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By David L. Levy / Climate Inc.

I was asked recently to write a short essay on environmentalism to be published in a book on ‘Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies’ to be published by Sage later in 2010. I hope it’s useful for those who want a little bit of history and critical understanding of environmentalist as a concept and a movement. It’s not directly about climate change, but my thinking about climate change is certainly influenced by these frameworks. The references should also prove useful to anyone who wants to follow up further. A bit academic in terms of style, but accessible, nonetheless!

Environmentalism refers to a social movement and associated body of thought that expresses concern for the state of the natural environment and seeks to limit the impact of human activities on the environment.

Environmentalism has grown out of concerns that the natural environment and human health are adversely affected by the rapid growth of urbanization, industrialization, population and consumption in the modern era. These processes are associated with loss of natural habitats and endangerment of species, land degradation, natural resource depletion, and pollution of air, land, and water due to waste products. Environmental concerns have shifted over time and vary by location (Guha, 2000). Urbanization and industrialization created expressions of environmentalism directed toward urban effluent and hazardous factory wastes. Wilderness conservation and species protection have played a key role in the United States, through the national parks system and private land trusts.

North American environmentalism has traditionally highlighted the intrinsic, experiential, and recreational value of nature for humans. In Europe, where high population density and industrialization largely preceded the rise of environmentalism, efforts have focused more on managing industrial pollution and waste, protecting human health from toxics and nuclear risks, and energy efficiency. More recently, attention has shifted to transboundary regional and global issues such as acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change. In developing countries, priority has been given to desertification, water resources, soil erosion and degradation.

Economists regard environmental pollution and resource depletion as negative externalities, costs that are imposed on society and not taken into account by private firms in their decision making. The ability of firms to externalize environmental costs while appropriating profits from production generates incentives for firms to overproduce goods with harmful environmental impacts and under-invest in measures to reduce these impacts (Stavins, 1989). The standard economic solution is to force firms to internalize the environmental costs by taxing environmentally harmful products or processes, enabling legal processes for damages, or direct regulation (Portney, 2000).

It is therefore not surprising that business has traditionally viewed environmental concerns as a threat to profitability and managerial autonomy. Business has generally opposed new environmental regulations and the establishment of regulatory authorities, frequently contesting the scientific basis for understanding harmful impacts and pointing to high compliance costs.

The wave of environmental activism in the 1960s and 1970s, originating with the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, led to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and similar agencies in other countries. Business acquiesced partly to assuage key stakeholders, including consumers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government agencies, and partly because federal regulation would preempt an expensive patchwork of varied and sometimes stricter state laws.

Business opposition to environmental regulation grew during subsequent decades as standards became more extensive and stringent. Business perceived that environmental risks were not balanced against compliance costs, and that direct regulation was an inefficient and blunt tool to address environmental concerns. During the 1990s, regulatory authorities began to experiment with market-based measures, such as the trading system for SO2, and industries launched self-regulation initiatives such as the US chemical industry’s Responsible Care program. Business, NGOs, and governmental agencies experimented with partnerships and voluntary agreements as part of the increasingly complex field of societal environmental governance (Prakash & Potoski, 2006). The decade also saw the rise of a “win-win” discourse of corporate environmentalism that framed environmental and economic goals as potentially complementary, and the emergence of environmental management as an academic field (Hoffman & Ventresca, 2002).

Paradigms of Environmentalism

Egri and Pinfield (1996), in a review of the literature on organization theory and the environment, identify three paradigms for understanding the relationship between environment, society, and economy. The dominant social paradigm is anthropocentric and neoliberal, encompassing assumptions that human welfare is aligned with the maximization of economic growth, personal consumption, and corporate pursuit of profits. Unlimited economic growth is assumed to flow from exploiting infinite natural resources, technological innovation, the primacy of markets, and a minimal role for government. The environment, in this paradigm, is regarded as an instrumental economic input, perhaps a constraint, but its sole purpose is the generation of economic value for humans.

Radical environmentalism, by contrast, is biocentric, emphasizing the intrinsic value of nature and the dependence of human economic and social life within larger dynamic ecosystems. In this paradigm, environmentalism derives less from concerns about resource depletion or harmful toxics, but more from respect for other species and appreciation of the interconnected complexity and fragility of ecosystems. Various schools of radical environmentalism have different points of departure (Merchant, 1992). Neo-Marxist variants emphasize production for profit under capitalism and the political power of corporate elites (Pepper, 1993). Deep ecologists also critique modern industrialism but focus on cultural and normative anthropocentrism, in which humankind is distinct from and superior to nature, entitled to control and subdue it (Naess, 1989).

