Another day, another radical anti-capitalist rant in another left-wing rag. Let’s examine parts of George Monbiot’s opus in the Guardian saying capitalism is killing the planet.
‘Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction,’ reads the headline.
‘Instead of focusing on “micro consumerist bollocks” like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up.’
He concludes: ‘Just as there is a poverty line below which no one should fall, there is a wealth line above which no one should rise. What we need are not carbon taxes, but wealth taxes.’
Level down? Even if George Monbiot directed his very lengthy screed only at the wealthy elite of which he is a member, that would be a terrible idea.
I’d fisk the entire piece, but it’s 3 345 words long, and there’s only so much space on the internet. So let’s pick just enough holes in it to compromise its structural integrity.
‘There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence,’ he writes. ‘It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter.’
That is far from true. Humans take a jumper when they go out, in case the weather turns. Humans build shelter for the winter. Humans buy car, house, health and life insurance. Humans save up for a rainy day (even though the inflationary monetary policy maintained by Keynesian governments strongly discourages saving and encourages spending).
In winter, even middle-class Britons flee their miserable country for warmer climes in Spain, Italy, or South Africa. We call them ‘swallows’, because they’re just like the ‘other species’ whose winter-avoiding behaviour Monbiot lauds.
Flights and SUVs
‘When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival,’ argues Monbiot. ‘We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious, or even that it isn’t happening.’
The trouble isn’t that people don’t prepare for, or mitigate, threats. The trouble is that people don’t respond as Monbiot would wish to a few very specific threats he believes to be very serious.
‘We double down on destruction,’ he writes, ‘swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy.’
It’s easy to attack people for their choice of vehicles, or their long-haul flights, while forgetting that all vehicles have become far more fuel efficient over time. Today’s motor vehicles are 80% more powerful than those of 1975, but they’re also twice as fuel efficient, and emit half the carbon dioxide. This is technological progress, made possible by economic prosperity.
Likewise, aviation transport efficiency has improved by approximately eightfold since 1960, in terms of grams of carbon dioxide emitted per revenue-passenger-kilometre. Again, this is a function of growing prosperity.
Judging other people for their choices is typical of rich elitists like Monbiot, but it is not justifiable. It isn’t up to him, or anyone else, to decide that someone ought to fly less, even if they’re flying for pleasure and not business. The same goes for their choice of motor vehicle. A wealthy Brit living in Oxford might not need an SUV, or care to fly particularly far for minor reasons, but that isn’t true for everyone.
In countries like South Africa, because they are five times larger than the United Kingdom and have a GDP eight times smaller, owning a motor vehicle, and preferably a fairly big one that serves multiple purposes, is not a luxury.
Moreover, poor countries on the far side of the world from rich elites like Monbiot are highly reliant on international tourism to relieve their dire poverty. Now Monbiot wants to stop people flying? What is he, a deadly respiratory infection?
Survival of the species
Monbiot continues by claiming that human civilisation depends on current equilibrium states in natural systems. If these states are disturbed, he argues, we’re done for. We’ll fail, he says, to ‘secure the survival of our children or, perhaps, our species’.
Yet this isn’t true. Humanity is quite capable of adapting to a very wide range of climatic conditions. Even in our present world, we live in arctic tundras, swamps, African savannas, tropical rainforests, monsoon territory, on the slopes of volcanoes, in burning deserts, and in Benoni. None of these climates have killed us, yet.
While the public debate on climate change is certainly replete with catastrophism, the scientific literature is not. Some predicted effects are certainly serious concerns, but no scientific paper that I have ever seen casts climate change as an extinction-level threat for humanity.
If Monbiot cannot be trusted to accurately describe the problems he believes humanity faces, how can we trust him when he proposes an extreme solution?
As one example, he describes how the tropical savannas of Brazil could, ‘soon and suddenly’, be ‘flipped’ into desert. Environmental alarmists have been saying that for decades, about the Sahel, in Africa. Yet the reality (as I wrote in 2014, and scientists reconfirmed in 2016) is that the majority of the planet is greening, not browning.
All at sea
Next up on the list of grave calamities is the prospect that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), a system of ocean currents that carries warm water from the tropics towards the north pole, is being disrupted, and is weakening.
