environment science writing -111

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Short essay questions. Total 5 essay questions. Please provide a response about 150 words to each essay question.

Here is the question:

( essay part). 150 words for each question:

1. How is hunger built in to economic structures according to Vandana Shiva?

2. What are the ecological differences between the peasant food web and the industrial food chain?

3. Explain why Magdoff and Foster think that technological reforms can never make capitalism sustainable.

4. What does Waring mean when she says the women and the environment “count for nothing”?

5. How does Du Bois link the problem of race to the environmental degradation of soils and loss of biodiversity?


Here is the reading link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rMrm_JW1pAIu0xhwn...

Need to use the information from here.

For question 1, read: Shiva, “Hunger by Design”(pp. 238-248)

Q2: Kautsky, “The Peasant and Industry” from The Agrarian Question(pp. 186-190)

Q 3: see attached file.

Q4. Waring, “A Woman’s Reckoning” (pp. 299-315)

Q5. Du Bois, “The Quest for the Golden Fleece” plus selections(pp.200-224)

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5. Can Capitalism Go Green? The most obvious way out [of the climate crisis] is a new round of growth-a giant burst of economic activity designed to replace our fossil-fuel system with something else that will let us go on living just as we do now (or better!), but without the carbon. Even, or especially, as our economy has tanked, we've seized on the idea of green growth as the path out of all our troubles. -BILL McKIBBEN! Some people who recognize the ecological and social problems that capitalism brings still think that capitalism can and should be reformed. According to Benjamin Barber: "The struggle for the soul of capitalism is ... a struggle between the nation's economic body and its civic soul: a struggle to put capitalism in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants. Saving capitalism means bringing it into harmony with spirit-with prudence, pluralism and those 'things of the public' ... that define our civic souls. A revolution of the spirit."2 William Greider has written a book entitled The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy. There are books that tout the potential of"green cap- 96 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW italism" and the Natural Capitalism of Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. Green to Gold, a book by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston-"printed on acid-free paper made from 100% postconsumer recycled pulp with soy ink"-is subtitled How SmaTt Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage.3 So we can get rich, continue growing the economy, increase consumption without end, and save the planet-all at the same time! How good can it get? There is, however, a big problem with such thinking. A system that has only one goal, the maximization of profits in an endless quest for the accumulation of capital on an ever-expanding scale, and which thus seeks to transform every single thing on earth into a commodity with a p1·ice, is a system that is soulless; it can never have a soul, never be green. It can never stand still, but is driven to manipulate and fabricate whims and wants in order to grow and sell more ... forever. Nothing is allowed to stand in its path. There are a number of important "out of the box" ecological and environmental thinkers and doers who are highly critical of the status quo and identifY with the environmental resistance to the system, but who have nevertheless found ingenious ways to reconcile themselves with capitalism. For example, Hawken and the Lovinses argue that capitalism is not really capitalism unless it fully embraces so-called "natural capital," which means that all will be well if capitalism internalizes everything in nature, bringing the external world under its laws, reducing everything in existence to the status of a commodity-with a price. Consequently, these seemingly nonconformist environmental thinkers do not differ much from a more establishment figure like Al Gore, with his aspirations for a "sustainable capitalism."4 Hawken and the Lovinses and many others in the broad tradition they represent-people seeking progressive solutions but finding it impossible to get out of the capitalist framework-are CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 97 no doubt genuinely good and well-meaning people who are sincerely concerned with the health of the planet. Most are also concerned with issues of social justice. Some truly admirable figures like WesJackson and Wendell Berry are working toward concrete low-tech solutions, emphasizing local sustainability and community, while understanding that there is no real silver bullet cure for what ails the planet. We ourselves have been inspired at times by the ideas of such out-of-the- box thinkers. But there is one box from which it is impossible to escape without confronting it directly: the capitalist economic system. Many, if not most, influential environmental thinkers in the world's rich countries still shy away from such a direct confrontation. Even the increasing numbers of green thinkers who criticize capitalism and its market failures, frequently settle in the end for what they regard as practical solutions directed at creating a tightly controlled humane, green, and non-corporate capitalism, instead of actually getting outside the box of capitalism. Some call for reinventing "the purpose and design of business," or using tax policy to better direct investment and consumption to green ends, or for trade policies that might promote the goods of more sustainable economies.s Others suggest eliminating the myriad government subsidies to businesses and taking into account social and ecological consequences of production ("externalities") so as to give rise to "honest prices" that reflect the real costs, including those to the environment. 6 The contradictions and complexities of actually implementing a new way to price commodities, in a system in which the profit is the only god, and power rests in the hands of people who have no interest in doing this, makes all of this an insurmountable task. As David Harvey has said: "If capitalism is forced to internalize" all of the social and environmental costs it generates "it will go out of business. This is the simple tmth."7 98 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW The Mystique of the Market The remedies proposed by environmental reformers often include maintaining a strong role for private ownership of businesses as well as the role of markets. In many people's minds markets (especially so-called free markets) are an important positive aspect of capitalism because they provide cues telling businesspeople what to invest in, and whether more or less of some product or service should be produced. Markets are also, in this view, the only efficient way of distributing goods. Thus markets are supposed to make sure that what's needed gets produced and what people don't need or want doesn't get produced. Such claims with regard to market efficiency are frequently based on mystical notions of what markets are-and what the market system is. Indeed, much of this has its basis in a form of circular reasoning: market prices are described as efficient, while efficiency itselfis whatever arises from a system of market prices. Widespread market inefficiencies and market failures are downplayed as peripheral issues no matter how pervasive. Negative effects, resulting from the externalization of costs on people and the environment, are often ignored even if they threaten the existence of most human beings and the planet itself.s The fact that markets in a capitalist society serve the narrow interest of the accumulation of capital and reinforce the power of the wealthy is frequently hidden, since the power relations that lie behind most real markets are not transparent. Often we are told that markets should be self-regulating, and hence "free," which means governments should not intervene. Yet, markets in the real world are dominated by giant corporations, which intervene in numerous ways in their functioning, employing enormous monopoly power. Indeed, economists commonly speak of the market power of such giant corporations, in order to refer to their monopoly power over the market. Most discussions of markets ignore not only corporate power but also class power and other forms of social and economic CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 99 inequality. Market economies are mystifying in that they disguise these vastly unequal relations, generating results that appear accidental-the violence of things rather than the violence of property.9 The "highest and best use" of a resource or a commodity in a market system is not what benefits the population as a whole, but what benefits those with the greatest purchasing power. The neoliberal idea of the smoothly operating and efficient self-regulating market society-nothing more than a self-serving myth-dominates much of current policy, and is used to beat down any barriers to economic interests.I 0 Rather than a self-regulating market, what we increasingly have today is a society in which private interests increasingly reg;ulate the state. For example, in the financial crisis of 2007-2009 the first priority of all of the mature capitalist states was to bail out big capital and big finance, to the tune of trillions of dollars. The population was simply told that the market demanded it, since certain firms were "too big to fail." At the same time that the riches of the wealthiest members of society were being preserved millions of people lost their homes and jobs and slipped into poverty. The whole notion of the market has become so abstract, and so removed from reality in every way, as economist james K. Galbraith has stated, that "when you come down to it, the word market is a negation. It is a word to be applied to the context of any transaction so long as that transaction is not directly dictated by the state." 11 The Neoliberal Concept of Democracy The commonplace notion of the opposition between state and market, between public and private, is important. The state represents the realm of political action, in which democracy-the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people-is theoretically possible. In contrast, the market under capitalism represents the rule of capital, by capital, and for capital. 100 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW Today, rather than a true democracy we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the formal elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy, as this was classically understood in egalitarian terms, is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal way of things under capitalism. Hence, ever since the publication in 1942 of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, in which the neoliberal concept of democracy as a market relationship was first introduced, attempts have been made by defenders of the system to redefine "democracy" in economic terms, transforming it into something nearly opposite its original meaning. In ancient Greece democracy was associated with the rule of the demos, i.e., the common people. In contrast, democracy has now been redefined in the United States and some other countries as a system in which individuals simply vote periodically for political entrepreneurs, who seek out their votes much like commercial interests seek out dollars in the marketplace. 12 The essential content of democracy has therefore been eviscerated. So politically corrupted is the U.S. political system that instead of one person, one vote being the rule, an individual's political influence is weighted according to his/her wealth, which determines how responsive politicians are to that individual's interests. Big money, as is well known, provides access to politicians and opens doors. At the same time, corporations themselves "vote" with their dollars, feeding the financial campaign chests of politicians and hiring a phalanx of lobbyists to forward their interests. Politicians frequently end up paying their financial donors back "with interest" for what they receive. As in any business transaction, corporations provide political campaign financing and naturally expect "value added" in return.I3 CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 101 The Inversion of the Real The capitalist system, since it worships what Rachel Carson called "the gods of profit and production" rather than real needs, is unable to supply all people with the essential requirements of a decent life, or, in some cases, life itself. 14 This derives from the fact that capitalism is inherently an alienated system, in which those on the receiving end of the system measure themselves by their distance not only from the rest of the world's population but also from nature itself, glorying in the "conquest of nature." It is a world turned upside down: one that places abstract value above human beings, making it, and not the living, creative forces of nature and humanity, the measure of what is material and productive. It follows that the various ways of "reforming" capitalism that are promoted by often well-meaning, practical people, who are trying to change things within the parameters of what is allowed by the system, are little more than intellectual contortions: people trying to get around or smooth over basic features of the system because in their eyes a real alternative is unthinkable. In what Derrick] ens en and Aric McBay call the "inversion of what is real," capitalism is seen as more real than the environment; and hence it is capitalism that needs to be saved in the context of the environmental crisis, as opposed to the earth's environment itself. 