Turn on cable news at any given moment and chances are good you'll be hearing about either immigration or record gas prices. It occurred to me that although you'd never know it from watching corporate media, these two issues have much more in common than you think, and their causal link goes back hundreds of years and can be summed up in a single word: <b>growth</b>. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I want to talk about global warming.

Let's start with the basics. The worldwide industrial infrastructure is dependent on polluting fuels like gasoline and writing off the effects of that pollution. Only 40% of America's gas goes toward filling up vehicles at the pump; the majority of gasoline is used in other industrial manufacturing. Now, gas prices are at an all-time high and show no sigs of retreating; petroleum is only getting more energy-intensive and dangerous to extract.

The incremental progress called for with intergovernmental solutions like the Kyoto treaty isn't just too little, too late; it gives us the impression that we can do enough to stop global warming without substantial lifestyle and industrial changes. We may have already reached a tipping point in global warming. No environmental proposal being considered by any government has a goal of reducing the actual amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, only reducing the rate at which we are adding to them.

Lately, I've been reading a lot about environmental catasprophes and global warming, because as part of some research for a book I'm trying to write, I checked out Jared Diamond's Collapse from the library.
It turns out that when people overharvest natural resources, shit happens, and this shit ranges from civil war to cannibalism to societal extinction, usually in that order. But the unifying factor in all of the collapses mentioned in the book is that each dying society (e.g., Easter Island, the Greenland Vikings, the Anasazi) overconsumed their available resources.
Now, the greatest impediment to successful implementation of environmental policies in any country has always been the perception of an underlying conflict between the environment and the economy. You've seen the talking heads line up on television–concerned lefty environmentalist saying we need to be environmentally responsible at all costs, arrogant conservative saying the cost to business would cripple our economy and calling the other camp Chicken Littles. The problem is, both sides are right about why the other camp is wrong, and the tragedy doesn't stop there.

For example, let's look at recycling, because it perfectly illustrates the issues involved. A while ago, Penn & Teller's Bullshit (of which I am a huge fan) did an episode on recycling, where they claimed, with characteristic libertarian skepticism, that recycling was actually bad for the environment and amounted to a huge scam. They relied heavily on the works of one Daniel K. Benjamin, who wrote "The Eight Great Myths of Recycling" and the Cato and Competetive Enterprise Institutes, libertarian think tanks notorious for bending other people's scientific studies to their market-driven libertarian wills. The show decries recycling as a feel-good activity which does more harm than good.

P & T's major beef with recycling, and the only one which stands up to scietific scrutiny, is the fact that it costs three times as much to recycle trash than to simply throw it away in a landfill, and he seems particularly agitated at the thought that recycling is mandated and subsidized by the governent. When recycling workers and proponents bring up the point that the extra money being spent on recycling is good for the economy, Penn shouts that recycling workers are doing "unnecessary, shitty, make-work jobs," presumably as opposed to healthy, comfortable miners and paper-mill workers who face no risk of lung disease, cancer, asthma, nerve damage, retardation, or death by cost-saving safety rollbacks.

The episode also claimed that recycling costs more energy than it saves, contrary to the often quoted statistics from the EPA which assign huge energy savings to recycling as opposed to virgin extraction. The discrepancy is a bit of (appropriately enough) sleight-of-hand: when Penn says,
"It takes more energy to recycle a plastic bottle than to make a new one" he's ignoring the costs of extracting, transporting, and refining petroleum and converting it into virgin plastic. Similarly, capitalism depends on exluding the costs and hazards of waste disposal as "externalities," making the true costs of production disappear from the purchase price.

And this brings me back to the point of this essay (and it's a good thing, too, because I could go on and on about the problems with the anti-recycling claims made in that episode). Benjamin and company make some good points about the efficiency of the recycling industry, because much of the machinery the industry relies on is fossil-fueled and contributes to pollution even while saving other resources.

Now, speaking of gasoline (as I've been trying to do for several paragraphs but not quite succeeding), a perfect example of an actual feel-good/do-little problem is the phenomenon of the hybrid car.

