Why 'private enterprise' can't clean up damaged eco-system

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When federal agencies and the Coast Guard are called in to clean up the disasters, the costs are passed Second part of a 4-part series At the end of last month's article, two questions were posed: Are the warnings of the environmentalists pessimistic, and is it possible for capitalism to clean up the current ecological mess?

An article in the July 24, 1989, issue of Newsweek magazine attempts to address these issues. The special report is titled "Cleaning up our mess: What works, what doesn't, and what we must do to reclaim our air, land and water."

The author, Gregg Easterbrook, states that he is attempting to "sort out which ecological alarms merit worry and which are overblown; which Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] programs work and which do not." He is reassuring: "Readers should be of good cheer." In his estimate, things are under control.

However, when carefully analyzed, Easterbrook's article is actually an attempt to lull an awakened public back to sleep, to take an underhanded swipe at the environmental movement, and to suggest that nuclear power is a safe alternative source of energy to the burning of fossil fuels.

Easterbrook considers it good ecological sense to "stop splitting hairs... on arcane estimates of potential health hazards. Forget Love Canal: Superfund toxic waste sites are overrated as environment hazards. Arrest the Nimby (Not In My Back Yard) Patrols: By blocking construction of new waste facilities, they keep bad old ones in operation." According to him, reason will prevail and the EPA will come to the rescue.

Easterbrook's assessments seriously differ from those of many leading environmental specialists. I am referring to, among others, two classic assessments written during the 1970s: Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's "The Three Hundred Years War: A Chronicle of Ecological Disaster" and Barry Commoner's "The Closing Circle."

Douglas and Commoner assess the damage and analyze the cause. They lay the responsibility squarely with capitalist industrial and farming powers and with government policies that support their interests.

James Bellini's recent "High Tech Holocaust," written in 1986, has more current information on the damages, which not only bears out the predictions of the earlier writers but show that things have become far worse in terms of lives and non-renewable resources that have been lost. All three authors estimate that things are out of control.

New polluting technologies Barry Commoner-a biologist, ecologist, and educator-is perhaps one of the best known and most widely read environmentalists. He pinpoints the start of the current, serious ecological degradation with the beginning of the post-war era.

Some have claimed that the current levels of pollution come from the increased population and affluence of this period. Commoner, however, provides documentation to show that this cannot explain the 200 percent to 2000 percent rise in pollution levels since 1946.

Total production, as measured by the GNP, increased by only 126 percent while pollution levels have escalated far beyond those figures.

Commoner analyzes statistical tables of U.S. industrial and agricultural production since World War II. He finds that, while production for most basic needs has kept about even with population growth, the kinds of goods produced have changed radically.

New synthetic production technologies have replaced the older natural ones. For instance, detergents have replaced soap; aluminum, plastics, and concrete have replaced steel and lumber, and chemical pesticides and herbicides have replaced natural methods of pest and weed control.

The chemical industry needs increasing amounts of electrical power—which has encouraged the development of the nuclearpower industry. Trucking has replaced rail in 6 SOCIALIST ACTION IC FARMI AND WAS HOME TOWN IS TO shipping and requires fuel.

Commoner estimates that the increase in population accounts for roughly 12 percent to 20 percent of the increase in pollution. The affluence factor (or amount of goods per capita) only accounts for from 1 percent to 5 percent of the increase in pollution.

Thus, while the standard of living of the American people has changed very little during the last five decades (average hourly wages actually fell by 7 percent between 1979 and 1987), new high-polluting technologies have been responsible for reducing the quality of life for millions.

How this has taken place in the air, water, and land (atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere) will be examined below. At the end of this article, we will analyze why it has happened.

Air pollution is legal!

Gregg Easterbrook makes a telling point about air pollution in his Newsweek article. "It's all legal," he notes.

In 1986, Congress required corporations who discharge large amounts of more than 320 chemicals to disclose their toxic output. When the statistics were tallied, admitted air pollution added up to over 2.7 billion tons of toxic chemicals per year. Virtually none of these chemicals are controlled by the federal government.