15 Not surprisingly, then, the dominant strategies with respect to global warming to be found in environmental circles are concerned not with preserving the planet but with preserving capitalism, the very system that is destroying the earth as we know it. In a speech calling for "urgent action to fight global warming," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said: "We must be actively engaged in confronting the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere." 16 In this view, it is not capitalist development, that, by promoting global warming, constitutes a threat to the earth's environment and its 102 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW inhabitants, but rather global wa~ming that constitutes a threat to capitalist development. What nearly all mainstream solutions to the global environmental problem have in common, as Jensen and McBay write, is that they all take industrial capitalism as a given, as that which must be saved, as that which must be maintained at all costs (including the murder of the planet, the murder of all that is real), as the independent variable, as primary; and they take the real, physical world-filled with real physical beings who live, die, make the world more diverse-as secondary, as a dependent variable, as something (never someone, of course) that (never who) must conform to industrial capitalism or die .... Within this culture, the world is consistendy less important than industrial capitalism, the end ofthe world is less to be feared than the end ofindustrial capitalismP The "out of the box" environmental thinkers, who often parade as the most radical and critical green thinkers, but who all too often fall prey to the mystique of capital, are thus unable even to envision, let alone promote, an economic system that has fundamentally different goals and decision-making processes than those that are currently dominant. As cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has said, for many people in this society, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.'' 1B The Morality of "Green Capitalism" Today green is good. "Being green" has become very fashionable as well as profitable, and corporations are outdoing each other to portray themselves as green and socially responsible. After all, who doesn't want to be considered sustainable? You can buy and wear your Gucci clothes with a clean conscience CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 103 because the company is helping to protect rain forests by using less paper.I9 Newsweek claimed that corporate giants such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Intel, and IBM were the top five green companies of2009. This was because of their use of renewable sources of energy, their reporting of greenhouse gas emissions (or their lowering of them), and their implementation of formal environmental policies.2° Some environmentalists and business leaders say that you should "vote with your wallet," by purchasing green products. Environmental problems can be and in some cases are being ameliorated by better production practices (for example, growing organic food or using renewable inputs instead of nonrenewable ones). The business offensive along these lines just prior to the Copenhagen Climate Change meeting was described by the Guardian (UK): "Climate change catastrophe can be averted by 'greening' consumer behaviour rather than by curbing economic growth and mass consumerism, leaders of some of the world's biggest businesses including Tesco, CocaCola and Reckitt Benckiser argued today."2 1 The mainstream emphasis on corporate responsibility as the solution to the environmental problem can be examined by looking at the case ofBP. On April22, 1999, Sir John Browne, CEO of BP, received an award for Individual Environmental Leadership from the UN Environmental Programme for his leadership in promoting environmental causes. Under Browne's leadership BP had adopted the slogan "Beyond Petroleum," and had acknowledged that greenhouse gases might cause global warming. In 2000 Browne was also awarded FIRST Magazine's FIRST Award for Responsible Capitalism for his advances in social responsibility. Browne and BP became symbols of a new green corporate world. "Can business be about more than profits? We think it can"-went a Browne-inspired BP ad. Browne promised growth with environmental cleanliness. Browne was a leading advocate of the "precautionary principle," in which business 104 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW would refrain from economic activities that might be environmentally destructive.22 However, despite BP's "Beyond Petroleum" slogan the company continued its aggressive expansion of oil drilling, even in environmentally sensitive and hazardous areas, such as the Arctic Circle and the deep ocean. Browne argued that there was no conflict between green values and cars that emphasized performance over fuel efficiency. Nor, he insisted, was BP's opposition to government regulation with regard to the environment a contradiction, since socially responsible corporations would police themselves.23 Under Browne's leadership BP entered an era of extreme cost cutting with regard to safety, which generated greater profits but also greater environmental hazards. In March 2005 fifteen workers were killed and another 180 injured in chemical fires and explosions at BP's plant in Texas City-later shown to be the fault of drastic cuts in safety personnel.24 Although Browne resigned as CEO of BP in 2007, BP's practice of putting profits before safety and the environment continued, leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, after an explosion that killed eleven workers. Oil flowed for three months into the Gulf of Mexico, in the biggest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the oil industry. The spill itself was the result of numerous, egregious reductions in safety standards by BP, associated with a business culture of cost cutting to improve its bottom line,25 The fact that BP's celebrated status as a leading "green" company was shown to be mere corporate "greenwashing" should of course hardly surprise us. When noted conservative economist Milton Friedman was asked in 2004 whether John Browne as CEO could go so far with his supposed green convictions as to sacrifice BP's economic interests, Friedman flatly answered: "No .... He can do it with his own money. [But] if he pursues those environmental interests in such a way as to run the corporation less effectively for its stockholders, then I think he's being CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 105 immoral. He's an employee of the stockholders, however elevated his position may appear to be. As such, he has a very strong moral responsibility to them."26 In other words, it is the fiduciary responsibility of any CEO to pursue the highest profits or the maximum increase in stockholders' equity. If a CEO were so deluded as to think that other values could in some way intrude upon this objective, such tlmt profits would be diminished-say by an oil company cutting back on its drilling or by putting safety and the environment first-then that CEO would soon be out of a job. Quite clearly,John Browne knew the corporate bottom line in this respect, and never let his talk about environmental values and corporate social responsibility interfere with BP's real, exploitative relation to the environment. The corporate green movement has also reached into consumption, leading to endless hype on "green consumers" and "green markets." All the emphasis in media stories and advertising on sustainable consumption has created would-be green consumers, who feel that by purchasing "sustainable" commodities they can pursue their same consumerist lifestyles and feel virtuous at the same time. However, many so-called green products have been shown to be no better for the environment than their non-green counterparts,27 As environmentalist Heather Rogers informs us: What I learned [while doing research for Green Gone Wrong] is that the outcome of industrial organic [food], commodity hiofuels, and C0 2 offsetting isn't authentic protection and stewardship of the environment. What's transpiring is a tailoring of environmental crises so they can be dealt with in ways today's economic and political structures deem least threatening to the status quo. 28 The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, although supported by some genuinely concerned individuals, 106 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW have mainly become marketing opportunities, and somewhat successful as such: Companies use CSR programs to build brand loyalty and make personal connections with customers. There can be a payoff: 70 percent of consumers say they would pay a premium for goods fi:om socially responsible companies, according to a recent poll of I ,00 I adults .... Of that group, 28 percent said they would pay at least $I 0 more for a product because of the social responsibility link. 29 An expert consultant on issues such as "social responsibility" has some doubts about it: "There's often more spin than substance when it comes to social responsibility. ... Companies want to take credit for things that they ought to be doing anyway."3o One of the companies leading the movement, as we have seen, has been BP, one of the least socially responsible companies on Earth. But BP's obfuscating propaganda was effective as indicated by its stock being held in the portfolios of a number of"socially responsible" mutual funds,3I Today, mainstream environmentalists, oddly enough, look to Wal-Mart as the leader in corporate responsibility and green business. Thus Wal-Mart, the world's largest corporation in 2009, is celebrated in the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World, 20 I 0 report as the firm that best exemplifies the move from an exclusive focus on profits to a sustainable business model as its "primary fiduciary responsibility." Former Wal-Mart CEO (now hoard chairman) Lee Scott is quoted as committing the company in 2005 to "100 percent renewable energy, to create zero waste" (while at the same time admitting he had no idea how Wal-Mart can achieve such goals). We are told that Wal-Mart is now on a "sustainable journey" (at little cost to itself), promoting green values among all of its 1.4 million U.S. employees, who are encouraged to be more sustainable consumers, recycling and eating more healthy meals. Among its other measures, Wal-Mart has pledged to market only CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 107 wild-caught fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (an organization viewed dubiously by Food and ~ater Watch and ~y many environmentalists). Its chief concrete enVIronmental commitment, made in 2005, was to become 20 percent more energy efficient by 2013 through cutting the carbon emissions associated with its current stores by 2.5 million metric tons. But by 2006 WalMart's carbon emissions had already risen, by its own admission, another 9 percent. The new stores that were being added in 2007 alone were expected to consume enough electricity to add one million metric tons to its overall greenhouse emissions, exceeding any efficiency gains. As Wes Jackson put it, "When the Wal-Marts of t~e world say they're going to put in different lightbulbs and get their trucks to get by on half the fuel, what are they going to do with the savings? They're going to open up another box store somewhere. It's just nuts." In the end, Wal-Mart is an economic juggernaut. of a new, sustam . able econonuc . ord er: 32 anything but representative It is known especially for its harsh policies toward labor and Its readiness to go to virtually any length (including closing down . . stores) to prevent the unionization of its workers. The reality is that none of the proposals for reformmg capitalism deal with the essential issue, the bottom line of net gain or profit. For the sake of the environment and our future as a species, the economy cannot keep growing forever with more and more goods and services (green or not) consumed per person. But if the economy doesn't grow, how are jobs going to he created ~nd maintained? Experience has shown that slow or no growth m a capitalist economy is a disaster for working people. Is Reversing Global Climate Change Compatible with Capitalism? Let's put aside corporate greenwashing efforts, the systemic imperative to growth and environmental exploitation, and the 108 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW question of the role of technology under capitalism and take a look at some of the proposed technical ways to deal with global climate change-currently the most critical problem facing the earth and its inhabitants-without disturbing capitalism. TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE MORE ENERGY EFFICIENT, LESS HARMFUL, AND/OR USE FEWER MATERIAL INPUTS Some proposals to enhance energy efficiency-such as helping people tighten up and insulate their old homes so that less fuel is required for winter heating, and the use of simple rooftop solar water heaters-are just plain common sense. Machinery, including household appliances and automobiles, is continually becoming more energy efficient-a normal part of the system, sometimes coaxed by government regulations. Nevertheless, it is important to note that increased energy efficiency usually leads to lower costs of use, but also increased use, and often increased size as well, as in automobiles and refrigerators-so that the amount of energy used is frequently increased, or the energy savings are less than they would be if product size remained the same. People may drive their fuel-efficient Toyota Prius more miles and leave on the efficient LED lighting more hours than with more energy-consuming technologies. They may think that they are doing the earth a favor by buying hybrid SUVs that are more fuel-efficient than nonhybrids, but still use a lot more fuel than a smaller vehicle. There are proposals to provide less polluting technologies, particularly solar, wind, and water power. It is certainly true that this is the way to go in generating energy, as opposed to fossil fuels, agrofuels, or nuclear energy. There is also the possibility of combining hydropower with either wind or solar power by pumping water uphill during the day when energy from wind and solar are available and then allowing the water to return through turbines, generating electricity at night if needed. But these CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 109 sources of energy do not provide a free lunch with respect to the environment, and hence do not allow for unlimited economic expansion without cost. They frequently come with their own problems. There is renewed interest in hydropower, especially in smaller-scale projects-although large-scale projects continue to be developed in Asia and South America. The damage to the environment and to humans caused by large dams-forests inundated, species destroyed, seawater intrusion and the killing off of mangroves in deltas, and relocation of indigenous peoples-has generated a movement to try to stop such projects. The earth's geothermal energy can be safely developed in some areas (Iceland has done quite a bit with this source of energy) and holds promise, although appropriate locations are difficult to find and drilling for such projects in northern California and Switzerland triggered earthquakes. 33 Resource extraction needed for some of the "clean" technologies, such as the rare earths required for wind electric generators and hybrid car batteries, come with their own environmental issues. 34 While some of the proposals make sense, tl1e misguided push to "green" agrofuels (biofuels made from agricultural crops such as corn, soybeans, rapeseed, and palm oil) has been enormously detrimental to the environment and people. The idea is to replace oil-derived gasoline and diesel by producing the liquid fuels ethanol and biodiesel from farmed crops. Not only has the growth of the agrofuel industry put food and auto fuel in direct competition, pushing food prices higher, but the production of agrofuels also sometimes actually uses more energy to grow and transport and process the crop than the energy obtained. In addition, significant air and water pollution is frequently associated with the growing and processing of crops for liquid fuels. 35 Tropical forests are being cut down to plant oil palms, to supply oil to produce biodiesel (in addition to its customary use as a cooking oil and in cosmetics), resulting in displacement of indigenous peoples and massive emissions of C0 2 as trees are burned 110 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW and soils disturbed. Conversion of forests to produce oil palm to make "green" hiodiesel ends up increasing C02 emissions, even in the fairly long term. It is estimated that it will take four hundred years of diesel production of palm oil from these plantations to "pay hack" the environment for the C0 2 emissions occurring during preparation and planting of oil palm trees. Another idea for producing "green" liquid fuels is to convert plant cellulose to alcohol, although it is not yet economically feasible to do so. One of the potential materials, the crop "waste," considered to he one of the important feedstocks for this endeavor, is not waste at all. The return to the soil of crop residues is essential for maintaining organic matter, which has such positive effects on crop yields. Another avenue being explored is the use of algae that make oil. However, this has its own potential problems such as the amount of land needed and the possibility that genetically modified algae will he used, with unknown consequences if they escape into the environment. Instead of rethinking the entire system as environmental problems develop, people look for silver bullets-technologies such as agrofuels that will "solve" the problem. However, it is not uncommon to discover later that the silver bullet itself causes other problems. For example, in order to find a replacement for ozone-depleting chemicals used in refrigerators and air conditioners as well as insulating foam, HFCs (hydrofluorocarhons) were introduced as a substitute in the I990s.36 Though this did help the protective ozone layer recover, HFCs turn out to have over 4,000 times the heat-trapping ability of C0 2 , thus worsening global warming. The increase in atmospheric HFCs from leakage from junked refrigerators and air conditioners is projected to he large enough by 2050 to account for six years' worth of C0 2 emissions. There are technologies that allow for some kind of conservation, lessening the throughput of resources and energy, generating less waste, reducing toxins, etc. But increased efficiency in the use CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 111 of energy and resources tends, as we have seen, to result in the expansion of the capitalist economic system as a whole, negating any reductions in energy and resource use per unit of output. This is known as the Jevons Paradox, after nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons, who first raised the issue in his hook The Coal Question. ]evons pointed out that every new steam engine was more efficient in its use of coal than the one before, and yet the introduction of each more efficient engine led to the consumption of greater amounts of coal due to the expansion of production. The Jevons Paradox is now widely recognized by environmentalists as a key reason why technology alone-outside the transformation of social relations-cannot solve the ecological contradictions of capitalism.37 As philosopher Hannah Arendt put it in The Human Condition: "Under modern conditions, not destruction hut conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process [of capital], whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold."38 HIGH-TECH/HIGH-RISK SOLUTIONS The fact that accumulation is the single drumbeat of capitalist society means that ecological systems, and the biological-health systems of species, are stretched to the limits, leading to everincreasing risk. This has led sociologists to speak of the emergence of a "risk society," as a product of capitalism and modernity.39 Toxic chemicals, radiation, and other hazards pervade our environment and our bodies, with no attempt to discern the full effects-or even to test most of the chemicals, despite their frequent carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic effects. It is enough for the system that such technologies are useful in expanding the economy at low cost to business. The consequences are dealt with in terms of so-called risk management, 112 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW attempting to discern (while underestimating and playing down) the number of deaths per million that constitute "acceptable risk."4o In a society organized in this way it is natural enough to respond to the threat to the planet represented by global warming by turning to riskier and riskier technologies, continually upping the general level of risk. Where "progress" is confused with higher profit margins, which often means the willingness to take on greater risk, such a solution may even seem rational. The risk-society issue is immediately evident when the question of nuclear power as a solution to global warming arises. Some scientists concerned with climate change, including James Lovelock and James Hansen, see nuclear power as an energy alternative and as a partial technological answer to the use of fossil fuels-one that is much preferable to the growing use of coal. However, nuclear energy at present releases 9 to 25 times the carbon emissions of wind energy, due to uranium refining, transport, and reactor construction. Although the technology of nuclear energy has improved somewhat with third-generation nuclear plants, and although there is now the possibility (still not a reality) of fourth-generation nuclear energy, the dangers of nuclear power are still enormous-given radioactive waste lasting hundreds and thousands