This is a book about government subsidies and taxes as they affect the environment. Roodman has succeeded in putting forward a book that simultaneously pleases the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and other liberal and radical sources of grant money that funded the book on the one hand and the environmentalist movement on the other hand. For the bourgeoisie, it was worth the money.

The book starts by attacking subsidies to mining and lumber companies, fisheries and highways. Canadian seal hunters garner a four dollar government subsidy for every seal they club to death.(p. 101) The attack on such subsidies amounting to $650 billion globally will please conservatives and libertarians, both of which support economic Liberalism. Nonetheless, MIM also supports the end to subsidies for mining, lumber and fisheries in the imperialist countries, because the environmental goals supported by Roodman most benefit the proletariat.

We also agree with Roodman that the $111 billion in subsidizing U.$. roads (p. 43) should go toward mass transit and subsidies for renewable energy instead. The subsidies to mining, lumber and fisheries in particular have been called "corporate welfare." The rich receiving the corporate welfare have had the most incentive to allow the degradation of the environment. The proletariat is the class of people with the least interest in the degradation of the environment. Only people making large profits from pollution would consider degrading their own environment.

The end of the book is about existing pollution taxes in the world and tax proposals for the United $tates. Roodman correctly criticizes the bogus arguments raised against environmental taxes. Their regressive nature can be overcome and taxes on other things can be dropped if pollution taxes increase.

Capitalism and the environment

Roodman makes crucial admissions throughout the book only to soften them and argue for social-democratic reforms of capitalism. "Though the market is a powerful tool for economic progress, where its edges meet the planet it is mainly as a saw, shovel, or smokestack--as an instrument of destruction rather than protection."(p. 19) Moreover, the "market system today threatens environmental, thus economic, disaster."(p. 27)

Like many other market-believing environmentalists, Roodman says there should be a market for the right to pollute. In a back assward argument, he says "that people have a right to breathe air and drink water not contaminated by other people's wastes" and then he decries moralists for upholding that argument!(p. 157) To translate what Roodman is saying: capitalism cannot be overturned; hence, second-class environmental citizenship for the poor and middle-classes is the only choice. He calls that "pragmatism" and he is right to call it that. Since Roodman knows that by his own (conservative) estimate 300,000 to 700,000 a year die from air pollution and another 50 million children cough chronically because of it,(p. 156) his market for pollution rights is nothing less than a market for murder and disease licenses.

In contrast, MIM maintains that the right to food, clothing, shelter and a non-toxic and non-militarist environment is non-negotiable. By themselves, these rights imply the use of organized force to protect them against would-be profiteers. Such organized force is called dictatorship of the proletariat, which will be necessary until that day all humyns find it unthinkable to force others to negotiate their non-negotiable rights.

Politics and blame

Like other defenders of capitalism, Roodman blames the lack of progress on the environmental front on the environmentalists or the masses. He admits that the idea of environmental taxes have been around for 80 years, but not used. The blame goes to environmentalists for preferring regulation he says.(p. 22)

Yet elsewhere he does admit that businesses affected overturned tepid environmental reform in Louisiana in 1992.(p. 182) Conventional fossil fuel businesses also shut down a measly tax proposed by Clinton to favor renewable energy sources.(p. 131) Moreover, Roodman recognizes that federal research priorities are skewed toward spending money in the most polluting energy industries, which is also where the most corporate clout lies.(p. 138)

When it comes to the famed market for sulfur emissions rights, Roodman makes further admissions about the reality of capitalist political economy. In the first place, he admits that the law written grants existing polluters the right to pollute based on their previous pollution levels. The idea is that if they cut their pollution below their quota, they can sell the right to making that pollution they cut back to someone else for a profit.

He and other die-hard marketeers do not admit it, but based on this principle, it is possible for companies to invent new sources of pollution and then go to the government to set up a pollution market and then profit from the pollution rights sold! For MIM this is the ultimate proof why patchwork policy can never reform capitalism and why scientific socialist planning has to be used throughout. Profit is an indiscriminate motivator. In the current system it encourages companies to "innovate" by creating new forms of pollution that the government has to regulate and sell rights to.