Every year, more cities register deadlier air quality. Two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in "air quality non-attainment" areas, a euphemism used by the Environmental Protection Agency to denote areas where airquality standards are consistently violated.

Air in the inner city is the poorest. The majority of workers who live there are exJANUARY 1990 VACATION IN NEW JERSEY MO MAN JOIN THE posed to carbon monoxide levels 30 percent higher than those experienced by affluent suburbanites.

The original Clean Air Act of 1970 was supposed to have cut auto and airplane emissions by 90 percent in the year 1975. But due to the powerful automaker and airline-industry lobby, those provisions have never been enforced.

Alternatives exist to the present-day smoggenerating engines. Ralph Nader has exposed the fact that pressure by the petroleum industry has eliminated the development of electric and steam-driven cars and mass publictransportation systems.

Dead lakes and rivers Lakes and streams worldwide are becoming polluted by atmospheric contaminants. This pollution has been caused mainly by the combustion of large amounts of fossil fuels-coal, oil, and gas. Oxides of sulfur and nitrogen are released into the air, where they react with oxygen, water, and other substances to form acid rain.

Chemical elements such as sulfates and nitrates are naturally emitted from the sea and soil; until the 1960s, such natural emissions were greater than those produced by manufacturing activities. In 1940, about 22 million tons of sulfur oxides and 6.7 million tons of nitrogen oxides were created in the United States. By 1976, these emissions had increased by 45 percent and 273 percent respectively.

Today, the world emits approximately 100 million metric tons of sulfur into the air every year as a result of economic activities.

James Bellini, in "High Tech Holocaust," documents the damage to the world's ecosystem. In Sweden, 18,000 lakes are acidified In Norway, 13,000 square kilometers of lakes are reported dead. In Ontario, Canada, some 50,000 lakes are at risk.

Crop losses in the United States due to acid rain are estimated to be 5 percent of their cash value, much-needed crops have been seriously affected in India, and Europe is experiencing crop losses of $500 million a year.

Most governments foresee no reduction in sulfur oxide emissions over the next 10 years. In fact, most analysts predict huge increases in these emissions in the advanced countries (as well as in the smaller nations) due to increasing coal consumption.

Waste in the waterways So great has the contamination of our waterways become that this very source of life itself has become endangered. Bellini warns that we have perhaps only half a century before the world's waters become as contaminated as the land.

From earliest times, humans have used the water systems to dispose of waste. Before modern population increases and industrial production, this waste was too small to create any real problem. However, within the last 100 years-and particularly within the last 50 years—Bellini points out, "We have transformed the hydrosphere from a wholesome, cleaning medium into an increasingly poisoned one."

Water is used in most industrial processes, and this contaminated water inevitably ends up in the outside environment. Highly dangerous chemicals, nuclear waste, and increased sea traffic add to the risk. Some 70,000 different chemicals made for industrial and agricultural use are finding their way into the hydrosphere.

Highly dangerous metals like mercury, copper, lead, and cadmium are also increasingly carried into our water supplies. Heavy metal contamination, a result of acid rainfall, is an immediate threat to all living things— including humans.

Today 9 percent of stream pollution comes from industry and 65 percent comes from nonpoint sources such as agriculture. While the National Pollutant Discharge System requires that industry get permits for any emissions they discharge directly into the waterways, control of runoff from streets and fields remains largely uncontrolled.

The oil industry has been one of the major polluters. Gigantic oil spills—in addition to "routine" discharges—have spread millions of tons of petroleum (composed of dangerous hydrocarbons) directly into the hydrosphere.

Last year's Alaska spill has not yet been cleaned up, and Exxon has never claimed any serious responsibility to do so. Exxon was fined only $50,000 by the government, and the company invested another $200,000 in a limited cleanup effort.

Giant industries get away, with a mere slap on the wrist, and the fines rarely add up to the financial gains made by failing to install proper safety measures in the first place. When federal agencies and the Coast Guard are called in to clean up the disasters, the costs are passed onto the working class.