As we all know, the average gas mileage of American cars has been steadily dropping for the past twenty years, since the end of the 1970s politically motivated oil crisis. With the introduction of the SUV, which was expressly designed for the purpose of guzzling more gas than government fuel efficiency standards had allowed for passenger cars. The average mileage for American cars has declined to about 20 miles per gallon. (The Bush administration raised CAFE standards for SUVs by about 1-2 mpg last year for 2011 models, a move widely hailed by environmental groups as not going nearly far enough.)

There are two major reasons for this; we pay less for gas than any other industrialized country, and we are addicted to more horsepower. The auto-industry shills will bring up the canard that increasing CAFE standards makes for unsafe vehicles (because of the decreased weight of the resulting cars). Of course, the weight of the vehicle isn't going to help you if there are no safety features like seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones, which are much more important towards keeping consumers alive. Keeping vehicles "safe" by increasing the weight of the car is the worst way to do it because you just make the cars deadlier for anyone they hit, regardless of the safety of the people inside the thing.

Along comes the hybrid car, which, don't get me wrong, is a great engineering idea, but has little practical benefit when it comes to reducing actual consumption relative to the rest of the world. A hybrid might get comparable mileage to a car with two fewer cylinders, but the Prius, for example, gets worse mileage than any European-manufactured compact car. Buying a hybrid vehicle is almost, but not quite, an offset for the increased fuel consumption of the supremely powerful needs of Western consumers. It makes us think that a small increase in efficiency can make up for our incredible consumption. But if we had all kept driving the smaller cars people bought during the 1970s gas crisis, we could have dramatically lowered fuel consumption. It reminds me of the tobacco companies who spend more money promoting their charitable donations than the actual charity itself.
Hopefully, you're noticing a theme here. Our economy is sustained by externalizing–the developed world is inside the SUV and the rest of the world is outside. And it's not like we care about emissions or accidents or the implications of our gas guzzling; our economy needs the horsepower! And the truth of it is that there is no way that the present renewable energy technology can supply a world full of first-class energy consumers like those of us who maintain American-style consumption. We use 24.4 barrels of oil a year per capita. Over 40% of the autos sold in the U.S. are SUVs. The rest of the world coming even halfway towards our levels of consumption and emission would unquestionably melt the icecaps.

Even if we had been getting a worldwide average of 40 miles to the gallon, the fact that we consume so much leaves us with no means to undo the damage we have done to the environment. As I said before, we have no hope, under the current economic program, of reducing global warming, only of slowing down the rate at which we are making it worse.

It isn't that our economy couldn't support more economic regulation (which it could) or that environmental efficiency isn't good for business (it is), or even that the transition costs to a so-called 'carbon-neutral' economy wouldn't create jobs (it would, even in the developed world); we lack the political will to change our way of life in time. Instead, we have increased interest in half-measures (like Kyoto), but so far, no radical solutions to the radical threat faced by climate change.

The tide may have turned, however, in the United Kingdom. An article on ZNet entitled "From A Dying Planet –
The Media's Aversion To Addressing The Juggernaut of Economic 'Growth'" caught my eye a while ago. It details a British Government report on global warming which draws some shocking conclusions:

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Colin Challen, the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, sets out the case for abandoning the "business as usual" pursuit of economic growth, which has been the basis of Western economic policy for two hundred years.

…

Note, however, that 'growth' should be placed in inverted commas because standard measures of economic activity externalise – in plain terms, ignore – the often enormous attendant environmental and social costs. As Colin Challen warned:

"No amount of economic growth is going to pay for the cost of the damage caused by a new and unstable climate."

[Michael] McCarthy expanded: "the pursuit of growth, which essentially has not changed since Victorian times, is misleading, and the terms need to be redefined. Instead, we need a different policy which looks at how much carbon we can afford to emit."
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The central tenet of capitalist faith–that growth is good in and of itself–relies on externalizing the consequences of that growth, not to mention the fact that it assumes there is no practical limit to which wealth can be extracted from the earth. In the case of gasoline, oil companies are making record profits based on record demands for their product, which will only increase, no matter how many hybrid SUV getting 24 miles to the gallon Americans might buy in 2011. The only thing which has spared us total global environmental catastrophe is the incredible poverty to which we have reduced the rest of the world in our quest for resources and cheap labor.