‘Without it, the UK would have a climate similar to Siberia’s,’ Monbiot warns hysterically. ‘AMOC has two equilibrium states: on and off. … Everything we know and love depends on AMOC remaining in the on state.’
Well, that too, is a lot of hot air. The idea that the Gulf Stream, which flows into the North Atlantic Current that flows northwards alongside Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia, is responsible for Europe’s relatively mild winters, is a 19th century myth (sci-hub).
According to scientists, writing in the book Abrupt Climate Change (2008): ‘No current comprehensive climate model projects that the AMOC will abruptly weaken or collapse in the 21st century.’
While a weakening of the AMOC is anticipated, ‘it is still very likely that on multidecadal to century time scales a warming trend will occur over most of the European region downstream of the North Atlantic Current’.
Oh, let’s just quote them in full: ‘One of the motivations behind the study of abrupt change in the AMOC is its potential influence on the climates of North America and western Europe. Some reports, particularly in the media, have suggested that a shutdown of the AMOC in response to global warming could plunge western Europe and even North America into conditions much colder than our current climate. On the basis of our current understanding of the climate system, such a scenario appears very unlikely. On the multidecadal to century time scale, it is very likely that Europe and North America will warm in response to increasing greenhouse gases (although natural variability and regional shifts could lead to periods of decadal-scale cooling in some regions). A significant weakening of the AMOC in response to global warming would moderate that long-term warming trend. If a complete shutdown of the AMOC were to occur (viewed as very unlikely, as described in this assessment), the reduced ocean heat transport could lead to a net cooling of the ocean by several degrees in parts of the North Atlantic, and possibly 1 to 2 degrees Celsius over portions of extreme western and northwestern Europe. However, even in such an extreme (and very unlikely) scenario, a multidecadal to century-scale warming trend in response to increasing greenhouse gases would still be anticipated over most of North America, eastern and southern Europe, and Asia.’
Can’t you just hear the sneer when they write ‘particularly in the media’? Mr Monbiot, are your ears burning yet?
Extreme weather
Monbiot is astonished and deeply disappointed in his fellow humans because not everyone wants to jammer on about the climate all day. They prefer – gasp! – to talk about food. He thinks that ‘preventing systemic environmental collapse’ is dependent on talking less about things that don’t interest him, and more about things that do.
He cites wildfires, floods, and droughts… no, wait. His language is far more colourful: ‘While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs.’
So, when the news reports extreme weather, we must all drop everything and panic.
Yet the global area burnt by wildfires has actually been decreasing steadily over the last decades, and where they do increase in severity, that’s because of poor ecosystem management, not anything you, I, or pet charcuterie board-makers are doing.
There has been an increase in flooding globally, but this trend can be explained by natural climate variability and oceanic oscillations, rather than climate change.
There are no trends in global droughts.
‘Faced with crises on an unprecedented scale, our heads are filled with insistent babble,’ he writes, preferring our heads to be filled with sensational falsehoods and hysterical alarmism.
Viva plastic!
Monbiot is wrong about a lot, but not about everything. While he frets that we’re too distracted by trivialities to panic about the apocalypse he believes is coming, he does think that what we are doing is pretty pointless. In that, he’s right.
‘We focus on what I call micro-consumerist bollocks (MCB): tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe,’ he writes. ‘We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.’
Yes! I’ve been saying so all along! Not only is it tremendously annoying to have to remember to pack your reusable shopping bags every time you go shopping, they’re terrible for the planet. They’re also a health hazard, unless you diligently wash them, which places even more of a strain on the environment. Paper bags tear, and are also far worse for the planet than plastic shopping bags. All the virtue-signalling is entirely pointless and counter-productive.
Same with straws. If you think straws are the problem, I have a bridge to sell you. The vast majority of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from discarded fishing gear, and not discarded plastic straws. Besides, as Monbiot himself points out, inert plastic is far from the biggest pollution threat to the oceans.
Monbiot raises the problems of the fishing industry and their impact on marine ecosystems, but once again, he exaggerates the problems, misdiagnoses the causes, and misrepresents the solutions.
