Book Review
JANUARY 2007
by Carol Van Strum
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, by Peter Barnes, 2006. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., $22.95, hardcover.
Hell and High Water: Global Warming - the Solution and the Politics - and What We Should Do, by Joseph Romm, 2007. William Morrow, $24.95, hardcover.
Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
from The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss, 1971
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As Earth's atmosphere tips past one threshold after another toward catastrophe, climate change discussions desperately need to go beyond singing to the choir. To address this need, here are a book on economics inspired by The Lorax and another debunking the spurious arguments, point by point, of right-wing nay-sayers.
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REVIEW
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, by Peter Barnes, 2006. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., $22.95, hardcover.
To all but its bloated beneficiaries, capitalism has long been a dirty word, representing wanton exploitation of nature and human labor - the ascendancy of profit over all things bright and beautiful and everything in between. In this astonishing little volume, Peter Barnes, co-founder of Working Assets and a self-described, successful capitalist, gives capitalism a new and beneficent meaning simply by tweaking its operating system.
"When capitalism started," Barnes writes, "nature was abundant and capital was scarce; it thus made sense to reward capital above all else. Today we're awash in capital and literally running out of nature. We're also losing many social arrangements that bind us together as communities and enrich our lives in nonmonetary ways. This doesn't mean capitalism is doomed or useless, but it does mean we have to modify it. We have to adapt it to the twenty-first century rather than the eighteenth. And that can be done."
Barnes outlines just how readily it can be done in 195 succinct, brilliantly argued pages. The result is a 21st Century Capitalist Manifesto that should be on the desk of every legislator, student, CEO, and activist in the nation.
Barnes's deceptively simple proposal is to add a commons sector to our economic system. By commons he means much more than the old village green; the commons here is "a set of assets that have two characteristics: they're all gifts, and they're all shared….Examples of such gifts include air, water, ecosystems, languages, music, holidays, money, law, mathematics, parks, the Internet, and much more."
For centuries, corporations have used and abused these assets voraciously, paying little or usually nothing for the privilege; the commons, without any rights of its own, has no defense against commercial exploitation, and government, itself but a tool of business, rarely shares the priorities of the commons except in empty rhetoric. Barnes's upgrade would invest the commons with its own property rights, birthrights, and other shields against exploitation. The scheme has startling, double-edged benefits.
Traditional trusts, trust funds, and mutual funds provide the working model for Barnes's proposals:
- A series of ecosystem trusts that protect air, water, forests, and habitat;
- A mutual fund that pays dividends to all Americans - one person, one share;
- A trust fund that provides start-up capital to every child;
- A risk-sharing pool for health care that covers everyone;
- A national fund based on copyright fees that supports local arts;
- A limit on the amount of advertising.
In the upgraded capitalist system, corporations would have to pay a commons trust for what they now take or destroy for free. An air trust, for example, would charge for every molecule of carbon dioxide or other pollutants discharged by industry. Half of the funds collected would go toward maintaining and improving the atmosphere for future generations. The other half would be distributed in yearly dividends to each citizen, much as the Alaska Permanent Fund functions in that state. Trusts for other commons assets would be similar, their primary and over-riding responsibility being to future generations. Written into the equation is that when push comes to shove, the commons always trumps capital.
To jump-start this new version of capitalism, the state would assign rights to the commons in what Barnes calls "propertizing" - as clearly opposed to "privatizing." Once a commons asset has property rights, corporations must pay for its use [or for damaging it], whether of water, air, soil, brainwaves [through advertising], or airwaves. Capitalism 3.0 is a step by step manual for making this vital transition smoothly and relatively painlessly.
Barnes's proposal is so far-reaching that even those who couldn't care less about climate or pollution will find something to applaud - for example, his ingenious idea to limit corporate trespass on our minds. "Children in America see, on average, one hundred thousand television ads by age five; before they die they'll see another two million," he writes. "In 2002, marketers unleashed eighty-seven billion pieces of junk mail, fifty-one billion telemarketing calls, and eighty-four billion pieces of email spam."
What advertisers assert to be free speech, we experience as mental trespass, Barnes adds, pointing out that "every neuro-minute occupied by an ad is one less neuro-minute available for our own thoughts and feelings. Every ad thus has an opportunity cost, a cost we experience but advertisers don't pay."
Capitalism 3.0 would manage advertising as it would manage physical pollution. "If corporations want to pollute our minds, they'd have to pay for the right to do so," Barnes says. A trust would set caps on total trespasses on our "inner commons," selling tradable advertising permits to corporations. "Our psychic costs would then show up as advertisers' monetary costs. There'd be less advertising, more peace of mind, and if we so earmarked the revenue, more money for commercial-free broadcasting and the arts." Furthermore, he emphasizes, "if we dampened an overheated economy by lowering the volume of advertising, we'd get the benefits of higher interest rates without the pain. In fact, households might save money by buying less."
Think about it. How much useless stuff would never get made, how much pollution never happen, if advertising were no longer free to con people into buying what they don't need. Wow!
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Hell and High Water: Global Warming - the Solution and the Politics - and What We Should Do, by Joseph Romm, 2007. William Morrow, $24.95, hardcover.
