Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment

Liam Downey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781479843794
• eBook ISBN: 9781479878406
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Winner, American Sociological Association Section on Environment and Technology Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award

The world currently faces several severe social and environmental crises, including economic under-development, widespread poverty and hunger, lack of safe drinking water for one-sixth of the world’s population, deforestation, rapidly increasing levels of pollution and waste, dramatic declines in soil fertility and biodiversity, and global warming. Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment sheds light on the structural causes of these and other social and environmental crises, highlighting in particular the key role that elite-controlled organizations, institutions, and networks play in creating these crises.

Liam Downey focuses on four topics—globalization, agriculture, mining, and U.S. energy and military policy—to show how organizational and institutional inequality and elite-controlled organizational networks produce environmental degradation and social harm. He focuses on key institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Military and the World Trade Organization to show how specific policies are conceived and enacted in order to further elite goals. Ultimately, Downey lays out a path for environmental social scientists and environmentalists to better understand and help solve the world’s myriad social and environmental crises. Inequality, Democracy and the Environment presents a passionate exposé of the true role inequality, undemocratic institutions and organizational power play in harming people and the environment.

1

Popular Explanations of the Environmental Crisis

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leased by the oil giant BP, exploded and sank off the coast of Louisiana, killing 11 and injuring 17. Two days later, oil was discovered leaking from the damaged well site, and by the time the well was capped nearly three months later, an estimated 4.9 million barrels, or 205.8 million gallons, of oil had spewed into the Gulf of Mexico (Robertson and Krauss 2010). One of the worst accidental oil releases ever, the BP oil spill, and the toxic dispersants BP used to break down the spilled oil, continue to threaten thousands of animal and plant species that rely on the Gulf ecosystem for food, habitat, and breeding (Biello 2010; National Wildlife Federation 2015; Iallonard 2010). Of particular concern to scientists are the effects of the spill and dispersants on fish eggs, larvae, crabs, oysters, birds, mammals, fish, insects, and sensitive habitats such as beaches, wetlands, mudflats, estuaries, and corals. There is evidence, for instance, that deep-sea corals have been severely damaged by the spill (Press Association 2012), that contamination from the spill is moving up the food chain from phytoplankton and zooplankton to larger marine organisms (ABC News 2012), that deep-sea shrimp, crab, and lobster are experiencing higher than usual deformity rates (Democracy Now 2012), that red snapper are 20–50 times more likely than before the spill to have lesions and other physical problems (Democracy Now 2012), and that dolphins and sea turtles in the area are dying in larger than normal numbers (ABC News 2012). In addition, immense volumes of oil and dispersants have settled at the bottom of the ocean floor, waiting to be stirred up by the next big tropical storm (ABC News 2012).

Because the Gulf Coast economy relies heavily on tourism and commercial and recreational fishing, which, in turn, depend on the health and beauty of the local ecosystem, the BP oil spill has also damaged the regional economy. For example, prior to the spill (in 2008), the dockside value of commercially harvested fish and seafood in the Gulf Coast region was $659 million, recreational fishing trip expenditures were valued at $1.5 billion, and 25,700 people were employed in the commercial fishing industry. During the same year, approximately $51 billion was spent on tourism in the region, resulting in $17.6 billion in wages for the 587,000 Gulf Coast residents employed in the industry. Thus, the decline in tourism and temporary closure of 88,522 square miles of federal Gulf waters to fishing after the oil spill caused immediate and severe economic hardship for many individuals in the region, as evidenced by the fact that by August 20, 2010, over 150,000 monetary claims, representing approximately 250,000 separate damages, had been filed against BP by Gulf Coast residents (White House Oil Spill Commission 2010). Moreover, in 2012 researchers were still unsure whether the region’s tourist industry had fully recovered (Finn 2012), and local fisherman continued to claim that their catches were significantly lower than they had been before the oil spill (Jamail 2012; Johnson et al. 2012).

The spill also poses a serious health risk to those who were exposed to the spilled oil, to fumes from the oil, or to the toxic chemicals used during cleanup efforts (Canfield 2012; White House Oil Spill Commission 2010), as well as to those who have eaten seafood contaminated by the spill and dispersants, a risk that is of particular concern for pregnant women and children (Rotkin-Ellman et al. 2012). Concerns about the long-term social, economic, and medical consequences of the oil spill have also bred anger and resentment among many local residents (Jamail 2011), which, in turn, could result in increased levels of domestic violence, substance abuse, and stress-related illnesses (White House Oil Spill Commission 2010).

