The Once-ler’s Green Glove

In Dr. Seuss’s popular children’s book “The Lorax”, the Once-ler is a young entrepreneur who ventures out in search for the perfect material for his cutting-edge product: The Thneed. Soon, the Once-ler finds the fluff of the Truffula Tree, and decides to cut one down and try it out. It is then that, from the tree stump, The Lorax, a conservationist, emerges to ask him to stop cutting the trees. However, The Once-ler decides to ignore The Lorax’s request and drives himself out of business once he cuts the last Truffula Tree. But what if the Once-ler had done something different? What if he had extended his green glove at The Lorax and said “I won’t stop the Thneed, but I’ll be more mindful of Truffula needs”? This is what the discussion about Green Capitalism is all about: can we extend our green gloves to environmentalism? Can capitalism be green?

Green Capitalism 101

Green Capitalism is the ideology that we can transform capitalist practices into a more environmentally friendly model, hence retaining the lifestyle and consumption habits we have world-wide while being more environmentally responsible. This transformation can happen through many fronts, from resource extraction, to the way in which we innovate, the way we regulate waste and pollution, the way we trade world-wide, move around, etc. Ultimately, the idea is that “greater ecological enlightenment can be secured through capitalism by using the characteristics of commodity culture to further progress environmental goals.” The discussion around Green Capitalism is centered on neoliberalism—the champion of free markets—so most solutions involve removing government intervention from the equation and creating systems for voluntary participation in environmental action, motivated by market incentives.

Perhaps the best example of this is Terry Anderson’s work on the Property and Environmental Research Center. Anderson believes that at the core of all environmental issues lies The Tragedy of the Commons: the idea that if you provide unlimited access to resources, every common will do what’s best for their individual interests, ultimately causing the exhaustion of the common resource. This idea was first posed in the 1880’s, but gained political significance in Garrett Hardin’s essay from 1968; he posited that The Tragedy of the Commons would cause ecological collapse unless it was prevented. Hence, according to Anderson, protecting the environment is a matter of protecting property rights and privatizing the natural landscape to avoid common ownership. The logic behind this is that if under common ownership nobody takes care of the environment that is because nobody thinks they have anything to lose, but when it is your property that is suffering the effects of ecological collapse, you will do your best to protect it.

In the words of Lester Brown, what capitalism needs in order to become green is a paradigm shift: we need to change the way in which we think about economics by producing and consuming with an environmental mindset. Sounds nice and simple, right? Well, like all other discussions about economics, nothing is simple about this, and the different ways in which this could work out (or if it should, in principle) are subject to debate. It seems like The Once-ler’s Green Glove is a little bit more twisted than we initially thought.

Source: Medium

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The Good

Green Capitalism does have a legitimate concern for the environment, and, hence, the efforts it makes in order to transform the system could be a promising way of buying humanity time to solve other environmental issues. Some of the most prominent solutions are found within Geo-Engineering: CO2 Removal, CO2 Capture, Solar Radiation Management, etc. The key thing to understand here is that all of these efforts fall under what environmentalists call “mitigation efforts”, which basically means intervening in natural processes to slow down or reduce the impacts of Climate Change.

A positive example of this is the United Nations Programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (UN-REDD). This programme focuses on sustainable land-use management with the intention of protecting existing carbon sinks and creating more. In 2009, they estimated that “an investment of $20,000 USD in the programme could curb 90% of global carbon emissions”; now in 2021, they seem to be having success in a lot of less economically developed countries like Indonesia or Sri Lanka. Their modus operandi is to go into the forest communities of partner countries, make comprehensive studies in relation to their cultural and economic activities, and come up with ways of protecting the forest in collaboration with stake-holders such as indigenous people in the land. The goal, of course, is not to outright promote a capitalist agenda in these communities, but to train the members of the community to protect the forest and use it as a resource to maintain a livelihood. Nonetheless, the programme makes use of market incentives and the commodification of climate action to get the communities to cooperate with the program, and, hence, it makes use of Green Capitalism. If you wish to learn more about this project, I recommend that you visit their webpage or watch some impact videos in their YouTube Channel.

