Political Economy of the Environment: A Conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics Co-sponsored by New Politics

A Conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics

Co-sponsored by New Politics

St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY • Saturday, October 5, 2013

Call for Workshop Presentations

If you would like to make a workshop presentation related to the theme of this conference, please send an email to the URPE National Office at urpe@labornet.org.

We are living in a period of increasing environmental crisis and growing inequalities within and between the countries of the world. The obstacles to sustainable development and the equitable distribution of the products of our labor lie in the ways in which our political economic system operates. The necessary technology is already available, and the resources required to end the use of fossil fuels, for example, exist. But multinational corporations, and the governments they control, base their decisions on the maximization of profits, not on the well-being of the world’s people. Understanding and challenging capitalism is therefore essential for the building of local, national and international environmental movements.

The goal of this conference is both to clarify areas of agreement among progressive environmental activists and to promote friendly discussion of disagreements. Thus we would like the plenaries and workshops of the conference to address questions such as the following:

• What would a sustainable and just future look like? 
• What short-run reforms, if any, can enable us to survive the climate crisis until fundamental change can be achieved? 
• Would sustainable development necessitate a reduction in living standards? 
• What have been the main successes of environmental movements and how were they achieved? 
• How do we promote environmental justice, making sure that environmental movements in the US address the specific concerns of African American and Latino/a communities? 
• Is there a conflict between the environmental movement and the labor movement? 
• How are people in the US and other countries responding to the challenge of fracking? 
• How do we assess the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the Copenhagen summit fail? 
• How should we address hazardous waste disposal -- locally, nationally, and internationally? 
• What are the relative merits of carbon taxes and tradable carbon-emission permits as ways of reducing worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases? 
• What are “green taxes” and how could the imposition of taxes on pollutants be made “revenue neutral” or used to make a tax system more progressive? 
• Does environmental regulation result in the loss of jobs, the creation of jobs, or is this the wrong question to ask? 
• How does the changing balance of international power, such as the rise of the BRICS, affect the prospects for reducing environmental damage? 

For updates on the conference program, please visit the program page. For a flyer announcing this call for workshops, click here.

Human Drivers of Environmental Change

Within the social sciences there is a growing consensus that human social processes, in a dialectical complex interrelationship with the environment, are the primary drivers of destructive ecological change. A broadly shared framework of idiosyncratic ideas and understandings has been formulated to assess the degree to which the genus, and the species, of spatial practices in, the capitalist world-system has ensued prodigious modifications of the global ecosystem. Palpable cognitive perceptions, along with a priori assumptions, of the causes and outcomes concerning the bio-synthetical facets of social organization have been articulated—amplifying intelligible explanations and empirical testing of what perceived biophysical characteristics contribute to environmental transformations.

Competing paradigms regarding human-environment interactions have been constructed. Despite their intellectual fragmentation, these perspectives are materialist in essence, since they elucidate the degree to which the historically specific mode of production, capitalism, depending on its scale in a macro-comparative context, produces world-systemic biospheric transmutations. There is a presupposition that with endless accumulation of capital for the production and realization of surplus value (profits) by way of material inputs, extracted from the physical world, with increasing returns to scale, sets in motion a concomitant process of ecological degradation that cannot be decoupled-the income effect of ‘Jevons Paradox.' The effect, it is purported, depends on the particular geographical dimensions of spatial productive practice, like peripheral industrialization and resource extraction with concomitant core consumption and innovation, producing anthropogenic methane emissions, resting on an acceptance of a so-called fundamental 4th law of thermodynamics.

It is requisite to note, however, that there is no distinct 4th law of thermodynamics that the entire physics profession has missed for 100 years, and has somehow been rediscovered, e.g. by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and unfortunately has since been suppressed. The inherent assumptions concerning the totality of the capitalist mode of production and concomitant environmental degradation are unexamined; yet, they influence the following prevailing theories in environmental sociology:

· Ecological modernization theory, which assumes that the genus of capitalist accumulation spawns an environmental Kuznets curve as an evolutionary universal for any country undergoing economic development

· Treadmill of destruction theory, which assumes increasing levels of pollution due to the aggrandizement of military operations,

· Neo-Malthusian structural ecology theory, which assumes natural supply constraints in the face of expanding capital accumulation,

· Ecological exchange theory, which assumes an environmental load displacement as core countries externalize their pollution costs to the periphery via transnational production.

Parametric specifications, regardless of theoretical induction, and explicit clarifications of the environmental research question are primary. As Tom Murphy on “Elusive Entropy” points out (see here):

An unfortunate conflation of the concepts of entropy and disorder has resulted in widespread misunderstanding of what thermodynamic entropy actually means. And if you want to invoke the gravitas of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you’d better make darned sure you’re talking about thermodynamic entropy—whose connection to order is not as strong as you might be led to believe.

[…] The resulting duplicate use of the term “entropy” in both thermodynamic and informational contexts has created an unfortunate degree of confusion. While they share some properties and mathematical relationships, only one is bound to obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics (can you guess which one?). But this does not stop folks from invoking entropy as a trump card in arguments—usually unchallenged.

Environmental sociology is prone to developing superior understandings into the degree to which human social processes affect the natural world, which, in turn, shape human social processes. Yet, to escape habitual modes of thought and expression and establish un-darkened analytical articulation, it is pertinent that such prevailing paradigms undergo refinement, to enhance their generalizability to the dynamics of capitalist development and its complex interaction with the natural world; in my view, they do not pay sufficient attention to the role of effective demand and the relationship to distribution under the capitalist mode of production (see Sraffian Environmentalism).