Privatization plays a major role here. Even "cap and trade," which is the only concrete step we're contemplating right now, means putting a price on carbon, means saying to people who emit carbon, "You'll have to pay something, and you can actually buy from someone else who is not emitting carbon the right to pollute--for a price." That would be fine if they really did pay, but what this administration wants to do is give the big companies the right to pollute the first time around for free and then introduce a system by which they gradually start paying for it. Subsidize the initial caps. In effect, of course, it's not the government that's doing the giving, it's us, the taxpayers, who gives. We are paying those companies to pollute for a while to make it easier for them to buy into the notion that eventually they should pay some price for the pollution they're causing and the carbon emissions they're responsible for. That's the best we can do under present circumstances.
We need to begin thinking about how to get back to a world in which citizens, not consumers, are making choices, a world in which we understand the public consequences and public costs of our private choices. If I have to name a villain behind the scenes, it's the unchallenged ideology of privatization and its belief that markets take care of everything. It's not that markets don't do a lot of things more efficiently than the state, it's that the privatized and consumerist thinking behind markets is deadly for the public good and public interest, which are not even part of the political calculation.
I have been talking about the impact of cars and gasoline on carbon emissions, yet there are other perilous consequences: every time we drive a car we are opting for the war in Afghanistan. If we buy a Hummer, we're saying, let's send more troops to Iraq. We all know that the United States isn't dependent just on fossil fuel, it's dependent on foreign fossil fuel, and that means we are going to have to be interested in the parts of the world where those fuels are produced, whether it's Venezuela or Russia or the Middle East. And of course no responsible President can walk away from that. It's easy to say that we shouldn't be involved in such places, but we are involved, for our whole economy depends on the oil coming out of, for instance, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a country that actually upholds the Wahabist ideology behind Al Qaeda, and thus the dollars we pay for that oil are also dollars going to Al Qaeda. If you want to cut off the source of funding for Al Qaeda, go after the Wahabists in Saudi Arabia. That can't be done because the Saudis produce a quarter of the gasoline we use. We need them, so never mind Al Qaeda! Neither can we walk away from Iraq because that's another big producer of oil, and Iran presents a problem because that country controls a lot of oil too. Instead of asking ourselves whether we should buy from those countries, we ask only whether we want to drive our cars. Of course we do! But driving our cars means we are committed to a foreign policy that is interventionist, whether it's for military or state-building purposes or whatever else it's for.
Again and again, by thinking as consumers and thinking that markets are the solution, no matter if they are inefficient sometimes, we opt out of making public choices that would give us the ability to actually create the framework in which we live, the framework that would enable us to say no to carbon emissions, to say no to an oil-dependent economy. Instead, we say that our politicians are stupid or they don't like science. But the truth is that in a market economy the logic of consumers trumps the logic of citizens, and to get elected, politicians have to go along with the consumers. As consumers Americans are right to believe that fossil fuel is good, that cars are good. Of course cars are good. There's no public transportation in this country. How are we going to get around if we don't have a car? That's the situation we're stuck with into the near future, yet those are the very political issues we need to be dealing with.
Of course, the best way to deal with carbon emissions in economic terms is to suspend global economy permanently. Create a permanent recession, a Great Depression for the next 40 years. We wouldn't have to do anything else. No changes in behavior. It just would mean that people don't have jobs, they don't have money, they can't go anywhere, they can't afford their cars. (The recession has actually had some impact in slowing warming!) But obviously this isn't viable, so President Obama is saying exactly what President Bush said after September 11, 2001: "If you want to help America, go back to the malls and go shopping"! Would you believe that the Secretary of the Treasury is complaining that Americans are saving too much? This is after 20 years during which we had a negative savings rate. We saved nothing and spent everything; we spent ourselves into this hyper-consumerist economy that then collapsed, and the best that our leaders in Washington can recommend is that we go back to where we were. If we can just fix the market and get people shopping again, won't that be great? All over the world the mantra is, "Let's restore the global economy of yesteryear, with people spending more than they have." Except that now we need to be joined by the Chinese. They have to start spending too because they've been saving too much and sending all their stuff to us to buy. They should at least buy some of their own stuff. They can produce enough for export to get rich and still buy their own goods.
