Yes,
In message <95A711A70065D111B58C00609451555C0C118978 at UMKC-MAIL02>,
Forstater, Mathew <ForstaterM at umkc.edu> writes
>the evidence
>concerning famines, e.g., shows that scarcity was not the cause, rather socially
>and politically determined distributional issues are what are at bottom. The
>idea of "scarcity" is used to excuse all kinds of unnecessary suffering and
>problems and policies.
and isn't the obvious conclusion to this that the imagined 'scarcities' of environmentalism are nothing but the relative scarcities imposed by capitalism, now imaginatively projected onto nature.
Ergo, industry (= CO2 emissions) is now a scarce resource, which must be restricted in less developed nations, and rationed under the Kyoto agreement.
(The famous radical churchman Donald Soper used to say of profiteers that 'if they could turn the air into private property they would sell it back to us'. He would have been horrified by the derivatives market in CO2 emissions.)
Isn't this a case of artificially created scarcity reinforcing the West's monopoly over resources?
>There is not one kind of "scarcity." First, there are absolute scarcity and
>relative scarcity. Then there are different kinds of relative scarcity.
>Neoclassical scarcity is relative scarcity of a particular type. Resources are
>scarce relative to unlimited human wants, where infinite wants is part of human
>nature, pre-social and unalterable. This is very different than saying, e.g.,
>that resources are scarce relative to basic human needs. But all the evidence
>concerning famines, e.g., shows that scarcity was not the cause, rather socially
>and politically determined distributional issues are what are at bottom. The
>idea of "scarcity" is used to excuse all kinds of unnecessary suffering and
>problems and policies. Lack of social services, poverty, etc. Most 'scarcity',
>to the extent that it is valid, is trivial. Marx on Malthus, Bookchin on
>Post-scarcity, Franke and Chasin on famine, numerous authors on socially
>conditioned needs, are good antidotes to this stuff. Mat
-- James Heartfield