The planetary emergency

Monthly Review

Volumn 64, Issue 7, 2012, Pages 1-25

  Foster, John Bellamy ^a   Clark, Brett ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF UTAH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84872104896     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-07-2012-11_1     Document Type: Article

References (154)

1. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 2.
3. Robert Heilbroner, "Ecological Armageddon," in Warren A. Johnson and John Hardesty, eds., Economic Growth vs. the Environment(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1971), 36-45.
4. Susan Solomon, et al., "Irreversible Climate Change Due to Carbon Dioxide Emissions," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 6 (February 10, 2009): 1704-9;
5. Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future (New York: Harper, 2010), 261-71;
6. James Hansen, "Tipping Point," in Eva Fearn and Kent H. Redford, eds. Stare of the Wild 2008 (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008), 7-8
7. James Hansen, "Comments on Assertions of Pat Michaels at Grover Norquist's 'Wednesday' Meeting," September 5, 2012; http://www.columbia. edu.
8. Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou, "Increase of Extreme Events in a Warming World," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 44 (November 1, 2012): 17905-9;
9. John Carey "Global Warming: Faster Than Expected?," Scientific American 307, no. 5 (November 2012), 54;
10. James E. Hansen, "Climate Change is Here-And Worse Than We Thought," Washington Post, August 3, 2012;
11. Mark Fischetti, "Did Climate Change Cause Hurricane Sandy?" Scientific American blog, October 30, 2012, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com.
12. Myles Allen, et al, "The Exit Strategy," Nature Reports Climate Change, April 30, 2009, 56-58,
13. and "Warming Caused by Cumulative Carbon Emissions Towards the Trillionth Tonne," Nature 458 (April 20, 2009): 1163-66;
14. Malte Meinshausen, et al, "Greenhouse-Gas Emission Targets for Limiting Global Warming to 2°C," Nature 458 (April 30, 2009): 1158-62;
15. TrillionthTonne.org; Catherine Brahic, "Humanity's Carbon Budget Set at One Trillion Tons," New Scientist, April 29, 2009;
16. Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen, and Diana Liberman, Climate Change. Global Risks, Challenges, and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 212.
17. An increase in global average temperature of 2°C is equivalent to a carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere of 450 parts per million (ppm). This would be too much for long-term stabilization of the climate, which requires no more than 350 ppm. However, keeping below the trillionth metric ton in emission is regarded as a prior constraint, since it constitutes a point of no return in terms of the possibility for effective human action with regard to these processes. If carbon emissions could be stopped below a trillion metric tons, it would be possible to get back down over time to 350 ppm. See http://trillionthtonne.org/questions.html15, accessed October 23, 2012.
18. Climate Central, Global Weirdness (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 165-67.
19. See Mark Lynas, Six Degrees (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2008).
20. "Ending Its Summer Melt, Arctic Sea Ice Sets a New Low that Leads to Warnings," New York Times, September 19, 2012, http://nytimes.com;
21. "Arctic Expert Predicts Final Collapse of Sea Ice Within Four Years," Guardian, September 17, 2012, http://guardian.co.uk;
22. Carey, "Global Warming: Faster Than Expected?", 52.
23. See http://tnllionthtonne.org, accessed September 7, 2012.
24. Nicholas Stem, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stem Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4-16, 95, 193, 220-34, 637-51;
25. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 153-56.
26. Glen P. Peters, et al., "Rapid Growth in CO2 Emissions After the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis," Nature Climate Change 2 (January 2012): 2-3.
27. 2 Emissions," Nature Climate Change (October 7, 2012), http://nature.com;
28. "Greenhouse Link to GDP Not Symmetric," ABC Science, http://abc.net.au.
29. Pwc(Pricewaterhousecoopers), Counting the Cost of Carbon: low Carbon Economy Index 2011, http://pwc.com, 2-7.
30. Charles H. Anderson, The Sociology of Survival (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1976), 122-23;
31. Herman E. Daly, "Moving from a Failed Growth Economy to a Steady-State Economy," in Julien-François Gerber and Rolf Seppacher, eds. Toward an Integrated Paradigm in Heterodox Economics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 176-89.
