Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Consequently, a clear dependence on the car industry as a sure way of securing good
profitability has emerged. As Foster writes:
The capitalist class is divided when it comes to reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions to slow down the rate of global warming. A significant part of the
ruling class in the US is willing to contemplate more efficient technology, not
so much through a greatly expanded system of public transport, but rather
through cars with greater gas mileage, or perhaps even a shift to cars using more
benign forms of energy. Efficiency in the use of energy, as long as it does not
change the basic structure of production, is generally acceptable to capital as
something that would ultimately spur production and increase the scale of
accumulation.
(2002: 99)
For many Marxist analysts, hope lies neither in more stringent regulation nor new
technology, but in nothing less than the full transformation of the capitalist mode
of production.
Indian economist Partha Dasgupta (2001) argues that globalization has led many
economists to ignore the significance of geography and the local as conditions for
economic development and progress, but he also recognizes that environmental
damage may have some human benefit. He does not completely dismiss the value
of cost-benefit analysis. A road may destroy part of a local ecosystem, but there are
benefits to communication, travel and economic development. For Dasgupta, it is
important to clearly understand economic signals, such as migration, price, resource
scarcity and product quality that derive from human interaction with the natural
environment. However, he does not wholeheartedly dismiss the possibility and
desirability of substituting one form of capital for another. People do seek alterna-
tives to goods, services and resources when their traditional supply dries up. Necessity
is the mother of invention, and with peak oil the world may invest seriously in
alternative, renewable, fuel sources. For Dasgupta, then, economic development needs
to be sustainable and growth needs to be measured in terms of wealth rather than
crude economic activity (GNP) and understood as the value of manufactured assets
like buildings and roads, human knowledge and skills, ecosystems, and civil and
governmental institutions. GNP per capita may increase but overall wealth may not
- for example, in India. Substitution of human for natural capital may lead to an
increase in both GNP and overall wealth - for example, in China. However, there
are limits to the services the planet's ecosystems provide - and limits to substitution.
There is only so much CO
2
the ecosystem can accommodate before significant climatic
change occurs. Thus, in examining the economic development of a large number of
poor countries, Dasgupta (2007) concluded that in all cases this development was
either unsustainable or barely sustainable, with Pakistan being the worst performer
on the Indian subcontinent. For Dasgupta, sustainable development means:
that an economy's wealth must not decline. But the equivalence doesn't mean
that sustainable development is possible. Whether it is possible depends upon
demographic behaviour, consumption patterns, and production and substitution
possibilities among the myriad forms of capital assets.
(2001: 142)
