Progress or Collapse

The Crises of Market Greed

Roberto De Vogli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415510189
• eBook ISBN: 9781135102913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Human progress is heading toward collapse. There are converging ecological crises looming on the horizon: climate change, peak oil, water shortages, fish depletion and food scarcities. The world is on a collision course against the limits of the ecosystem. Modern societies are consuming, polluting and growing as if there is no tomorrow. Indeed, there may not be one.

In Progress or Collapse, Roberto De Vogli guides us through the multiple converging global crises of economic progress. He explores the connections between the environmental crisis and the psychological, social, cultural, political and economic emergencies affecting modern societies. It is not a coincidence, the author argues, that global ecological destruction is occurring in tandem with other crises: rising mental disorders, mindless consumerism, rampant conformism, status competition, civic disengagement, startling social inequalities, global financial instability, and widespread political impasse.

In this hard-hitting analysis, Roberto De Vogli identifies the root cause of all these symptoms of societal breakdown: neoliberalism, defined as market greed. He argues that in recent decades, modern societies have been dominated by a suicidal economic doctrine based on two articles of faith: the greed creed and the market God. The greed creed states that people are nothing but selfish profiteers in a perpetual search for status and wealth. The market God is the belief that all societal and human affairs are best regulated as market exchanges.

What is to be done? Can we stop progress toward collapse? Given the current distribution of power and wealth, and the state of psychological and political inertia in which we are trapped, our chances of redefining progress around alternative values and embracing a new philosophy of life are slim. Yet, the history of human emancipation has often been shaped by giant leaps forward. In the past, civic struggles have overcome "the limits of the possible". Whether this will happen again in the future is the central question of our time.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students of ecology, psychology, public health, epidemiology, human development, political philosophy, economics, sociology and politics.

1

A TURNING POINT OR A POINT OF NO RETURN?

At the dawn of human civilization, some million hunter-gatherers around the planet fought for their survival against ferocious animals, starvation and natural disasters. Thanks to their ability to tame and exploit their surrounding environment, they evolved and prospered. Throughout the millennia, they learned how to make fire, invented spears and arrows, and domesticated animals. They mastered the art of writing, discovered farming and gave birth to the first rudimentary forms of agricultural societies.

Then, came the Industrial Revolution. The horrible working conditions of child laborers, and the massive expropriations of lands from peasants, ruined the existence of countless people. But one thing is certain: without the industrial age, Homo sapiens would not have even dreamt of the health, wellbeing, comfort and sophistication enjoyed today. The breakthroughs that followed the Industrial Revolution were impressive: rising wealth, better nutrition, finer medical care, and wider access to goods, services, technologies and medicines. These transformations changed our lives forever. They also changed the way we see ourselves. They made us more confident, aware of our exceptional abilities to discover, create and innovate. They gave us a sense of new security and possibility. They also hooked into our mind an illusion: the thought of being unbeatable, unstoppable.

Overly conscious of our own powers, we have escalated the exploitation of the natural world beyond measure. And we have taken it too far. We are cutting down and burning enormous quantities of forest. We are denuding massive hectares of grasslands to feed our livestock. We are killing most of the wildlife, fish and other forms of biodiversity. We are eroding farmlands to the point of robbing them of their productive topsoil. We are rapidly depleting metals, minerals and other precious materials. We are consuming, wasting and polluting untold quantities of oil, plastic, water and food.

There are multiple ecological emergencies now casting a shadow over the future of our offspring: climate change, peak oil, water crises, and fish and food shortages. It is as if history has reached a turning point where our dream of unlimited progress is turning into a nightmare. Can this really be true?

Cooking up the planet

Some believe that all this is nonsense. They are the so-called environmental skeptics, or those that, for years, have belittled or even ridiculed evidence showing that, because of human activities, the temperature of the earth is getting too high. In 1997, pro-business magazine the Wall Street Journal, thundered: “Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is A Myth.”¹ In the United States, Republican Senator James Inhofe argued that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world.”² Some years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by Exxon, aired two 60-second TV ads with the slogan: “CO₂: They Call It Pollution, We Call It Life.” Similar claims are still widely heard today. As former wannabe presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently argued: “I have never believed in the ‘hoax of global warming.’”³

Profusely paid by the fossil-fuel industry,⁴ and widely covered by corporate media,⁵ many environmental skeptics have grown in popularity in recent years. After the leaked emails scandal of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, also known as “Climategate,” many critics were even more convinced that the science of climate change had been debunked. One wishes that they were right and that global warming is nothing but a fabrication. But it is hardly so. As David Biello wrote, in an editorial in Scientific American, “sadly for the potential fate of human civilization, rumors of the demise of climate change have been much exaggerated.”⁶ Now that massive catastrophic ecological events are multiplying before our eyes, planet heating is becoming more real than ever.

In the last decades, the number of extreme weather events has quintupled.⁷ The intensity of hurricanes has sharply increased.^{8 9} Since 1976, phenomena like El Niño have become more frequent: the average return decreased from 6 years per cycle to only 3.5 years.^{10 11} Heat waves too seem to be becoming more and more dangerous. In 2003, Europe experienced at least 35,000 casualties due to extreme summer heat.¹² Exceptional weather events occur more frequently everywhere. In March 2004, for the first time in history, a hurricane hit Brazil on the South Atlantic coast.¹³ In 2010, Russia experienced a fire that wiped out about 20 percent of its grain. That same year, about 1,500 people in Pakistan lost their lives, while half a million lost their homes, to one of the worst floods ever experienced. Although these disasters are disproportionately hitting the poor, and marginalized communities, they can occur virtually anywhere. Recent natural disasters in industrialized countries, such as horrific mudslides in California and the devastating Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as well as the worst floods ever recorded in English history, clearly show that there is no safe place to hide. We are all in the same boat. And, by the way, the boat is sinking.

