Unfortunately, this romantic petty-bourgeois intellectualism inadvertently adds another layer of confusion to the contemporary discourse on change. This kind of scholarly disquisition and the proliferation of non-governmental organizations and intergovernmental institutions, mainstreaming the concepts of ecological economics to reform the productionist growth ideology, have simply fostered the creation of the romantic illusion that meaningful change can occur by modifying the prevailing social order. For example, fully internalizing the narrative and liberally appropriating the concepts of ecological economics, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) produced a lengthy monograph in 2011 titled Towards a Green Economy: The Pathway to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication. The document never mentioned, even in a sentence, the desirability or possibility of limiting capital accumulation as a way to address the impacts on resource depletion, environmental degradation, and atmospheric deterioration. Instead, the authors wasted page after page on the purported feasibility of a green economy consistent with a hyper-accelerating global capitalism in order to convince the reader and policy makers that limitless growth could be had if corporations and government adopt ecological modernization to promote eco-efficiency and eco-sufficiency, led by the market in resource extraction and circulation. The fanciful jargon used in this exercise is dubbed “decoupling,” that is, decreasing the metabolic rate of use of natural raw materials per unit of economic output. In other words, the use of less energy, raw materials, land and water resources to produce the same economic output would automatically result in eco-efficiency increases. The Pollyanna-ish consequences could be expressed as the simultaneous achievement of the goals of resource conservation, poverty eradication, climate mitigation, and green economic growth. Decoupling of natural resource use could also go hand-in-hand with negative impact decoupling, in which negative environmental impacts would decline in absolute terms, while green economic value is continuously being added.65
Unfortunately, the presumed correlation of efficiency with resource use reduction has long been debunked. The nineteenth-century British economist William Stanley Jevons found that efficiency in resource production actually increased consumption of the resource.66 It must be borne in mind that efficiency in bourgeois accounting means reduction in the cost of producing and supplying a given unit of goods and services, in which case this will have a perverse impact on consumer behavior. The supply of fuel-efficient cars means that people would drive more frequently and for longer distances. It is no accident that people drive more when gasoline prices are low and drive less when gasoline prices spike. Moving of goods around the globe more efficiently because of the technological revolution in transportation and communication has not led to less extraction and use of resources. On the contrary, the efficiency gains from the technological revolution have made it easier and cheaper for consumers to use resources and goods produced in distant lands by wasting huge energy on transporting these resources and goods. The $1.6-trillion-strong global tourism industry could not have grown to the degree it has without the proliferation of air-polluting airplanes that have made global travel the most convenient and affordable mode of modern transportation.67 To develop a keen appreciation of the extent to which the notion of decoupling is hollow, consider the fact that 320–850 million hectares of additional forests, savannahs, and grasslands are projected to be converted to cropland by 2050 in order to produce the required feedstocks, food, and feed. Could the consequences of deforestation of this magnitude, accompanied by emissions from the manufacturing and use of synthetic nitrogen, pesticides, fuels, and other agrochemicals, be decoupled from GDP? Obviously, the answer is no; to admit otherwise would represent a scornful repudiation of basic physics. The evidence-free romantic conjectures manufactured by such as the UNEP is meant not to solve the looming dangers of poverty and climate change but rather to mask their legitimation functions of neoliberal globalization.
Finally, if the aspirational project of ecological economists is too utopian to have a long-term impact on the course of history, their account of history is even weaker, because ecological economists run into serious operational difficulty when it comes to the role of the state in the economy, where they envision Keynesian eco-managerialism. The error stems from the tendency to view the state as exterior to the process of accumulation. The state is presented as a neutral force, potentially capable of objectively generating and enforcing legislation and regulation to address questions of efficiency, equity, and scale. In this sense, they share with conventional economists the state-centric approach to resource conservation and environmental protection. They thus inadvertently entertain the illusion that overexploitation of natural resources and pollution of the ecological system could be avoided if the information gaps among stakeholders are closed through state intermediation. In their view, the state can bring about a broad consensus among producers, consumers, non-governmental organizations, and all other relevant actors on the essential values of sustainable scale, just distribution, and efficient allocation of resources. As some ecological economists have argued, the processes of consensus building, ecological integrative modeling, and adaptive management could close the gaps in information and understanding. This, in turn, would yield the desired institutional framework by shaping, modifying, or altering the behaviors and attitudes of all participants in the intellectual endeavor.68
Let us look a little further at the ecological economists’ conception of the capitalist state. In the wake of the 1970s oil shocks, the oil oligopolies have succeeded in securing radical deregulation of the fossil energy sector in the United States, cushioned by numerous exceptions, loopholes, tax breaks, and subsidies. A look at Koch Industries will serve to show how deep the political reach of corporate capital is, especially that of the petrochemical industry.
The $115 billion Koch Industries is the second largest privately held corporation in the United States after Cargill, which means that it is the sole corporate fiefdom of Charles and David Koch. Operating in over sixty countries with about 100,000 workers, Koch Industries controls four oil refineries, six ethanol plants, a natural gas–fired power plant, and 4,000 miles of pipeline within the United States. The company has prospered no matter the president or the political party in control of Congress. The two brothers saw their wealth soar from $28 billion when Barack Obama assumed office in 2009 to $86 billion by the end of 2015.69 What matters is their capacity to relentlessly defend the extremely deregulated hydrocarbon energy sector, and to wage open war against any effort to change it. For example, when the Environmental Protection Agency moved to regulate surface ozone emission from oil refineries, the high-powered Koch lawyers argued that the EPA failed to take into consideration the immense health benefits of smog because it blocks the sun, thus reducing skin cancer. Without smog, 11,000 additional cases of skin cancer would occur annually. Remarkably, the D.C. circuit court accepted the lawyers’ pro-smog arguments, even accusing the EPA of discounting the possible health benefits of ozone and overstepping its authority to regulate ozone levels. The judges had reportedly been participants in the seminars on law and economics organized by the Koch brothers.
The Koch Industries are major polluters, ranking third among the thirty worst polluters of air, water, and climate, after Exxon and American Electric Power. Its Georgia-Pacific paper mill alone was dumping more pollutants into U.S. waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. Moreover, Koch Industries have generated more than 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually. In 2012, Koch Industries was singled out to be the number-one producer of toxic waste in the United States, producing 950 million pounds of toxic chemical waste.70
It is this mode of accumulation by emission/pollution that makes the Koch brothers the most ubiquitous and notorious warriors against the