The left and right of global warming

Two opposing events clouded the global warming issue last week. The Blue Mountain bushfires certainly caused concern in the Lucky Country. Tony Abbott’s new administration is rich in climate change sceptics, and opponents blamed the fires and Sydney’s soaring temperatures on global warming accusing the Liberal/National coalition of having its head in the sand.

Abbott has already closed the government’s climate change department and the state funded Climate Commission which advised on the effects of climate change and is soon to dump the unpopular carbon tax introduced by the now much-despised Julia Gillard led regime.

Meanwhile NASA last week announced new record growth of sea ice saying that the ice in the Antarctica has extended over an area of 19.47 million square metres at the end of September. This is the highest since measurements began in 1979. This puts paid to those gruesome pictures and claims that the polar regions are melting and rising tides will soon swamp us all.

Lines seem to be drawn between capitalists and socialists as to the verisimilitude of global warming. I guess those tensions will always be with us.

Karl Marx reckoned capitalism would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. If someone was to gain, someone else had to lose in the free market, he surmised. The middle class, he wrote, would become the proletarians and the proletarians would starve. But the industrial revolution gave freedom to innovate, produce and to trade and the proletariat became the middle class and the middle class began to live like the upper class. And the most liberal country - England - led the way. According to trends in mankind, until then it would take 2000 years to double the average income, but in the mid-19th century the British did it in 30 years. When Marx died in 1883 the average Englishman was three time richer than when Marx was born in 1818.

Despite their obvious flaws Marx’s ideas were eventually taken up, but prominent modern socialist Robert Heilbroner in 1989 famously admitted: “Less than 75 years after the contest between capitalism and socialism began, it is over: capitalism has won. The tumultuous changes taking place in the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organises the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.”

But Heilbroner did not make peace with capitalism. Someone he concluded would have to pay for its success. He decided it would have to be the heavy cost to the environment. After having been opposed to capitalism because it would create waste, inefficiency and poverty, a socialist could now be opposed to capitalism because it was too efficient and created too much wealth, and that it would destroy nature.

Johan Norborg, head of the political ideas at Swedish think tank, Timbro, says this argument is as popular as it is false. First of all the worst environmental problems in the world are not smokestacks. Much worse is that so many people burn wood, coal, crop waste and dung indoors for heating and cooking. Respiratory diseases kill about 1.6 million people every year. Undoubtedly the modern production of energy creates environmental problems, but it doesn’t kill someone every 20 seconds as this killer in the kitchens of the third world does.

And diseases transmitted by water kills about another 5 million people every year. Just the number of people who die from these two environmental problems is 300 times the number of dead in war every year. These diseases also happen to have been eliminated in every industrialised nation on earth.

Norborg goes on to say that people in western societies live longer lives, with better access to goods and technology, and with bigger opportunities than the kings in Marx’s day.

Oh well, said Marx’s evil apprentice Lenin, we might have got that wrong, but the working class in the West could only become richer because they are bribed by the capitalists. Someone else would have to pay for that bribe – poor countries. Lenin meant that imperialism was the next natural step of capitalism, whereby poor countries had to give up their resources to feed the West.

The problem with this argument, continues Norborg, is that all continents became wealthier, albeit at different speeds. The average Western European or American is 19 times richer than in 1820, but a Latin American is 9 times richer, an Asian 6 times richer and an African 3 times richer. So from whom was the wealth stolen?

In this country we worry about most of the goods we buy being sourced from China. It’s true that a New Zealand manufacturing worker might lose his or her job because of this, but there are other mitigating effects. A Chinese worker gets a job of course and his new income means he can spend his money on luxury goods which to him may mean a Fonterra milk product. New Zealand consumers get cheaper prices and when they do they can spend the extra purchasing power on new goods and services and so an unemployed New Zealander can get a job in a newly created sector.

Socialists tend to be atheists; Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses destined to keep downtrodden workers in their place as they waited for their rewards in paradise. Capitalists however probably believe that God has “got the whole world in His hands” and we are all safe and sound.

Is it possible then that global warming is just a new tool that died-in-the-wool-socialists are using in their centuries-old effort to discredit capitalism?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamouring to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken.