http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23656
A taste from the start of the article
>[This is a reply to Robin Hahnel's ZNet article "Has The Left Missed The Boat On Climate Change?"]
>Robin Hahnel, ordinarily so persuasive when criticizing markets and constructing notional post-capitalist economic relations, makes serious strategic errors in his article ‘Has the Left Missed the Boat on Climate Change?' (www.zcommunications.org/zspace/robinhahnel). In half the space he used, I'd like to offer two concerns:
> * Robin's argumentative technique assumes there's no space in between full-fledged eco-socialism (our shared long-term ideal) and cooption into (allegedly reformable) carbon markets, and thus he takes serious political missteps justified through strange allegations about the Climate Justice (CJ) movement.
> * Robin's political vision is constrained by the backward state of US congressional power relations, which indeed makes his proposed reforms far less likely than the combination of grassroots direct actions (not a legislative utopia) against polluters, national/local air quality and planning regulation, and substantial public investments that together the CJ movement is advocating.
> In short, Robin's ‘pragmatic' market-reformist approach to an urgent challenge is in reality more idealistic - impossible, really - than CJ anti/post-market politics. Having had exchanges of this sort in person and on email with Robin for fifteen months already, I have no illusion that his mind will be changed in the following pages. Still, at the risk of sounding ill-tempered, here's a reply (at Z's request) to Robin's attacks on those of us who have, as he puts it, ‘missed' his sinking cap-and-trade ship.
Read the rest at: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23656