Tropic of Chaos (35 page)

Another tool of transformation readily at hand is direct government procurement of clean technology. Currently, leading clean technology remains slightly more expensive than the old dirty-tech alternatives. This so-called “price gap” is holding back clean technology's mass application. The simple fact is that capitalist economies will not switch to clean energy until it is cheaper than fossil fuels.

The price gap results partly from dirty tech's history of subsidies ($72.5 billion between 2002 and 2008) and partly from the massive economies of scale that the fossil fuel industry enjoys. The fastest way to close the price gap
is to build large clean-tech markets that allow for similar economies of scale. And the fastest way to do that is to reorient government procurement away from fossil fuel energy toward clean energy and technology—to use the government's vast spending power to create a market for clean energy.

After all, the government didn't just fund the invention of the microprocessor, it was also the first major consumer of the device. It not only created the technology, it created its market. Throughout the 1950s,
more than half
of IBM's revenue came from government contracts. Along with money, these contracts provided a guaranteed market, as well as stability for IBM and its suppliers, and thus helped coax in private investment—all of which helped make IBM the market leader.
³¹

Now consider the scale of the problem: our asphalt transportation arteries are clogged with 250 million gasoline-powered vehicles sucking down an annual $200 to $300 billion worth of fuel from more than 121,000 filling stations. Add to that the cost of heating and cooling buildings, jet travel, shipping, powering industry, and the energy-gobbling servers and mainframes that are the Internet, and the US energy economy reaches a spectacular annual tab of $2 to $3 trillion.

Those are enormous sums, but federal, state, and local government constitutes more than 38 percent of our GDP. The federal government spent about $3.6 trillion in 2010. In more concrete terms, the federal government is the world's largest consumer of energy and vehicles—it owns or leases more than 430,000 buildings, mostly large office buildings, and 650,000 vehicles. As a result, it is the nation's largest greenhouse gas emitter. Add in state and local government activity, and those numbers grow again by about a third.

A redirection of government purchasing would create massive markets for clean power, electric vehicles, and efficient buildings, as well as for more sustainably produced furniture, paper, cleaning supplies, uniforms, food, and services. If government bought green, that would drive down the price of clean technology, and then the momentum toward green tech would become self-reinforcing and spread to the private sector.

Government has tremendous latitude to leverage green procurement because it requires no new taxes, programs, or spending, nor is it hostage to
the holy grail of sixty votes in the Senate. It is simply a matter of changing how the government buys its energy, vehicles, and services

There is one last imperative question. Several strands of green thinking maintain that capitalism is incapable of arriving at a sustainable relationship with nature because, as an economic system, capitalism must grow exponentially, while the earth is finite.
³²
You will find this argument in the literature of ecosocialism, deep ecology, and ecoanarchism. The same argument is often cast by liberal greens in deeply ahistorical and antitheoretical terms that, while critical of the economic system, often decline to name it. Back in the early 1970s, the Club of Rome's book
Limits to Growth
fixated on the dangers of “growth” but largely avoided explaining why capitalism needs growth or how growth is linked to private ownership, profits, and interfirm competition. Whether these literatures describe the problem as “modern industrial society,” “the growth cult,” or the profit system, they often have a similar takeaway: we need a totally different economic system if we are to live in balance with nature.

Some of the first to make such an argument were Marx and Engels. They came to their ecology through examining the local problem of relations between town and country—which was expressed simultaneously as urban pollution and rural soil depletion. In exploring this question they relied on the pioneering work of soil chemist Justus von Liebig. And from this small-scale problem, they developed the idea of capitalism's overall “metabolic rift” with nature.
³³
Here is how Marx explained the dilemma:

From that grew the Marxist belief that capitalism, as a whole, is irreconcilably in contradiction with nature; that the economic system creates a rift in the balance of exchanges, or metabolism, connecting human society and natural systems. As with “soil robbing,” so too with forests, fish stocks, water supplies, genetic inheritance, biodiversity, and atmospheric CO
₂
concentrations. The natural systems are out of sync; their elements are being rearranged and redistributed, ending up as garbage and pollution.

As Mary Douglas, paraphrasing William James, put it, “Uncleanliness is matter out of place.”
³⁵
At a large enough scale, that disruption of elements threatens environmental catastrophe.

It may be true: capitalism may be, ultimately, incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural world.

However, that is
not
the same question as whether capitalism can solve the climate crisis. Because of its magnitude, the climate crisis can appear as if it is the combination of all environmental crises—overexploitation of the seas, deforestation, overexploitation of freshwater, soil erosion, species and habitat loss, chemical contamination, and genetic contamination due to transgenic bioengineering. But halting greenhouse gas emissions is a much more specific problem; it is only one piece of the apocalyptic panorama. Though all these problems are connected, the most urgent and all encompassing of them is anthropogenic climate change.

The fact of the matter is time has run out on the climate issue. Either capitalism solves the crisis, or it destroys civilization. Capitalism begins to deal with the crisis now, or we face civilizational collapse beginning this century. We cannot wait for a socialist, or communist, or anarchist, or deep-ecology, neoprimitive revolution; nor for a nostalgia-based
localista
conversion back to the mythical small-town economy of preindustrial America as some advocate.

In short, we cannot wait to transform
everything
—including how we create energy. Instead, we must begin immediately transforming the energy economy. Other necessary changes can and will flow from that.

