Last night, in Manchester Vermont, the nationally known environmental writer Bill McKibben debated the locally known free-market booster John McClaughry on Global Climate Change. McKibben needs no introduction; he wrote the book on the subject and has been a strong advocate for signing on to the Kyoto protocols. (Check out http://www.billmckibben.com/... McClaughry is head of a small think-tank, the Ethan Allen Institute (see http://www.ethanallen.org/...
I didn't get to the debate, but I've heard McClaughry's views before, and the local paper's report tells me he stuck to his guns: he concedes that the planet is probably undergoing climate change, but he's either certain or pretty certain that it's a natural phenomenon. He argues that calls to take action against it— a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade system of limits--are misguided. Measures like that would be expensive and they’d have very large economic consequences: they’d definitely slow economic growth. For McClaughry, that’s the biggest sin. But his commitment to keeping the engines of economic growth fully stoked leads him into a contradiction.
This is the new defensive position staked out by Climate Change skeptics: faced with overwhelming evidence that the phenomenon is real, they argue that we can’t know that we’re causing it. (And then, they commit the fallacy of argument from ignorance: since we can't know something, we should therefore conclude the opposite.) Climate Change Denial is no longer an intellectually defensible position, so Deniers have become Climate Change Naturalists. The further step in the Naturalist argument goes like this: since it’s likely (or possible or certain) that the warming is part of a natural cycle, we should accept it and let nature run its course.
There’s quite a bit of irony—or is it just plain hypocrisy?—in an argument that says "let nature be" in order to defend economic growth, the ongoing practice of transforming nature to suit us. Since when have free-market, pro-capitalist, pro-industrialist thinkers ever argued for letting nature and its processes alone?
There's yet another position that Global Climate Change Naturalists frequently take: environmental quality (including, presumably, a stable macroclimate) is something that societies can afford only if they have enough economic growth. We've got to keep on keeping on, growing the economy (and continuing our use of fossil fuels) in order to be able afford to do anything about global climate change. To most of us, this is an absurdity: how can you "grow" your way into solving the problems that economic growth creates? But what's definitionally absurd in one mind-set is evidently reasonable in another--and partisans of this "grow first, fix the planet later" position point to something called the Environmental Kuznets Curve to support their position. This curve purports to model environmental damage as an inverted U shaped curve: pollution increases with industrialization, and then as societies become wealthier, they pass environmental protection laws, which bring the curve down again. Free-marketers conclude that when people are wealthy enough, they "choose" to use part of their wealth to purchase environmental quality.
Although some specific pollutants in developed countries can be modelled by this sort of curve, there are several problems here. Any one of them is fatal to the whole notion of an EKC. One, measurement of specific pollutants in a developed country isn't a good measure of total environmental damage, because the most insidious and costly damage is loss of natural capital (and with it the non-market yet necessary and valuable ecosystem goods and services it provides). Two, measuring pollution in developed countries tells you nothing about those countries' ecological footprint, precisely because the pro-capital lobby has been successful in establishing the mostly free-market world-trade system of Globalization. Rich countries can and do export the environmental consquences of their wealth to poorer countries and regions. If you've got a Globalized economy that can affect ecosystems on a global scale, it seems pretty straightforward to take the globe, and not a few specific countries on it, as the relevant unit of analysis. Three: behind the EKC is an assumption that environmental damage, and evidently repair, come in discrete units: you get a little wealthier, you buy a little less of one, more of the other. But what if natural systems operate as, well, ecosystems--not a mechanistically reducible collection of parts, but as living, breathing things? And what can it mean to be willing to spend money to remediate the loss of a species gone extinct?
McClaughry and the others in his camp are the product of a particular moment in time. I think historians a hundred years from now will find in them the concrete embodiment of a brief moment in the evolution of our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. These guys are the pundit equivalent of those typewriters that came out in the eighties--the ones that showed you a line of text in a little window before it got smacked onto the paper by standard electronic typewriter keys. Not good as typewriters, lame as word processors, they marked an intermediate technology that didn’t--couldn't--last long. They, like Global Climate Change Naturalists, represented an effort to retain the wrong part of the past while embracing just a tiny, inescapable sliver of a future that we can all clearly see is coming. To do that isn't conservativism, properly understood; it's just dysfunctional.