Contrary Notions

by Michael Parenti

  Sober business heads have refused to get caught up in doomsayer “hysteria” about ecology. Besides, there can always be found a few stray experts who will obligingly argue that the jury is still out, that there is no conclusive proof to support the “alarmists.” Conclusive proof in this case would come only when the eco-apocalypse is upon us.

  Just as corporate capitalism undermines ecology, so too is ecology profoundly subversive of capitalism. It needs planned, environmentally sustainable production rather than the rapacious, unregulated, free-market kind. It requires economical consumption rather than an artificially stimulated, ever-expanding, wasteful consumerism. It calls for natural, relatively clean and low-cost energy systems rather than high-cost, high-profit, polluting ones.

  Ecology’s implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many. In other words, the struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists but is well understood by the plutocrats—which is why they are unsparing in their derision and denunciations of the “eco-terrorists” and “tree huggers.”

  Meanwhile the mechanisms of denial are in place. Already the late-night TV comedians are making light of global warming, thereby normalizing it. “It’s getting so hot that Paris Hilton said she was going to wear less clothes. How is that possible?” Ha, ha, ha, that guy sure takes my mind off things. In addition there are still those few well-publicized holdout scientists, mentioned earlier, who—if they no longer actually deny the existence of global warming—do minimize its significance, telling us that, yes, the disruptions will be a bit unsettling but it’s just another of those cycles that the Earth has endured during its many epochs, and the Earth has been warming for centuries.

  Almost as deplorable are the scientists who warn us of the dangers of global warming, then say things like: “If it keeps up at this rate, there will be a serious climatic crisis by the end of this century.” By the end of this century? that’s about ninety years away; we and almost all our kids will be dead. That makes for a lot less urgent concern. There are other scientists who manage to be even more irritating by putting the crisis even further into the future: “We’ll have to stop thinking in terms of eons and start thinking in terms of centuries,” one announced in the New York Times in 2006. If global catastrophe is a century or several centuries away, who is going to make the terribly difficult and costly decisions that are needed now?

  The trouble is that global warming is not some distant urgency waiting to develop over the next century or two. It is already acting upon us with an accelerated feedback and deadly compounded effect that may be irreversible. We do not have eons or centuries or even many decades. Most of us alive today may not have the luxury of saying “Après moi, le déluge” because we will be around to experience the déluge ourselves. And if you think it will be “interesting” or “exciting,” ask the tsunami survivors if that’s how they felt. This time the plutocratic drive to “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate” may take all of us down, once and forever.

  10 AUTOS AND ATOMS

  Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, America was said to have a “car culture.” But the omnipresence of the automobile was something not devised by us ordinary Americans. It was the centerpiece of a national transportation system created by large corporations. Across the country in a score of cities, ecologically efficient, nonpolluting, convenient, and less costly mass-transit electric rail and trolley systems were deliberately bought out and torn up, starting in the 1930s, by the automotive, oil, tire, and highway-construction industries, using dummy corporations as fronts. The electric mass-transit systems were replaced with gas-guzzling buses, and then with more and more cars and freeways. These companies put “America on wheels,” in order to make us dependent on gas-driven private vehicles, thereby maximizing profits for themselves, with no regard for the costs in money and lives, and no regard for the damage done to the environment.

  For decades Americans conducted a costly and extended “romance” with that dangerous and polluting instrument of conveyance known as the automobile. Now much of the Third World is going through the same adolescent pangs for wheels. In places like China, Pakistan, India, and certain countries in Africa, people want to own cars, and in increasing numbers they are doing so.

  Meanwhile for many Americans the blush of romance has faded. Many still maintain their automotive excitement but only by upping the stimulus, that is, by owning Humvees, SUVs, stunning sports cars, and other super vehicles that give them a hefty competitive edge when barreling along on the road.

  There are some basic things we should say about the automobile. Every year this great wonder of modern technology kills 40,000 to 50,000 people in the United States alone and injures and cripples hundreds of thousands more. In some countries where speed limits and other traffic rules are not taken seriously, the death toll is proportionately higher. The automobile is also an ecological disaster, consuming large amounts of oxygen with the consumption of every gallon of gas, and spewing hundreds of millions of tons of lead, sulfur, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and a variety of other poisons every year, enough to make it the major cause of urban pollution.

  Motor vehicles also add significantly to the acid rain that is killing our lakes and forests. Worst of all, they play a central role in changing the very chemical composition of our environment, contributing to global warming and all the ensuing disasters that may follow. Our cars also turn our cities and suburbs into ugly urban sprawls. More than 60 percent of the land of most U.S. cities is taken up by the movement, storage, and servicing of motorized vehicles. Recreational areas and whole neighborhoods, particularly in working-class communities, are razed to make way for costly highways. The billions spent on the construction and maintenance of freeways are a hidden but immense subsidy to the automotive and trucking industries, compliments of the U.S. taxpayer.

