’s life.

This period has now concluded. In a number of areas crucially important to humanity, these boundaries have been (or are about to be) transgressed: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, global freshwater use, changes in land use, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. (244)

Human activity is the main causal factor explaining this development, leading earth scientists to refer to the new period as the “Anthropocene.”

The authors of an important study cited by Foster and Clark warn that if the upper-range of projections of global warming were to occur it “would severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.”(1) When we recall how little has been done to prevent increased global warming, and how y-it is only one of the numerous planetary transformations imposing comparable risks on human societies, talk of an “existential threat” is fully warranted.

(2) There is no “technological fix” for this existential crisis. The more intelligent representatives of capital do not deny that serious environmental challenges must be faced. For them, however, this is best done by working with capitalist markets and not against them.

A carbon tax on polluting firms would give companies a strong market incentive to lower their costs by using technologies requiring fewer carbon emissions. Having to purchase rights to release carbon into the atmosphere in carbon markets would supposedly have the same effect, in their view.

There are also calls for the state to support firms undertaking massive geoengineering projects, such as sending aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect away the sun’s rays before they increase the planet’s surface temperature. Another proposal is to install technologies capable of extracting and sequestering significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

As Foster and Clark remind us, technological change in capitalism tends to develop “greener” technologies without any special spur. Over the course of the industrial revolution, for example, each succeeding generation of steam engines became “greener” over time, burning less coal per unit of output than the one before. The total amount of coal burned in England increased nonetheless. (245)

This “Jevons paradox” (named after the British political economist who first brought it to attention) is easily explained: the increase in the number of units produced overwhelmed the reduction of coal use per unit, leading to more coal being burned overall.

Is there any reason to think that introducing technologies “greener” than those employed today won’t have a similarly paradoxical result? Investors in the stock market, whose pricing of oil companies’ stocks assumes that the last drop of oil in the ground will be profitably extracted, do not seem to think so. (243-4)

Engineering Disaster

Regarding geoengineering projects, Foster and Clark repeat the warning of many scientists that such unprecedented technological experiments would almost surely have pernicious consequences as harmful as the harms they are supposed to alleviate. (278)

Further, their massive scale would leave few resources for other social needs. An infrastructure capable of handling annual throughput 70 percent larger than that handled currently by the global crude oil industry would be required, along with ridiculous quantities of water — 130 billion tons annually just to capture and store U.S. emissions. (280)

Far from being a step towards socialism (as some techno-utopians of the left hold), government funded geoengineering would simply solidify an environmental industrial complex alongside the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, and other complexes of big capital. (281-2)

Finally, once again, climate change is only one way in which present environmental trends will soon “severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.” In all the other cases too the sorts of technologies that have been developed, and the ways they have been used, have been part of the story of how we got to the present “existential crisis.”

Unless we figure out why that has been the case and eliminate that reason, to think we will be saved by technologies is to indulge in fantasy.

(3) Capitalism is the fundamental cause of the existential crisis in the relation between humans and the earth. All living beings appropriate resources from their environment and all generate wastes back into their surroundings. For a species to successfully occupy an environmental niche, the rate at which it depletes resources from its ecosystem must correspond to the rate they are replenished, and the rate it generates wastes must be aligned with the rate wastes can be processed.

When the social forms of capitalism are in place, neither condition is met, creating the metabolic rift between human society and its environment.

Capitalist market societies are distinguished from other societies in that products generally take the form of commodities sold for a profit. Any capitalist producers who do not attempt to make as much profit as possible, as fast as possible, will find themselves losing market share to those who do, if not forced out of existence altogether.

Making as much profit as possible, as fast as possible, generally means producing and selling as many commodities as possible, as fast as possible. This accelerated temporality is in tension with the temporality of our environment; resources tend to be depleted at a faster rate than they can be replenished, and wastes generated at a faster rate than they can be processed.

From this standpoint the “Jevons Para­dox” is less a paradox than a general description of how capitalism works. Any environmental benefits from technologies using fewer natural resources or generating fewer wastes per unit of production necessarily tends to be overwhelmed by the increase in the number of commodities produced in response to the “Grow or die!” imperative so ruthlessly imposed by the demands of capital accumulation.

From Local to Global Destruction

In the early phases of capitalist development, environmental destruction was relatively localized. After a handful of centuries of global expansion, it has sucked in re­sources from the natural world and spewed out wastes on a global scale, creating a fundamental rift in the metabolic relationship between human beings and the earth that is our home.