32. Carbon Tracker Initiative, Unbumable Carbon, 2, accessed October 24, 2012, http://longfinance.net.
33. Bill McKibben, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," Rolling Stone (July 19, 2012):55-60.
34. Johan Rockström, et al, "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity," Nature 461, no. 24 (September 2009): 472-75.
35. President Barak Obama, "Interview of the President by the CBC," February 17, 2009, http://whitehouse.gov.
36. Ecological modernization (green-capitalist) theorist, Arthur Mol, remarks: "In a number of cases (regarding countries and/or specific industrial sectors and/or specific environmental issues) environmental reform can even result in an absolute decline in the use of natural resources and discharge of emissions, regardless of economic growth in financial or material terms (product output)." See Arthur P.J. Mol, "Ecological Modernization and the Global Economy," Global Environmental Politics, 2, no. 2 (May 2002): 93.
37. Yet recent empirical analysis shows that such "absolute decoupling' is nonexistent at the global level, that is, to the extent that a decoupling exists within nations, it is due to the shifting of production and environmental effects from one part of the globe (usually the more powerful part) to another (the weaker part). See Andrew Jorgenson and Brett Clark, "Are the Economy and the Environment Decoupling?: A Comparative International Study, 1960-2005," American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 1 (July 2012): 1-44.
38. On how the entropy law constrains technological solutions to environmental problems see Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths (New York: Pergamon, 1976), 12, 57.
39. On the Jevons paradox see Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 169-82;
40. David Owen, The Conundrum (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011).
41. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 492.
42. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 247-57, 742.
43. For the relation of M-C-M' to the economic contradictions of capitalism see Paul M. Sweezy, Four lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 26-45.
44. Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 207-11.
45. On the failure of absolute decoupling and even relative decoupling of the economy from the environment see Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth (London: Earthscan, 2011), 67-86.
46. Solar energy is abundant but is 'inherently dilute." A great deal of energy is thus necessary to convert it into concentrated form and hence the net energy return on energy investment (EROI) is small. See Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 207-9;
47. Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2001), 163-68.
48. Nuclear energy presents serious dangers and does not constitute a feasible overall alternative to fossil fuels. See Kozo Mayumi and John Polimeni, "Uranium Reserve, Nuclear Fuel Cycle Delusion, CO, Emissions from the Sea, and Electricity Supply: Reflections After the Fuel Meltdown of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Units," Ecological Economics 73 (2012): 1-6.
49. Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, "Notes on Watergate One Year Later," Monthly Review 26, no. 1 (May 1974): 8-10.
50. Paul M. Sweezy, "Capitalism and the Environment," Monthly Review 41, no. 2 (June 1989): 6.
51. Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 93-94.
52. This was famously highlighted by Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971), 138-75.
53. Howard T. Odum and David Scienceman, "An Energy Systems View of Karl Marx's Concepts of Production and Labor Power," in Emergy Synthesis 3 (Proceedings from the Third Biennial Emergy Conference, Gainesville, Florida Center for Economic Policy, 2005), 41;
54. Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down.
55. The argument in the following pages develops on an earlier analysis in John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy," Monthly Review 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1-16.
56. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Modern Times (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), 300-301.
57. See especially K. William Kapp, Social Costs of Private Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950);
58. Scott Nearing, The Economics of the Power Age (East Palatka, FL: World Events Committee, 1952);
59. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library, 1958);
60. and Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).
61. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, "The Last Letters," Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012), 68, 73;
62. Franklin M. Fisher, Zvi Grilliches, and Carl Kaysen, "The Costs of Automobile Changes Since 1949," The Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 5 (October 1962): 433-51;
63. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 131-38.
64. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library, 1953), 78-80.
65. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, "Some Theoretical Implications," Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012), 57.
66. The issue of "specifically capitalist use value' was addressed in a commentary on Baran and Sweezy's analysis by Henryk Slajfer, "Waste, Marxian Theory, and Monopoly Capital," in John Bellamy Foster and Henryk Slajfer, eds., The Faltering Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 302-13.
67. The concept was carried forward in John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 39-42.
68. The explanation of this as a transformation of Marx's general formula of capital under monopoly capitalism, in terms of the emergence of M-C-M', was first introduced in Foster, "The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy."
