The economy and the environment are on a collision course ”“ the need to raise the gross domestic product from its current slump and the need to slow impending climate change are diametrically opposed in their agendas. The drama is playing out on many stages but most publicly with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Wall Street Journal, 10-24/25-09).
Several major corporations such as Exelon, Apple and Nike have left the chamber because of its fundamental resistance to climate change legislation. Those corporations no doubt have their own agenda in this political struggle but it is a highly visible example of severe battles to come on reversing the damage to the atmosphere.
The feisty chairman of the U.S. chamber, Tom Donohue, while supporting the cap-and-trade system of controlling carbon, is not giving an inch in the matter of including carbon in the Clean Air Act because of the Environmental Protection Agency”™s “endangerment to human health” finding. Donohue told the WSJ: “It would put them (the EPA) in charge of every major construction and rehab project, every road, every port, every big building. I mean, you wanna put people out of work?”
And so the battle is joined ”“ the struggle of the U.S. economy to return to business as usual while confronted with the need to undo the damage done to the environment by certain business activities. A vivid example of that damage is the current practice of the coal industry to remove the tops of mountains as the more efficient way of getting the material within the mountain. Whereas the practice does indeed reduce the cost of coal mining it inflicts horrific damage on the environment, polluting water supplies and spewing carbon into the atmosphere, in the mining process as well as when the material is burned.
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To quote Donohue further: “We want to encourage and promote a bunch of enthusiasm behind ”¦ the free enterprise system with free capital markets and free trade and the ability to fail and fall right on your ass and get up and do it again!” (Meanwhile the chamber supported the bank and auto bailouts and stimulus funds.)
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My father, who founded King Kelly Marmalade Co. just before the Great Depression and whose story I have written about twice in these pages, would have appreciated Donohue”™s position. Even though his was a non-polluting business my father would have objected mightily to the government interfering in the management of his affairs for whatever lofty reason.
That was then, this is now and it”™s time to pay the piper. There has been no accounting for the loss of natural resources and the pollution of water and air in the GDP over the years. The GDP, the primary gauge of the health of the economy, is not a double entry system. It merely totals up transactions, no deductions allowed.
Donohue is right that curbing carbon emissions will raise the cost of business generally but consider what will happen if we do not get serious on this matter. Mainstream scientists, not influenced by the bottom line or the need to get reelected, have a far clearer notion of the dangers of what doing little or nothing has done to control climate change ”“ drought, famine, rising seas ”“ all of which are already in progress.
Another element in climate change legislation ”“ national security ”“ has proved to get more attention than the above-mentioned disasters. Rajendra Pachaouri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has warned that: “What we do in the (next) two or three years will determine our future.” He said that two years ago in a New York Times article. Climate change will create crises like drought, starvation, disease and mass migration, producing predictable regional conflicts. This assessment of national security does not even mention the insecurity of the energy supply itself. After all, most of the oil that is producing the climate change is located in less than friendly countries.
Not having taken account of the damage to the environment as it was occurring we now must now take the full hit. There is no “free” enterprise, no “free” capital, no “free” trade and certainly no free lunch. We are a global community now and cannot continue to ignore the pressures from that community to get control of our carbon emissions.