of years, the social management of complex systems, and the sheer level of risk involved. The 2011 post earthquake/tsunami disaster at Japan's Fukushima Dai-Ichi facility once again illustrates the ongoing dangers and immense risks associated with dependence on nuclear power. The breeder nuclear reactor-a third-generation nuclear technology currently available and often presented as an alternativehas similar problems to those of conventional fission reactors , though producing less low-level radioactive waste and able to reuse the spent fuel, thereby alleviating the problem oflimited uranium reserves. However, they also generate nuclear materials closer to weapons grade that can be more readily reprocessed for nuclear weapons. This close connection between nuclear power CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 113 and nuclear weapons development is of course a major concern for all humanity. Nuclear plants take about ten years to build and are extremely costly and uneconomic. It has been estimated that to satisfY the world's electrical power demands through nuclear energy it would require building a nuclear power plant every day for the next forty-three years. If a mere 5 percent of these were built it would double the world's current nuclear power installations worldwide. The result would be an increased likelihood of what sociologist Charles Perrow has called "normal accidents," as these extremely high-risk facilities proliferate. There are all sorts of reasons, therefore, to be extremely wary of nuclear power as any kind of environmental solution. To go in that direction would clearly be a Faustian bargain.41 A number of vast geoengineering schemes have been proposed either to take C0 2 out of the atmosphere or to increase the reflectance of sunlight back into space, away from Earth. These include: • Finding ways of absorbing carbon more effectively, such as fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate algal growth to absorb carbon, and reforesting the planet with genetically altered fast-growing trees. • Various proposals to decrease solar energy absorbed by the Earth by means of enhanced sunlight reflection schemes, such as deploying huge white islands in the oceans to restore the albedo effect; creating large satellites to reflect incoming sunlight; contaminating the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide particles that reflect light and promote global dimming. • Geoengineering carbon sequestration on a massive scale. Here the assumption is that physics and economics will allow the capture of carbon, and the use of large machines distrib- 114 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW uted around the world will make it possible to scrub C0 2 from the atmosphere itself instead of from individual industrial plant emissions. Mter trapping C0 2 on an adsorbing material it would then be liquefied fot disposal. 42 ' No one knows what detrimental side effects might occur from such huge schemes-attempts to play God with the planet. The sheer complexity of the problems raised suggests the enormous planetary-risk nature of such ventures. For example, stimulatin~ algal growth by applying iron to oceans might just lead to more "dea~ zones" when the algae die and fall to the lower depths, harmmg other aquatic life. Dumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block sunlight could reduce photosynthesis throughout the planet. CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 115 nomic costs-with price increases from the implementation of CCS technology estimated to be in the range of21 to 91 percent. The fuel needs of plants employing CCS technology are expected to go up by 25 percent. A May 2011 report by the American Physical Society on the physics ofDAC (direct air capture) of carbon dioxide concluded: With optimistic assumptions about some important technical parameters, the cost of this system is estimated to be of the order of $600 or more per metric ton of C0 2• Significant uncertainties in the process parameters result in a wide, asymmetric range associated with this estimate, with higher values being more likely than lower ones. Thus, DAC is not currently an economically viable approach to mitigating climate change . . . Since a 1000-megawatt coal power plant emits about six million metric tons of C0 2 per year, a DAC system consisting of structures 10 "CLEAN COAL" One common technological solution proposed is the shift to what · is referred to as "clean coal" as a way of expanding the production of fossil fuels-but without carbon emissions. The U.S. government has poured billions of dollars into supporting such clean coal research. Although clean coal is not a reality (and never can be), the mere idea is used to defend continued coal production and the building of more dirty coal plants. The clean-coal technology claim is based on what is called carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. This technology is designed to remove carbon from the air prior to its being released into the atmosphere and turn it into a non-harmful substance that can be injected into geological formations or into the ocean. Even the most optimistic scenarios, however, do not see CCS technology as available until 2030-way too late to deal with the immediate climate change problem. The technology, while nascent, has never been used on an industrial scale. Moreover, it carries with it enormous eco- meters high that removes C0 2 this coal plant emits would require structures whose total C0 2 from the atmosphere as fast as length would be about 30 kilometers. Large quantities of construction materials and chemicals would be required. It is likely that the full cost of the benchmark DAC system scaled to capture six million metric tons of C0 2 per year would be much higher than alternative strategies providing equivalent decarbonized electricity. 43 The injection of captured carbon into the ocean could increase the acidity of the ocean with consequences potentially as large as climate change itself. The ramifications of attempting to store the captured carbon dioxide in geological formations is still uncertain, though it is clear that the escape oflarge amounts of the gas could be dangerous (residents near an African lake were suffocated in 1986 when a natural pocket of carbon dioxide escaped). For all of these reasons, clean coal is largely a hoax. The real priority, as James Hansen indicates, is to stop building new 116 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? coal plants and to retire those that exist. If the coal reserves are burned climate change will become unstoppable and catastrophic. CCS technology also does not address the many other environmental damages caused by coal production and coal plants: mountaintop removal, long-wall mining, plus all the mercmy, arsenic, sulfates, and other air and water pollutants that come with the coal system. 