Intro to Climate and Sustainability

History of Sustainability II + Collective action problems

Misha Velthuis

m.velthuis@uva.nl

Mon 7 Oct 2024

Today

History of sustainability II

Collective action problems

Hardin

Ostrom

Global strike?

Digital sovereignty

Last week

Two different sources of sustainability thinking

Imperialist

Human control over nature

Flora and fauna mere objects of dispassionate analysis

Arcadian

Restoring coexistence with other organisms

Deep, humble reverence for all living beings

Three sources of critique

Socialist

Friedrich Engels

1820-1885

Social conservatist

Thomas Robert Malthus

1766-1834

Capitalist liberalist

John Stuart Mill

1806-1873

Picking things up where we left them

Roots in the 60s and 70s

New awareness of pollution

Rachel Carson 1907-1964

Environmental disasters

Torrey Canyon oil spill

Santa Barbara oil spill

Social movements

Decolonization

Civil right movement

'68 student protests

Second wave feminism

Not so much big, but influential oil spills

New perspectives: limits to growth

Club of Rome, 1972

Limits to growth

The graph on the slide is echoing Malthus:

Population growth
Resource decline
Deaths increase
And (interestingly): births increase (we will talk more about this in the next session)

Quote from article in de Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper):

'"It was not a left-wing report", says Geert Buelens, a Flemish professor of literature at Utrecht University, who describes the “forgotten green history of 1972” in his book "What we already knew". "It came from the elite. The report was initiated by people coming from Olivetti and Fiat, it was sponsored by Volkswagen. It was anything but left-wing. In response to the report, an exhibition was organized in Rotterdam that was opened by Queen Juliana."'

Original:

‘Het was geen links rapport’, zegt Geert Buelens, een Vlaamse hoogleraar letterkunde aan de Universiteit Utrecht, die in zijn boek Wat we toen al wisten de ‘vergeten groene geschiedenis van 1972’ beschrijft. ‘Het kwam uit de elite. Het rapport was geïnitieerd door mensen die van Olivetti en Fiat kwamen, het werd gesponsord door Volkswagen. Het was allesbehalve links. In Rotterdam werd naar aanleiding van het rapport een tentoonstelling georganiseerd die werd geopend door koningin Juliana.’

Guardian article from 2014, suggesting that the predictions of Limits to growth were turning out to be accurate: link (but it remains unclear how the graphs have been produced, as there appears to be no supporting peer-reviewed work, which basically makes the comparison worthless).

Cowboy vs Spaceship economics

Frontier (cowboy) economics

Spaceship economics

Contemporary cowboy economics?

Embracing the capitalist way out: pushing the frontier.

Wiki on Musk's family

Elon Musk's paternal great-grandmother was a Dutchwoman descended from the Dutch Free Burghers, while one of his maternal great-grandparents came from the Haldimann family in Switzerland. … Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, is a South African former electrical and mechanical engineer consultant and property developer, who was involved in the emerald business at some point in the 1980s, and was a member of the South African Progressive Federal Party.

His maternal grandparents Winnifred Josephine "Wyn" (Fletcher) and Joshua Norman Haldeman were explorers who lived in South Africa and Canada and searched for the Lost City of the Kalahari. Joshua Haldeman was a former director of Technocracy Incorporated and a political activist who ran for the Canadian Parliament on the Social Credit Party ticket, and headed the Canadian branch of the Technocracy movement.

Ideas have causes and effects

Parasitism, predation
enterprise, gregation, service

Gregation

Service

Sustainable development

Primitive/ animal state: British empire

Modern/human state: Nazi Germany

Advanced/ spiritual state: nothing yet

Education in the UK/US, but very different conclusions.

Parasites

At the present time, all national organizations that depend upon colonial production or on exploited labour are Parasitic. The British Opium Trade with China, the British Slave Traffic with Southern States of America, King Leopold's exploitation of the West African Estates, and the dependence of British manu- factures on Indian markets are parasitic in that they spell ruin to their victims.

Gregarious (bees)

The Islamic culture, with its ethnical solidarity and unity, where there is no distinction of colour, White, Black, Red, Brown or Yellow, nor of estate-prince or peasant, is definitely of the Gregarious type. The recent acquisitions to this group are the Nazis and Fascists. These are highly group-conscious, though of a violent type, especially to those outside their circle.

Occasional support for (or mild views of) Nazis in India has to be seen in the context of India's own decolonial struggle against the enemy of the Nazis (the British).

See for example Subhas Chandra Bose (whose affection for Axis powers was at least partly driven by his defiance of British authority (next to probably independent inclinations towards authoritarianism/antisemitism)).

Service

As yet we have not evolved any large social group which can be cited as an example of this order. Though the ancient conception of the Brahmins was an approach to this stage, yet, the modern sect, so

Connections with degrowth?

Rejection of materialism

Christian and Gandhian values of "trusteeship"

Satisfying human needs and challenges

Rooting out socio-economic conflict

The rest of the course

(1) Collective action problems

(1970s)

(2) Ecomodernism

(2010s)

(3) Capitalism and free trade

(90s-2010s)

(4) Degrowth and decolonization

(2020s)

Today: Collective action problems

When the pursuit of short-term narrow self-interest undermines the pursuit of long-term collective interests.

Reception effect

The history of what?

