No, nowhere near them. But the my arguments against offsets are not original with me. Attention Conservation Notice: what follows is a thumbnail biography of how I came to the thinking I came to on these matters.
I have had an interest in renewable energy and efficiency all my life. I grew up on Bucky Fuller and Barry Commoner. I was always involved on a low level in left activity - attending demos and vigils and events. Never a leader, but a really long term grassroots activist - anti war, labor supporter, environmentalist, feminists, anti-racist - basically low level support in whatever was going on near me. And at the same time I was always fascinated by waste of potential in physical infrastructure. All the energy and resources thrown away through bad design.
And then when the Iraq war was starting, and I was in a demonstration against it, I got in a civil discussion with an unusually polite counter demonstrator. And he admitted that the war was mainly about oil and said "but we really need the oil, oil is survival man". And I pointed that we had all these substitutes for oil and he just stared at me. He refused to believe me when I told him that cars and trains could run on electricity, and that wind and solar generators were running all over the U.S. and all over the world now. And I realized that the stuff I knew was not common knowledge, and that while there were short articles out there nobody had done a detailed compilation of tech that could replace fossil fuels. And so I did that mainly because I felt somebody had to get that out of the way so we could move the discussion on to the politics and economic where it belonged. I while there has been a lot of work on the same lines since I think I really was one of the first to do a really detail reference work on existing technology. I won't say the very first because you are kind of tapping into an existing stream when doing something of this sort and nobody is really original in putting these things together, you are reinventing rather than inventing. And there have been a lot of stuff on the same lines since including the article in the November 2009 issue of SciAm . And I'm always happy when someone says essentially the same thing I first said back in 2004. Because if nobody independently came to the same conclusions I'd wonder if I got something wrong. But when intelligent technical people keeping looking at the same facts I looked at, and obtain the same results - well I find that reassuring.
OK, so what were the economic and political conclusions I think the technical info should clear the way for? Well one thing I was saying was that while some of the solutions with existing technology were more expensive than fossil fuels, many of them are cheaper. You can weather seal and duct seal a building a great deal cheaper than you can heat or cool it. You can insulate it significantly cheaper. And there are similar conclusions that can be drawn with industry and many possible improvements in transport. So all this emphasis on putting a price on carbon was misplaced. Because a lot things that should have been happening if price signals and market mechanisms were the way to drive change were not happening. And then I stepped back and looked at this from a bigger perspective and looked at that bigger perspective historically. And I realized that the need for infrastructure changes dwarfed the need for behavioral changes. That is that we were talking mainly an infrastructure problem. Transports: freight trains, passenger trains, bicycle paths, pedestrian paths, walkable neighborhoods -- all infrastructure. What about homes? Well insulation, weather sealing, better water heaters, better appliances - infrastructure on the individual level Factories - better pipes and pumps and motors, better boilers, better manufacturing techniques - infrastructure again. Renewable electricity - again infrastructure. And historically where does infrastructure come from. Sticking to the U.S. (because I'm most familiar with U.S. history) infrastructure transformations always come with huge public investment - sometime in money always in land or right of ways. Maybe the first great U.S. infrastructure project were the great canals including the Erie Canal - built by private companies on land stolen from the Native Americans.
Ditto the rail roads. Ditto the farms on the great plains. And then there were the great seaports which were built not only on public lands (purchase to taken by force to become public land) but with public money. Of course there was the U.S. post office. and then there street cars for local transport and streets and highways for the automobile, and water, and sewers and telegraphs and telephones, and electric lines cable for cable TV and wired broadband, and electronic spectrum for wireless radio, TV , internet and cell phones. Always huge public invest often of money, always of public rights of way. And then another big part of infrastructure transformation was regulation. For example we have sewers, but we also have regulation that if you build a house you have to hook up to a sewer (or in rural areas build a septic system that meets certain standards). We have public fire rules, be also have rules that your home can't be a tinder box, to reduce the number of fires in the first place. And lastly I saw that we should use price for reinforcement, but in a rough and ready imprecise form like a carbon tax or auctioned permits. Because the most important thing about price as reinforcement was that it be done in a way not to interfere with more important policy components.
On a deeper level I realized that a lot of the structural flaws that led to all this waste came from class conflict. That is lot of the reason for this waste is that the kind of structural changes that would have led to good decision making would have also required weakening the relative power of capital vs. labor. Maybe not so far as giving the workers ownership and control over the means of production (though that would certainly have been the best solution). But at least flattening access to capital, and more worker say in the workplace to spot opportunities that are easier to see from the bottom up than the top down. And public investment and regulation in even a capitalist democracy can be a democratization of the society relative to a more neoliberal system, even if it is still capitalist and not all that democratic.
And I realized that "price" as a means to drive change was an attempt by more far-thinking elements of capitalism to get around the need for democratization and structural change in solving environmental problems. And that it came to something as fundamental as climate change that touched so many aspects of our system, that attempt might diffuse more radical reforms, but it would not actually solve the problem of climate change. For various reasons, putting a price on carbon, even by a carbon fee or an autctioned permit system would not get the infrastructure problem solved. And Mickey Mouse gimmicks like offsets and introducing trading would make that even worse.
But I just thought of offsets and carbon tradings as a particularly ineffective and egrious form of carbon fee. And then Patrick Bond introduced me to the Durban Group. Patrick thought at the time that my concentration on solutions might benefit the climate justice movement. At the same time I was introduced to the full horrors of how much worse offsets were and how much worse carbon trade was than an ordinary carbon tax. While a carbon tax (or some forms of carbon trading very close to a carbon tax) are inadequate by themselves, but useful if a reinforcement to other policy, actually existing forms of carbon trading actually undermine reductions - especially but not only offsets. Offsets in particular not only undermine reductions, but actually kill people on the micro level. And when I talk about offsets and carbon trading (as opposed to carbon prices in general) I'm talking about stuff I've mainly learned from long term climate justice activists like Patrick Bond, and Larry Lohmann, and Daphne Wysham, and also from intellectuals in the Global South like Walden Bello. Also I've read a lot of primary sources, including studies by Wara and so forth. And some of the original debates around Coases work.
So when I talk about offsets and what I say sounds familiar, it may be that I'm channeling people you are familiar with.
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:09 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Dec 20, 2009, at 9:25 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>>
>> Doug's program is also here, for those like me who seem to have the
>>> wrong `codex' to use. This works with just a browser and audio card:
>>>
>>> http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/57092
>>>
>>
>> It's also here, in higher fidelity, playable by anyone who can handle MP3s,
>> downloadable or streaming:
>>
>> http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#091217
>>
>> Links to Gar's stuff also there.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *********************************************************
> Alan P. Rudy
> Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
> Central Michigan University
> 124 Anspach Hall
> Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
> 517-881-6319
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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