I'm glad that we've got that jibe out of the way, although not best
 deployed here I think.  Your rhetoric - prudence, pricing, making 
 people 'get it' - would be more familiar to my co-workers than to my
 comrades. Assuming that people are right because the stakes are high 
 seems foolish to me - it's an approach that encourages scaremongering, 
 and in this case the cure seems to be nearly as bad as the curse.

 I don't agree with you about climate change, and we're clearly not
 going to change one another's mind.  But what interests me is how, if
 we assume that climate change is for real, should the left respond?  
 Given that it is an issue affecting all humanity - even capitalists and
 bankers - there's no reason why everyone shouldn't respond positively
 to the challenge.  Indeed, many reactionaries have supported 
 environmental causes.  So what is the left response?  Your answer 
 seems to be, make the market better reflect environmental cost 
 to 'make people get it'. I would have expected convincing people to
 be  more important, together with forms of planning that would ensure
 that living standards could be maintained and improved without
 endangering the environment. But your approach is just austerity.

 If there were a direct assault on working class incomes, I am sure  
 that you would be the first to condemn it. But here you are advocating
 the same thing - putting use values out of the hands of the working
 class by increasing their prices.

 James Greenstein

--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com> wrote:
<james@communistbanker.com> wrote:

>  Cheap mass transportation means that working class people have more use
>  values.  If you distort market pricing to represent a guesstimate of
>  the 'costs of environmental damage' then you will price certain
>  consumer goods out of the reach of the working class. Regardless of
>  the merits of the environmentalist case, raising prices is not
>  progressive, and it implies that the problem is that consumers just
>  don't get it.

This is more banker than communist, I'd say. If the theorists of 
climate change are right - and, given the stakes, it's prudent to 
assume they are - then the spatial layout of the U.S. (among many 
other places and things) is unsustainable, because it endangers life 
itself. The working class isn't going to be better off if the Gulf 
Stream shifts and Western Europe acquires the climate of Siberia and 
New York City is under several feet of water. This is a problem 
facing humanity as a whole, and if consumers "just don't get it," 
well they're going to have to.

Doug
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