These “red-green” debates raise significant theoretical issues. Neo-Marxists accuse deep ecologists of lacking an analysis of class and power, and view the cultural infatuation with consumption and technology as part of the ideological superstructure of capitalism. Deep ecologists accuse neo-Marxists of harboring modernist anthropocentric ambitions to harness nature for human benefit. Neo-Marxists reply that ecocentrism is both undesirable in its potential for misanthropism and misguided in its efforts to assign intrinsic value and moral consideration to nature. Ecofeminists share this critique of anthropocentrism but point to patriarchy as the ideological underpinning of the construction of nature as feminine and its subjugation by industry, technology, and the military (Salleh, 1992).

Reform environmentalism, a third paradigm, is a more pragmatic approach that recognizes the limits of natural systems and attempts to address them within the parameters of the existing order. Reform environmentalism has roots in various theoretical traditions, including systems theory, which emphasizes the interdependence of the economy and the environment, and the stakeholder perspective, which points to corporate obligations toward, and dependence on, groups other than shareholders, including consumers, the community, and government. Axiomatic for reform environmentalism is the reconciliation of environmental and economic goals, expressed in the concept of “sustainable development,”defined by the Brundtland Commission as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Ecological modernization, or eco-modernism (Hajer, 1995) is an optimistic expression of reform environmentalism that places considerable faith in technology, entrepreneurship, and markets in the efficient use of environmental resources and the pursuit of sustainable development. Rather than view economic growth as the source of negative environmental externalities, it posits that growth enables the investment to address environmental issues, giving the Kuznets bell-curve relationship between pollution and national income. Simultaneously, growth and modernization lower population pressures on the environment.

Environmental Management

Ecological modernization theory has provided fertile ground for the rapid growth since the mid-1990s of environmental management as an academic field and as managerial practice. Gladwin, Kennelly, and Krause (1995), for example, proposed a “sustaincentric” synthesis of traditional and ecocentric paradigms, which would privilege humans as intelligent stewards of the environment, embraces innovation, and offers a managerialist approach to prevent business activity from exceeding ecosystem constraints. Environmental management proponents argue that successful firms proactively seek profitable “win-win” opportunities to reduce pollution or develop new green product markets. Environmental management is held to offer the prospect of lower costs for energy, materials, waste disposal, and litigation, and the potential for higher sales stemming from green product differentiation.

Implicit in the field of environmental management are a number of ideological assumptions that are rarely articulated and problematic (Levy, 1997). One is that the environment can and should be managed at industrial scale, a second is that win-win opportunities give corporate managers the financial motivation to do so, a third is that corporations are the best equipped societal organizations, in their possession of financial and technical resources, to accomplish this task, and a fourth is that existing disciplines of management are readily adaptable to the cause. A larger question is whether  environmental management efforts at the level of individual firms addresses sustainability efforts at the macro-level of the economy-ecosystem interface.

Hajer (1997: 34) asks whether ecological modernization is “the first step on a bridge that leads towards a new sort of sustainable modern society” or whether it is a “rhetorical ploy that tries to reconcile the irreconcilable [environment and development] only to take the wind out of the sails of ‘real’ environmentalists.” Ecological modernization and environmental management can better be understood as a Gramscian accommodation between business and environmental concerns, in which environmentalist pressures are assimilated with modest adjustments to the economic systems. It is not empty rhetoric, or “greenwash”, as it demands a degree of compromise and practical steps to address more egregious environmental harms, especially those that threaten the resource base and political legitimacy of capitalist production. In mobilizing the language and practices of environmentalism, leading business sectors can sustain their hegemonic position, construct alliances with key environmental groups in civil society, and marginalize radical environmentalists calling for deeper structural and cultural transformation in the social and economic order.

References

Egri, C. P., & Pinfield, L. 1996. Organizations and the biosphere: ecologies and environments. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Gladwin, T. N., Kennelly, J. J., & Krause, T.-S. 1995. Shifting paradigms for sustainable development: Implications for management theory and research. Academy of Management Review, 20(4): 874-907.

Guha, R. 2000. Environmentalism: A global history. New York: Longman.

Hajer, M. A. 1995. The politics of environmental discourse: ecological modernization and the policy process. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hoffman, A. J., & Ventresca, M. J. 2002. Organizations, policy and the natural environment : institutional and strategic perspectives. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Levy, D. L. 1997. Environmental management as political sustainability. Organization and Environment, 10(2): 126-147.