44 117 Some low-tech solutions may help, but obviously cannot solve the problem given an expanding economic system, especially since trees planted now take a long time to sequester meaningful amounts of carbon, can be cut down later, and carbon stored as soil organic matter may later be converted to C0 2 if practices are changed. However, if practiced, widely increasing soil organic matter might provide a temporary slowing down of the rate of increase of atmospheric C0 2 • LOW-TECH SOLUTIONS CAP-AND-TRADE AND OTHER MARKET SCHEMES Also proposed are a number oflow-tech ways to sequester carbon such as increasing reforestation and using ecological soil management to increase soil organic matter (which is composed mainly of carbon). Most of the management techniques for increasing soil organic matter-use of cover crops, return of crop residue to the soil, integrating livestock and crop farming once again, and using better crop rotations-should be done for their own sake because organic material helps to improve soils in many ways. As agricultural soil organic matter content increases and forests grow (and the soil underneath the forest also increases in organic matter), this keeps at least some C02 out of the atmosphere. Thus reforestation, by pulling carbon from the atmosphere, is sometimes thought of as constituting negative emissions. Another scheme for increasing stored carbon in the soil is to incorporate "biochar," the product of relatively low temperature burning with limited oxygen. This char is very stable and is believed to be one of the factors responsible for the maintenance of soil fertility in long abandoned fields in the Amazon basin (these dark soils are referred to as terra preta de indio). However, forests must be cut down to produce large quantities ofbiochar, and croplands will have to be used to grow residue to burn-and about half of the carbon contained in these materials will end up in the atmosphere during the combustion process. II ii I I Government regulation of polluting industries has worked to some extent and can in the future if the regulations address the actual problems and the regulators are not in bed with those being regulated, which, however, is the normal case in the present system. A struggle for increased government regulation with respect to the environment, particularly if structured to respond to the needs of the actual population as a result of constant public pressure, is a necessary immediate response to the environmental problem. But many environmentalists, unable to imagine a non-capitalist economy, and responding to what they consider practicalthat· is, what the reigning economic interests are willing to . " to enVIronmen. accept-have endorse d market- b ase d " so Iutwns tal problems. These run the gamut from paying businesses to be more ecologically sound (such as "green payments" for farmers to use practices that reduce soil erosion), to the heavy taxation of fossil fuel use, to giving or selling tradable rights to pollute after imposing a cap on emissions of the pollutant. Until the last couple of years, the darling of market-oriented solutions to carbon emissions was "cap-and-trade." This involves placing a cap on the allowable level of greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing, either by fee or by auction, permits that II8 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW allow industries to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Those corporations that have more permits than they need may sell them to other firms that want additional permits to pollute. Such schemes invariably include "offsets" that act like medieval indulgences, allowing corporations to continue to polJut~ as long as they buy good grace through helping to curtail pollutwn somewhere else, perhaps in the third world. How did cap-and-trade, as opposed to taxing pollution or simply legally mandating reductions in emissions, go from a theory to a near consensus? According to a 2009 article in the New York Times: The answer is not to be found in the study of economics or environmental science, but in the realm where most policy debates are ultimately settled: politics. Many members of Congress remember the painful political lesson of 1993, when President Bill Clinton proposed a tax on all forms of energy, a plan that went down to defeat and helped take the Democratic majority in Congress down with it a year later. Cap and trade, by contrast, is almost perfectry desig;ned for the buying and selling of political support through the granting of valuable emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific Congressional districts. 45 Cap-and-trade-originally proposed by conservatives for red.uc!ng sulfur dioxide (a significant contributor to acid rain) emisswns from power plants-has gone out offavor in the United States as a response to carbon emissions because conservatives now claim it is a new tax, and some of the political liberals in Congress are aware of its failure in Europe. It is clear that this proposed solution is much less efficient than a straight tax or mandate for lowering pollution, partly because it tends to put a floor under existing emissions, partly because it promotes offsets that " re duce " emiSSions . . onIy on paper, not in reality. CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? II9 In theory, carbon cap-and-trade would stimulate technological innovation to increase energy and commodity output per amount of carbon dioxide emitted. In practice, however, it has not led to carbon dioxide emission reductions in areas where it has been introduced, such as Europe. The main result of carbon trading has been enormous profits for some corporations and individuals and the creation of a subprime carbon market. 46 Carbon offsets are invariably part of cap-and-trade schemes but also can be stand-alone projects. You can now travel wherever you want, guilt-free, by purchasing carbon "offsets," such as having a few trees planted somewhere, and thus supposedly cancel out the environmental effects of your trip. The lack of verification and long-term commitment of these supposed offsets can result in fraudulent or poorly designed and carried out projects that will not be enough to compensate truly for the C0 2 emitted and supposedly offset.47 In addition, there are no prohibitions against changing conditions sometime in the future that will result in carbon dioxide release to the atmosphere. Europe dominates the $144 billion a year (in 2009) greenhouse gas market. A primary offset purchased by many European companies has been for Chinese firms to destroy HFC-23, a by-product of producing the gas HFC-22, used as a refrigerant. One molecule of HFC-23 in the atmosphere has about ten thousand times the heat retention of one molecule of C0 2 • It turns out that companies can make a lot of money destroying HFC-23. There is evidence that some plants in China have been producing more refrigerant than they can sell in order to have more HFC-23 that they can be paid to destroy.4s About half of all offsets approved by the United Nations through the summer of 2010 are for credits for HFC-23 destruction. As Clare Perry of the Environmental Investigation Agency has stated, "It would be far cheaper and more effective to directly finance the factories to deal with the HFC-23 problem rather than use this kind ofbyzantine financing."49 120 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW For James Hansen cap-and-trade is the "temple of doom" and "worse than nothing" because it prevents effective action directly limiting carbon through regulations and a properly designed tax, while giving people the impression that something is being done. 5° Indeed, the various technofixes discussed above associated with today's green technology and markets-more efficient and/or cleaner energy production and use, better regulations, cap-and-trade of greenhouse gases, carbon offsets, etc.