Hopeless? No. If we put aside the question of capitalism's limits and deal only with greenhouse gas emissions, the problem looks less daunting. While capitalism has not solved
the
environmental crisis—meaning the fundamental conflict between the infinite growth potential of the market and the finite parameters of the planet—it has, in the past, solved
specific
environmental crises. The sanitation movement of the Progressive Era is an example.

By the 1830s, industrial cities had become perfect incubators of epidemic disease, particularly cholera and yellow fever. Like climate change today, these diseases hit the poor hardest, but they also sickened and killed the wealthy. Class privilege offered some protection, but it was not a guarantee of safety. And so it was that middle-class do-gooder goo-goos and mugwumps began a series of reforms that contained and eventually defeated the urban epidemics.

First, the filthy garbage-eating hogs were banned from city streets, then public sanitation programs of refuse collection began, sewers were built, safe public water provided, housing codes were developed and enforced. And, eventually, the epidemics of cholera stopped. So, too, were other infectious diseases, like pulmonary tuberculosis, typhus, and typhoid, largely eliminated.
³⁶

Thus, at the scale of the urban, capitalist society solved an environmental crisis through planning and public investment. Climate change is a problem on an entirely different order of magnitude, but past solutions to smaller environmental crises offer lessons.

Ultimately, solving the climate crisis—like the nineteenth-century victory over urban squalor and epidemic contagions—will require a relegitimation of the state's role in the economy. We will need planning and downward redistribution of wealth. And, as I have sketched out above, there are readily available ways to address the crisis immediately—if we make the effort to force our political leaders to act. We owe such an effort to people like Ekaru Loruman, who are already suffering and dying on the front lines of the catastrophic convergence, and to the next generation, who will inherit the mess. And, we owe it to ourselves.

Foremost thanks go to my dear friend and colleague Ruth Baldwin, who championed this book and kept all the moving pieces from crashing. My agent Howard Yoon, a true gentleman and scholar, guided the contract patiently and superbly. He secured the advance upon which all of this was possible. Neil Smith, David Harvey, and Padmini Biswas at the Center for Place Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, provided crucial institutional and intellectual support without which research for this book would have been impossible. The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation facilitated work with a substantial grant. Also, the Nation Institute supported me over the course of many trips, some of which are discussed in these pages, many of which are not, but all of which shaped my thinking. And thanks more recently to The Puffin Foundation for their support.

Deepest thanks to Betsy Reed, my editor at
The Nation
for her patience, diligence, clarity, and friendship. Josh W. Mason also gave me a much needed, very helpful edit. Thanks to Carl Bromley of Nation books, Taya Kitman, and Katrina vanden Heuvel for all their hard work at the Nation Institute and
The Nation
magazine. For careful copyediting, thanks to Jen Kelland. Marissa Colón-Margolies and Chantal Flores helped with some key research and fact checking. And thanks to all the good people at Perseus Books, like John Sherer, with whom it is a pleasure to work again. Thanks also to David Callahan and Lew Daily at Demos for offering to support the promotion of this book.

Some of the travels that appear in or inform this work happened variously in the company of Ian Olds, Ryan Grim, Jessica Dimmock, Christopher Anderson, and Teru Kuwayama. In traveling for this book I
worked with Casper Waithaka, Ananthkumar Chintalapalli, Michel Mbula, Tshibasu Dieudonné, Pedro Stillner, Julian Cardona, my friend Lina Britto, and my very close friend Naqeeb Sherzad. I also worked with Ajmal Nakshbandi. Ajmal was murdered by the Taliban in 2007. He is missed and his death is still a bitter lesson.

Tala Hadid, Rob Eshelman, and Forrest Hylton were essential intellectual comrades in this process. Sadia Abbas assisted with important good ideas. In India I was the guest of the inspiring and gracious Biju Mathews. Chris Cook, John Marshall, Tina Gerhardt, Jeff Burt, and Sara Kazemi; Ted Hamm, Bill Cole, Chris Reilly, Jeremy Freeman, Jan Chelminski, and Jay Stewart; Ed and Sekeena Gavagan; and Eyal Press were all good comrades.

Very importantly, Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone fed me, informed me, shared ideas, and indulged my late-night excesses. On occasions Adolph Reed was there to make it all better. Last but not least, deep appreciation goes to Rebecca Lossin, who gave me support, comfort, company, and love.

I am lucky to say there are many other excellent friends, old and new, who were kind to me during this project and I feel deep appreciation for all of them. The more I travel, read, and learn, the more I value friendships. I see in friendship the rudimentary components—generosity, loyalty, solidarity, patience—that are the building blocks of a better society.

 

Brooklyn, New York

1
On Africa the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change writes, “Warming is
very likely
to be larger than the global annual mean warming throughout the continent and in all seasons, with drier subtropical regions warming more than the moister tropics. Annual rainfall is
likely
to decrease in much of Mediterranean Africa and the northern Sahara, with a greater likelihood of decreasing rainfall as the Mediterranean coast is approached. Rainfall in southern Africa is
likely
to decrease in much of the winter rainfall region and western margins. There is
likely
to be an increase in annual mean rainfall in East Africa. It is unclear how rainfall in the Sahel, the Guinean Coast and the southern Sahara will evolve.” Susan Solomon, Dahe Qin, Martin Manning, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I,
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 850.