Doug, did we go over this before, 12 days ago? I suggested you please *not* think of carbon taxes as market mechanisms but, ideally, as anti-market mechanisms: if done *properly* (with an intense focus on disincentivizing luxury consumption and, in the process, on cross-subsidisation of energy for basic needs), they would 'distort the markets' (get the 'prices wrong'), because they would work against the inexorable capitalist logic of declining short-run marginal cost curves. So, since Chris Doss doesn't get this either, let's sum it up like this: market mechanisms commodify life; our job is decommodification. Ok?
Patrick Bond wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>> "Market mechanisms," yes, but that's a vague phrase. It can mean cap
>> and trade, and it can mean carbon taxes. Offsets are bogus. Carbon
>> taxes are market mechanisms but I think they're pretty good ones.
>
> Full agreement with you on content but not semantic form.
>
> This is interesting in part because it parallels the somewhat more
> advanced water commodification debate underway (Doug gets a bit of this
> by subbing to the debate list, but there's a more surgical listserve,
> water-warriors, which has picked it up too).
>
> One of the conflicts amongst marxists doing water work is whether the
> commodification of water reflects the drive to price according to
> short-run marginal cost (my position), or whether it's based on a
> reading of the private versus social commodity described in Vol 1 of Das
> Kapital (this is Erik Swyngedouw's and Susan Spronk's position, which is
> very strong in abstract terms but not much use in day-to-day struggle).
> The commodification process means that large water consumers pay flat or
> even declining prices per drop, given economies of scale, and pressure
> on the water company (whether public or private sector isn't so
> important) to *not* distort the market. That means much higher prices
> for people who consume lower amounts. We have some seminal case studies
> in South Africa.
>
> But moving to energy, if you are serious about carbon taxes, Doug, you'd
> soon get into a situation where *punitive* taxes would need to be
> applied to large per capita users (consumers and firms) so as to
> cross-subsidise a minimal lifeline energy use for everyone else
> (including African peasants for example). And to do that is *not* going
> to work with a market-mechanism approach, I'd say, Doug. On the
> contrary, s an *anti-market* mechanism is required - a free lifeline for
> all plus rapidly rising (concave) block tariff, that doesn't 'get the
> prices right'. And that's the damn thing about the market-oriented
> enviros: they think that market solutions can deal with market-created
> problems (correcting externalities). They don't quite get it, that it
> will require an anti-market carbon tax - a very very high price for
> hedonistic energy consumption (such as my own given a regrettable desire
> to depart frequently from Durban and Joburg airports) - to properly
> disincentivize excess CO2 emissions.
>
> So don't call a *serious* luxury tax on CO2 a market mechanism, ok? They
> will coopt you and your ideas faster than the other way around, comrade.
>
>