West coast debate
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- Should let capitalism collapse now instead of later – key to save the environment
- Capitalisim isn’t sustainable – collapse is inevitable
- Capitalism = Root Cause Of Environment
- Our capitalist international system is the cause of Third World poverty, environmental crisis and overpopulation
Impact – EnvironmentCapitalism will cause eco-doom by 2013 through global warmingMinqi Li, teaches economics at the University of Utah, August 2008, “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism,” The Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/080721li.php The 2007 assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that it is virtually certain that human activities (mainly through the use of fossil fuels and land development) have been responsible for the global warming that has taken place since the industrial revolution. Under current economic and social trends, the world is on a path to unprecedented ecological catastrophes.1 As the IPCC report was being released, new evidence emerged suggesting that climate change is taking place at a much faster pace and the potential consequences are likely to be far more dreadful than is suggested by the IPCC report. The current evidence suggests that the Arctic Ocean could become ice free in summertime possibly as soon as 2013, about one century ahead of what is predicted by the IPCC models. With the complete melting of the Arctic summer sea ice, the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheets may become unavoidable, threatening to raise the sea level by five meters or more within this century. About half of the world’s fifty largest cities are at risk and hundreds of millions of people will become environmental refugees.2 Should let capitalism collapse now instead of later – key to save the environmentGlen, Barry, PhD, the President and Founder of Ecological Internet, January 4, 2008 “Economic Collapse and Global Ecology,” http://www.countercurrents.org/barry140108.htm We know that humanity must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% over coming decades. How will this and other necessary climate mitigation strategies be maintained during years of economic downturns, resource wars, reasonable demands for equitable consumption, and frankly, the weather being more pleasant in some places? If efforts to reduce emissions and move to a steady state economy fail; the collapse of ecological, economic and social systems is assured. Bright greens take the continued existence of a habitable Earth with viable, sustainable populations of all species including humans as the ultimate truth and the meaning of life. Whether this is possible in a time of economic collapse is crucially dependent upon whether enough ecosystems and resources remain post collapse to allow humanity to recover and reconstitute sustainable, relocalized societies. It may be better for the Earth and humanity's future that economic collapse comes sooner rather than later, while more ecosystems and opportunities to return to nature's fold exist. Economic collapse will be deeply wrenching -- part Great Depression, part African famine. There will be starvation and civil strife, and a long period of suffering and turmoil. Many will be killed as balance returns to the Earth. Most people have forgotten how to grow food and that their identity is more than what they own. Yet there is some justice, in that those who have lived most lightly upon the land will have an easier time of it, even as those super-consumers living in massive cities finally learn where their food comes from and that ecology is the meaning of life. Economic collapse now means humanity and the Earth ultimately survive to prosper again. Human suffering -- already the norm for many, but hitting the currently materially affluent -- is inevitable given the degree to which the planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. We are a couple decades at most away from societal strife of a much greater magnitude as the Earth's biosphere fails. Humanity can take the bitter medicine now, and recover while emerging better for it; or our total collapse can be a final, fatal death swoon. A successful revolutionary response to imminent global ecosystem collapse would focus upon bringing down the Earth's industrial economy now. As society continues to fail miserably to implement necessary changes to allow creation to continue, maybe the best strategy to achieve global ecological sustainability is economic sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks. Capitalisim isn’t sustainable – collapse is inevitableBarbara Harriss-White, Development Studies Prof @ Oxford, 2006, “Undermining Sustainable Capitalism,” Socialist Register, socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/ecolbhweh19Oct06.doc Capitalism is not fixing the environment. It is not able to, either in theory or in historical practice. Market-driven politics has ensured that renewable energy remains far from the point where it might start to form any kind of technological base, either for an alternative model of capitalist development (in the UK or in an engagement with large developing countries which are about to enter a highly polluting phase of industrialisation ), or for the remoralised and equitable allocations argued for by Altvater. In energy, there is no sign of the politics able to generate a new kind of social, non-market regulation of money and nature. Sustainable capitalism is a fiction and the politics of renewable energy are merely a reflection of the fiction. Capitalism = Root Cause Of EnvironmentCapitalism is the root cause of environmental destructionDemocratic Socialist Party, ENVIRONMENT, CAPITALISM, AND SOCIALISM, online edition, 2004. Available from the World Wide Web at: http://www.dsp.org.au/dsp/ECS/index.htm, accessed 8/5/07. Thus, the capitalist private profit system is the root cause of the environmental crisis. With its inherently anarchic exploitation of both human labour and natural resources for short-term profits, capitalism is incapable of utilising natural resources in a way that meets not only the current needs of all members of society but those of future generations as well: If resources in capitalism are "freely" available, like water, air and soil, then they are treated as "external inputs" whose cost of reproduction is ignored. If, however, they are incorporated into the costs of production of capitalist firms (for example through government taxes and charges on the use of these resources) the burden of these extra costs is simply passed on to the consumer. Moreover, no capitalist government will impose taxes and charges on the use of natural resources that the major corporations deem "excessive" to their ability to maximise profits. The compartmentalisation of production under capitalism (in which each particular natural resource is the independent object of profit-making) and the self-centered rationality of each individual capitalist firm make it "cheaper" to throw away or incinerate industrial by-products than to recycle them. Thus mountains of waste and toxic waste are the inevitable result of the capitalist version of the "affluent society". Capitalism's need to maximise short-term profits also leads it to impose irrational patterns of consumption on the mass of consumers through the commodification of rational needs (for example, substitution of private automotive transport for mass public transport systems) and through manipulative advertising. To this extent, the behavior of individual consumers is a factor contributing to the ecological crisis. Capitalist ideology plays directly on this factor with its credo that "people are responsible for the crisis" or with the claim that it is caused by "excessive consumption" on the part of ordinary working people in the imperialist countries. Such arguments are a convenient means of diverting attention from the fundamentally anti-environmental nature of the capitalist mode of production — and the patterns of consumption it forces working people to adopt. Today's capitalism, with its entrenched exploitation of the "South" by the advanced capitalist "North" also places an unequal burden of pollution and environmental degradation on those economies which are newly industrialising. In a world marked by excess capacity in most major branches of industry even palliative environmental protection measures can make struggling industries uncompetitive. The economic "miracle" countries of South East Asia have also been those most blighted by environmental degradation and natural resource depletion. Uncontrolled "development" of the remaining frontier in countries like Brazil, Thailand and Burma shows no sign of differing from the destructive historical model of "slash and burn". Indeed, the rules applied by international trade organisations, such as the World Trade Organisation and the North American Free Trade Association, are invoked to undermine traditional agricultural biodiversity and systems of land management. Our capitalist international system is the cause of Third World poverty, environmental crisis and overpopulationDemocratic Socialist Party, “Chapter II: Symptoms and Causes of the Environmental Crisis,” ENVIRONMENT, CAPITALISM, AND SOCIALISM, online edition, 2004. Available from the World Wide Web at: www.dsp.org.au/dsp/ECS/Chapter2.htm, accessed 4/22/06. However, if the poor nations and humanity as a whole are being brought to the brink of environmental disaster, the responsibility for this cannot be laid at the door of the peoples of the Third World. Rather, the responsibility rests squarely with the ruling classes of the industrialised capitalist countries. The governments and big corporations of the First World have imposed on the Third World an international economic system that takes more out of these countries than it puts in and that forces the latter to deplete their environmental resources at an alarming rate. The economic exploitation of Third World countries by transnational capital, and the accompanying military-political intervention by Western governments to maintain this exploitation, is the fundamental obstacle to the social and economic changes required to eliminate poverty in those countries, bring about a decline in their population growth and take pressure off their environment. 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