Capitalism’s disregard for the Environment…..
Jan 2021.
Most of us living a comfortable life and breathing crisp and clean air pre-suppose it as our birth-right and any rumination about Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) functioning are an afterthought, either when we are gluttonizing our car tanks or when a newsflash of some oil spill appears on our omnipresent screens. You will be surprised to know that this birth-right is a very recent luxury and its fragility is important to appreciate. The irony is that many of the Ayn Rand sheeples have no inkling, or they conveniently ignore, that it’s the government that over the years has policed against the know-it-all private enterprises to ensure that we get to breathe the much adored crisp and clean air.
It was President Nixon whose ‘Reorganization Plan №3’ issued in July 1970 officially established the EPA on 2nd December 1970. The mission of EPA is to protect human health by safeguarding the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land on which we live. It wasn’t that Nixon had an epiphany or this was on his electoral agenda, rather it was the weight of the social movements, devastations and health crises as an aftermath of the second industrial revolution that led to the EPA legislation. Nevertheless, Nixon did what was right. Donald Trump copied President Nixon’s supervisory tactics in many ways, to delegitimize the executive norms and faith in democratic institutions, but not in the case of environmental regulations!! In this area, like many others, the Trump presidency rolled back regulations that Obama presidency tightened. Trump rolled-back nearly 100 regulations that govern clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. It sounds Hippocratic when the world’s richest nation claims regulatory burden as the reason for rolling back these regulations and then have an audacity to state on the EPA website that “we are returning the agency to its core mission: Providing cleaner air, water and land to the American people”!!!
History of Environmental Regulation:
The patent of the steam engine “Puffer Devil” by Richard Trevithick in 1802 was an early event in the US industrial revolution that started the mass consumption of fossil fuel. Prior to the advent of the fossil fuel based economy, the industrialization was indeed environmentally friendly, powered by water and horses. Following the lead from Europe’s technological advancement in late 18th century, American inventors and entrepreneurs created a second industrialization wave that increased automation and productivity in mass transportation, heavy machinery, metallurgy and textiles.
The invention of water-mill and subsequently the steam-engine triggered mass industrialization that transformed the agro-economy to the machine based manufacturing. The labor requirements lead to large migration of population from villages into the industrial city centers of Pittsburg, Chicago, St. Louis and New York which soon became over-crowded leading to unsanitary conditions. Untreated human waste was a major environmental hazard because the rapidly growing cities lacked appropriate sanitation and sewer systems. This led to contamination of ground-water that swelled into the drinking water sources causing frequent outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. These factories were powered by steam engines fueled by Anthracite which was abundantly available in the regions of Pennsylvania. The consumption of immense quantities of coal contributed gravely towards the air-pollution and the unregulated discharge of the slurry had a catastrophic effect on land and water pollution.
In 1832, New York experienced a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 1% of the city’s poor workers who lived in squalid conditions. In today’s NYC, this would amount to 90,000 people!! The worker migrants started to flee the city and the rich capitalists who were immune to such squalid conditions and distant from the conditions of the poor kept ascribing the cause to the poor. London saw a similar outbreak in 1849 that killed 10,000 people in 3 months. But, the attraction of a higher living wage was stronger than the repulsion of the epidemics, so the worker population of cities kept inflating even though the poor kept dying. In 1865, New York City sanitary survey reports a death rate of 33 per 1000, which was much above the death rates observed in London or Philadelphia. These putrid conditions caused by the industrial revolution are well documented in the writings of Dickens, Victor Hugo (in Les Miserables) and by Martin Scorcese in his film ‘Gangs of New York’. Finally in 1866, after Dr Snow’s theory of epidemiology proved the relationship between infected water and cholera, the Metropolitan board of Health was established in NYC with doctors in control and with the goal of cleaning up the cities. Aqueducts were built to supply water from the lakes to replace infected well water. There was some progress towards cleanliness for the poor but many unconscionable setbacks as well, largely driven by the wealth-divide, examples of which are when in 1867 wealthy members of the Pennsylvania legislature rejected a bill to regulate water pollution; and in 1871 the Great Chicago Fire that razed the squalid quarters of the city.
