Patrick Bond's reply to Robin Hahnel on Carbon Trading: summary carbon trading still fails both as policy and as politics
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 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
