Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet

by Richard Elliot Benedick
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 449 pp. p.b.

reviewed by MC5, June 7, 2000

This is an extremely informative book on how an international treaty came about to protect the ozone layer of the atmosphere. We find much factual material in the book to support a Marxist view of the environment.

Richard Elliot Benedick was U.S. Foreign Service official and negotiator for the so-called 1987 "Montreal Protocol" (followed by important meetings in 1990 "The London Amendment," the 1992 "Copenhagen Amendment" etc.) which aimed at saving the ozone. In 1988 he received an award from the president for his career. Benedick was a Reagan administration official in charge of the ozone question appointed by Secretary of State George Schultz,(p. viii) but there is none of the ideological stupidity on the environment that we would expect from a conservative in this book. Benedick fully realized that governments were going to have to do something about the ozone.

Anarchy of capitalist production and the class struggle

What MIM finds most interesting is how the environmentalists and scientists managed to convince the Reagan administration and other capitalists to support a global treaty mandating protection of the ozone. Usually bourgeois reactionaries such as Reagan administration officials would be paranoid about "world government" arising from such a global treaty mandating government control of private industry. Indeed, the ozone treaties transferred on the order of $1 billion to the Third World to aid it in replacing equipment that is dangerous to the ozone. The treaties provided a first in history whereby the rich countries admitted to a responsibility and paid special dues to an organization to subsidize the Third World to cooperate with environmental-protection. The ozone treaties are examples of reform worthy of the word "proletarian" in the 1980s, 1990s and 21st century.

It turns out that the division of the capitalist class into competing segments gave the proletariat a chance to advance the cause of the environment. In this case, the active elements of the proletarian class struggle were earth (atmosphere) scientists and other intellectuals in governments and the media. Although they are not usually thought of as proletarian, some scientists have jobs that intrinsically bring them into contact with the ozone issue. From the substance of their jobs, they knew that regulation of the ozone might be an emergency necessity. Their struggle benefited all the property-less; hence we can say that the struggle for an international ozone treaty was a proletarian one. In contrast, the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers in chemical industries who were to lose or change jobs in lay-offs in the banning of certain chemicals (mostly in the imperialist countries and hence the kind of workers who are really labor aristocracy and not entirely property-less) and the capitalists who were afraid of losing their ozone-depleting property(p. 1) are examples of the bourgeois side of the struggle against a livable environment.

According to Benedick, for some odd reasons including the fact that the United $tates has the most earth scientists, the ozone question was more immediate in the U.$. public's mind than in the public of any other country. U.$. public opinion and the lagging opinion of Europe created the possibility that U.$. industry would be put under regulations that European capitalists did not face. As a result, multinational corporations based in the United $tates did an about-face and started favoring international regulation of industry for ozone-depleting substances (ODS)--with the reasoning that they did not want their European competitors to have an unfair advantage. Coupled with the fear of lawsuits and irate consumers, competition from Europe drove U.$. industries to pay for the scientific studies--even done by Europeans--that proved they would have to be regulated.(p. 30) Once U.$. industry backed the idea of an ozone treaty, the struggle was downhill from there. U.$. industry actually beat back the attacks from reactionary political propagandists (e.g. anti-scientific big mouth Rush Limbaugh (p. 226)) whenever they tried to undo the treaties the United $tates signed.(p. 47) Public opinion in the rest of the world rose to the occasion and caught between U.$. industry, the Reagan administration and global public opinion, governments everywhere started falling into line for an ozone treaty. For example, the United $tates simply threatened the regime in southern Korea with a cut-off of trade to get it to sign on without asking for special favors.(p. 244) It was a combination of proletarian push and capitalist fissures that put together the world treaty.

Even when the science was done, Europeans had some skepticism typical of the problems of science produced under capitalism. The Europeans originally believed that the United $tates was raising the ozone issue in order to place Europe at a competitive trade disadvantage. That is exactly what the United $tates did when it came to the Concorde jet produced by England and France. The United $tates kept it from landing in the United $tates ever since 1974 by saying among other things that the Concorde damaged the ozone.(p.32) Thus, Boeing had protection from European competition and Europeans rightly became cynical about ozone science. That is the nature of science production under capitalism, because capitalism organizes production and the state for private gain.

CFC producers in Europe assumed that DuPont had developed an alternative to CFCs in secret and that was the real reason the United $tates favored banning CFCs. It turned out to be true that DuPont had done some research on alternatives to CFCs.(p. 33) Whatever the case may have been, the point is that under capitalism, science cannot escape the context it is produced in. We Maoists believe science should be produced for the public interest and we rebuff any who believe that science production is neutral. There are always resource choices to be made concerning what science to produce and who produces it. Science production is inherently political, but it can be produced in a situation generating less distrust than a for-profit system. The political distrust of capitalist science concerning the ozone controversy generated delays in the creation and implementation of the ozone treaty. Fortunately those delays were not fatal yet, but in another environmental catastrophe, they could have been fatal to the humyn species.