69. Unbeknownst to the author at that time, a similar reformulation of Marx's general formula as M-W-M' had been introduced a number of years before in Patrick Brantlinger and Richard Higgins, "Waste and Value: Thorstein Veblen and H.G. Wells," Criticism 48, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 466.
70. For how this concept of waste (unproductive labor) influenced Baran and Sweezy's analysis see Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, "Some Theoretical Implications", Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012): 45-58;
71. John Bellamy Foster, "A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital," Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012): 17-21.
72. The case for Marx's theory of socialism as one of sustainable human development is made in Paul Burkett, "Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development," Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34-62.
73. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 46.
74. John Ruskin, Unto This Last (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 73.
75. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 463.
76. See Frederik Berend Blauwhof, "Overcoming Accumulation," in Ecological Economics (forthcoming).
77. Captain Charles Moore, Plastic Ocean (New York: Penguin, 2011), 129.
78. Diana Wicks, "Packaging Sales Goals and Strategies," Chron, http://smallbusiness.chron.com, accessed October 16, 2012;
79. "Product Packaging Can Cost Three Times as Much as What's Inside," Daily Mail, July 13, 2007, http://dailymail.co.uk.
80. "Global Hunger for Plastic Packaging Leaves Waste Solution a Long Way Off," Guardian, December 29, 2011, http://guardian.co.uk;
81. Moore, Plastic Ocean, 41;
82. Hannah Holleman, Inger L Stole, John Bellamy Foster, and Robert W. McChesney, "The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital" Monthly Review 60, no. 11 (April 2009): 6.
83. Kevin C. Clancy and Robert S. Shulman, "Marketing with Blinders On," Across the Board 30, no. 8 (October 1993): 33-38;
84. and their Marketing Myths That Are Killing Business (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994), 140, 171-72, 221.
85. "U.S. Marketing Spending Exceeded $1 Trillion in 2005," Metrics Business and Market Intelligence, June 26, 2006, http://metrics2.com.
86. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 121-28.
87. The one in every twelve dollars figure for marketing is based on the Blackfriars 2005 marketing estimate, representing roughly that portion of GDP that year. See note 50. On the role of marketing in the maintenance of monopoly capital, see Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
88. Robert S. Lynd, "The People as Consumers," in President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1933), 858, 867-88.
89. Juliet Schor, Plenitude (New York: Penguin, 2010), 40-41.
90. Schor, Plenitude, 38.
91. Marc Perton, "Jobs: 'You Have to Buy a New iPod at Least Once a Year,'" May 26, 2006, http://endgadgetcom.
92. "Paper or Plastic-Abstract," Watershed Media, http://watershedmedia.org, accessed October 24, 2012;
93. "Environmental Facts," Ecocycle, http://ecocycle.org, accessed October 24, 2012;
94. Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff (New York: Free Press, 2010), 195;
95. "Beverage Containers," Report Buyer, http://www.report-buyer. com, accessed October 24, 2012.
96. Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism (Vancouver, BC: Red Publishing, 2011), 13, 108, 115-16;
97. U.S. Department of Transportation, "Nation's Highway Traffic Reaches Highest Level Since 2007," March 2011, http://fhwa.dot.gov;
98. "Your Big Car is Killing Me," June 27, 2011, http://slate.com;
99. Arbitron Inc., The Arbitron National In-Car Study, 2009, http://arbitron.com, 2-5;
100. Office of Department of Transportation, Office of Highway Transportation Information, "Our Nations Highways: 2011," http://fhwa.dot.gov, accessed October 30, 2012;
101. Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth (New York: WW. Norton, 2004), 92.
102. The reference to a "car-first" transportation system is from Michael Dawson, "Electric Evasion," Counterpunch, October 15-17, 2010, http://counterpunch.org.
103. See Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 389;
104. Michael Kidron, Capitalism and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1974), 53;
105. Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster, "The Tendency of Surplus to Rise, 1963-1988," in John B. Davis, ed., The Economic Surplus in the Advanced Economies (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1992): 63.
106. Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise, 231.
107. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 180.
