Re: [Marxism] Why socialists should enter the environmental movement

[ehrbar <ehrbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Patrick, the Carbon Trading book is one of the assigned readings in my
policy class.  Here is a shorter URL (6.4 MB):

http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD2006_48_carbon_trading/carbon_trading_web.pdf

Even the American Enterprise Institute has published something
critical about cap and trade, see

http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070601_EPOg.pdf

On the other hand, almost the entire professional economics literature
says good things about carbon trading.  Please, if you find some
peer-reviewed articles which are critical of the principle instead of
saying "it depends on the implementation", let me know.  I must tell
the participants in my class to ignore all this literature, and hope
they won't consider me a quack.  In the circles where these policies
are debated, the governor's "Blue Ribbon Council on Climate Change,"
peer reviewed = good.  On the other hand, everyone is on a learning
curve, and people are truly interested in good information.  (I am not
on this council, but Rocky Anderson, the radical SLC mayor, is.)  One
member of this council, I forget who but he was not an environmental
activist, said that the European cap n trade is a mess, they wish they
would never have started it.  But the US is inexorably going this way.
I have read that the present big bulge of applications for dirty
coal-fired power plants comes from them hoping to grandfather in their
pollution credits.

This brings me to Michael's remark.  I believe Michael that Arnold
only uses it as a talking point, but this "talking point" may take him
farther than he intends.  We have to patiently go through their dance.
First they denied that climate change is a problem, now they pretend
to do something about it but use mostly ineffective or even
counterproductive means (like carbon trading or burning down
rainforests in order to grow ethanol).  There are much better policies
around, for instance the German feed-in tariffs.  We have to keep
pushing without getting discouraged.  I am assuming that climate
change will become increasingly obvious and therefore the pressure
from the mass movement will increase.  But it is heart-wrenching how
much time we are losing.

Another influence which is a mixed blessing is David C Korten's book
"The Great Turning".  The SLC progressives fell in love with this book
and Korten has visited twice in the last 10 years.  Korten says that
organization will come about spontaneously if we all repudiate the
imperial story and change the view how we fit into nature.  People
believe in miracles or they despair.  Nobody is talking about
revolution.

Hans.


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