Can Capitalism Be Green?
Posted on May 12th, 2007Inter Press Service News Agency (Stephen Leahy)
TORONTO, (IPS/IFEJ) - Capitalism has proven to be environmentally and socially unsustainable, so future prosperity will have to come from a new economic model, say some experts. What this new model would look like is the subject of intense debate.
One current states that continuous growth can be environmentally compatible if clean and efficient technologies are adopted, and if economies leave behind production of material goods and move towards services. This is known as sustainable prosperity.
International agreements to fight global problems, like the thinning of the atmosphere’s ozone layer and climate change, have used market principles to achieve compliance by the private sector.
But the problem is, “we are consuming 25 percent more than the Earth can give us each year,” says William Rees, of the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia.
Rees and other experts have calculated that annual human consumption of natural resources exceeds the planet’s ecological capacity to regenerate them by 25 percent, a proportion that has been growing since 1984, the first year they calculate that humanity crossed that capacity threshold.
“Our planet needs natural capital (resources) like trees to provide the ecosystem services of clean air and water that we all depend on,” said Rees in an interview. He was one of the inventors in 1992 of the concept of “ecological footprint”, an indicator of how much productive land a certain human population needs in order to supply itself with resources and to absorb its waste.
Capitalism is all about accumulation of wealth based on the consumption of natural resources, whose availability is strictly limited, he said. We are also exceeding the maximum amounts of pollution or waste products, such as carbon dioxide emissions (the main contributor to climate change), that the planet can absorb and process without affect.
Market economists call pollution and its impacts “externalities”, and rarely factor them into the economic models, he said.
Rees defines sustainable prosperity as the global use of resources and generation of wastes that do not exceed the planet’s capacity to regenerate and absorb. Equally important, he says, is the social dimension: true prosperity is possible only when income disparity between the rich and poor is small.