The difficulties of solving environmental issues

This Science Saturday takes a look at the complexity of environmental politics. Charlie Keeble explains the situation of why environmental issues are difficult to resolve and the underlying concepts that reveal a spectrum of environmental politics.

Environmental issues are some of the most difficult to solve, which have become self-evident by the way that some social actors believe that they have a stronger cause than others. In the years that I have studied and responded to these issues there has been conflicting interests over the objects and ecosystems of a dynamic planet that we live on. Some people value nature for it’s instrumental uses and some value nature for intrinsic purposes. So the question we must ask ourselves is what should be valued in the environment?

In my experience reading about climate and environmental studies I have explored many aspects of environmental issues. What I found is that the reason why we the living beings of this planet are struggling to solve problems like climate change and an energy crisis is because of divisions between environmental activists and thinkers. Such as the way they argue over things like defending seaside towns from coastal erosion using natural defences like salt marsh, or building sea walls to protect the town from falling into the sea. Should we value human life more or less than other species or let nature take its course and rebuild the town in another place?

In environmental politics there is a spectrum of ideas similar to the spectrum of political diversity. At one end of the eco-spectrum are light greens and at the other end are dark greens. The people that have agency and power in this arena use a clash of ideas to see if they can determine which aspect of nature has more value in order to achieve social change.

The system of environmental politics as shown here in this table tells us that they each have their own concepts and values that those with power and human agency favour the most. They can be explored with an interdisciplinary view in see what they can achieve for society. In training to become a scientist I have to investigate and analyse these things usingan interdisciplinary approach to all the fields of science. In this case I use natural sciences, social sciences, engineeringsolutions, and political science to determine what makes up the complexity of the challenges we face. Every political actoruses environmental issues to their own desires depending on their agenda. Some use them objectively like light greens doand some use them for domination like dark greens do. 

You have probably seen political parties support climate policies that makes them look like they are not in line with their philosophies. The Conservative Party has been pushing a net zero agenda that involves promoting sustainable growthbut it is anti-business. The Labour Party have been pushing for a green agenda that is very industrially regressive and makes people more impoverished. This battle of ideas for climate and environmental protection is being fought for it’s control between visionary technologists and irrational primitive.

As a conservative myself I am in line with the light green ideas because I support free market capitalism with an emphasis on creative freedom and relying on individualsinventing technology to change the world for the better. I have engaged in discourse and networking with other people like this at the Conservative Environment Network. Human civilisation needs constructive ideas and more people that will come to build this can make a society that is diversely energetic with hydrogen cars, nuclear powered electricity, oilproduced methane and natural gas for heating our homes. When these energy companies compete with each other to provide the best energy supply to their customers they work to be efficient and cost effective to provide a good and fair service for ordinary people.

Such action like his can be beneficial to the world’s energy production. It could remove the prisoner’s dilemma that the Western consumer countries have with the OPEC nations. OPEC is the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a multination organisation of oil producing countries that have also got majority shares in oil companies drilling oil in theMiddle East and North Africa. OPEC countries have made attempts since the 1960s and 70s to control Western foreign policy towards the Middle East using their control of the world’s biggest oil wells as bargaining leverage. But this backfired on OPEC when they realised that since the decadent capitalist West were important customers to keep them rich,they were interdependent of each other. So we are in effect locked into an agreement with them in which we have to be on good terms to secure world peace and economic prosperity.

This prisoner’s dilemma that we with have with OPEC has meant the environmental advocates have become stuck in a crisis. If they make a move to rid the world of oil completely they could create untold devastation and defeat their own purpose. Instead of ridding the world of fossil fuels completely they should innovate to improve technology that is clean, cost-effective, energy efficient and can power a green industrial revolution. So far they have struggled to scale them up to the size and power required to replace fossil fuels outright. Mostly because a majority of environmental advocates are propagating their ideology blindly instead of going into inventing sheds and building the machines they require for this utopia. 

Eco-capitalism can also be good for promoting the wellbeing and conservation of nature when it’s used instrumentally. There is an algorithm that contributes to the economic and conservation of nature called the Total Economic Value, and when calculated it produces a cost-benefit analysis of the all the environmental goods. Examples include the protection of species for intrinsic non-use values and instrumental use values for observation by visitors to national parks. Like theintroduction and breeding of red squirrels in England to prevent them from extinction and creating places that people can observe them so that nature parks can profit from theirwildlife conservation work.

Dark greens prefer intrinsic uses of nature in which sites ofnatural interest are rewilded with animals and kept completely free of human interventions. Even if those animals are likely to disrupt instrumental ecosystems where the animals stray into areas that can cause infections to other animals or damage crops. Like the way badgers cause bovine tuberculosis to cows which ruins the milk they produce. This situation was highlighted in Amazon Prime’s Clarkson’s Farm where Jeremy Clarkson found himself constantly frustrated and undermined by bureaucracy and high operating costs to run his farm. The show highlights the difficulties in which farmers in Britain struggle to turn a profit that undermine Britain’s food independence at the satisfaction of condescending dark green advocates.

This creates an enforced burden on farmers that frustrates and ruins their industry and can create an artificial famine, as demonstrated by Stalin during his reign of terror in the 1930s. The Soviet leader introduced polices that completely ruined the agriculture of Russia which included the collectivisation of farming which spoiled and plundered the crops that led to the Holodomor in Ukraine. Stalin wanted to completely industrialise the output of the crops through political order instead of subsidising the farmers to upgrade their operations.However in these modern times dark greens have got an anti-industrial agenda and want to apply social eugenics to condemn nations to the squalor and misery of pre-industrial subsistence.

Science and technology has a long history of being instrumental to politics and business in constructive and destructive ways. Throughout the ages and in different places there have been examples of people wanting to make use of innovative ideas for their own personal self interests. Some of them change the world for improving human civilisation and some of them endangering human life. Environmental science is a terrific display of this endeavour and it shows in the way that powerful actors use their agency to battle for the claim that they believe what objects and systems have the greatest value in society that they must be preserved and what are so burdensome that they must be destroyed. 

Such groups of people appear very dominate in environmental politics where the science of nature is subverted to serve a political actor or order. In 1970s when the green movement began the environmentalists were not as polarised as they are now into light greens and dark greens. They were visionaries who were excited about the potential for green technology but they were also cautious about what kind of environmental and technological dangers could happen. 

But now in the words of former Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore his organization was “hijacked’ by the political left when they realized there was money and power in the environmental movement. [Left-leaning] political activists in North America and Europe changed Greenpeace from a science-based organization to a political fundraising organization”.

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