Joseph, many thanks for the correction on Gore, as I hadn't read 'Our
Choice'. A few points, and I expect your usual insightful rebuts:
* I suppose I'm let off the hook, somewhat, by the fact that it is /only
/cap 'n trade that has gotten any traction in Washington as a global or
national climate strategy (hence that's where I've seen Gore's inputs,
e.g. in Kyoto when he insisted that cap 'n trade be included in the
Protocol in exchange for Washington's support - which ended up being
95-0 /against /Kyoto in the US Senate in 1998);
* I sense that there is zero potential for getting a carbon tax aimed at
climate passed globally or nationally, yet if there were such a tax and
if it went to the Green Climate Fund (supposedly to reach $100 bn/year
by 2020, if you believe Hillary Clinton, hahaha) in a way that didn't
exacerbate existing power relations and if it didn't fund False
Solutions - i.e. if it really were a Climate Debt payment from North to
Southern /people /(not elites) - then I would probably come out in
favour of it, whatever that's worth;
* we have a very insignificant carbon tax in SA and not much of a debate
(I reviewed it here recently:
http://triplecrisis.com/south-africas-carbon-tax-debate-disappoints/
)... and I'm wondering if you think I'm taking the right tack in
opposing it as useless /because it is so low that it doesn't have any
apparent impact on price elasticity of demand for fossil fuels; /
* but I think the challenge you have in fundamentally opposing a carbon
tax is that at some point, if it is high enough, a tax has the same
impact as a command-and-control prohibition on fossil fuels... and of
course it all demands on price elasticity and income inequality, as to
how it works;
* so yes, the 'if only' was meant to indicate that there is a
substantial difference between cap 'n trade and taxation (especially if
the latter has the Hansen-style rebate to all citizens, so as to gain
political popularity). There are so many ways to critique cap 'n trade
(I must get into this in detail again because of Robin Hahnel's recent
articles in RRPE and CNS) but the talk I gave at the Brazilian Society
of Political Economists yesterday in Rio - slides to be posted soon at
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?11,65,3,2636 - concluded with these
'fatal flaws':
- inventing property right to pollute is effectively 'privatizing air',
a moral dilemma given unprecedented inequality;
- GHGs have non-linear impact, not reducible to commodity exchange (a
tonne of CO2 produced at 'X' not same as a tonne reduced at 'Y');
- the corporations most guilty of pollution, and the World Bank (most
responsible for fossil fuel financing), are the market's driving forces
-- and the United Nations is utterly incompetent at regulation;
- many offsets -- e.g. monocultural timber plantations, forest
'protection', landfill methane-electricity -- devastate local
communities and ecologies;
- price of carbon in these markets is haywire, not least due to
corruption, fraud and theft -- with no prospect of regulation;
- dangerous potential for markets to become multi-trillion dollar
speculative bubbles, similar to other exotic financial instruments;
- encourages small incremental shifts, distracting us from big changes
needed across economy, energy, transport, consumption, disposal;
- 'market solutions for market failure' is not an appropriate ideology
after the world's worst-ever financial market failure
* and if anyone wants the two books I did on this topic last year -
Durban's Climate Gamble and Politics of Climate Justice - let me know
offlist.
Ciao,
Patrick
On 6/8/2012 2:17 AM, Joseph Green wrote:
Patrick Bond wrote:
Many of these libertarians believe climate change is a plot by Al Gore to
impose world carbon taxes. If only -- for Gore is actually instead a
self-interested huckster for carbon trading, which is failing miserably in
Europe, as well as in the US (except California) in the wake of the 2010
closure of the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Gore backs both tax and trade and a carbon tax. His book "Our Choice: A Plan
to Solve the Climate Crisis", states that
"I have long advocated the first option--a CO2 tax that is offset by equal
reductions in other tax burdens--as the simplest, most direct, and most
efficient way of enlisting the market as an ally in saving the ecosystem of
the planet." (p. 343)
And "In my opinion, the real solution would include both a CO2 tax and a cap
and trade system, and I believe that will eventually be our choice." (p. 345)
Gore is correct in identifying the carbon tax, and nost just cap and trade,
as a market method. He is wrong in advocating that market methods will save
the environment, and in saying that both the carbon tax and cap and trade
have worked.
It makes sense for a "self-interested huckster" and neo-liberal such as Gore
to back the carbon tax. It makes no sense for any opponent of neo-liberalism
or friend of the environment to do so. So I hope that the "if only" in the
quoted paragraph, with its implied support of the carbon tax, is an
inadvertent error of writing, rather than the author's real stand.
-- Joseph Green
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