Do a search on "capitalism and environmental problems" and you'll find a flood of articles in recent years. The claim is not just that capitalism can cause environmental problems but that it is THE cause of environmental degradation in the world. Or, as a 2022 Harvard Business School article put it "Capitalism drove the environmental decimation of the planet". Looking at most of the articles and rhetoric on this subject it is evident that the authors usually know little about the environment, or the actual practices of capitalism and its alternatives. What they do know are the slogans they've heard repeatedly and now believe on faith.
I thought I'd write about some of my experiences regarding the environment and safety and alternatives to capitalism based on my thirty years in the field.
My first experience was indirect. In the mid-80s a colleague from my company was on the first American delegation to go to China to discuss industrial safety. On his return he told me of an incident where he had observed a number of highly ergonomically stressful tasks in a factory and asked about the prevalence of back injuries and how employees were treated. He was told that Chinese workers did not experience back injuries and there was to be no further discussion on that topic.
In 1994 I attended a conference in Nitra, a small city in the newly independent Slovak Republic, which until recently had been part of the now disunited Czechoslovakia, a country under Soviet domination from the end of WW2 until 1989. The topic of the conference was addressing the environmental catastrophe left behind by the Communists. I was one of three Americans attending, the others being the leader of a local Massachusetts environmental group and a representative from the Massachusetts Department of the Environmental Protection. We were there for a panel on government, NGO, and corporate cooperation on environmental cleanups.
By then I'd had nearly twenty years experience dealing with waste sites and cleanups in the U.S. but I was shocked by the extent of the environmental contamination in Eastern Europe, with contamination levels and volumes orders of magnitude higher than what I was used to.
I'm sure the participants would have felt better if they had waited a couple of decades to read in the New York Times an article by Fred Strebeigh (a Yale professor, so he must be an expert) titled, "Lenin's Eco-Warriors" about how, under Lenin, a "longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping", the Soviet Union became a global pioneer in conservation (for more on this read Normalizing Mass Murder and Repression).
That same year, a colleague went on a due diligence trip to Volgograd (the former Stalingrad) to look at a factory our company was thinking of acquiring. Upon his return, he reported that the toxic waste from the plant, and every other factory in the area, was transported by a pipeline some miles to a local lake where it was dumped without any treatment.
Two years later, I found myself on a ferry going up the Pearl River delta from Hong Kong to a small city in Guangzhou province. We were in a joint venture to build a plant in this booming town where everything seemed under construction. As required by China law at the time we had a joint venture partner, the local communist party and I was a guest for a lunch at their building. Under the JV agreement, the plant, which used an older-generation technology from our business, would have our partner take the lead in construction, while we would take the lead on the operation once the facility was completed. JV costs required approval by both parties and we had insisted on strict safety rules during the construction.
A few weeks after returning to the U.S. I received a call from our Hong Kong office to inform me, as our corporate guidelines required, of a serious injury during construction. A worker had fallen off the roof and been critically injured. Our team decided that the only possible way to save him was by helicopter airlift to a Hong Kong hospital, a costly proposition. My colleagues told me the communist party JV partner refused to accept it as a cost of the JV, so our guys decided to pay 100% of the airlift cost and get the worker to Hong Kong. Unfortunately, while he reached the hospital he was so severely injured he died. They said that the JV partner could not understand our concern for the worker telling us, in effect, "why are you worried, we can always find another worker."
In 2005 when I was organizing a corporate wide greenhouse gas reduction and energy efficiency program, I spent time becoming knowledgeable about historic greenhouse gas emissions (you can read more about my experience on this project at Changing Climate). It turned out that the single biggest 20th century reduction in emissions came about due to President Reagan's victory over the Evil Empire - the Soviet Union. The collapse of its incredibly inefficient industrial base led to an enormous reduction in emissions. Moreover, the data, then and now, shows that contrary to the rhetoric about energy companies like Exxon and Chevron, most greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas industry come from state owned companies like Aramco and Gazprom.
Economic development by capitalist enterprises can lead to environmental degradation. So can industrial and agricultural development by communist countries and state owned enterprises. The problem is that with the latter there are no mediating institutions if there are problems. When the government owns both the means of production and the enforcement of the rules there is an inherent conflict of interest. The Soviet Union actually had fairly strict environmental and worker safety laws on its books, but there was nobody to enforce them in a society where production took priority and where citizens had no independent right to seek enforcement. That's what happens when you have the warmth of collectivism. As our JV partner in China believed, when you are for THE WORKERS, no individual worker matters as workers are just replaceable cogs in a collective world.