Even once the treaty was signed, the Europeans were reluctant to release private industry data on CFC production, for fear of competitive losses. It is the nature of capitalist corporations to want to keep their business doings confidential. Yet, it was not possible to enforce a treaty amongst all countries without disclosure of CFC production data. This is another reason capitalism is bad for the environment--the desire to hide for profit.

In fact, at the highest level of secrecy for profit, after a few rounds of treaty implementation, the Russians started profiting from the ODS treaties by starting a black market. Certain businesspeople specialized in making it appear that treaties were upheld and regulations followed when in fact they were not. By 1994, the import of illegal CFCs in the United $tates totaled between $150 million to $300 million a year.(p. 274)

Because black marketeers exist in a capitalist system where cash is unlimited and can purchase unlimited goods, there is a strong attraction to getting around environmental regulations in capitalism. Under socialism, people with the kind of money that black marketeers have would not be able to spend it and would be suspect for having it in the first place. After developing through a period of socialism, the world will reach communism and cash will be abolished completely. Black marketeers will no longer be a factor: that goes for drugs, weapons and polluting equipment that is banned.

Aside from public pressure and capitalist fissures, there were persynal factors involving the ruling class when it came to reform. While Ronald Reagan was president, he developed skin cancer. As he underwent operations for skin cancer(p. 67)--which is caused by ozone depletion among other things--Reagan did not sign off on the efforts of ultra-conservative and libertarian government officials who sought to keep government out of environmental affairs.

One last point to mention is that in the class warfare of the United $tates, white people with their settler history are the ones to most oppose any government activity. In the case of the ozone, there was an added incentive for white people to get on board with the people they normally spit on as socialists: "The U.S. national Cancer Institute reported that melanoma had increased more rapidly than any other form of cancer among Caucasian Americans in the years 1973-1992."(p. 225)

The point is that in any struggle for proletarian reform, there are special circumstance to take advantage of. In the case of environmental issues generally two factors will always have to be considered by activists--public opinion (not that of the polluters) and splits within the capitalist class.

Libertarianism

The free market ideology, bourgeois economics and political Liberalism known as libertarianism does not work when it comes to the environment. In the case of the ozone, the various individualists are forced into arguing that skin cancer caused by ozone depletion is the fault of the individual for not wearing adequate sun block (sun tan lotion). Movies arose satirizing this view, where people are depicted in blue sunblock from head to toe or dying for not having it on.

The libertarians sought to blame people living in the South or any sunny climate for their own poor individual choices. No doubt they also blamed them for living in cold places and sometimes freezing to death or getting insufficient exposure to the sun. Rather than take up science to eliminate dangers from something as essential as the sun, the libertarians sought to blame the individual for everything. Reagan administration Interior Secretary Hodel said in the Wall Street Journal: "'People who don't stand out in the sun--it doesn't affect them.'"(p. 60) Desperate idiots like Hodel prove the lengths to which individualists have to go to avoid socialist conclusions.

The individualists go to extremes to avoid the commonalties of the humyn race. All people require clean air to breath, drinkable water and an atmosphere that protects them. The indivisible environment is one reason why there is a real basis for cooperative economics and government.

Probability and causation

The most difficult part of the ozone treaty is that in the imperialist countries the same people inclined to individualism because of the property structure also have a hard time understanding cause and effect in science. When it comes to the ozone, "the concept is not obvious: a perfume spray in Paris helps to destroy an invisible gas in the stratosphere and thereby contributes to skin cancer deaths and species extinction half a world away and several generations in the future."(p. 3) Fortunately, it was relatively easy to attack the whole idea of an aerosol can and aerosol consumption declined once global public opinion heard of the link to a poor environment. Yet, not all atmospheric issues were as catchy as the aerosol can.

Scientific discussion as early as 1974 had already concerned itself with the ozone and CFCs (chloroflurocarbons). By the time Benedick was working on the issue in the 1980s, there was doubt whether anything needed to be done at a governmental level. In 1986 it could still be said there was no statistical evidence that the ozone was depleting,(p. 15) despite what was shown to happen in laboratories. Benedick mentions only one study from 1985 that was published too late for considerations by the UN environmental program known as UNEP, a study which showed that the ozone covering Antarctica fell by 50% since the 1960s.(p. 18) As 1986 turned into 1987, more evidence arose for a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, as confirmed by satellites.(p. 19) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) started predicting that 150 million new cases of skin cancer would arise by 2075 including 3 million deaths.(p. 21) Thus, in 1987, a critical moment arrived in Montreal and the tide turned in international diplomacy.