Here I come back to where I started, with the dilemma of capitalism. Capitalism started out by manufacturing goods to meet our needs, but long ago in this country, and in many other middle-class parts of the world, most of our reasonable needs have long since been met. I don't mean only food and shelter. I mean a car, a house, a hi-fi set. All the things that contribute to a decent middle-class life have been purchased. And then come the capitalists, saying: "Hold on. That doesn't mean you're going to stop shopping, does it?" Well, yes, you capitalists have done so well that you've met all our basic needs. Then they say: "That's not good news for capitalism. What are we going to make? How are we going to make profits? What if we can figure out some new needs you didn't know you had? What if we can create a capitalism that doesn't manufacture goods to meet your needs but manufactures needs to sell all the goods we have?" That's been capitalism for the past 40 or 50 years, the capitalism of marketing. Not advertising but marketing, the capitalism that sells us what we don't need, what we can't afford, and what often we don't even want, at least not until we hear about it from the advertisers and the marketers.
I'll bet that those of you who have an iPhone didn't know six months before it went on the market that you "needed" it. You probably thought the phone you had was okay. You didn't know you needed something that was a not very good camera, a not very good browser, a not very good iPod, and a not very good telephone, all rolled into one, but nevertheless with a very classy, cool interface. By the time Apple was through marketing it, however, we--especially young people--believed that we really needed that iPhone! I went on line to read about it before it came out, and you should have seen what people were saying: "I don't know quite what it is, but I need one." "I've got to have one." "Where can I get one?" That's marketing.
Marketing makes people want and even need something although they don't know exactly what it is. Or how about this example: Almost everywhere I go to speak about these issues, I am given a small bottle of water. I mention this even though the Schumacher Society has robbed me of my prop by putting a glass of water on the podium. The water in this glass came fresh out of the tap. Well, the water in the bottle comes out of the tap too. I'm not talking about boutique water; I'm not talking Perrier or Pellegrino. I'm talking just plain water, the kind of bottled water sold all over this country. Is that because tap water isn't safe to drink? No, this country has a fine aquifer and aqueduct system, and it's one that uses almost no energy to transport the water. Yet there are externalities here too. The reservoirs and aqueduct system had to be built. Because they are long since paid for, we have the equivalent of free water. Do you know what we spend on bottled water every year? Twenty-five billion dollars! Utterly unnecessary. In fact, it's the plastic that causes the carbon imprint of these bottles: their manufacture and recycling as well as transporting them instead of just taking water from the tap. Twenty-five billion dollars has created a new faux need. If you go to a restaurant, you are asked whether you would like tap water or bottled water. Many of us say, "Oh, I'll take the bottled water." New York, with its wonderful reservoir system, has a reputation for some of the best water in the country, yet restaurants do a terrific business selling bottled water. We don't need it, but we buy it because we've been made to think we need it, with all sorts of rationales for why we need it. Here's the irony: we spend $25 billion annually because Coca Cola and Pepsi noticed that people weren't buying soda when they were thirsty because soda actually made them more thirsty. They wanted water instead, so the companies figured out that they should bottle water and sell it, making their profits that way.
While we're spending $25 billion on bottled water, about three billion people around the world don't have access to clean, potable water; indeed, about two billion don't have access to water they can even wash their clothes in without contaminating them. If I'm a young capitalist, wouldn't you think I might exclaim: "Wow! There's a need. Why don't I figure out how to get clean water to these people?" Well, a little firm in Denmark did just that by making something called the Life Straw. Here's my other prop: the straw I have here is just a mock-up, but the Life Straw is about this size, and it has nine filters. For a family of four, drinking daily all the water they need, it lasts a year and a half, and it costs about two dollars to manufacture. This little firm is doing very nicely. Being a good old-style capitalist firm, it recognized a need, and it created an inexpensive, easy way to manufacture a product that it is using to address the real human need for clean water. Same thing for hi-tech mosquito nets: new products to meet old needs. Right now a big campaign is underway to provide low-cost antiretrovirals for AIDS and cures for malaria, both very important. With simple little mosquito nets certain health problems can be addressed very cheaply. Jeffrey Sachs has a campaign, as does Bill Clinton's foundation, to promote the use of mosquito nets. By the way, the people who make the netting do very well too because they're providing something people really need.
Someone may say: "That works in the Third World, but there isn't much money to be made there. What about here?" Then I come back to alternative energy. There's a ton of money to be made in developing alternative energy. Initially you have to invest without an immediate return. It was ever so. You have to defer your gratification. But if you keep working, keep being inventive--whether it's in geothermal or wind turbines or tidal energy or the electricity that comes from waves--eventually you're going to find a good way to do it, and whoever figures it out is going to do very well. That's the way capitalism works. Not by making huge profits with destructive forms of carbon-emitting fossil fuels but by meeting a real need with new products. We have an essential need for alternative energy that capitalism ought to be able to meet.