Thus, as with most environmental crises, the BP oil spill has had and will continue to have multiple social, economic, and environmental consequences that are difficult to disentangle from one another. As with other environmental crises, the BP oil spill has also prompted many people to offer explanations for why the disaster occurred and to provide prescriptions for how to avoid similar disasters in the future. For instance, a perusal of letters to the editor at the New York Times shows that many readers thought the spill was the product of BP’s greed and ability to avoid regulatory oversight, while other readers argued that the disaster resulted from high consumer demand for oil, with some blaming consumers (rather than BP) for the oil spill and others suggesting that consumer demand for oil is high because the price of oil is too low given its high social and environmental costs. These letters thus offer several implied or explicitly stated suggestions for how to avoid similar disasters in the future, including subordinating corporate power to regulatory oversight, getting consumers to voluntarily change their purchasing behavior, and incorporating the social and environmental costs of fossil fuel use into the prices we pay for these fuels.

What is striking, though not particularly surprising, about these letters to the editor is how closely they hew to a handful of relatively well-known explanations of and solutions for the global environmental crisis. For example, portraying consumers as both the problem and the potential solution to the environmental crisis is, as I noted in the introduction, a well-known argument among environmentalists, many of whom believe that we can solve the crisis simply by altering our purchasing habits. Similarly, much attention has been devoted in the news media and environmental and public policy circles to the environmental economics argument that the best way to solve environmental problems is to incorporate the financial costs of these problems into the prices that businesses and consumers pay for goods and services. And finally, the liberal and left-leaning press has long argued that many of our nation’s social and environmental problems result from a lack of regulatory oversight by government over business.

Given the widespread support these arguments have found among certain segments of the public, the fact that the consumer behavior and environmental economics arguments have eclipsed the argument for environmental regulation in many environmental and public policy circles, and my belief that the consumer behavior and environmental economics arguments are flawed in fundamentally important ways,1 my goal in this chapter is to explain why I think these two arguments are flawed so that I can focus later in the book on factors that I believe are more central to explaining and solving the world’s many social and environmental crises.

It is important to note, however, that in critiquing these two arguments, I do not mean to imply that they provide us with no important insights. Changing consumer behavior and altering the manner in which we determine the prices of goods and services are probably both necessary ingredients for overcoming inequality, injustice, and the world’s major social and environmental problems. Nevertheless, as I argue in both this and the next chapter, a number of fundamental social forces and social structures exist that prevent these and other environmentally and socially important changes from occurring. As a result, these forces and structures must be identified, understood, and overcome before we can fundamentally alter consumer behavior, incorporate a broad range of social and environmental costs into prices, and solve the world’s major social and environmental crises.

There are also many ways in which consumer behavior and prices can change that, although consistent with the consumer behavior and environmental economics arguments, will not solve the environmental crisis or promote social justice. For example, if we shift our purchasing habits so as to buy less environmentally damaging products, but dramatically increase the number and volume of products we purchase, we are still likely to increase the environmental burden we place on the planet, a dynamic that already exists throughout much of the world (York and Rosa 2003). Similarly, several highly regarded policies for incorporating social and environmental costs into the prices of goods and services have been proposed that, if enacted, are likely to increase economic inequality—by, for example, placing increased economic burdens on the poor and working class and increasing Wall Street profits—while doing little to help the environment (see later in this chapter).

Thus, in the following sections of the chapter, I provide a critique of the consumer behavior and environmental economics arguments that highlights several fundamental flaws in these arguments, one of which is that they ignore inequality, power, and other important social structural factors, a characteristic they share with many mainstream explanations of the environmental crisis. Carefully evaluating these two arguments will therefore tell us much about what is wrong with mainstream environmentalism and why environmentalists must incorporate social structural factors such as OINB inequality and elite-controlled organizations, institutions, and networks into their explanations of the environmental crisis.

I turn now to a critique of the consumer behavior argument.

Consumers as Environmental Saviors

Undoubtedly BP is responsible [for the Gulf Coast oil spill], but so are all of us who drive cars, travel by plane or consume goods produced and shipped with oil. If we didn’t use it, BP wouldn’t drill for it. Until we recognize that demand for oil is as much the problem as supply, and start to change the way we live to reduce it, environmental destruction is inevitable.