Within science as known in capitalist society where people are not educated as they should be, the fact that certain risks can only be estimated is disconcerting to many people. The individualist and conservative simpleton prefers to know something in an either/or sense. Something is either 0% true or 100% true in the minds of many people not accustomed to dealing with quantitative matters.

In the case of the most important causes of death however, they strike in small percentages but routinely. There is only a chance that a U.$. citizen would be one of the 3 million with skin cancer in the United $tates. Furthermore, there is only a chance that the scientists in 1986 were right about what would cause cancer. Hence, there was only a chance that banning CFCs would help with the ozone problem and skin cancer.

Benedick rightly condemns the "Panglossians" (a reference to Voltaire and the conservative idea that everything is fine) for neglecting dangers that are neither zero nor one hundred percent certain. Most people in the imperialist countries know to buy insurance for accidents. Yet there is no such thing as an interstellar insurance company that will help us out if we blow the Earth's environment. Once it becomes unlivable, that may be the end for the species. Under capitalism, businesspeople take risks with our environment every day for their profits. Under socialism, such risks will be minimized and only done in the interest of the people, not the wealth of individuals. The competition dynamic in which the environment is damaged while capitalists are busy fighting for market control will not exist.

Benedick quite correctly observed that "The world may not have the luxury of early warning signals before an irreversible collapse occurs in some other segment of the planet's ecosystem."(p. 307) We won't always be able to afford to know every last scientific detail before acting. That was the lesson learned in the ozone controversy. Once chemicals are released on the surface, they often take years to reach the ozone. Hence, the results in the ozone now may only reflect usage of chemical in the distant past.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is best suited for handling environmental issues. Because property is eliminated, there will be less resistance when equipment has to be scrapped or a new technology introduced.

Such resistance will exist only to the extent that some people are trying to restore capitalism and property as a whole. Under dictatorship of the proletariat, change can be implemented without particular individuals bearing the brunt of the cost. For the foreseeable future, everyone can gain from environmental improvements because there is a massive resource that the dictatorship of the proletariat can tap into globally--unemployed people by the hundreds of millions.

Environmentalism and economic efficiency

Under capitalist society, whenever someone proposes a new environmental regulation, someone has to be willing to retire, recycle, modify or throw out what is known as capital stock. In this context, capital stock is simply physical assets --tools, buildings, machinery.

The first excuse of polluting capitalists is always that the technology they use is irreplaceable. The capitalists at this stage of struggle invariably parade their experts on how it is "impossible" to do what the public and environmentalists want. Whenever change happens--implementing social security, requiring an average miles per gallon of gas in automobiles and banning ozone depleting solvents like CFC-113,(p. 231) the capitalists parade their corrupted scientists to say it is "impossible." When the class struggle pushes hard enough in the proletarian direction, however, we soon find out that it is "possible" and in much less time than anyone imagined. This is seen again and again throughout the book and we thank Benedick for recording for history the self-serving stances of industry which said it was "impossible" time and time again.

The ozone treaties made various kinds of refrigeration and air conditioning equipment illegal. However, under capitalism, the capital stock is privately owned, so private individuals end up losing money for having equipment that becomes outdated. For this reason, private individuals owning capital stock known as capitalists often oppose environmental regulation for their own short-sighted economic reasons--and nothing better can be expected in a capitalist society.

According to Benedick, the imperialist country environmentalist organizations Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace did not play much of a role in the creation of an ozone treaty and they studiously avoided discussing economic costs of regulation.(p. 204) In contrast, Reagan official Benedick has a higher consciousness going beyond that of these activists, because he already recognizes the state of bourgeois economics: "The market is essentially neutral with respect to the environment, and the current state of economics is not helpful in analyzing such situations. Relying on Adam Smith to protect the ozone layer--or to mitigate climate change--could be disastrous."(p. 308) Environmentalists who fail to learn this lesson will not be able to get society where it needs to get.

MIM agrees with Benedick that avoidance of economics is annoying. Environmentalists should be slamming bourgeois economics on a regular basis. MIM would not avoid making the argument for international pollution regulation on economic grounds. Not having studied political economy, many pseudo-environmentalists are fooled by arguments from bourgeois economists that it is a good thing for capitalists to oppose supposedly overly expensive environmental regulation. As an example, when the bulk of the ozone destroying chemicals were already cut back under international treaty, the United $tates had an argument with northern Europeans who wanted the treaties to be stricter on lesser ozone-depleting substances (ODS) known as HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons).

Under capitalism, there are times when thanks to cut-throat competition, entire manufacturing plants become obsolete the day they are built. Such is wasteful and harmful to the environment. The cause is that competition amongst capitalists is not rational from a social perspective. What may increase wealth for individuals may not be good for the society as a whole. It certainly is a business victory to advance your own business so well that your competitors' factories are all obsolete, but it may not be good for society as a whole.