For a renewable resource - soil, forest, fish - the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate of regeneration of its source.

For a nonrenewable resource - fossil fuel, high-grade mineral ores, fossil groundwater - the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate at which a renewable resource, used sustainably, can be substituted for it.

For a pollutant the sustainable rate of emission can be no greater than the rate at which that pollutant can be recycled, absorbed, or rendered harmless in its sink.

Common pool resources

Rival in consumption:

when one person's consumption comes at the expense of another person's consumption

Excludable:

when it is relatively easy to prevent people from consuming the good.

Examples

Private goods: excludable and rival

My shoes

Natural monopolies: Not rival but excludable

Once the cable is there, it doesn't affect my usage if more people make use of it. But it's easy to reserve access to those who pay a subscription.

Public goods: Not rival, not excludable

Me hearing the tornado siren does not affect other people hearing the tornado siren. And it is hard to only make the tornado siren audible for people who paid a subscription.

Common pool resources: rival and not excludable

One person catching a fish prevents some other person from catching that person.
It is difficult to patrol the oceans to prevent people from fishing.

Tragedy of the commons

Imagine a "commons": a piece of land that is owned by some community: anyone can use it (not excludable), but the gras that is eaten by one sheep cannot be eaten by another sheep (rival). In other words: a common pool resource.

Imagine that putting a sheep on the commons gives a certain benefit to the owner of the sheep (wool, milk, meat?). Let's express this as "points".

Read the table like this: if shepherd A puts 1 sheep on the commons, and shepherd B puts 2 sheep, shepherd A earns 3 points, and shepherd B earns 6 points.

It is always in the narrow self-interest of shepherd B to put 2 sheep on the "commons":

If shepherd A puts 1 sheep, it makes more sense for shepherd B to put 2 sheep (6 points) than to also put 1 sheep (5 points).
If shepherd A puts 2 sheep, it makes more sense for shepherd B to put 2 sheep (4 points) than to put 1 sheep (3 points).

Note that:

Putting more than 2 sheep causes the overall total productivity of the commons to decline (2 sheep = 10 points, 3 sheep = 9 points, 4 sheep = 8 points). (Beyond 2 sheep, the damage done by an extra sheep to the commons outweighs the benefit of the extra sheep).
Putting an extra sheep = individual gain, but collective loss.
If shepherd B would show restraint, and would still decide to put 1 sheep, even when shepherd A puts 2 sheep, shepherd A is "free riding" on the restraint of shepherd B.
If everyone choses to "free ride", everyone is worse off.

In-class assignment

Two influential views on CPR management

Garret Hardin (1915-2003)

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

What does Hardin say?

Pollution

Population

Context of "Tragedy of the commons"

How to manage CPRs?

Individual self-interest?

How to manage CPRs?

~~Individual self-interest?~~

Ethics?

How to manage CPRs?

~~Individual self-interest?~~

~~Ethics?~~

Make CPR excludable

Make the costs of free-riding higher than the benefits

In-class assignment

How to manage CPRs?

~~Individual self-interest?~~

~~Ethics?~~

Make CPR excludable

It does not matter how to restrict access, as long as it happens

Break

What does Ostrom say?

Yes…

… CPRs are real.

… the risk of free-riding is real.

… we need forms of exclusion.

But …

… not everyone is purely self-interested

… privatization and collectivization are not the only options

… distribution/allocation matters

But #1

… not everyone is purely self-interested

Different users of CPRs

"those who always behave in a narrow, self-interested way and never cooperate in dilemma situations (free-riders)"

"those who are unwilling to cooperate with others unless assured that they will not be exploited by free-riders"

"those who are willing to initiate reciprocal cooperation in the hopes that others will return their trust"

"perhaps a few genuine altruists who always try to achieve higher returns for a group."

But #2

… privatization and collectivization are not the only options

Neither private, nor collective property

Group property rights: norms, trust, reputation, collective forms of monitoring, collectively shared knowledge of CPRs

Empirically substantiated (rather than theoretically deduced) case for self-organization. It did happen successfully in many places and times.

Ostrom:

"In this instance, Mongolia has allowed pastoralists to continue their traditional group-property institutions, which involve large-scale movements between seasonal pastures, while both Russia and China have imposed state-owned agricultural collectives that involve permanent settlements.

More recently, the Chinese solution has involved privatization by dividing the "pasture land into individual allocations for each herding household".

About three-quarters of the pasture land in the Russian section of this ecological zone has been degraded and more than one-third of the Chinese section has been degraded, while only one-tenth of the Mongolian section has suffered equivalent loss. Here, socialism and privatization are both associated with more degradation than resulted from a traditional group-property regime."

See: Sneath, David. "State policy and pasture degradation in Inner Asia." (1998): 1147-1148.

Neither always private, nor collective property

It depends

Institutional diversity

But #3

… distribution/allocation matters

Different ideas fit differently with different interests

Justification and performativity

Whenever someone claims "This is simply how the world works", be wary:

What world does it justify as inevitable?

What world does it create?

Who benefits from the idea that …

… people are ultimately self-interested *ssholes?

… ethical behaviour is self-defeating?

… it does not matter that much if the allocation is just, as long as the allocation happens?

… the only choice we have is full collectivization or full privatization

Thursday

Ecomodernism and its critics