Merchant, C. 1992. Radical ecology. New York: Routledge.

Naess, A. 1989. Ecology, community, and lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pepper, D. 1993. Eco-socialism. London: Routledge.

Portney, P. S., Robert N.  . 2000. Public policies for environmental protection. Washington DC: RFF Press.

Prakash, A., & Potoski, M. 2006. The Voluntary Environmentalists: Green Clubs, ISO 14001, and Voluntary Environmental Regulations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Salleh, A. 1992. The ecofeminism/deep ecology debate: a reply to patriarchal reason. Environmental Ethics, 14: 195-216.

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The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN’s climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. “Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” the book concludes.

Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as “cloud whitening” to reflect the sun’s heat back into the outer atmosphere.

In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.

His declaration about the importance of action on climate change comes at a crucial point in the debate, with international efforts to agree a global deal on emissions stalled amid a resurgence in scepticism caused by rows over the reliability of the scientific evidence for global warming.

Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. “The point I’ve always been making is it’s not the end of the world,” he told the Guardian. “That’s why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well.”

But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, “so it wouldn’t end up at the bottom”.

The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other “solutions” including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.

“If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?” was the question posed, he added.After the analyses, five economists were asked to rank the 15 possible policies which emerged. Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes – of which Lomborg has long been critical – were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.

Lomborg acknowledged trust was a problem when committing to long term R&D, but said politicians were already reneging on promises to cut emissions, and spending on R&D would be easier to monitor. Although many believe private companies are better at R&D than governments, Lomborg said low carbon energy was a special case comparable to massive public investment in computers from the 1950s, which later precpitated the commercial IT revolution.

Lomborg also admitted climate engineering could cause “really bad stuff” to happen, but argued if it could be a cheap and quick way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change and thus there was an “obligation to at least look at it”.

He added: “This is not about ‘we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions’. It’s about technologies, about realising there’s a vast array of solutions.”

Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today’s Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: “If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money.”

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• Bjørn Lomborg: climate change is a problem after all (newscientist.com)
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By George Monbiot / The Guardian

It was Australia’s second climate change election. Climate change deposed the former leaders of both main parties: Kevin Rudd (Labor) because his position was too weak, Malcolm Turnbull (Liberal) because his was too strong. When Julia Gillard, the new Labor leader, also flunked the issue, many of her supporters defected to the Greens.

Labor’s collapse began when the senate rejected Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. Faced with a choice of dissolving parliament and calling an election or dropping the scheme, he chickened out and lost the confidence of the party. Gillard’s support began to slide when she proposed to defer climate change policy to a citizen’s assembly. Nearly 70% of the votes she lost went to the Greens.

Turnbull, like Rudd, was ousted over the emissions scheme, but six months earlier. His support for it split the Liberal party, and just before the first senate vote last December he was overthrown by Tony Abbott, who had told his supporters that climate change “is absolute crap”. If Abbott manages to form a government, he will reverse the result of the 2007 election, in which the Liberal party was defeated partly because it wouldn’t act on climate change.

It’s not difficult to see why this is a hot issue in Australia. The country has been hammered by drought and bushfires. It has the highest carbon dioxide emissions per person of any major economy outside the Arabian peninsula. Australians pollute more than Americans, twice as much as people in the UK and four times more than the Chinese. Most Australians want to change this, but the coal industry keeps their politicians on a short leash. Like New Labour here, Rudd and Gillard’s administration was a government of flinchers. It has been punished for appeasing industrial lobbyists and the rightwing press.

Australia provides yet more evidence that climate science divides people on political lines. Abbott is no longer an outright denier, though he still insists, in the teeth of the facts, that the world has cooled since 1997. Some members of his party go further: Senator Nick Minchin maintains that “the whole climate change issue is a leftwing conspiracy to deindustrialise the western world”. (He has also insisted that cigarettes are not addictive and the link between passive smoking and illness can’t be demonstrated). A recent poll suggests that 38% of politicians in Abbott’s coalition believe man-made global warming is taking place, in comparison with 89% of Labor’s people.

It’s the same story everywhere. At a senatorial hustings in New Hampshire last week, all six Republican candidates denied that man-made climate change is taking place. Judging by its antics in the Senate and primary campaigns all over the US, the party appears to be heading for a unanimous rejection of the science. Václav Klaus, the ultra-neoliberal Czech president, asserts that “global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so”. The hard-right UK Independence party may soon be led by Lord Monckton, the craziest man in British politics, who claims that action on climate change is a conspiracy to create a communist world government. The further to the right you travel, the more likely you are to insist that man-made climate change isn’t happening. Denial has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics.