Within the Private Sector there’s a lot of options as well. During a 1999 Bioneers conference, Paul Hawken, a prominent American environmentalist, explained his concept of “Nature Capitalism” can be a useful way for corporations to shift to a more environmentally friendly model. Hawken argues that while sustainability is important, it’s not going to single-handedly save the environment, and so we need to look at the Economics of Restoration. Put simply, Hawken believes that our economic activities can be used to restore living systems.

For this, our economic system would have to resemble a biological system, and so three principles have to be respected during the production of commodities in order to achieve restoration: Radical Resource Productivity could be used to maximize productivity per unit of natural resources, hence reducing the amount of resources we need and reducing our ecological footprint; Biomimicry could be used in design, to make machines and systems that work more similar to nature, hence reducing the disturbances we make in the environment; finally, the way in which resources move through different stages of production (from extraction to disposal) would have to leave net zero waste, thus achieve total reusability or recyclability, be it through industrial processes or natural processes like composting. Most of these solutions, however, are mostly theoretical or in an experimental stage.

The Bad

The biggest problem with Green Capitalism is that it simply shows no significant results. This is an ideology that has been around since the late 80’s and 90’s, and yet, 30 to 40 years later, few of their ideas have been implemented and the impacts of these are barely noticeable.

The first real global attempt to implement green capitalist policies was with the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. In it, 37 industrialized countries signed an agreement to voluntarily reduce an average of 5.2% emissions by 2008, with adjustments for every country. The problem was that no country did this, so the Cap-and-Trade system was invented. In theory, a cap to emissions is set and, from that limit, countries and corporations are allowed to buy their right to pollute; the idea is that cleaner corporations, not reaching their maximum allowance, can sell their spare pollution capacity to more polluting corporations, and, by gradually lowering the cap, polluting corps would go out of business. In practice what happened was that countries tried to cap emissions through taxes, but the elevated costs coming from this were not taken kindly by corporations. In his article, “Green Capitalism: The God that Failed”, Richard Smith explains why this was the case. Essentially they traded out their allowances, enabling the biggest polluters to remain polluting. Ultimately, through lobbying and threats to the economy of these countries, corporations won. The final attempt, still in process during 2021, is the establishment of Carbon Taxes, but very few countries have accepted to implement them because corporations, so far, have been impossible to deal with and that is going to have an impact on their GDP.

Richard Smith also explains why, in principle, this is not working; short answer: he thinks capitalism can never be green. To its core, Capitalism is held by two things: the maximization of profit in the short-term to keep competitiveness high and consumer culture. In “This Changes Everything” Naomi Klein provides some insight into this. She explains that Capitalism is a system that encourages short term, unplanned, unregulated economic activity, so the idea that a free market approach to climate action—such as Terry Anderson’s—would never work; in a system like this, one cannot companies to do the best for the environment if it implies losing profit in the present. This is the same reason why countries cannot accept carbon taxes: in a competitive global economy, countries are run like businesses and they cannot risk undergoing a recession. Then, there is the problem with consumer culture, which is sustained by a perpetual process of resource extraction, production, distribution, and disposal; even if we developed a system similar to Hawken’s Natural Capitalism, there’s many industries that cannot be made any more environmentally friendly, such as the mining and the oil industry. Shell is never going to be green because their business model is reliant on Greenhouse emissions, and the same goes to all other fossil fuel corporations. “No amount of ‘green capitalism’ will be able to ensure the profound changes we must urgently make to prevent the collapse of civilization from the catastrophic impacts of global warming.”

Finally, there is the problem with the core goals of Capitalism. Paul Hawken explains that capitalism is built on the principle of industrialism: the idea that we can manipulate the elements of Nature to satisfy our human needs, which is why he thinks the next industrial revolution should be characterized by a Capitalism aligned with the processes of living systems. Naomi Klein has the opposite perspective: she encourages humanity to challenge our extractivist relationship to Nature and reject the industrialist principle that Capitalism is built upon. She argues that an economic system that is designed with the purpose of exploiting and exhausting Natural resources for the exclusive benefit of humanity can never be part of the environmental movement our planet so desperately needs. Hence, both Klein and Smith advocate for a similar solution: the nationalization of polluting corporations, a shift towards a planned economy, the massive relocation of labour to shrink harmful industries and strengthen greener ones, a massive investment in the social sphere, and to focus on adapting to the now-inevitable reality of Climate Change. To them, Green Capitalism is dismissive of the complicated nature of our environmental situation, and so we need to get into the ugly part that Green Capitalism is missing.

