[lbo-talk] The Price is Wrong - what is wrong with carbon rations, cap-and-trade, carbon taxes as primary demand when it comes to the climate crisis.

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Oct 2 16:47:14 PDT 2013


The crisis and economic alternatives by Gregory Albo, Socialist Register 2013

A snippet: "The turn of green movements toward localist and market-based strategies led to a remarkable - and unexpected - convergence with neoliberalism, via promoting changing individual behaviour in response to prices, and/ or a self-regarding communal localism. This has locked the approach to climate change, in the most prominent example, almost entirely along the axis of 'pricing carbon' and incentives to shift technology from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources. The critical question of expanding noncommodified social relations as an ecological strategy through reduced work time, extending free public transit, continual learning through free education and so forth, was left out of the programmatic proposals and struggles over climate change. Such strategies do not just appear. They need to be built strategically through finding points of convergence between anti-austerity and climate change struggles."

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Put otherwise: Normal political procedures will never lead to any control over global warming. Whatever control is achieved must be _forced_ on a reluctant state as the price of domestic tranquility.

Carrol



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