“Our capitalist system,” I have just learned, “is one of the main reasons our planet is getting stripped away and destroyed.” That is according to the Toronto District School Board, which made the claim in the November edition of its EcoSchools newsletter to promote something called “Buy Nothing Day” on November 29. The TDSB says that by buying nothing for a day people can protest consumerism and help the environment. The reality, of course, is just the opposite: capitalism and buying things are nothing to protest. Nor are they responsible for “our planet getting stripped away and destroyed.”

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Matthew Lau: Schools should stop teaching lies about capitalism Back to video

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From 1900 to 2021, world average life expectancy rose from 32 years to 71 years — an astonishing increase that was not the result of people buying nothing and consuming nothing. Quite the opposite: it was the result of the widespread advances in technology, medicine and overall economic productivity driven by capitalism that enabled people to increase their consumption.

One reason people live longer and better lives than they used to is that modern economies and technologies protect against environmental disasters. The global death rate related to climate and weather catastrophes is today less than one per cent what it was a century ago.

That capitalism is responsible for planetary destruction and other environmental harm is also nonsense. In addition to longer and better lives, capitalism has delivered a high degree of environmental cleanliness. Mass production of the automobile cleaned cities by ridding streets of horses and disease-attracting horse manure. Vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, air fresheners, washers and driers, ventilation systems, disinfecting wipes — the virtually unlimited products that make our immediate environments cleaner are today all affordable and widely available because of capitalism.

In response to left-liberals who say the private market and capitalism are responsible for polluting the air and water and destroying the earth, Milton Friedman liked to point out that countries with government-run economies, such as the former Soviet Union, had worse pollution than the United States. In 1984, a United Nations report identified East Germany as the most polluted country in Europe; in 1990 the Washington Post reported that Bitterfeld, an East German city south of Berlin, was “the dirtiest place in the most polluted country in the world, according to government statistics and Greenpeace.”

So bad was communism for the environment that even in the capitalist world much pollution came from communist countries. Studies by a joint U.S./Soviet research center near Vienna, the same Washington Post story said, “have traced pollutants falling on Western European countries back to their source: East Germany and its neighbors.” An East German automobile put about 100 times more carbon monoxide into the atmosphere than Western cars, while East Germany put about five times as much sulfur dioxide into the air as West Germany.

In line with Friedman’s observation that capitalism and private ownership were good for the environment because “nobody takes care of somebody else’s property as well as he takes care of his own,” a 2003 article on economic freedom and environmental quality published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas cited evidence that in countries with stronger property rights, environmental outcomes such as sanitation, restricted deforestation and access to clean water were better than in countries with weaker property rights. Similarly, a 2014 Fraser Institute study found that countries with the most economic freedom had cleaner air than those with the least.

In condemning capitalism, the TDSB newsletter predictably attacks the “deadly activities of the fossil fuel industry, which continues to pollute, burn, and ransack the planet in the face of mounting human suffering” — a claim again contradicted by the facts, which show fossil fuels have helped power literally billions of people out of poverty.

Elsewhere the newsletter highlighted a recent climate change conference organized by the TDSB the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which was attended by 250 teachers and keynoted by a representative from the David Suzuki Foundation. One workshop encouraged teachers to integrate “age-appropriate climate action into their classrooms, schools, and communities,” while another explored how public schools can “address the climate crisis that students are experiencing here and now” and a third concerned “engaging students in environmental advocacy.”

Enough with the climate action, advocacy and activism. When will the TDSB get around to teaching students indisputable facts — such as the widespread benefits of capitalism?

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.

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