In fact, to even pass the law to begin with, some companies gained the right to pollute at 1985 levels and hence were guaranteed a profit in selling their rights to pollute from day one of the law, which came into effect in 1990 under President Bush. The five years of progress in reducing emissions between 1985 and 1990 were automatic profits for companies so exempted.(p. 238)

Another reason that socialist scientific planning needs to be used is that one result of the famed U.$. market for sulfur dioxide emissions is that production shifted toward cleaner coal that can only be obtained by more abusive coal-mining techniques!(p. 154) Environmental gains are offset by environmental losses in another area, because Anglo-Saxon individualists refuse to plan production from start to finish and instead place mystical faith in the market.

We credit Roodman for recognizing the negative influence of big money on democracy. "It is politics, not sound policy, that best explains the remarkable resilience of outmoded resource regimes in the United States, for instance. In the 1995-96 election cycle, oil and gas companies gave $11.8 million to congressional candidates to protect tax breaks worth at least $3 billion over the period. Timber lobbies donated $3.6 million, mainly to members of committees that set the Forest Service's budget and logging quotas. Mining firms handed out $1.9 million in order to fend off royalty charges on public hardrock minerals, something they have succeeded in doing for more than 120 years. Ranching interests contributed $2.2 million in order to keep federal grazing fees low, as they have been since 1906."(p. 228) Total environmental lobbyist donations to Congress members was $1.1 million in 1995-6.(p. 229)

While Roodman recognizes the influence of big money in politics, he gives in to shallow and casual anti-communism. He is of the opinion that communism failed to protect the environment,(p. 234) but he gives no detailed treatment and so we won't grant him the benefit of a rebuttal.

Labor aristocracy

Roodman informs MIM of further reasons to oppose the demands of oppressor nation "workers." Although the image of the coal-miner is central to Marxism, in Germany the subsidy to inefficient coal is over $7 billion.(p. 24) Thus coal-mining jobs are saved through a government paper-shuffle, at the cost of over $85,000 per coal-mining job per year.

Likewise, England had a source of fuel open to it--the natural gas of the North Sea--but labor aristocrats and labor bureaucrats opposed closing the coal mines despite their higher levels of pollution. MIM would point out that under socialism, everyone is guaranteed a job, so resistance to environmental progress of this sort should be lower. The way it happened in England, imperialist Thatcher rammed change down the throats of the labor aristocracy and England is one of the few countries in the world experiencing declining carbon emissions in the midst of economic growth as a result.(p. 104)

The environment is often a reason we must refocus our Marxism into Leninism, which includes a theory of imperialism as the decadent stage of capitalism. As Lenin pointed out, whole countries become parasitic and attain decadent lifestyles at the expense of the Third World masses.

Environmentalists should be Leninists of the MIM sort, because we oppose the consumption demands of the oppressor nation workers and because we recognize decadence and conservatism not just in the imperialists, but the oppressor nation workers.

MIM favors having the imperialist countries pay the Third World for the right to emit greenhouse gasses. If there is a global market for pollution rights created under global capitalism, then the Third World should receive 80 percent of the pollution rights as the UN has pointed out.(p. 195) Since the imperialist countries create 80 percent of greenhouse gas pollution, they will have to pay the Third World tremendous sums of money to emit greenhouse gasses. Roodman correctly points out that the rich countries have it in their self-interest to pay for an end to global pollution, because they cannot afford to wait until the poor are rich enough to do so themselves.(p. 196)

Unlike the Titoites or anarchists favoring "local control," MIM never favors local interests over those of the international proletariat. If a small group of workers or petty-bourgeoisie benefits from pollution at the expense of the international proletariat MIM, like Marx before it, stands with the international proletariat against the local interests of the workers backing pollution. It is the duty of the communist to apply Marxist science and support the interests of the class overall and not just any one of its sections. The unions opposing greenhouse gas emissions standards discussed at the 1997 Kyoto conference are wrong.(p. 230)

Only 1 in 300 German workers are coal-miners and 1 in 25 workers in the Pacific Northwest of North America make their living in mining or lumber.(p. 53) As Mr. Spock would say in Star Trek, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The few will not be allowed to override the many under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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