Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
$9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon)
that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts.
It is therefore quite possible, as Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark make plain in
the
Burning Question
(Berners-Lee and Clark, 2013) that runaway climate change,
and all that it entails, is a distinct possibility. Those states that have been most
obstructive in the quest to curtail emissions - the US, Russia, China, Australia,
Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada and Kazakhstan - have the largest
reserves of untapped fossil fuel.
Ecology against capitalism
In the early stages of capitalist economic growth, 'nature' became completely
objectified as solely existing for the purposes of human exploitation and the satisfaction
of human wants. Later, the major imperatives of continuing economic growth,
industrialization and technological development meant the use of ever greater amounts
of energy. Oil production, upon which the global economy has grown to depend,
is now either near, past or actually at its peak. The future is likely to see oil prices
rise, despite desperate attempts to drill in the world's last remaining wildernesses in
the Arctic and Antarctic (Heinberg, 2004; Zittel and Schindler, 2007). Historically,
when local environmental resources are exhausted, then industry looks further afield,
extending both its geographical reach and ecological footprint, and free market
liberalism, and liberalization, has become the ideological rationale for increased
production and consumption, even though wealth creation has been unequally
distributed socially and geographically. For Carlos J. Castro (2004), the problem
with the concept of sustainable development, and particularly in the form articulated
by the United Nations and the World Bank, is that it is effectively synonymous with
capitalist development
, meaning continual economic growth, the private accumulation
of profit and the optimization of utility. Understood as such, sustainable develop-
ment is a contradiction in terms. For Castro, the idea that the capitalist system could
transform itself to incorporate a strong sustainability thesis is highly unlikely:
The idea that economic growth is achieved by free trade, that economic growth
reduces poverty and that, once poverty is reduced, environmental degradation
will be reduced as well does not work out in practice.
(2004: 198)
For post-structuralist and ecological Marxist writers, economic growth and the
profit motive are integrally linked in theory and practice. Their criticisms are often
acute, but they sometimes fail to fully develop practical proposals for sustainable
change. Capitalism, with its driving logic of continuous accumulation, has privileged
certain technological and economic initiatives but closed off others (Foster, 1999,
2000, 2002). For instance, the car has been central to capitalist development,
and although the eco-modernist promotion of greater fuel/eco-efficiency has led
to modest eco-innovation in car manufacture, there has been little significant invest-
ment in public transit systems, particularly in the US and UK, which would have
had far greater societal benefits. The car is also tied to growth in rubber, glass, steel
and petroleum production, trucking, highway construction, and suburbanization.
