[lbo-talk] My latest on Grist - The price is wrong (Gar Lipow)

Eugene Coyle e.coyle at me.com
Thu Oct 3 11:27:30 PDT 2013


Gar,

You take up two different subjects in your article. The bulk of your article is criticism of the efficacy and feasibility of carbon pricing vis a vis global warming. That part of your article I basically agree with.

But you are on dangerous ground, that is to say wrong, in your first paragraph when you support economic growth on a grand scale, which in your scenario would result from a massive spending on clean energy. You also extol that massive spending as the best policy, but it isn't clear whether that is for building a grassroots movement or controling greenhouse gas emissions or both. If you are saying that is the best policy for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, that is clearly wrong IMO.

Your opening paragraph supports "Business as Usual with clean energy." That is basically a technology fix for a social and economic problem and it is the wrong way to go. This is the mistaken line taken by Fred Krupp of Environental Defense Fund on new clean technology: "This revolution will depend on industrial technology -- capital-intensive, shovel-in-the-ground industries -- and will almost certainly create the great fortunes of the twenty-first century." (Page 3 of Earth: The sequel).

Related to the problem of a massive US spending "...hundreds of billions in annual green public investment... " is the question of separately funding similar massive spending in the South. Is the US public going to embrace that?

Certainly technology has a role to play in dealing with GHG emissions but giving it the lead role is a mistake.

Carrol provided a snippet from Gregory Albo:
> 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."

and then Carrol added his own interpretation:
> 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.

But you didn't respond to Albo's remark about noncommodified social relations. If you are not depending on a technological fix and ignoring noncommodified social relations all is well. But I don't see that in the piece you posted yesterday.

Gene



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