  But let us be fair and balanced. Let us look at the advantages. We can spend hours each day in our cars—almost always one lone driver and no passengers in a vehicle built to sit five or more—hurtling along highways, courting injury and death at breakneck speeds. Or, less exciting, we can creep along in agonizing traffic jams, dying a little each time from the fumes we inhale. Here is a mode of transportation that costs the average American almost two full working days a week in car payments, auto insurance, gasoline, tolls, parking fees, traffic tickets, servicing, repairs, and taxes for highways and roads. For the less fortunate, the millions who cannot afford cars, there is the isolation, the inability to move about because public transportation is so insufficient, having been starved out by privatized vehicles. The fewer people available to ride buses, the fewer the buses, which in turn further discourages use of public transit.

  Those who cannot afford a car or cannot drive for one reason or another can still feel how necessary a car becomes in a society built around vehicular traffic. The shopping mall is way off; the church and the school are in opposite directions; the movie theaters, restaurants, parks, libraries, museums and schools—assuming such things are available—are situated in widely dispersed places. Driving to them may not be easy because parking is difficult. Those people with children who need to get here and there and back again find that being the family chauffeur feels like a full-time job.

  Everything in the community is spread out in order to make room for the automobile, for its movement, parking, maintenance, and storage. Urban sprawl makes public transportation that much more uneconomical for the community to support, while making a private car that much more necessary. With sprawl there is no real center to town or city, unlike Europe with its car-free promenades and piazzas, where people walk pleasant distances surrounded by lovely shops, interesting old buildings, fountains,
and inviting cafés. It is not that the Europeans are so much more resourceful than we. They have been as car crazy as any of us Yanks, but fortunately their cities were build centuries before the automobile companies imposed their dictates upon urban and suburban communities. And their cars tend to be of less gargantuan dimension.

  The solution to many of our woes in regard to the “car culture” is more and better public transportation. High-speed monorails can link cities and provide service to every significant area within a region or community. Nonpolluting electric cars powered by solar-feed batteries could play a major role in cleaning up the air and saving the environment. The electric cars built to satisfy California’s requirement for zero-emission vehicles were among the fastest, most efficient automobiles ever built. They ran on electricity, produced no emissions or noise, and required almost no maintenance and servicing. And they put American technology at the forefront of the automotive industry. The people who got to drive them loved them. But General Motors destroyed its entire fleet of ev1 electric vehicles—not because they did not work but because they worked too well. Mass production of electric cars would have meant horrendous losses for the oil companies and for the auto servicing and repair industry that deal with the complex and costly internal combustion engine.16 The lucky few who drove the ev1 never wanted to give it up.

  Even in countries with excellent public transportation, such as the former German Democratic Republic (Communist East Germany), it soon became the rage to have a car all one’s own. If given a choice between a rational public transportation system or the thrill, status, novelty, and instant mobility of a private car, too many people will go for the car.

  Something has got to be done about the internal combustion engine before it does something irreversible to us—assuming it already has not. It is not a rational and survivable form of technology. Its social, ecological, and human costs are far greater than any benefit it brings.

  The same holds for nuclear power, that other great technological wonder. Nuclear plants in the United States are so hazardous that insurance companies refuse to cover them. People exposed to atmospheric nuclear tests and the contaminating clouds vented from continued underground tests have suffered a variety of serious illnesses. Nuclear mishaps have occurred at reactors in a dozen states. In 1979 the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, experienced a temporary shutdown when the reactor core overheated and almost caused a meltdown. The near disaster was well reported. Left largely unreported was the aftermath: livestock on nearby farms aborted and died prematurely, and households experienced what amounted to an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, and premature deaths.17 The aftereffects of Three Mile Island remain one of America’s best kept secrets.

  In many countries, contaminating leakage is a common occurrence. Aside from a momentous accident of the kind that occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine in 1986, there is the everyday emission of radiation caused by the mining, milling, refinement, storage, and shipment of various nuclear materials and wastes. Any amount of emission can have a damaging effect on human health. High rates of cancer have been found among persons residing close to “safe” nuclear plants. In 2004, despite all the unresolved problems facing nuclear power, Bush Jr. proposed massive subsidies for the construction of new commercial nuclear reactors.18

  No country in the world knows what to do about a core meltdown, the results of which could be globally catastrophic.

  No country in the world has a long-term technology for safe disposal of nuclear wastes, some of which remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Sweden solved its safety problem by phasing out its nuclear power and moving decisively toward sustainable and renewable energy sources. Some countries dump their radioactive nuclear waste into the ocean. Our oceans are the major source of oxygen for the planet. If they die, so do we.

