As the Gulf oil leak oozes itself into the history of environmental disasters, and the government desperately tries to figure out how to contain it, one aspect of the story is being overlooked: the cost of the clean-up. The Associated Press says that the military may be called into action. Which is a good thing, from an environmental standpoint.
A massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is even worse than believed and as the government grows concerned that the rig's operator is ill-equipped to contain it, officials are offering a military response to try to avert a massive environmental disaster along the ecologically fragile U.S. coastline.
Speaking Thursday on NBC's "Today" show, an executive for BP PLC, which operated the oil rig that exploded and sank last week, said the company would welcome help from the U.S. military.
"We'll take help from anyone," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.
But should we, the taxpayers, foot the bill for the cost of cleaning up a mess caused by an enormous corporation? Too often, we do. But in this case, we might not. This tiny paragraph, from this USA Today article, deserves much more attention:
President Obama directed officials to aggressively confront the spill, but the cost of the cleanup will fall on BP, spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
We must publicize this, and make sure that it happens. And we must use this moment not only to broaden public awareness that the Obama Administration is doing the right thing, but also to broaden public awareness of why this is so important.
As this nation and the world glide blindly into a future of unfathomable climate change consequences, we hear many excuses as to why governments won't do much, if anything, to stop it. But, in fact, governments are enabling it. And one of the worst means of that enabling is government subsidization of environmentally devastating industries and technologies. Make industries bear the full costs of their doing business, and they will be forced to develop new technologies at a pace commensurate with the need for such technologies. It's called capitalism. It's called the free market. Politicians love to talk about the wonders of capitalism and the free market, but we don't see a lot of actual support for them. Subsidizing polluting industries is neither capitalism nor the free market.
In November, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke to the Sierra Club, about capitalism and environmentalism. It's common to think of the two as antagonistic. Kennedy explained why they are not. It's a long speech, and I'm quoting liberally:
I want to say this: There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
You don't often hear such a framing, but the logic and truth of it are indisputable. If the oil companies were forced to pay for the cost of the environmental devastation caused by their products- including the costs of climate change- the cost of oil would skyrocket, and both government and industry would have no choice but to innovate. You often hear about the cost to taxpayers, when new mass transit projects are proposed, but you don't often hear about the hidden subsidies to the oil and auto industries.
Kennedy:
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.
And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.
It's just business. And for our system to function, the government needs to ensure that doing business means honesty and accountability. The oil companies make their staggering profits at our expense. Not only by what we pay at the pump, but also by what we taxpayers pay, to enable them to do business. That must end. Make them bear the burden of cleaning up their own environmental disasters. They are costing us, the public. And by allowing them to do so is costing us more than we, the public, can afford.
The Obama Administration seems to be ready to do the right thing, by making BP pay to clean up its own mess. The Obama Administration deserves credit for this, not only for doing the right thing in one particular instance, but also for demonstrating how the system should work.