Free markets shift environmental costs onto communities whoever produces

Evidence

The capitalist system contained a fundamental flaw, Kapp argued, since businesses routinely forced members of society to pay a significant part of the costs of production. To illustrate the point, Kapp considered a handful of environmental issues, including air and water pollution, soil erosion, destruction of wildlife, and waste of energy. Because no one charged for the use of air as a waste depository, manufacturers sent dirty, destructive, and deadly pollutants into the skies. Manufacturers also destroyed aquatic life, contaminated drinking supplies, and marred the aesthetic qualities of water by pouring wastes into rivers, lakes, and oceans. To reduce the costs of logging, timber companies often left steep slopes to erode, and so increased the siltation of streams and the severity of floods. In the race to exploit limited oil, gas, and coal resources, extractive firms used inefficient means of production and abandoned wells and mines prematurely. Market hunters also took for today without thought of tomorrow. For a number of species, from the passenger pigeon to the whale, the result of competitive exploitation was extinction or near-extinction. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 1051

Categorization

• XREF: Kapp’s ‘economy of unpaid costs’ is the same externality logic animating the law-and-economics readings in the LGST legal systems course and the accounting the eco-justice thread runs on. — connects to: Voluntary environmental planning fails because buyers won’t pay for public goods — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 1066; Service industries carry large hidden environmental costs through their supply chains. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 994; Disregard of environmental costs is structural to profit-seeking, not individual bad character — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 1052 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Market-driven consumer economics omits environmental costs from its calculations #expands (0.95) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2656
• Consumption resists change because it is profitable and shielded from environmental costs #corroborates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2986
• Short-term profit incentives override distant and slowly accumulating environmental harms #expands (0.80)
• Capitalist profit control of resources harmed environmental quality versus peasant subsistence control. #corroborates (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 254
• Distant production removes moral incentives to examine consumption’s true costs #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2528