Another area of need here in the United States is for housing that can withstand the growing weather extremes, such as those causing coastal flooding. A large part of the problem caused by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was the destruction of coastal housing, often cheap, trailer-like buildings made like matchsticks, which were easily swept away. There are people in the housing industry who are now trying to develop relatively flood-proof buildings--housing that's tethered to the ground differently, that floats, and that has a different kind of window so it can take hurricane-strength winds. It's all right to profit from this human need. If I'm able to construct a house that can withstand a category three hurricane relatively inexpensively, I have a right to make good money for inventiveness and entrepreneurship. That's how capitalism ought to be working, instead of concocting faux needs or making paper profits by buying and selling other people's companies.
There may come a time, if we survive long enough, when capitalism does for the whole world what it's done for New England. People will have everything they need, and then someone will have to figure out what we're going to do next because capitalists will have very little cause to make anything. But we're not there yet. There are plenty of needs even in middle-class places. Someone this morning was talking about weatherizing houses. Why not create a cheap, durable, easily applicable white paint? Then if you paint the top of every apartment building in every city in the world white, you can make an incredible saving in the energy needed to heat those buildings because the paint provides a kind of insulation. A great idea! Someone ought to develop that kind of paint and an applicator for the paint that can be applied easily and quickly to many different surfaces. It's the kind of thing entrepreneurs thought about in the old days of capitalism, and it's why so many early capitalists were inventors, trying to meet real needs with inventiveness. That's something we know the state is not good at. You're probably not going to the Department of the Interior to say, "Be inventive." It does other things well but not that, whereas capitalism does it extremely well.
There are three things we need to do to address the challenges I have been talking about. We need to reconnect capitalism with real human need; we need to reconnect capitalism with democracy and democratic oversight; and we need to reconnect capitalism with nature itself, with sustainability. We don't have to do away with capitalism, but we do have to put it back in its place. For the past 40 or 50 years we inverted the classical formula according to which the economy serves society, serves democracy, serves sustainability--with the result that politics and society have turned into servants of an economy devoted to assuring that private financial companies survive and make profits for their shareholders. But private profits are not the purpose of a public society. The capitalist economy should be subordinate to society, and democracy is how we guarantee that. Overseeing and regulating capitalism puts it in its proper place, as one of democracy's many servers, certainly not as an end in itself.
As we've seen, capitalism can serve the green economy by being entrepreneurial in an inventive way and finding alternatives that will eventually make money for some people, as it should. If I'm right in what I've been saying, then it is our task first and foremost to restore democracy: the commonwealth, the public good, and citizenship. I'm suggesting that what's wrong in the debate about greening and climate change is that we're trying to meet the challenge of sustainability exclusively as consumers in a market economy; we're acting in a way that doesn't allow democracy to oversee the public good anymore. Science makes powerful arguments, but science doesn't vote. What we need instead is a restoration of the role of the citizen, of public thinking, of the commonwealth, and of the public good. A green America is part of the commonwealth, not of private wealth or corporate wealth or shareholder wealth. Shareholders have their place too, but we mustn't support private wealth at the cost of public wealth. We need advocates for the commonwealth, and yes, we have them--they're called citizens. If citizens take themselves seriously, then they vote for politicians who uphold the public good. If we have only consumers involved in politics, then of course they vote for the people who uphold private interests and the lobbyists who represent them.
What I want to suggest here today is that to deal effectively with the urgent crisis of global warming--which, as Bill said, doesn't allow us much time--we've got to do something that may seem harder but in a way is easier: restore our democracy, revive our sense of citizenship. There doesn't have to be an argument between science and politics; the argument has to be between citizenship and the market, between public goods and private goods. The minute we put the debate on another level--Is it good for the public? Is it good for our communities?--then the green argument will win without people having to be scientific about it. But as long as we say that private trumps public, consumer trumps citizen, the economy trumps political democracy, then we lose. There will be no way to win the political battles that have to be fought. We can do that only as citizens, which in fact is the implicit condition of Bill's 350.org movement. What many people in this room are already doing in their various organizations is obviously about citizen action, about citizens working together, working for the public good, the commonwealth, the "res publica." The word "republican" comes from res publica, the "things of the public." In a republic, the things of the public--the commonwealth--come first. If we restore our res publica, if we restore the commonwealth, if we restore our citizenship, then I think we can and we will meet the challenges of global warming.
Question PeriodWhat are your thoughts on the politics of food if we think back to the latter half of the 19th century when the vast majority of people's income was spent on meeting basic needs such as food? The slow food movement contends that cheap subsidized food has freed up money to advance the consumer culture. Given that you said raising gas prices would be too abrupt and painful, what role do you think the politics of food should play?
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