May 13, 2007
This is the sixth in GLS’s series on Labor and Global Warming.
The danger of global warming was recognized in the 1960s, and by the 1980s its effects were already becoming apparent. Yet significant action to limit it has only just begun. Meanwhile, the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere continues to grow.
Why?
According to Adam Smith’s analysis of the market — echoed by today’s neo-liberals — each player, by pursuing their own immediate self-interest, brings about the common interest of all. According to Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and author of the British government’s “Stern Review” on global warming, “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.” As corporations and individuals have pursued their own immediate self-interest, they have brought about a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.
Nor is this just a question of economic ideology. Exxon and other energy companies spent millions of dollars promoting “environmental holocaust denial” not out of its economic principles but because it feared measures to limit the use of fossil fuels might cost it hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.
Market failures occur when the market is unable to capture the real costs and benefits. As David Foster wrote in New Labor Forum, “Acceptance that human impact causes climate change invites a radical review of the market-based orthodoxy around which the current model of globalization has been constructed.”
Addressing global warming will be a long-term development, like the development of public sanitation measures in response to epidemics. It requires the emergence of a more collective response. The transition to a low-carbon economy will require a new level of social coordination. It will require much more social control of investment. And, if it is to be conducted in a just and equitable way with wide support around the world, it will require social allocation of costs and benefits.
Underlying the failure to address global warming is a “democracy deficit.” Neoliberalism has largely dismantled the means for controlling our common life at a national level. And it has prevented the construction of new means to control our common life at a global level. As a result, at present we lack the social capacity to compensate for market failure. Those who are affected by global warming individually have far less power than those in a position to aggravate it. We have been left with no way to protect ourselves against devastating market failures.
Countering this democracy deficit is a central part of contesting global warming. After all, what can we expect of politicians, media, and a political system dominated by oil companies? Indeed, according to the famous NASA climate scientist James Hanson, one way the U.S. public can help fight global warming is by helping to “address threats to American democracy.” People have the right to know the truth about climate change. Effective campaign finance reform is needed for this. “As long as politicians are getting support from special interests, then special interests are going to have special privileges.”
The problem of democratic control of threats to the environment is even more pronounced at a global level, where the means for popular governance have never been strong. Indeed, as David Foster puts it, “It demands majority decision-making on a global scale.”
Guy Ryder, General Secretary of the ITUC, articulated the problem to a U.N. environmental conference:
You are called upon to address issues which can only be addressed globally, which can only be addressed at significant cost (in the short term at least) and where costs will only grow quickly the longer action is delayed; which can only be addressed by impacting on strongly entrenched vested interests and habits; and which can only be addressed by breaking radically from past practice and orthodoxies.
The fact of the matter is that consistently and uniformly the international system
has underperformed, sometimes very badly — in its task of exercising governance
of globalization. Those failures extend well beyond the environmental field and I
won’t enlarge on them.But I believe they reflect an underlying constraint. It is that individually and
collectively Governments have rather fallen under the spell of the prevailing
belief that the best thing they can do is to make themselves small â to unleash
the forces of the market, and then get out of the way.This is the era of small Governments and free market economics. And yet today
we are faced with a critical situation which (according to a better authority then
I) constitutes the biggest market failure in history, and which, self-evidently,
requires assertive state and inter-state action which must include new and
considerable international regulation and constraints on the way markets work
and on those who act in them.
Establishing “majority decision-making on a global scale” will be the work of an era and will ultimately require a movement as powerful and pervasive as neoliberalism itself.
David Foster sees such a movement growing out of the convergence the labor and environmental movements.
We do need a powerful movement, but not one focused on retaining the isolated reforms that labor fought for in the 1930âs or the landmark environmental protections of the 1970′s. We need a movement, based in our separate histories, but focused on our common futures.
According to Foster, incremental legislative reform linked closely to electoral strategy has been the guiding doctrine for many unions and environmental organizations during the last several decades. But the Blue Green Alliance “is focused on restoring an additional element to the relationship between public policy and electoral politics — that of movement building.” Indeed, “Without strong, well-organized social movements, mobilizing along a society’s basic fault lines, meaningful change is unlikely.”
The next piece in our series on “Labor and Global Warming” will examine labor’s stake in the response to global warming and the outline of a new global warming policy for America labor.