One hundred forty years ago, Lucretia Peabody Hale's chronicles of the fictional Peterkin family gently satirized unbounded faith in science and technology to fix all our mistakes. When Mrs. Peterkin puts salt in her coffee instead of sugar, the family consults a chemist, who adds chorate of potassium to her cup, then bichlorate of magnesia, then hypersulphate of lime, ammonia, and in succession oxalic, cyanic, acetic, phosphoric, chloric, hyperchloric, sulphuric, baracic, silicic, nitric, formic, nitrous, nitric, and carbonic acids. When this appalling brew fails to improve the coffee, the chemist adds calcium, aluminum, barium, strontium, bitumen, and even a little arsenic, followed by belladonna and atropine, granulated hydrogen, potash, antimony, and carbon. To everyone's surprise and dismay, the coffee is still undrinkable.
The Peterkins then bring in the local herb-woman, who adds three heaping paragraphs of herbs to the cup, which is now worse than ever. It is getting late in the day and Mrs. Peterkin still hasn't had her cup of coffee. Finally, in desperation, her children - Elizabeth Eliza, Agamemnon (who has been to college), Solomon John, and their unspecified little brothers in india-rubber boots - consult the visiting Lady from Philadelphia. After hearing their tale of woe, she asks, "Why doesn't your mother make a fresh cup of coffee?" At which everyone shouts for joy, wondering "Why didn't we think of that?"
Through such tales, the Peterkins in their day became a household word for avoiding obvious, practical solutions to everyday problems. Today, the issue of global warming has spawned a wealth of classic Peterkin remedies, from denial to delusional hydrogen follies, all promising a continued free lunch with little economic or personal sacrifice. No wise Lady from Philadelphia has yet stated the obvious, but Joseph Romm's Hell and High Water fairly begs for her sensible advice.
Romm, a physicist who headed Clinton's Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, devotes the first part of Hell and High Water to the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming and its devastating consequences. Since the book went to press, daily reports of melting icecaps, extinctions, thawing permafrost, and rising seas unequivocally confirm Romm's gloomy prognosis. In Part Two, he exposes the contrived, false controversy that has hamstrung public discourse and policy on climate change, preventing any action whatsoever. These chapters are an excellent catalogue of the spurious arguments used by the "Denyers and Delayers" to keep the public ignorant and confused about global warming and its causes.
Unfortunately, Romm's remedies for both global warming and political denial do not offer much hope. He urges immediate, massive energy-efficiency legislation by both state and federal governments, the savings from which would pay for development of zero-carbon energy sources such as wind power and carbon sequestration.1 He acknowledges bleakly that effective legislation would require "Two Political Miracles" - first, American conservative leaders accepting climate science, and second, those leaders strongly embracing the very solutions they now spend millions to condemn. The likelihood of such miracles occurring in time to prevent multiple disaster is, as Romm notes, slim to none. By the time droughts and heat waves kill enough thousands and rising oceans swamp enough cities to convince the Denyers, it will be too late to reverse global catastrophe.
Absent strong leaders willing to take necessary action, Romm clings to the faint hope that enough people will become informed - and alarmed - to effect drastic changes in government policy. "This is vastly preferable to waiting for multiple disasters," he urges. "Get informed, get outraged, and then get political."
Despite his heightened alarm and pessimistic outlook, however, Romm stops short of recognizing the key issues of global warming: runaway overpopulation and the insanity of limitless-growth economics. Instead, like Al Gore and too many others, he avoids the ire of religious fanatics and attempts to sweeten a bitter pill for inveterate consumers by suggesting that minor changes in lifestyle, such as hybrid vehicles and carbon-free energy, will somehow enable a ravaged earth to support a projected population of 10.5 billion sustainably and comfortably. While this illusion may make climate science more palatable, its false premise ensures ultimate failure.
Capitalism 3.0, with its practical, feasible remedies for a destructive economic system, is an excellent complement to Romm's dire catalogue of disasters, present and future. Happily, a few brave scientists and political leaders are beginning also to raise the overpopulation issue: a new report by British MPs "challenges world leaders to put the contraceptive pill and the condom at the center of their efforts to alleviate global poverty, tackle starvation, and even help to avert global warming."2 And - stating the obvious with the aplomb of the Peterkins' Lady from Philadelphia -- physicist Fritjof Capra recently urged students that the single most effective thing an individual can do to combat global warming is to choose not to have children.3
The drastic scenarios of Hell and High Water demand no less than drastic remedies.
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1Romm includes both carbon sequestration and nuclear power among the alternatives to fossil fuels, acknowledging that much research remains to be done on sequestration and its feasibility, and that nuclear power is only feasible if serious problems like assuring secure storage of radioactive wastes for tens of thousands of years are resolved. Given that the conditions for safely sequestering carbon dioxide or producing nuclear power safely and efficiently are nowhere near resolution, including them here is somewhat misleading.
2"Birth Rates 'Must Be Curbed to Win War on Global Poverty,'", The Independent UK, Wednesday 31 January 2007.
3 Fritjof Capra, Portland, Oregon lecture, January 18, 2007
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