Over the years, there were many disparate city wide ordinances against the pollutants, starting in 1881 with Chicago ordinance regulating smoke discharge, followed by Cincinnati, Pittsburg and St. Louis but no national policy emerged. The economic progress and the ten-fold increase in the factory-worker’s income compared to an agrarian worker fed the labor-supply for the capitalists and kept the pollution control measures in abeyance. It is difficult, unfortunately to this day, to quantify all the externalities in the economic model which if ignored influences us to make wrong decisions, and in the case of deleterious effects of pollution there is an extra layer of uncertainty because of the stochastic outcome on health. Hence, keeping pollution control in abeyance helped the capitalists avoid any cost increases for a burden they did not want to bear. By the mid-nineteenth century, the pollution had become so severe that scientists started to deliberate its impact on the atmosphere. In 1859, John Tyndall explained the warming of earth due to water-vapor, methane and carbon-dioxide (now known as Green House Gases). In 1896, a noble prize winning Swedish physicist turned chemist Svante Arrhenius (known as the Father of climate change science) built upon the works of Joseph Fourier and John Tyndall in measuring carbon in the atmosphere and empirically proved that doubling the concentration of carbon would increase the earth’s temperature by 5 degree Celsius. Based on his observation of the rate of industrialization, Arrhenius estimated that human activity would increase the CO2 concentration by 50% in 3000 years. Alas, modern measurements proved him wrong in that CO2 concentration increased by 30% within the 20th century!!
By the early half of the 20th century, legal fights emanated on the Supreme Court’s docket. Even though there were no regulations regarding pollution, the plaintiffs used the ‘common law of nuisance’ as the basis. In 1900, Missouri vs Illinois was regarding water pollution in the Chicago river where the plaintiff (Missouri) lost, but in 1915 Georgia vs Tennesse Copper Co on air pollution the plaintiff won the same legal argument, depicting how views were changing. The WW-I pushed for higher levels of manufacturing and the introduction of Ford Model T added to the pollution woes. In 1928, public health services did a survey in the east coast cities and reported that sunlight was cut by 20–50% in NYC. On the east of the Atlantic, industrialized cities were suffering a similar fate as attested by Claude Monet’s work in 1900, “London, Houses of Parliament, The Sun shining through the Fog”.
Many academics and public health professionals were getting too concerned which gave rise to some fragmented social movements, legal fights in the Supreme Courts and local ordinances that created institutes of public health, national park systems, inspections of working conditions, etc, but none went too far to make businesses accountable for polluting. The major events like WW-I, Great depression and then WW-II forced all countries to invest in job creating and demand satisfying mass production with its health deteriorating impacts again ignored in lieu of capitalist demands.
In Dec 1952, “Killer Fog” hit London causing an estimated 4000–12000 deaths within a week due to respiratory illnesses. It was so bad that the vehicles had to use headlamps in broad daylight and the guide had to walk in front of the bus!!!. In 1953, New York smog killed nearly 200 people. In Oct 1954, heavy smog conditions shut down industries and schools in LA county for nearly a month. Rachel Carson, a birdwatcher, discovered that heavy use of pesticides was killing off birds and making forests “silent” and in September 1962 she published a book called ‘Silent Spring’ that jumpstarted an environmental movement. By June 1969, the Cuyahoga river in Ohio became so polluted that it catches fire.
Formation of EPA:
Nearly 170 years after the invention of ‘Puffer Devil’ and countless lives, millions suffering from respiratory illnesses, history took a turn for better when the Cuyahoga river fire prompted President Nixon to sign NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) on Jan 1, 1970. It was an event that would start changing the quality of life for millions. The US congress authorized EPA to set, implement and monitor national air-quality, auto-emission and anti-pollution standards which successfully led to limiting the exhaust of sulfur-dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons, initiated fuel-economy testing in vehicles, a ban on lead based paints in 1971, a ban on DDT in 1972, the invention of catalytic converter in 1973, prevention of chemical dumping in oceans, and initiated investments in waste water management. The EPA also banned known cancer-causing chemicals that were found to be in 75% of America’s dairy and meat products, phased out asbestos, CFCs and PCBs. It is estimated that in the following 20 years, the clean air act prevented more than 200,000 premature deaths.
Over the next 45 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, EPA would amend and enhance the ‘Clean Water Act’ 3 times, the ‘Safe Drinking Water Act’ 4 times, the ‘Clean Air Act’ 6 times, and the ‘Air Pollution Standards’ 4 times to make them more robust, transparent, stringent and enhanced as new science would unravel the underlying causes of pollution and its hidden impact on human lives. In 2009 under Obama administration, after 113 years since Arrhenius explained the warming planet due to pollution, EPA finally announced that GHG (Green House Gases) threaten the health and welfare of American people and thus can be controlled under the ‘Clean Air Act’, and goes on to stipulate stringent smog standards and GHG standards for buses, trucks and geological sequestration industries, the largest contributors of all. In 2012, they enforced stringent carbon pollution standards for power plants, reduction of VOC (volatile organic compounds) in Oil and Natural Gas drilling that reduced releasing of cancer causing toxins and methane, and increased the fuel efficiency standards expected to save nearly 12 billion barrels of oil at the pump. The know it all private enterprises were forced to clean up their acts and invested heavily in new technologies that enhanced vehicle fuel-efficiencies and anti-pollution devices. As a result, America’s air, land and water were becoming cleaner. The American vehicles were becoming competitive once again in the global marketplace, so much so that when Trump rescinded the Obama era legislation on fuel economy standards, General Motors announced that they would continue to reach for the higher targets. Reagan was once again proven wrong that government was the problem.
Impact to the Climate:
In its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world, concluded there’s a more than 95 percent probability that human activities have warmed our planet. For past 1 million years, the atmospheric CO2 never went above 280 ppm (parts per million), but due to the industrial activities since second industrial revolution, the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen to 414 ppm. The result has been devastating to the planet. Per NASA, in the last 50 years the average surface temperature has risen by 1.18 degree celsius with oceanic temperature increase of 0.33 degree celsius causing changes in oceanic currents, weather patterns, oceanic acidification and extinguishing marine ecology. NASA measured that between 1993 and 2019, Greenland lost 279 billion tons and Antarctica lost 148 billion tons of ice per year. The global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last century and this rate is increasing.
The NASA’s meterological research predicts that each region will have a differing impact, however, the trend will be that the heat waves, droughts and hurricanes will become more intense, heavier rainfalls and flooding are to be expected and the average snowfall will reduce. This will compromise agriculture and fisheries, increased diseases to flora and fauna, and reduction in the fresh-water supply for drinking. These changes will cause drastic sociological churn. This is not bogus science because the know it all private enterprises, insurance companies in this case whose business model risk is directly tied to these natural devastations, have started to exit the markets that are prone to these risks.
Impact to People Health:
Particulate Matter(PM)2.5 air-pollution is the deadliest form across the world and is predominantly a result of fossil-fuel combustion from vehicles and industries. It is the primary cause of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder), TB, strokes and heart-attacks. The PM cuts global average life expectancy by 2 years, greater than smoking, alcohol, sanitation, HIV and all other causes. In the US, majority of the population now lives in areas that comply to WHO guidelines on this pollutant. This was possible because of the efforts of EPA which was able to turnaround major industrial cities in the US from the “smoke capitals of the world” to one of the cleanest major cities. However under Trump, the EPA loosened the smog standards reversing the hard fought progress from last 150 years just to appease his capitalist supporters from the fossil-fuel industries.
Walk-Away With….
We must heed to the science, accept the shortcomings of capitalism, and shy away from crony-capitalism if we want to lead long, happy and healthy life and leave a habitable planet for our progeny. If anything the history has taught us, its that legislation is required to keep the devastating forces in check and that free-market and the capitalist society by itself does not necessarily place any priority on the quality of life. Measuring success by the stock market indices is a corrupt notion because it does not account for all the externalities.
We must appreciate the importance of agencies like EPA and the tremendous leadership it has demonstrated over the last 50 years in moving the trajectory of this country and the world away from millions of preventable deaths due to respiratory and cancer illnesses, something that the free-market failed to correct, as the history demonstrated. Now it has to lead the world against the climate change crises which is again a by-product of uncontrolled capitalism. The legislative framework is necessitated to balance that control.
** All statistics sourced from environmentalhistory.org, nasa.gov, epa.gov, AQLI.uchicago.edu