Politics & Power Quote by Barry Commoner

Commoner is diagnosing a policy design flaw that masquerades as economic common sense. “Control strategy” is doing a lot of work here: it points to the classic end-of-pipe approach, where pollution is treated as an external nuisance to be managed after production, not as a consequence of how production is organized. If you bolt a scrubber onto a smokestack, you’ve added a cost center, not created value. The politics write themselves: industry casts regulation as a drag on growth, environmentalists double down on limits, and the public gets trained to hear “clean air” and “jobs” as rival constituencies.

His real target is the assumption smuggled into regulatory architecture: that the economy gets to proceed on its own terms, and the environment must negotiate for scraps through permits, standards, and compliance timetables. “Built-in antagonism” is not rhetorical flourish; it’s a structural critique. Commoner is saying the conflict isn’t inevitable, it’s engineered by choosing reactive controls over preventive redesign - cleaner energy systems, safer chemistry, closed-loop manufacturing, and incentives that reward reduced waste at the source.

Context matters. Commoner emerged as a leading voice of the late-1960s and 1970s environmental movement, skeptical of techno-fixes that preserve business-as-usual while outsourcing harm. Against the era’s rising faith in regulatory “management,” he argues for an ecological economics before the term became fashionable: if environmental protection is framed as an add-on expense, it will always be politically fragile. Change the production logic, and “growth” no longer has to mean growing the bill for cleaning up after it.