On 12/11/2024 7:55 AM, Ian Angus via groups.io wrote:
Lancet study: Climate extremes are increasingly claiming lives and
livelihoods worldwide
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/12/10/the-record-breaking-human-costs-of-climate-change/
Thanks Ian, because this basis thesis is obvious enough - "A growing
body of literature shows that the economic benefits of a transition to
net zero greenhouse gas emissions will far exceed the costs of inaction"
- yet it helps to have increasing proof. However, the single best-known
way to measure this, is the 'Social Cost of Carbon' concept - which for
reasons I don't understand, these authors omit mention of. (Do we know why?)
I'm wondering if comrades are applying any sort of cost-benefit analysis
when addressing carbon-capitalist accumulation in your settings?
We're doing so repeatedly in South Africa and finding a bit of resonance
when debating the Social Cost of Carbon (and methane) while fighting
Shell and Total plans for offshore oil drilling
<http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/Files/articles/special-editions/33/06-bond.pdf>
(so far victorious in the courts), as well as Chinese high-carb
industrial capital
<https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/article/view/8864/8341>
and coal-fired power plant financing
<https://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=22894> inland,
or coal exports to Israel
<https://www.cadtm.org/From-South-Africa-to-Syria-rising-perils-for-Palestine-solidarity>.
The World Economic Forum endorses
<https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/06/nature-climate-news-global-warming-hurricanes/>
a $1056 costing of a ton of CO2 emissions, though other comrades would
put it at $3000/ton
<https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/economic-cost-climate-change-could-be-six-times-higher-previously-thought>.
Trump will no doubt again lower the U.S. government's official costing
to his 2017-21 level of $1/ton. (One reason we need to prepare carbon
border adjustment mechanism tariffs against any goods or services
exported from the U.S. starting next year, as the EU will do in 2026 and
the UK in 2027 against South Africa
<https://euromemo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Bond-2024-Vienna-Euromemo-conference-The-Political-Ecology-of-Carbon-Border-Taxes-and-the-Just-Energy-Transition.pdf>.)
How should we be quantifying damage to life and nature? Any way that one
tries to do so runs the awful risk of commodification - that by
'valuing' nature using price, the logic of markets suddenly arises and
takes control, such as in the 'privatisation of the air', known as
emissions trading or carbon offsets, which the climate justice movement
properly opposes.
So the challenge is to 'make polluters pay' without allowing gimmicks
and shlenters to arise. And of course the very /first /thing the
Conference of Polluters 29 did last month, was codify carbon
marketeering... and we can bet Lula will continue the process in Belem
next December, sigh.
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