Who are Progressive Environmentalists?
The traditional
environmental movement has basic core principles, and one of them, is that
there are limits to growth. This idea is embodied in several books,
particularly one first published in 1972. The
Limits to Growth was written by Donnella Meadows and others. Among
environmentalists and policymakers, this book is highly regarded as one of its
kind in the field. It used computer scenarios to predict population and
economic growth in the twenty-first century, and what impact it would have on
the planet. As the title states, the planet only has a finite amount of
resources from which humans can utilize, and as you can imagine it, we are very
near that limit according to Meadows et al.
This notion of
realistic limits to growth has been a fundamental component of
environmentalists today and it is one in which many outside the field have come
into realization today. However, there are individuals now dubbed Progressive Environmentalists who argue
that there is no limit to growth, and if there is, we are very far from
reaching it anytime soon. Among these Progressive Environmentalists are Ted Nordhaus
and Michael Shellenberger who founded the Breakthrough
Institute, which is dedicated to modernizing “liberal-progressive-green-politics.”
While Nordhaus and
Shellenberger are true environmentalists – since they do not reject climate
change as environmental skeptics do – they have a different approach to solving
today’s environmental problems. Their main argument is that capitalism at its
finest – continued growth off the planet’s resources – is better than slowing
growth for the purposes of alleviating the environment of its stresses. Bill
Blackwater of the Monthly Review
website states in summary of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s point of view that “while
energy efficiency fails to be good for the environment because it leads to
economic growth, we should still pursue it because…it leads to economic growth,
and this is good because it will make us richer.”
What the Progressive
Environmentalists fail to realize is that continued economic growth to the rest
of the world to the point that they are at the same consumerist level of the
United States will mean tremendous increases in carbon emissions, more natural
disasters costing more money, and decreases in food productivity. The Limits to
Growth displays our limits to all aspects of our planet, and not just a few
that we can ignore in favor of continued and unsustainable economic growth as
championed by the Breakthrough Institute and its members.
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