Immanuel Wallerstein (about whose work I have written before) described the method by which the 'developed nations' dependended on impoverishing the rest of the world to create their relatively fantastic wealth. His work is called 'World Systems theory,' and it constructs a three-tiered network of 'core', 'semi-periphery' and 'periphery' in the international economic system. You can read more about the theory here, but the one sentence summary I'll give here is that developed countries needed to export the awful working conditions of the industrial revolution to developing countries in order to maintain capitalism. The wealth of these often resource poor developed countries is built on the exploitation of less developed but resource-rich countries.

The 'money quote' from the ZMag article I mentioned above is this (empahsis mine):
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"We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world's resources. <b>Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.</b>

"Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world."
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Whether you recognize the history of colonialism as genocidal itself, it is clear that the wealth of Europe was built on the booty of its colonies. It's a familiar story; in order to satisfy the demand for growth (and free-market types will always assume that economic growth, rather than redistribution, is the only morally right way to better the lot of the non-rich), rich countries decided to take what they needed from others, consequences be damned.

And it is this institutionalized pursuit of growth and wealth that leads me to the second issue I had promised (so long ago, it seems) to address here: immigration.

As the developed world impoverished the rest of the world, it became inevitable that people would flood follow the flow of resources established by colonialism (and in the case of the United States, our particular flavor of neo-colonialism). Colonialism, the building block of the fortunes of the north, leads to immigration. A multicultural society may not have been the intended consequence of the race for world domination, but then again, history is replete with unintended consequences. Speaking of the Third Reich, it's doubtful that Hitler thought he would end up being the liberator of Africa (and India) from the Allies' colonial rule, but nonetheless World War II touched off an irreversible tide of postcolonialism. Likewise, a new wave of immigration to Europe was touched off by the demand sof rebuilding a ruined economy, and so the periphery returned the favor of invasion, one low-paid worker at a time.

As we look at the devastating impact of the pursuit of growth, we can't help wonder if the tide is reversible. Can industrialized nations, whose wealth is built on the exploitation of natural resources and people both at home and abroad, reverse the backlash which inevitably follows, whether it is a rising tide of immgrants or the sea itself?
For those who concern themselves with these consequences (although they seldom realize it, the question becomes, Can we give it back? The answer is that we couldn't, even if we wanted.

Those who sound the racist alarm about the "immigration crisis," no matter which country they're in, would scarcely conceive of regaining national racial purity by renouncing the benefits of racist exploitation. What you get instead are people like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson:
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Fox News' John Gibson again responded to criticism of his comments that advised his viewers to "[d]o your duty" and "[m]ake more babies," before citing a report that found that nearly half of all children under the age of 5 in the United States are minorities.

…I said people in this country should make more babies, particularly those groups whose birth rates are not as high as others. Why? Because we see what is happening in Europe. … [W]hen people stop having babies … populations cease being self-sustaining, end up filling population gaps with immigrants who then make demands on the culture the homies might not like, such as demands for Sharia law in some parts of Europe."
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You have to wonder which concerns besides outright racism actually motivate supporters of otherwise free-market policies want to restrict the free flow of people as well as money (the libertarian Cato Institute is notably pro-immigration). Businesses love illegal immigration because they need ways to lower wages (and subvert minimum-wage laws), and it makes screwing with their employees easier if they know illegals can't complain about their treatment. All of which is supposedly good for economic growth, you see.

I mentioned Diamond's "Collapse" way back in the beginning of this post, and I want to remind you, dear reader, of one of the important lessons from collapsed societies. The wider the disparity of elites from the rest of the population, the less able they are to recognize (or desire to implement) the crucial measures that would have been necessary to save their civilizations. What they did, in Diamond's words, was to "buy themselves the privelege of dying last." As the elites sequester themselves in gated community and SUVs (which, as my friend Sherwin noted, are like gated communities on wheels), the less able and willing they become to save anyone else, whether it is the victims of auto accidents or catastrophic climate change.

The consensus that we can maintain our levels of consumption and growth is slowly beginning to crack. Even if we assume that fossil fuel consumption has reached its saturation point in the US (which I cannot), when the rest of the world catches up to us there's going to be hell to pay unless we build a sustainable path to economic development. And whether the developed world betters their living standards by moving to the developed world or developing their home countries, it is clear that they cannot do it the way we did.