—We are all BP (M. Brown 2010)

If you live in an urban area and go to your local corporate bookstore, you will find several shelves of books devoted to describing, explaining, and providing solutions for the environmental crisis. Taking a look at these books, you will quickly notice two things. First, a large majority of them focus on climate change. Second, many of these books focus on things that individuals can do to save the environment, including changing their consumption behavior. With titles such as Stop Global Warming: The Solution Is You! (David 2008) and Green Guide: The Complete Reference for Consuming Wisely (Green Guide magazine editors 2008), some of these books focus entirely on consumer-based actions that individuals can take to solve the crisis, while others devote only a few pages or a chapter to this issue. But regardless of whether popular-press environmental books focus limited or sustained attention on individuals and consumption, many aim to convince the reader that he or she has the power as an individual consumer, rather than as a member of a social movement or social group, to solve the environmental crisis.

The argument in these books generally goes something like this: “You, the reader, probably feel overwhelmed by the immensity and severity of the environmental crisis and do not know what you can do to help solve it. However, as a consumer, you have the power to make an environmental difference. Because businesses depend on you to buy their goods and services, you can change what businesses produce and how they produce these things by committing yourself to purchasing environmentally friendly products from environmentally friendly companies. In other words, you are more powerful than the most powerful companies in the world because if they do not sell the goods and services that you want, they will go out of business. So if you and your friends go out and do your environmental duty by changing how you consume, you can help solve the environmental crisis without harming the economy or changing your lifestyles and levels of consumption.”

Implied in this argument, of course, is the idea that the global environmental crisis and specific crises such as the BP oil spill are the fault of consumers and not businesses. Moreover, having bought into neoclassical economists’ model of the sovereign consumer who acts as the final arbiter in the all-powerful market (Kirzner 1999), those who set forth this argument also clearly believe that consumers are the solution to the environmental crisis. Thus, as the quote at the beginning of this section suggests, if we want to avoid further oil-spill disasters, all we have to do is stop buying and consuming oil.

There is, of course, some logical validity to this consumer sovereignty argument. If every individual and organization on the planet stopped using oil, then companies would stop drilling for it, and we would have no more oil spills. However, what is logically possible and how the social world really works are two very different things. Setting aside for the moment the fact that businesses and governments also consume large volumes of goods (including oil) and therefore also affect the behavior of producers,2 the fact that modern industrial societies are structured in such a way that it is virtually impossible for most citizens to stop using their cars (or to be able to afford electric cars), the fact that the U.S. government relies on oil and other critical natural resources for its military and geopolitical power, and the fact that government policies determine the environmental friendliness with which we dispose of goods once they become trash and enter the waste stream, this argument makes several problematic assumptions about the behavior and cognitive abilities of, and thus the relationship between, consumers and businesspeople.

For example, the consumer sovereignty argument assumes that markets provide consumers with perfect information about the goods they can potentially purchase and businesses with perfect information about the wants and desires of consumers. It further assumes that businesspeople and consumers are all rational decision makers who can use this information to optimally and efficiently achieve their goals, that consumers have a wide range of choices in the market such that there are always environmentally friendly products and services available to them that they can afford to consume, and that businesses do not successfully shape consumer demand, produce goods for which there initially is little or no demand, or attempt to conceal information about their products from consumers.

After all, if consumers do not know how goods and services are produced, what the actual environmental effects of these goods and services are, or whether there are more environmentally friendly alternatives for them to purchase, then they will have trouble effectively shaping business behavior. Similarly, if consumers are unable to cognitively process all the information necessary to rationally evaluate and accurately rank the environmental quality of various goods and services, if they use cognitive shortcuts or quick rules of thumb to make purchasing decisions, or if they sometimes let emotions shape their purchasing behavior or make spur-of-the-moment purchasing decisions, then it is unlikely that their purchases will consistently line up with their professed environmental beliefs, thereby undermining the environmental effectiveness of their purported purchasing power.

The same is true for businesses. If they do not have sufficient information to identify current consumer demand or predict future consumer demand or if they are unable to rationally process all the information available to them but instead use simplified decision making rules to choose between competing options, then it is unlikely that business behavior will be entirely shaped by consumer demand.

The reality, of course, is that businesspeople and consumers are not entirely rational and never have perfect information (Gigerenzer and Selten 2001; Kahneman 2003; Stiglitz 2002). Instead, research shows that people are only partly rational, that the decisions we make are often irrational and shaped by emotion, and that there are limits to our ability to process information, especially as the volume and complexity of the information increase (Simon 1957, 1978; Williamson 1981). This means that rather than developing rational solutions to complex problems, such as choosing between complicated options in the face of uncertainty, individuals and organizations tend to make decisions that are adequate for the task at hand (rather than making decisions that are most likely to achieve their goals) using general rules of thumb and emotional filters, or frames, that simplify information processing (Fiske and Taylor 1991; Shefrin 2002; Simon 1978; Tversky et al. 1990).

Furthermore, because the rules of thumb and emotional filters that decision makers use tend to vary according to the conditions under which they make their decisions, the context within which people find themselves can dramatically affect the choices that they make (Slovic 1995; Tversky et al. 1990). Decision makers also tend to believe that they know more than they actually do about the information on which they base their decisions, and they tend to overestimate their ability to predict their own future preferences as well as the future preferences of others (Alba and Hutchinson 2000).

These research findings clearly have important implications for the relationship between consumer demand and business behavior. In particular, they strongly suggest that consumers are unable to rationally process large volumes of complex information about the environmental quality of the goods they might potentially purchase and that what consumers want and how they translate their desires into specific purchases likely vary according to the situation in which purchasing decisions are made. It is thus unlikely that environmentally conscious consumers are able to consistently translate their desires into purchasing behavior that clearly and accurately signals these desires to producers, making it difficult for producers to respond rationally to consumer demand. These findings also suggest that even if consumers were able to send clear signals to businesses about their consumption preferences, businesses would still be unable to rationally interpret these preferences and meet consumer demand with a mix of products that give consumers what they really want.

Casting further doubt on the consumer sovereignty argument, companies and industries are often able to successfully shape consumers’ desires. Data from the A. C. Nielsen Company show, for example, that the average American watches 28 hours of television per week, with the average American child watching up to 20,000 30-second commercials each year and the average 65-year-old adult viewing up to two million commercials over the course of her or his lifetime (Herr 2007). To reach these and other consumers, businesses spent almost $117 billion on advertising in the U.S. in 2009, with $440.8 billion spent on advertising around the world in 2008 (Advertising Age 2010).

Advertising campaigns are not always successful, of course, but often they are. Research shows, for instance, that advertising in traditional media outlets tends to increase company sales (Dertouzos and Garber 2006; Eng and Keh 2007; Rubinson 2009; Zhou et al. 2003) and that of the top 100 U.S. advertisers in 2009, those that increased their advertising spending from 2008 to 2009 were twice as likely to see their U.S. sales increase as those that spent less money on advertising in 2009 than they did the previous year (B. Johnson 2010). Research also shows that online advertising increases online and non-Internet sales (Lewis and Reiley 2009), that children and adults who watch food advertisements consume more food after viewing these advertisements than do other children and adults (regardless of whether they were hungry prior to seeing the advertisements) (Halford et al. 2007; Harris et al. 2009), and that as aggregate levels of advertising increase at the national level, so too do aggregate consumption levels (Jung and Seldon 1995).

Research further demonstrates that advertising most successfully promotes future sales when it relies on emotional appeals that include as little product information as possible (Binet and Field 2009; van den Putte 2009) and that advertising can shape how consumers experience the use of a product in the future as well as how they remember their prior experiences of it (Braun-LaTour et al. 2004). Moreover, indirect and vaguely stated claims are particularly effective advertising tools because they often lead consumers to make “positive inferences about . . . advertised brand[s]” that companies could not make without being accused of making false claims (McQuarrie and Phillips 2005, 7). The effect of indirect and vaguely stated claims is particularly powerful when the claims are made visually rather than verbally, leading McQuarrie and Phillips (2005) to argue that visual advertising that uses suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Popular Explanations of the Environmental Crisis
• 2. Inequality, Democracy, and Macro-Structural Environmental Sociology
• 3. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Environment
• 4. Modern Agriculture and the Environment
• 5. Armed Violence, Natural Resources, and the Environment
• 6. Restricted Decision Making and U.S. Energy and Military Policy in the George W. Bush Administration
• 7. Environmental Degradation Reconsidered
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author