  The “peak oil” theorists tell us that the world’s oil supply is running out. Not really, not soon enough. There are about a trillion barrels of oil left in the ground, and new reserves are being discovered every year. At $75 a barrel, that comes to $75 trillion dollars. The oil cartels are in no hurry to find alternative sustainable sources of energy that would seriously cut into that most profitable of all markets.

  Long before we run out of fossil fuels, we are likely to run out of fresh air, clean drinking water, and a sustainable ecology. Nuclear power, automobiles, and fossil fuels like oil and coal should all be phased out. We need to develop safer, cleaner, alternative modes of energy: thermal, solar, tidal, and wind. There already exist hundreds of thousands of homes and public buildings in the world that are serviced partly or entirely by solar energy. It is the only viable direction left open to us.

  One glimmer of hope lies in the fact that many private companies are thinking green. They are finding that ecologically minded forms of production can save them substantial costs. Some corporate heads are even calling upon the federal government to impose more environmentally sound regulations. Unfortunately many of our rulers are too immersed in their free-market ideology to notice that they are driving us over a cliff.

  11 WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  There are those who say that we critics carp endlessly about what is wrong with the present state of affairs but we offer no solutions. In fact we critics have plenty of sensible recommendations and solutions. It is no mystery what needs to be done to bring us to a more equitable and democratic society. Here are some specific measures to consider.

  AGRICULTURE AND ECOLOGY

  Distribute to almost two million needy farmers much of the billions of federal dollars now handed out to rich agribusiness firms. Encourage organic farming and phase out pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, hormone-saturated meat products, and genetically modified crops. Stop the agribusiness merger-mania that now controls almost all of the world’s food supply. Agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill and Continental should be broken up or nationalized.

  Engage in a concerted effort at conservation and ecological restoration, including water and waste recycling and large scale composting of garbage. Stop the development of ethanol and hydrogen-cell “alternative” energies; they themselves are environmentally damaging, consuming more energy in their production than they provide for consumption, and at huge cost. Phase out dams and nuclear plants, and initiate a crash program to develop sustainable alternative energy sources. This is not impossible to do. Sweden has eliminated the use of nuclear power and may soon be completely doing away with fossil fuels, replacing them with wind, solar, thermal, and tidal energies—programs that the United States and every other country should pursue.

  We need to develop rapid-mass-transit systems within and between cities for safe, economical transportation, and produce zero-emission vehicles to minimize the disastrous ecological effects of fossil fuels. Ford had electric cars as early as the 1920s. Stanford Ovshinsky, president of Energy Conversion Devices, built a newly developed electric car that had a long driving range on a battery that lasted a lifetime, used environmentally safe materials, and was easily manufactured, with operational costs that were far less than a gas-driven car—all reasons why the oil and auto industries were not supportive of electric cars and had them recalled and destroyed in California.19

  Meanwhile around the world hundreds of millions of automobiles with internal combustion engines continue to produce enormous quantities of toxic emissions and greenhouse gases. The dangers of global warming are so immense, so compounding and fast acting that an all-out effort is needed to reverse the ecological apocalypse of flood, drought, and famine. This is the single most urgent problem the world faces (or refuses to face). Unless we move swiftly away from fossil fuels, changing direction 180 degrees, we will face a future so catastrophic that it defies description, and it may come much sooner than we think.

  TAXES AND ECONOMIC REFORM

  Reintroduce a steep progressive income tax for superrich individuals and corporations—without the many loopholes that still exist. Eliminate off-
shore tax shelters and foreign tax credits for transnational corporations, thereby bringing in over $100 billion in additional revenues. And put a cap on corporate tax write-offs for advertising, equipment, and CEO stock options and perks. Strengthen the estate tax instead of eliminating it. Give tax relief to working people and lower income employees.

  Corporations should be reduced to smaller units with employee and community control panels to protect the public’s interests. As was the case in the nineteenth century, corporations should be prohibited from owning stock in other corporations. They should be granted charters only for limited times, say twenty or thirty years, and for specific business purposes, charters that can be revoked by the government for cause. Company directors should be held criminally liable for corporate malfeasance, financial swindles, and for violations of occupational safety, consumer, and environmental laws.

  ELECTORAL SYSTEM

  To curb the power of the moneyed interests and lobbyists, all candidates, including minor-party ones, should be provided with public financing. In addition, a strict cap should be placed on campaign spending by all party organizations, candidates and supporters. The states should institute proportional representation so that every vote will count. A party that gets 15 percent of the vote in a region will get roughly 15 percent of the seats instead of zero representation as is the case with the winner-take-all system we have now. Major parties will no longer dominate the legislature with artificially inflated majorities.20 Also needed is a standard federal electoral law allowing uniform and easy ballot access for third parties and independents. We should abolish the electoral college to avoid artificially inflated majorities that favor the two-party monopoly and undermine the popular vote. If the president were directly elected, every vote would count, regardless of its location.