Some scientists believe that extreme weather events are premonitions of how the future will look if the Earth's average temperature continues to rise.¹¹ Although it is too early to know whether this is true, there is little doubt that the global temperature has risen in an unprecedented way during the last century. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has investigated the trajectory of the Northern hemisphere's temperature over the last 1,000 years.¹⁴ In a figure named the “hockey-stick,” he showed a pattern of 900 years of little or no change, followed by a century characterized by a sharp, abrupt upturn in the average global temperature. Mann's chart provoked ferocious criticisms, not only fired by the skeptics funded by the fossil-fuel industry, but also by scientists criticizing his methods of analysis.¹⁵ Condemnations of the hockey stick have been so serious that they even prompted an inquiry by the National Academy of Sciences. The results of the inquiry, however, supported Mann's general assertion: when considering the past millennium, the temperatures experienced in the Northern hemisphere during the late twentieth century were exceptionally hot.¹⁶

The warming of the Earth has been documented by numerous other analyses. Some of them are based on the direct planet-wide temperatures over the past 150 years. Available records indicate that 19 of the 20 average hottest years have occurred after the 1980s.¹¹ According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the year 2010 was the warmest since records began.¹⁷ What is more, each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last 15 years. The deadly summer of 2003 was the hottest that Europe had experienced in 1,500 years.¹⁸ In July 2005, the temperature at Ny-Alesund, a little town just 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, hit a record temperature of 20ºC.¹¹

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists comprised of the world's most respected experts on climate sciences, displays little hesitation. Already in 2007, their report concluded unambiguously: “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level.”¹⁹ Climate change is not a hoax. It is real. The planet is truly cooking up.

The slippery slope to hell

Some skeptics agree that planet Earth is warming up, but refuse to believe that human activities are responsible for it. For them, climate change is something attributable to natural phenomena. The skeptics’ explanations for the increasing temperature of the Earth include adjustments in the geometry of the planet's orbit, changes in the radiation output of the sun and variations in the composition of the atmosphere. It is a pity – and not only for the skeptics – that none of these explanations has survived rigorous scientific scrutiny.²⁰ Several papers, including a 2006 study published in Nature, convincingly rejected the most popular of these explanations: that climate change is mainly due to variations of solar activities. As the authors of the study concluded: “variations in the sun's total energy output since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerate climate change in the last thirty years.”²¹ Most scientists, after all, show little disagreement. The most likely culprit for the warming of the planet and the rise of extreme events remains the massive increase of greenhouse gases (such as CO₂) in the atmosphere due to human activities. A scientific review of 928 articles on “climate change,” which were published in major peer-reviewed journals over a 10 year period, concluded that “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position”: human activities are causing global warming.²²

A key principle of the climate-change hypothesis was first proposed by John Tyndall more than a century and a half ago.²³ By studying the absorptive properties of various gases, Tyndall realized that transparent gases were largely responsible for the climate of the planet.²⁴ His work was later advanced by Svante Arrhenius, who, in the 1890s, investigated the peculiar ability of greenhouse gases to trap heat in the atmosphere.²⁵ The Swedish scientist demonstrated that greenhouse gases have very important properties; by partially blocking the radiation that the Earth continuously reflects back to space, they allow the sun's rays to heat up the planet. By trapping a portion of the radiation in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases warm it and thus contribute to increases in the Earth's temperature. Arrhenius’ work helped us to understand one of the major reasons why we can live on the Earth's surface: the average temperature is about 20ºC warmer than it would be without the greenhouse effect.²⁶ His research was ground-breaking in many respects and has contributed to our understanding of why, in the last few decades, the Arctic and the Antarctic have warmed up faster than any other places on earth.¹¹ More than a century ago, Arrhenius was already able to affirm that a doubling of CO₂ levels would cause a warming of around 5 or 6ºC, a figure quite close to the maximum amount that the IPCC predicts the global temperature may rise by as we approach the end of the century.¹⁹

The scientific exploits of Tyndall and Arrhenius were later corroborated and expanded by several authors. In 1938, Guy Callendar estimated that a doubling of CO₂ could gradually bring a 2ºC rise in the temperature.²³ In 1956, Gilbert Pass reanalyzed the mechanisms by which CO₂ traps heat in the atmosphere and warned that climate change could become a severe problem for future generations.²⁷ Charles Keeling then took on the task of proving that human activity is the main culprit behind the rise of atmospheric CO₂. In 1958, he started a project at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii where, for the first time, CO₂ concentration levels were monitored continuously over time. In line with the predictions of Arrhenius and other scientists, Keeling detected a gradual year-on-year rise of CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and noted that human activities were raising the concentrations of CO₂ by roughly a third above pre-industrial levels.²⁸

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Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Prologue: progress toward collapse
• 1 A turning point or a point of no return?
• 2 The growth delusions
• 3 United we spend
• 4 Chains of the free world
• 5 Market mediocracies
• 6 The market greed doctrine
• 7 Divided we fail
• 8 Out of control
• 9 State of political inertia
• 10 Progress or collapse
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index