108. To our knowledge the term "ecological debt' first appeared in Anderson, The Sociology of Survival, 143.
109. The direct inspiration, however, was Commoner, who had employed the concept of "environmental debt" See Commoner, The Closing Orde, 295;
110. Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, 139, 173, 175, 179 Odum used the concept of "emergy," which reduced all forms of energy to energy of one kind (measured in solar emjoules) as a means of analyzing embodied energy;
111. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, 278.
112. Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, 149.
113. Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, 183;
114. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, 58, 276, 389-91.
115. Howard T. Odum, "Energy, Ecology and Economics," Ambio 2, no. 6 (1973): 222.
116. Global Footprint Network, "World Footprint" http://footprintnetwork.org, accessed October 16, 2012;
117. Robynne Boyd, "One Footprint at a Time," Scientific American, July 14, 2011, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com.
118. Howard T. Odum and J.E. Arding, Emergy Analysis of Shrimp Mariculture in Ecuador (Narrangansett, RI: Coastal Research Center, University of Rhode Island, 1991), 33-39.
119. Tom Atthanasiou and Paul Baer, Dead Heat (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).
120. Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 439-40.
121. This was true of the Soviet Union as well, the analysis of which, however, does not concern us here. See John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 96-101.
122. Odum, Environment, Power and Society, 274.
123. Simon Kuznets, "National Income and Industrial Structure," Econometrica 17, supplement (1949): 217
124. "Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World," New York Times, April 26, 2008, http://nytimes.com;
125. Sally Deneen, "Food Miles," The Daily Green, http://thedailygreen.com, accessed October 16, 2012.
126. Report Buyer, The Food Miles Challenge (2006), http://reportbuyer.com, 2,
127. Daniel Imhoff, "Thinking Outside of the Box," Whole Earth (Winter 2002): 12.
128. See in particular Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, and Marty Bender, "Energy and Agriculture," in Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Bruce Coleman, eds., Meeting the Expectations of the Land (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 68-69;
129. Michael A. Altieri, "Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty,"
130. David Pimentel, "Reducing Energy Inputs in the Agricultural Production System,"
131. and Jules Pretty, "Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People," in Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, eds., Agriculture and Food in Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
132. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 216.
133. Mindi Schneider and Philip McMichael, "Deepening and Repairing, the Metabolic Rift," Journal of Peasant Studies 37, no.3(2010):461.
134. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, 189-90.
135. Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, 87.
136. For a discussion of how Cuba has transformed food production, see Richard Levins, "How Cuba is Going Ecological," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16, no. 3 (2005): 7-25;
137. Sinan Koont "Food Security in Cuba," Monthly Review 55, no. 8 (2004): 11-20.
138. Samir Amin, "World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation," Monthly Review 55, no. 5 (October 2003): 1-9;
139. Prabhat Patnaik, "The Myths of Capitalism," MRZine, July 4, 2011, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org;
140. UK House of Commons, A Century of Trends in UK Statistics Since 1900 (House of Commons Library Research Paper 99/111), December 21, 1999, http://parliamentuk, 13;
141. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012, Tables 28 and 29, http://census.gov, accessed October 30, 2012.
142. Wen Tiejun, et al., "Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China," Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 29-35;
143. Wen Tiejun, "Deconstructing Modernization," Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 49, no.4(Summer 2007): 10-25.
144. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 283.
145. On the scale of today's planetary rift see Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rit
146. On the relation between capitalism's internal economic contradictions and its external ecological ones see Kent A. Klitgaard and Lisi Krall, "Ecological Economics, Degrowth, and Institutional Change," Ecological Economics (forthcoming).
147. Herman E. Daly, "Further Commentary," in Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth, 267-68.
148. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 959.
149. Max Weber was quite likely the first major thinker to stress that modern industrial capitalism was predicated on a fossil-fuel-based environmental regime. See John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, "Weber and the Environment" American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 6 (May 2012), 1636, 1646-50.
150. On the nature of planning for a socialism for the twenty-first century see Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff, "Approaching Socialism," Monthly Review 57, no. 3 (July-August 2005): 19-61.
151. On the important concept of plenitude see Schor, Plenitude, 4-7.
152. Minqi Li, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 187.
153. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 174, 893-94.
154. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 141.