How Capitalism Affects the Environment: Best Arguments on One Side of the Debate
By: Matt Pierson
Tags: Environment, Climate Crisis, Climate Change, Capitalism, Climate Action

It’s a guarantee that political and economical issues will have endless amounts of differing opinions and arguments that oppose one another, with the debates always seeming to be between two different sides; climate change is no exception to that. If you read my previous blog posts, I mentioned that climate change came to exist because of the Industrial Revolution and continues to exist to this day because of capitalism. This system of continuously producing goods and services on a planet where resources are finite cannot go on forever, and the side effects of an ever-growing economy will have extreme environmental consequences if nothing is done to combat climate change and change our ways. So what is the more effective and realistic way of preventing further damage to the environment, fighting climate change through capitalism, or fighting it by getting rid of capitalism? I will be going over the best points made by the side that favors not getting rid of capitalism and instead using it in the effort of reversing the effects of climate change.

In his article ‘System Change Not Climate Change’: Capitalism and Environmental Destruction, Rainer Zitelmann argues that people just assume that economic growth will lead to the acceleration of environmental degradation. He then brings up a point that with Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which uses sixteen indicators that rank countries on environmental health, air quality, water, biodiversity, natural resources and pollution, it found that there was “a strong correlation between a state’s wealth and its environmental performance. Most developed capitalist countries with the worst EPI scores, such as Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger, are all poor.” Zitelmann also mentions that these countries all have weak environmental regulatory authorities as well as a low investment capacity for infrastructure, and goes on to note that economic freedom leads to higher environmental quality. One thing that he doesn’t mention with his perspective of this argument is the reasons why countries such as Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger all have poor EPI scores. He dismisses the idea that they might have low EPI scores because they are Third World Countries that don’t produce as many goods and services like the United States or China, and therefore don’t have as many jobs available for its citizens and ultimately not enough money to be able to be to develop as a nation to increase its EPI score. Things like this are either overlooked in Zitelmann’s article, or are simply failed to be mentioned.

In another article I read titled Is Capitalism Incompatible with Effective Climate Change Action? by Adair Turner, he goes over some policies which can be used to “unleash capitalism’s power to solve the problem (climate change).” One of the policies he mentions is that carbon taxes should be introduced at a high level in the effort to drive the multi-decade investment plans necessary to decarbonize heavy industry. Turner goes on to say that those carbon tariffs “should be used to protect industry from being undercut by imports from countries that fail to apply adequate carbon prices.” He also says that regulations that require airlines to use a “rising proportion of zero-carbon fuels from clearly sustainable sources” as well as rising carbon prices are what airlines should face. The final two big points Turner mentions in his article is banning new sales of vehicles with internal combustion engines (which means gasoline-powered vehicles) should be part of the policy by around 2030. Regulations should be put in place prohibiting putting plastics in landfills as well as the act of incinerating plastics, both of which will force the “development of a complete plastics recycling system.” One thing this argument could have done would have been to explain how these policies could gain more traction and become a reality so the readers would get an idea of how they can make the difference.

After looking over the arguments done on one side of the debate, I realized how so many people aren’t looking at this environmental crisis as a giant red flag, and the fact that not all the much has been done by our world leaders to hopefully lessen the damage due to climate change. Adair Turner’s argument mentioning the policies in which countries could apply to help combat climate change through the capitalist system is something completely plausible and realistic, but yet nothing like it is really being done. No world leader has really put their foot down to prevent climate disaster, and is instead finding loopholes to put off unified actions.