The problem with the oceans is not too much capitalism, but too little. It is hard, or impossible, to assert and defend private property ownership out at sea, which leads to a predictable tragedy of the commons. Although many environmental concerns involving the oceans are, as usual, wildly exaggerated, the solution is to extend property rights to marine assets using mechanisms such as individually tradeable and transferrable quotas.
‘Every little counts,’ says Monbiot. ‘But not for very much.’
I couldn’t agree more. Most of our demonstrative ‘green’ actions are either too minor to matter, or don’t work at all, or are actively counter-productive.
Degrowth delusion
Monbiot then goes on a rant against corporations. Instead of blaming environmental campaigns for convincing people that their personal actions matter, he blames corporate marketing on issues such as littering, or seasonal fruit.
He even invokes Godwin’s Law by citing someone who argues that Stalin and Hitler demonstrated that the human instinct to obey was more powerful than the instinct to survive.
‘The obedience reflex is our greatest flaw, the kink in the human brain that threatens our lives,’ Monbiot writes.
It is ironic, then, that he goes on to propose a solution that requires obedience.
The cause of all his exaggerated fears? Economic growth. In Monbiot’s mind, ‘All the crises we seek to avert today become twice as hard to address as global economic activity doubles, then twice again, then twice again.’
But that’s patent nonsense. Addressing environmental problems becomes easier the richer societies get. Both GDP per capita and Economic Freedom Index scores are strongly correlated with countries’ Environmental Performance Index. Economic freedom will save the planet.
Monbiot, like Greta Thunberg, labours under the degrowth delusion – that is, the belief that reducing economic growth, or better yet, negative economic growth, will save the environment, and consequently, save humanity from the apocalypses of their fevered imaginations.
Misdefining capitalism
‘Most people struggle to define the system that dominates our lives. But if you press them, they’re likely to mumble something about hard work and enterprise, buying and selling. This is how the beneficiaries of the system want it to be understood. In reality, the great fortunes amassed under capitalism are not obtained this way, but through looting, monopoly and rent grabbing, followed by inheritance.’
Inheritance ought to be non-controversial. What a parent works for, they are quite entitled to give to their children. All parents seek to leave their children better off than they were. That’s basic human nature, and a key engine of civilisational progress. Besides, 90% of family fortunes don’t make it past the third generation. Inheritance is far less significant a driver of prosperity than one might imagine.
Monopolies are problematic only if they are created and/or protected by governments. As long as new competition can arise, monopolies are required to continue to deliver what customers want, or risk being supplanted. Ask IBM, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Compaq, or Novell, or Altavista, or Netscape.
Looting and ‘rent grabbing’ are not features of free-market capitalism. The example Monbiot provides, of the British Raj extracting wealth from India, is an example of colonialism and mercantilism, not of free-market capitalism. More generally, corruption and cronyism are features of statism, not free-market capitalism.
‘The apparent health of our economies today depends on seizing natural wealth from future generations. … Such theft from the future is the motor of economic growth. Capitalism, which sounds so reasonable when explained by a mainstream economist, is in ecological terms nothing but a pyramid scheme.’
None of that is true. The only economic processes that seize wealth from future generations are escalating public debt and under-funded social welfare programmes, especially government-run pension schemes. None of those are features of capitalism.
Down with wealth!
Monbiot goes on to rant against wealth itself, claiming that it is the ‘main cause of your environmental impact’.
That is, at best, a half-truth. Surely, the rich have a bigger environmental footprint than the poor, but then, they also have a far bigger economic footprint. And by economic footprint, I mean that they employ people, either directly, or by patronising businesses that employ people. Someone has to build their yachts and their houses, paint the pictures on their walls, and prepare their lobster thermidor.
What Monbiot misunderstands about wealth that is honestly earned (as opposed to obtained through cronyist government deals, theft or fraud, all of which are contrary to free-market capitalist principles) is… wait, let me not put words in his mouth.
What Monbiot misunderstands about wealth is this: ‘In reality, some people are extremely rich because others are extremely poor: massive wealth depends on exploitation.’
That is arrant nonsense. At the micro-level of transactions, both parties to a transaction are better off afterwards than they were before, otherwise one or both of them would not have entered into it.
