Save the environment - ditch capitalism

From the "Bleedin' obvious facts that have to be repeated" department comes a fine article in the Grauniad which reminds us that capitalism is inherently environmentally destructive:

"Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet." ("It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both." Robert Newman, Guardian, 2/2/06)

So what's new, doc? The Left has known this for donkey's years, going back to the Industrial Revolution. The essence of capitalism is growth - no growth, no capitalism. A company that doesn't expand will be destroyed or taken over by its competitors, so all companies have to strive for growth for survival. Your CEO and Board might be dyed-in-the-wool greenies, but if you don't compete then your company will be screwed by the market and the shareholders will demand your heads. No matter how right-on a company's Board might be, no matter how Ben & Jerry's or Body Shop, a corporation's gotta do what a corporation's gotta do or go under. As growth is dependent on non-finite energy and resource supplies, capitalism necessarily requires non-sustainable abstraction of finite natural resources, all the while carrying on a consensual hallucination that, for all practical purposes, they're infinite.

This isn't a matter of 'evil' selfish businesspeople raping the planet, but simply the inbuilt logic of capitalism. This is not what liberals want to hear. To them, there are good and bad capitalists, and if only those on the side of the angels - Roddick, Branson et al - could gain the ascendancy over those environment-despoiling worker-exploiting Nikes and MacDonalds and Essos the planet could be saved from global warming, environmental pollution, rainforest destruction, and resource depletion, and led into a sustainable low-growth Nirvana.

So it never hurts to restate the bleedin' obvious - that capitalism fucks you and the planet up - as this simple fact can get easily lost amongst spin and Spectacle (witness the 'greening' of BP). It certainly needs restating in liberal newspapers, to force their readerships to confront what to many will be an ugly truth:

"You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both."

The corollary of which is that liberalism, as the ideology of capitalism, is not consistent with Greenery.