-are all roads to climate catastrophe rather than climate protection. "Green capitalism," even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers no way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus, continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these "fixes" will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches. Indeed, the problem with all of these approaches is that they allow the economy to continue on the same disastrous course it is currently following. The economy can keep on growing and we can go on consuming all we want (or as much as our income and wealth allow)-driving greater distances in our more fuel-efficient cars, living in very large but well-insulated homes, consuming all sorts of new products made by green cmporations, and so on. All we need to do is support the new green technologies and be "goo d"b . out waste that can be composted or a out separatmg reused in some form, and we can go on living pretty much as before, in an economy of perpetual growth and profits. The Need for Sustainable Human Development The seriousness of the climate change problem arising from human-generated carbon dioxide and oilier greenhouse gas emis- CAN CAPITALISM GO GREEN? 121 sions has led to notions that it is merely necessary to reduce carbon footprints (a difficult problem in itself). The reality is that there are numerous, interrelated, and growing ecological problems arising from a system geared to the infinitely expanding accumulation of capital. What needs to be reduced is not just carbon footprints but ecological footprints, which means that economic expansion on the world level and especially in the rich countries needs to be reduced, even cease. At the same time, many poor countries need to expand their economies, requiring an even bigger cut in the ecological footprints of rich economies to make room for development in the periphery. The new principles we should promote under these circumstances are those of sustainable human development. This means enough for evetyone and no more. Human development would certainly not be hindered, and could even be considerably enhanced, for the benefit of all by an emphasis on sustainable human, rather than unsustainable economic, development. 51 A drastic transformation in global energy use-staying within the solar energy budget-will be required to overcome the problem of climate change. To give some idea of the incredible effort needed to keep global warming to onry 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) simply by technical means, about 80 percent of all of the energy used in the world (1.'3 out of 16 trillion watts) would need to be replaced by C0 2-neutral technologies. According to a New Yorker article profiling inventor Saul Griffith, accomplishing this "would require building the equivalent of all the following: a hundred square metres of new solar cells, fifty square metres of new solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool's volume of genetically engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty-five years; one three-hundred-foot-diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one hundred-megawatt geoiliermalpowered steam turbine every eight hours; and one three-gigawatt nuclear power plant every week."52 All of this new construction would of course mean a huge, if temporary, increase in energy 122 WHAT EVERY ENVIRONMENTALIST NEEDS TO KNOW demands. Griffith has explained: "Everyone sees climate change as a problem in the domain of scientists and engineers .... But it's not enough to say that we need some nerds to invent a new energy source and some other nerds to figure out a carbon-sequestration technology-and you should be skeptical about either of those things actually happening. There are a lot of ideas out there, but nothing nearly as radical as the green-tech hype. We've been working on energy, as a society, for a few thousand years, and especially for the last two hundred years, so we've already turned over most of the stones."53 Regardless of whether major advances in cleaner energy production are coming soon, the magnitude of the climate change problem calls for drastic reductions in energy use through conservation and alterations in lifestyle. This requires radical transformations in human priorities-not just placing one's hopes in technological fixes. The reality is that the major environmental problems we face today-of which climate change is only one-cannot be solved by means of technological or market-based solutions while keeping existing social relations intact. Rather, what is needed most is a transformation in social relations: in community, culture, and economy, in how we relate to each other as human beings, and how we relate to the planet. What is needed, in other words, is an ecological revolution. 6. An Ecological Revolution Is Not Just Possible-It's Essential I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy. ... A planned economy which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society. -ALBERT EINSTEIN 1 The analysis in earlier chapters, if correct, points to the fact that .~eologicai-crisis; ~annot.b:e solved within the logic of the pres- .; en:teconomicfpoliticalfsocial systemJThe various suggestions for doing so have no hope of success. The system of world capitalism is clearly unsustainable in: (1) its quest for never-ending accumulation of capital leading to production that must constantly expand to provide profits; (2) its agriculture and food system that pollutes the environment and still does not allow universal access
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Running head: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

Environmental Science
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ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

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Question 1
Hunger is manmade and designed through the green revolution which is intended to introduce
scarcity of food in areas where it is practiced. Through the revolution, countries are forced into
international trade of their agricultural produce leaving them with little to survive on thus
introducing hunger among the citizens. Food corporations responsible for selling of the produce
are formed in order to maximize profits and expand their territories. Farmers are then diverted
from producing locally consumable agricultural produce to venture into cash crop farming that
only benefits a few wealthy countries. Agricultural industrialization has also led to the designing
of hunger to an economic structure. Farmers are forced to buy the farming supplements from the
corporation thus only benefiting a few countries. Governments are also reluctant in addressing
such issues...


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