Are environmentalism and capitalism compatible?

OK on the one hand the two are desperately trying to coexist, via carbon trading, the development of renewable technologies and – although this one is accidental – the massive rises in the price of oil.

There are plenty more areas, however, where the two forces are in opposition. Capitalism is synonymous with consumerism: capitalism works on the basis that people get paid to work in companies that produce things to sell. Regardless of whether they actually need them. Demand, where it does not occur naturally, has to be manufactured through ever-more sophisticated and invasive marketing. If the aim was to ensure every family had a car, that would not provide enough work to the masses of people who currently work for car companies. So the aim has to be for everyone to have a new car. So the world keeps making and making and making things and the old things have to be thrown away to make room for the new ones.

It is often said: “They don’t make things like they used to.” I wonder how many people consider the implications of this. People used to be made to last, because consumerism was in its infancy, and companies had not considered the possibility of reaching a point of saturation in their markets. So manufacturers were not concerned about whether they could sell a car to a family that already had one, because there were plenty of families without one to target.

Now items are made with a very limited shelf life. It is a balancing act: maintaining brand credibility through the perception of quality, while ensuring the need to replace products relatively frequently. And it is not only through things breaking down, and becoming “cheaper to replace than to fix.” It is through the holding back of innovations that have already been thought up in order to sell lesser innovations first. Don’t think that Gillette haven’t already had the idea of a razor with eight blades (for the closest ever shave). It is just that before that they have to surprise us with offerings with six and seven blades.

Everything is geared towards selling and consumption. And consumerism leads to the rapid consumption of the world’s finite resources. It makes any plans to curb energy consumption look largely fanciful: can efficiency gains offset the elevation of emerging economies to the same level of consumerism the West has enjoyed in recent decades? It is hard to see.

I have long counted myself as an economic liberal. I have been convinced of the case for free markets as a force for poverty reduction and the elevation of living standards around the world. (When emerging markets get stiffed by the West it is rarely free trade per se causing the problem, but the lack of its consistency in application. In essence, rich countries want free trade when it suits them, but protect their own workers when it doesn’t.)

But if the environmentalist agenda is to be taken seriously it is increasingly difficult to justify this view. The difficulty comes in settling on a viable alternative to the current political and economic system. Capitalism is too comfortable for people to relinquish it easily. It is system that rewards greed and channels it into productivity. There is no reason to suspect that a system that puts the planet above the individual will fare any better than one that tried to put society’s interests first (communism).

Following this line of thought, however, perhaps the next stage in history’s development will see the outbreak of environmentalist revolutions in countries particularly concerned about, or affected by, global warming and/ or resource depletion. Followed, presumably, by the emergence of environmentalist dictatorships. These would descend, over time, into the inevitably self serving and power hoarding cradles of corruption that is the fate of all but a handful of dictatorships, no matter how ideologically sound they were at the point of conception.

(This is not to say that democracies are not self serving or power hoarding, but that, when they work well, they recognise this trait in themselves, and seek to offset this tendency by diversifying the power bases in a system of checks and balances.)

Can democracy evolve away from unfettered capitalism towards environmentalism? Socialism wove itself into the fabric of democracy so that, in the main, it rose above party politics, so that in the UK we have a consensus that the state has to look after workers. Marx would presumably feel a little placated: the rich still get richer on the backs of the poor, but at least the poor get sick leave, paid holiday time and some oversight in the quality of their conditions. It is a lot less than he hoped for, but a vast improvement on what he was confronted with in his day.

And it is on this same trajectory that we are currently moving. Not a radical rethink of the system by which we live, but a moderation of the existing system in the right general direction. The question is: will this be enough? Will carbon trading, a few dozen windmills dotted around the country and, as Brown would remind us, a cut down in wastage be enough?

There is a definite generational divide in this debate and it is obvious treating the environmental situation as an impending cataclysmic event alienates many people – people of all ages, though the younger generation certainly see it as more serious. The older generation have lived through various threats to civilization and fancy this is just another issue that mankind will muddle through – like the Cold War or the Millennium Bug. And that is quite possibly true. But that is not to deny the problem: just as the Cold War left us with a legacy of problems around the world, so too will “The War on Carbon.”

A better analogy is probably the Industrial Revolution (in this context it is probably more helpful to think of it as the first stage in an ongoing revolution – or evolution). It became obvious the pollution caused by those early factories and mills had to be brought under control when London was caked in black soot. Industry cleaned its act up. The same with early urbanisation and hygiene, after plagues made it obvious city life demanded higher standards. We need to replicate those efforts, and perhaps once the full extent of the problem becomes clear it will be possible to adapt the system sufficiently to resolve the fundamental problems we have with our system.