In the case of HCFCs, however, the opposite is true. The problem for capitalism is pronouncing old property obsolete if it is causing environmental damage. The United $tates owned most of the $200 billion in property that needed HCFCs,(p. 292) so it opposed extending the ODS treaties to phase out HCFCs as fast as some other countries proposed. Such opposition comes in the name of efficiency; yet, exactly the opposite is the case. The unwillingness of individual capitalists or their rented governments to spend the money to get a socially desirable job done is why there has to be scientific socialist planning of the economy.

The market of consumers has little knowledge of the ozone, CFCs, HCFCs etc. The consumers want scientists serving the public interest to be delegated authority to handle these questions. That is socialism, not "consumer is king." Even experts in a market society are corrupted by their reliance on corporations for employment and consulting fees: "Industry and economists had vastly overestimated the costs of solutions."(p. 311)

The bourgeois economists given little to thinking globally with their academic models would counter that as socialists we would waste resources. This is not true, because the most wasted resource in the world is humyn labor-power. Every year hundreds of millions of people go without jobs. Hired by a socialist state, the unemployed could replace that $200 billion in capital equipment without denting global unemployment very much. True, $200 billion of capital stock should not be scrapped at the drop of a hat, but in this case, the scrapping is for the benefit of the environment. Workers as a class would benefit both from the employment and the accomplishment of a reduction of ozone depletion. Under capitalism, what happens is that the United $tates keeps its borders closed to the hundreds of millions of unemployed and then it complains that it would be wasteful to replace its polluting capital stock. Yet it would only be wasteful if we only counted U.$. labor in the matter. Because the United $tates does not appear on the surface to have hundreds of millions of unemployed people to spare for work replacing polluting equipment does not mean the world as a whole does not have the labor to spare. In this case, efficiency and the environment are not exclusive goals when efficiency is defined as the optimal use of resources, in this case unemployed labor-power on a global scale.

This scientific fact is also why there is no true environmentalism without internationalism as its foundation. The Third World unemployed are a great ally of environmental progress. They could use the jobs replacing polluting capital stock and it is not their property lost when such capital stock is replaced. The Third World workers only gain in environmental progress including cleaner air and water and atmospheric protection. However, pseudo-environmentalists who do not take the international proletariat into account and want to keep the borders of imperialist countries closed and international economic cooperation limited will likely fall for the bourgeois economists' arguments saying that scrapping pollution-creating devices is wasteful.

Under socialism, planners will still have to take care not to waste resources other than labor-power. Speeding up replacement of polluting equipment may cause more pollution through the expenditure of energy and other resources other than labor-power that are produced and consumed by polluting processes. Such a question is a scientific question and should not be left to private owners of capital. When total pollution can be cut back by scrapping equipment, no one's profits or persynal wealth should be a factor preventing progress.

Once polluting capital stock is gone, capitalism provides yet two more barriers to environmental reform. First, the least-polluting technology is privately owned through patents. The ozone treaties recognized this fact and saw to the free transfer of some technology to the Third World--a glimmering of socialism. Secondly, when it comes to compliance with treaties, information on what capitalists do is private. All the capitalist countries--especially Europe--had to concede to make public their private information. Hence, the struggle for the ozone was very educational regarding capitalism's defects.

Conclusion

Richard Benedick has performed a public service with this book. In it MIM learns of a proletarian reform won in recent years. Between 1986 and 1994, CFC production fell by 79%. Halons were off 85 percent;(p. 301) although originally it was thought halons would be more difficult to be done with(p. 204) thanks to the distortions of science and engineering production by the capitalists.

"CFC consumption had dropped by 75 percent, halon consumption by 83 percent. In the North, [industrialized countries--MC5] both production and consumption of CFCs has fallen by 90 percent, while halons had been completely eliminated. CFC consumption in the North stood at about 93,000 metric tons in 1994, while consumption was 80,000 metric tons."

"In the South, [Third World--MC5] as anticipated, production and consumption had risen from their extremely low 1986 levels, but the growth paths were leveling off."(p. 301)

Despite the success of the ozone treaty, it is the exception that proves the need for revolutionary struggle. Benedick is the first to admit that the treaty is the first and only of its kind and that similar attempts in regard to global warming failed despite some promising beginnings. Even in the case of the ozone, as with all ozone issues, capitalists are motivated to compromise by the fear of watermelons--people green on the outside but red on the inside. At least as early as Richard Nixon, the reactionaries have realized the huge risk that the environmentally minded public might go socialist on account of the environment. It is the specter of communism that makes reform possible in special isolated circumstances.

Buy This Book