If I bake 100 loaves of bread, only one of them has direct value to me. The other 99 have low value to me, but may have very high value to other people. So I enter into voluntary transactions with them, by which they give me stuff (or money) that exceeds my subjective valuation of the loaf, but which is less than their subjective valuation.
Afterwards, the buyer is richer because they have something they value more than the money they spent, and the seller is richer because they have something they value more than the goods they sold.
Zero-sum game
The notion that economics is a zero-sum game, in which one party to a transaction exploits the other, is actually childishly stupid. Yet socialists the world over understand economics through this lens of ignorance.
On a larger scale, the same is true. Bill Gates, whom Monbiot names, is rich not because of exploitation. He is rich because his company, Microsoft, created software that billions of people around the world chose to use.
Don’t ask me why. His software is shit, in my opinion, and I haven’t bought any of it for at least 20 years. But it isn’t up to me to tell other people how they should value things. Value is subjective, and many people obviously felt it well worth parting with some money for it.
And to be fair, the fact that billions of people got to run Microsoft software on desktop computers has also lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
No company can make money if they do not offer goods or services that customers want enough to pay for them. People like Monbiot will cast capitalists as greedy wealth-seekers, but profit and wealth don’t appear out of nowhere; they are reward for doing other people a good turn.
Monbiot wants an economic system that eliminates poverty by capping wealth: ‘Just as there is a poverty line below which no one should fall, there is a wealth line above which no one should rise.’
And he wants to achieve that with punitive wealth taxes; in fact, they’d have to reach 100% above the wealth line that he, quite arbitrarily, proposes to set.
Yet if he did that, nobody would have any motivation to create large companies that employ thousands and serve millions. Bill Gates wouldn’t be rich, but computers would still be limited to a few million geeks who know Unix, instead of having changed the lives of billions around the world.
Who would take the personal and legal risks of starting and running a company if they weren’t rewarded for that risk? Who would provide the capital, if capital were confiscated by the government at every turn, as Monbiot wishes?
Public ‘luxury’
Wealth taxes, Monbiot argues, ‘should be high enough to break the spiral of accumulation and redistribute the riches accumulated by a few. They could be used to put us on an entirely different track, one that I call “private sufficiency, public luxury”.’
‘While there is not enough ecological or even physical space on Earth for everyone to enjoy private luxury,’ he dreams, ‘there is enough to provide everyone with public luxury: magnificent parks, hospitals, swimming pools, art galleries, tennis courts and transport systems, playgrounds and community centres. We should each have our own small domains – private sufficiency – but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.’
Enjoying private luxuries does not seize anything from anyone. What’s worse, while Monbiot’s public facilities sound magnificent, the money for them must come from somewhere. He thinks they’ll come from the wealth taxes he proposes. But why would anyone create wealth in the first place, only for it to be confiscated by the state?
And in what world does Monbiot think that governments know what people want, and can provide everyone with what they subjectively value? Even if they did, in what world could governments deliver on these things? Has he seen the dismal, dreary, disinterested state of one-size-fits-all public facilities? What kind of grey, bureaucratic dystopia does Monbiot wish upon us all?
Perhaps public services are okay in his part of the world, by comparison with ours, but the reason for that is because people had an incentive to create taxable private wealth in the first place. The public services and social safety nets of the rich world were built not on socialist redistribution, but on the wealth created by free-market capitalism.
Dismantle capitalism, remove the incentive to create wealth, and it all comes crumbling down.
And even that wouldn’t be good for the environment. Just look at the polluted industrial wastelands created in the former Eastern bloc countries under communism. Look at the environmental destruction happening every day in socialist hell-holes around the world. Socialism and poverty are terrible for the environment.
The rich care about deforestation. If you’re poor and you need to plant vegetables, you couldn’t care less. The rich care about clean rivers. If you’re poor and you need to cut every cost you can to eke out a meagre living, rivers are cheap dump sites.
Monbiot is right that our survival depends on disobedience. It depends on disobedience to people who want to tax the economy to death. It depends on disobedience to the anti-capitalist fantasies of wealthy elitists like Monbiot and the paper he writes for.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tedconference/9021433570]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend