CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Israeli Lie-Bots; the Politics of Climate Change; and Centrists Elected Donald Trump, Twice

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Why Taming the Power of Capital is Needed for Environmental Resolution

In 2017 I wrote an article arguing that neoliberal climate policies were wholly inadequate to address the scale of environmental problems and that there existed a brief window before capital reasserted itself to end the entire effort. Noam Chomsky took the other side of the argument— which was still allowed back then, claiming that an economist at UMASS-Amherst had a detailed solution to climate change that only required a few small tweaks to solve it.

The economist— Robert Pollin, was elevated to be Joe Biden’s ‘climate guy.’ Pollin’s effort yielded exactly the product that I claimed that it would in the article— absolutely nothing. But getting the direction right wasn’t my point. Understanding and publicly conveying why it was the case was the point. Pollin’s plan was ‘pragmatically’ minimalist. Do the least that could possibly address the problem and forget it. But it predictably (I predicted it) went nowhere.

The problem with Pollin’s solution is that it ignores the power of capital to derail it. I argued that capital would turn any public policy into a way to enrich America’s oligarchs, and that this would prevent it from being effective. Before Joe Biden took office I went through his environmental proposals in detail. There was no detail. The conclusion was that they weren’t serious. Their top priority was making Biden’s donors rich using public money.

Those reading this in a political party frame need to stop doing so now or seek psychiatric help. I’ve followed environmental issues since 1970. As I explain below, the first head of the EPA was a Republican. The party difference then was over how to accomplish environmental goals, not whether or not to pursue them. And the Democrats have been putting forward only Republican proposals since Bill Clinton was in office. So, the division is between when both parties cared about environmental issues and today when neither party cares about them.

Republicans stopped being environmentalists with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. The first head of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, was both an environmentalist and a Republican. Environmentalism was a bi-partisan affair until Reagan mocked it in a political move to exploit the class divide between relatively well-to-do urban environmentalists and the loggers and coal miners losing their jobs from top-down environmental legislation.

As with Robert Pollin, the solutions were directionally correct while being politically counterproductive. If I wanted to create a large group of permanent political enemies, I would pass legislation intended to clean the air in New York and Los Angeles while economically devastating large swaths of the heartland. The emergence of the current urban / rural political divide began here. The arrogance of those willing to end other people’s livelihoods for what to them is an abstract benefit is breathtaking,

US greenhouse gas emissions were eventually outsourced to China. While they had been moderating with the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, US greenhouse emissions are now expected to rise 12% per year from AI. The setup is that a few dozen tech billionaires think that they aren’t rich enough yet and therefore wish to build a slight variation on existing technologies that require trillions in environmentally destructive infrastructure. Because they are billionaires, their dream of building crap that nobody asked for and that doesn’t work is becoming a reality.

This was my point in the 2017 article. Without bringing capital to heel, there is no realistic environmental path forward. Pollin’s ‘pragmatic’ approach enriched a few green tech executives. Doing so was the entire point of Biden’s adoption of Robert Pollin’s program. It looked complicated enough so that eyes would glaze over. But at its core, it was device to transfer wealth from the American people to Biden’s donors. That Pollin didn’t understand this is what made him an economics professor at UMASS – Amherst.

Donald Trump is the product of this class-war environmentalism. Displaced coal miners and loggers could have been given jobs doing other necessary things. The New Deal programs that emerged from the Great Depression built much of the infrastructure that today makes life in older American cities livable. Policy wonks don’t get Trump’s appeal because they’ve never had people three thousand miles away from them end their livelihoods, marriages, communities, and futures.

To understand the imperious mindset of doing so, consider Robert Moses, the New York oligarch who destroyed much of New York City in the 1960s by building highways through important economic routes. The resulting devastation was treated as an act of nature when it hit even though it was entirely oligarch-made. Poor people were blamed for the economic destruction that Moses was entirely to blame for. This was the class position behind early environmental legislation.

None of this is to argue against environmental policies in the present. The idiocy of ignoring accumulating environmental destruction is that the costs of remediating it are growing exponentially. Left ‘abundance’ theory needs to explain how it gets the world on a sustainable path forward. The irony is that quite a bit less would have needed to be done had Pollin’s weak tea proposals been implemented. But they were structured as gifts to donors rather than as serious environmental proposals.

Readers are invited to peruse the literature on tax incentives used to further public policies. As with AI, the literature in support of tax incentives is theoretical, and therefore prospective. The empirical evidence challenging the efficacy of tax incentives is based on outcomes. In the history that I was able to find, tax incentives went mostly to executive compensation. In American fashion, they are a cynical grift, repayment from politicians to donors for campaign contributions. This was known in 2017.

The appeal of Pollin’s argument is easy enough to understand. By limiting the problem as climate change, solutions appear easy and cheap. This is the ‘pragmatic’ counter to those of us waving our arms claiming that the power of capital must be addressed before any progress can be made. And it fits into the neoliberal framing of the Democrats’ ‘green capitalism’ as the only allowable solution to environmental woes. The problem with green capitalism is that it replaces one set of problems with another. Rather than removing the causes of environmental woes, green capitalism seeks to address them after the fact.

The starting position of capital is to solve existing problems by creating new problems. Rather than limiting the production of greenhouse gases, the green capitalist solution is to spend trillions on ‘carbon capture’ technologies and EVs. Question: how is this more environmentally efficient than directly ending greenhouse gas emissions? The answer: it isn’t. Building these new technologies while maintaining the........

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