The Ugly Part

Responding to the climate crisis is not just about economics: it’s about migration, it’s about access to affordable or free healthcare, it’s about colonialism and neocolonialism, it’s about race, it’s about gender, and, most importantly, it’s about power. The fact of the matter is that if anything got us here in the first place, it was our extractionist relationship to Nature. We have consumed and exploited with utmost disregard for the environment and if capitalism somehow proves it’s capable of being green, that will be great because we will have more time to transition out of it. The wealthiest 1% pollute thrice as much as the poorest 50% globally, and this happens because our economic system has enabled them to do it without consequences, which is also why the solutions of Green Capitalism are not working. Under a capitalist model, no matter how green, the wealthiest people will retain the ability to do whatever they want with the planet, to keep producers producing and consumer consuming, to keep exploiting the land, because that is what capitalism was designed to do; that is the industrialist principle. The same principle that historically has been illegitimately taking up indigenous land, that is against allocating resources in the public sphere, that is keen in keeping the borders up to protect their economy, and, most of all, dependent on limitless economic growth. The ugly part is that even if capitalism can be green, it will not give us climate justice or solve nearly enough of our environmentally related problems.

Conclusion

Why did the Once-ler not go greener? Because he didn’t want to, because it would have not been profitable. But even if he had wanted to, commodifying climate action has not shown any results in 40 years. He could have removed the smogulous-smoke from the air and the Gluppity-Glup from the water, privatized the plains for people to make a business out of taking care of the Brown Bar-ba-loots, and planted Truffula Trees for every one he cut down. All of this would have been great, because it would have bought The Lorax some extra time to figure out how to stop The Once-ler, but he had to be stopped in the end because his business model was to cut down Truffula Trees for profit, so he would have ended with the plains sooner or later. Perhaps capitalism can move things around with it’s green glove, but it will probably be temporary before it has to go.

How Can You Help?

Stay sharp, comrade. Capitalism is a really big structure and the decisions taken around it are mostly inaccessible to the common folk, so:

• Stay informed about what environmental initiatives are out there and how they work.

• Before supporting any environmentalist initiatives or political figures, ask yourself, “what does this solution imply?”, “whose interests is this solution catering to?”, “what will be the impact of this?”, “is this viable with the time we have?”

• Stay critical of the movement as a whole, as well as those who represent it.

• Listen to those who are most affected and keep an eye out for those who will be most affected by the decisions we make.

Environmentalism is simple in that most people within the movement agree on what the problem is and how urgent it is to solve it, but tricky in that no solution is perfect and never will be, so we need to keep coming up with ideas to address these problems on all levels: from your local community to the global community.

Sources

1. Amendolare, Nicholas, speaker. What is the Tragedy of the Commons - Nicholas Amendolare. TED-ed, 2017. Uploaded by TED-ed, Nov 21, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxC161GvMPc&ab_channel=TED-Ed

2. Anderson, Terry, speaker. Free Market Environmentalism with Terry Anderson: Perspectives on Policy. Policy Ed, 2019. YouTube, uploaded by Policy Ed, Jan 9 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADowFfaeWoU&ab_channel=PolicyEd

3. Anderson, Terry, speaker. “Free market Environmentalism with Terry Anderson”, 2009. Independent Thinking. Created by John Caldara, part 1. Youtube, uploaded by IIonKBDI, April 24 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lVMLwLg5rk&ab_channel=IIonKBDIIIonKBDI

4. Anderson, Terry, speaker. “Free market Environmentalism with Terry Anderson”, 2009. Independent Thinking. Created by John Caldara, part 2. Youtube, uploaded by IIonKBDI, April 24 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B-_8RuAc9c&ab_channel=IIonKBDI

5. Anderson, Terry, speaker. “Free market Environmentalism with Terry Anderson”, 2009. Independent Thinking. Created by John Caldara, part 3. Youtube, uploaded by IIonKBDI, April 24 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC7dyUFEECU&ab_channel=IIonKBDI

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13. Klein, Naomi, speaker. Discussing This Changes Everything - Capitalism vs. The Climate with Naomi Klein. Cambridge Forum, 2014. YouTube, uploaded by GHB Forum Network, Oct 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Yyd5dxTGE&ab_channel=GBHForumNetworkGBHForumNetwork

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