In the Telegraph, the Conservative Daniel Hannan tried to explain this association. “When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief-system; if it doesn’t fit, we question the discovery before the belief-system.” He’s right, we all do this. It is also true that in some respects an antagonism to climate science is consistent with rightwing – especially neoliberal – politics. The philosophy of the new right is summarised by this chilling statement from Václav Klaus. “Human wants are unlimited and should stay so.”

But rightwing denial leads to perverse outcomes. In a desperate attempt to appease deniers in his party, Turnbull proposed handing £70bn to industry to soften the impacts of acting on climate change. Rudd’s scheme, by contrast, was more or less self-financing. Abbott intends to lavish subsidies on polluting companies without demanding any corresponding obligations. State handouts? Rights without responsibilities? When did these become conservative policies?

Since way back. In the US Republicans also favour green incentives for industry, without caps or regulation. Worldwide, subsidies for fossil fuels are 12 times greater than subsidies for renewable energy. Many of the most generous handouts are awarded by rightwing governments (think of the money lavished on the oil industry under George Bush).

Yes, climate change denial is about politics, but it’s more pragmatic than ideological. The politics have been shaped around the demands of industrial lobby groups – which in many cases fund those who articulate them. Rightwingers are making monkeys of themselves not just because their beliefs take precedence over the evidence, but also because their interests often take precedence over their beliefs.

A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot’s website

For more info visit http://www.worldwildlife.org/science/fellowships/fuller/fuller-symposium-2010.html

The timeline for submitting articles is as follows:

October 30th 2010:First submission. It is possible to send an abstract to the editors in advance for an early quick scan

November 2010: Editors send the selected papers to reviewers

March 2011: Final submission by authors

June/July 2011: Publication

The aim is to have a critical review of several topics in CCS, for instance (but not limited to):

• Overview of technical progress in the field of capture technologies in power systems and/or in specific industrial processes
• Review of storage integrity studies: Is the “fraction retained” outcome in the IPCC Special Report still suitable?
• Economics of CCS, including retrofits versus new power plants with CCS
• Review of assumptions in scenario studies: what explains high CCS, high nuclear or renewable
• Biomass and CCS: what can we expect in terms of short- and long-term feasibility?
• CCS-readiness: what does it mean in practice?
• Insights from research on public perception, community engagement and communication issues around CCS
• Knowledge sharing, capacity building and technology transfer: How realistic is CCS in emerging economies and developing countries?
• Government policy and industry business models for CCS

The deadline for the first submission of articles is October 30th, 2010. Articles should be between 5,000 -8,000 words. For author instructions, related to electronic submission of manuscripts, can be found at https://www.editorialmanager.com/miti/. Inquiries or early abstracts can be sent to John Kessels at john.kessels [at] iea-coal.org, Heleen de Coninck at deconinck [at] ecn.nl, or Haroon Kheshgi at Haroon.S.Kheshgi [at] ExxonMobil.com

Nature is dead. Long live Nature™ Inc.! This adagio inspires many
environmental policies today. In order to respond to the many
environmental problems the world is facing, new and innovative methods
are necessary, or so it is argued, and markets are posited as the ideal
vehicle to supply these. Indeed, market forces have been finding their
way into environmental policy and conservation to a degree that seemed
unimaginable only a decade ago. Payments for ecosystem services,
biodiversity derivatives and new conservation finance mechanisms,
species banking, carbon trade, geoengineering and conservation 2.0 are
just some of the market mechanisms that have taken a massive flight in
popularity in recent years, despite, or perhaps because of the recent
‘Great Financial Crisis’.

The conference seeks to critically engage with the market panacea in
environmental policy and conservation in the context of histories and
recent developments in neoliberal capitalism. The conference is steeped
in traditions of political economy and political ecology, in order to
arrive at a deeper understanding of where environmental policies and
conservation in an age of late capitalism come from, are going and what
effects they have on natures and peoples. ‘Nature™ Inc’ follows a
successful recent conference in Lund, Sweden, in May 2010 and several
earlier similar initiatives that have shown the topic to be of great
interest to academics, policy-makers and civil society. The present
conference is thus meant not only to deepen and share critical knowledge
on market-based environmental policies and practices and nature-society
relations more generally, but also to strengthen and widen the networks
enabling this objective.

more info at www.iss.nl/nature2011

For more information see:
http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/events/2010-06-07-workshop-carbon-governance-asia