Land tainted with pesticides Since the 1940s, agribusiness has switched to the massive use of inorganic fertilizers (in order to increase the productivity of depleted soil systems) and pesticides. As Rachel Carson documented in her 1962 book, "Silent Spring," this has produced a death-dealing cycle of contamination. More and more chemicals are needed to eradicate pests that become immune to the ever-expanding array of pesticides.

The chemical manufacturers are now attempting to expand their markets in the underdeveloped countries and thus contaminate previously untainted agro-systems. Imperialism has long promoted single-cash-crop production that distorts the economies of neocolonial areas and impoverishes the local population. Now the capitalists are seeking to poison these areas as well.

In Nicaragua, cotton became an important crop in the 1950s. Its introduction acceler(continued from preceding page)

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ated the concentration of land ownership, capital-intensive technologies, and the heavy use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides.

Contamination was so rampant that the United States banned imports of beef from Nicaragua due to high levels of DDT in the meat. During the peak years of cotton production, more than 3000 agricultural workers were poisoned, many fatally. This pattern has been reproduced throughout the underdeveloped countries.

Alternative methods of pest control exist, including biological methods and diversification of croplands. But they have remained undeveloped since they are less profitable for agribusiness.

Superfund or "Superscam?"

Approximately 50 million metric tons of chemical wastes are produced in the United States each year. In 1987 alone, 2.3 billion pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped into landfills.

After the advent of the environmental movement, beleaguered communities that had been used as dumping sites began to fight back. At Love Canal, N.Y., over 22,000 tons of chemicals were found under a schoolyard in 1978. Afterwards, toxic dumps in thousands of other communities were "discovered" by the EPA.

The government's "Superfund" has inventoried over 1224 sites for cleanup; since the program's inception only 27 have been removed from the list and certified as totally "clean." Superfund works as a federally operated insurance program for industries that contaminate the earth. That's why they went along with it.

The $8.5 billion in the "Superfund" is supposed to be used for cleanups; then the federal government is supposed to recover the costs from the liable parties. But neither aspect of the program has been implemented-earning the program the name "Superflop."

It could be more correctly labled "Superscam," since 80 percent of the funds used so far have gone to consultants rather than toward cleanups.

Perhaps the most frightening instance of toxic waste comes from the approximately 528 nuclear-power plants in the world. William O. Douglas wrote in 1972: "If as little as 1 percent of our present annual production of radioactive garbage is lost to the class will come to its senses and see the wisdom of employing ecological safeguards to industrial production.

Robert Heilbroner, a left-liberal economist, suggests this alternative. He states: "The capitalist and managerial classes may see-perhaps even more clearly than the consuming masses—the nature and nearness of the ecological crisis, and may recognize that their only salvation (as human beings, let alone privileged human beings) is ... to accept a smaller share of the national surplus simply because they realize there is no alternative."

The fallacy in this argument is that it implies that the capitalist class could somehow introduce rational changes into an obviously irrational mode of production. This has been the goal of those in the environmental movement who believe in capitalism and want to clean it up.

However, the polluters really have little choice in the matter if the "private enterprise" system is to prevail. They cannot prevent pollution any more than they can prevent recessions, depressions, or stock market crashes. The drive for profits has a dynamic of its own. Its final logic is to drive humanity into barbarism or annihilation.

The major consideration as to how capital is invested has always been the rate of profit returned on the investment-not what is needed by society. The newer industrial technologies developed after World War Il have served the multinational corporations in two important respects.

First, as Barry Commoner has documented, new products often return an extremely high rate of profit (until they are duplicated and the profit rate falls due to competition). Therefore, there is an inherent drive to continually introduce new products and technologies before their long-term ecological effects are known.

Second, the production of new synthetics has in many instances relieved the imperialist nations of their need to obtain raw materials from the potentially revolutionary neocolonial countries, where private investments can be endangered. Thus, there is an apparent method in the "madness" of the capitalist class.

An economic system which spawns and perpetuates this kind of "madness" is clearly in need of being eliminated-before it eliminates us.

Commoner estimates that it might cost roughly $600 billion in order to remedy ma-

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