Let me take you up on a couple of points, Shane. On 2/10/2013 4:47 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
...Regulation means regulators chosen by the bankster-owned state, but it "sounds" progressive.
Yes, going back to the Progressive Era (and before), that's been the case. My first job was in the Philadelphia Fed regulating against redlining (I was the first person ever hired to do that full-time in the Fed, and it was in 1983, six years after the Community Reinvestment Act was passed); a classic captive-regulatory situation characterized by revolving-door officials way too cozy with the banks. And yes, the difficulties of regulating climate were made evident by Lisa Jackson's frustration and recent walk-out at EPA. Nevertheless, it's the only hope, as I try to argue below.
People don't understand Cap'n Trade, and they rightly would be even more opposed if they did.
A short film I helped with - http://storyofcapandtrade.org/ (the second of Annie Leonard's wonderful Story of Stuff series) - has had more than a million views, but I don't know of any other mass public education on the topic. It was great to see the diverse opposition to cap&trade in California and although so far unsuccessful the struggle seemed to unite activists ranging from enviro-justice critics in communities of color (because cap&trade will keep the big polluters there open for much longer) with those in trendy SF NGOs allied to Chiapas, Mexico victims of REDD forestry scamming, and lots of critical environmentalists in between.
The dilemma is that the big Washington enviro NGOs (the only exception being Friends of the Earth) will continue supporting cap&trade because it's seen as what's feasible in Washington. One test is what's going to happen to 350.org because it's the critical - and, as yet, undecided - site of potential mass youth and community involvement (only somewhat penetrated - not controlled - by yuppie greens dedicated to 'market solutions'). I am optimistic, because Bill McKibben and his team are smart; he seems to be a recovered-economist critical of bankster-solutions (http://grist.org/climate-energy/beyond-baby-steps-analyzing-the-cap-and-trade-flop/) and his decision /not /to endorse any of the Kerry and Waxman-Markey bills in 2009-2010 was useful. (He supported a carbon tax - a 'fee÷nd' strategy from his Maine neighbor Sue Collins.)
But they also don't understand taxation except that they've been trained to hate Taxes. In a market economy, such as we have now and for some time into the future, taxes--positive and negative--are the only effective way to channel resources away from ecologically destructive uses and to direct them to ecologically constructive alternatives.
The main problem, as Joseph Green can chime in with, is that you only get change at the margins with taxation. To deal with climate and so many other eco-social problems, we need full-fledged systemic transformation (the kind we last saw in the West in the World War II mobilization). A second is that a carbon tax generates climate-apartheid politics which makes for discriminatory (anti-poor) policies, and given that real estate markets price poor and working people so far from their sites of employment in sprawling exurbs, the need to build in countervailing subsidies makes fair climate taxation really difficult.
That's what the price system (aka law of value) is about. It's also what politics is really about. The coal can be kept in the hole and the oil in the rock only by making it unprofitable to extract them.
I disagree. The worldwide banning of CFCs - to prevent ozone hole widening - is the precedent we all seek, a task begun at the 1987 Montreal Protocol and completed by 1996. (To be sure, global governance since then has been miserable in form and content, failing to generate any solutions to global crises of any sort in any of the multilateral agencies.)
Greenhouse gases are much harder, but life on Earth in coming decades really does depend upon it. Since regulatory strategies coming from a fossil-fuel-addicted corporate-controlled US Congress are impossible to envisage in the near future, the orientation of activism at US national scale is to get that Clean Air Act enforced to halt coal fired plant approvals or ban mountaintop removals. That strategy is slowly working, it seems, way too slowly but at least it's an end-run around Congress.
The more direct popular-regulatory approach, however, is to intervene at the sites of emissions. Of the 150 coal-fired power plants proposed by Dick Cheney, only one or two have been commissioned, as a result of grassroots pressure, from local civic groups to Sierra Club (whose lawyers have done a great job). And divestment against fossil fuel corps has begun at several Northeast universities, with a couple hundred student chapters dedicated to this tactic now in motion. The Keystone XL Pipeline struggle is also crucial, and there's a big rally in Washington next Sunday http://www.350.org/en/about/blogs/presidents-day-weekend-2013
And this is true across the world: all progress on climate change has come at the point of production, extraction and generation. I could give you a long list - a full account of strategy and tactics is in http://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&method=view_books&global[fields][_id]=395 ... and if anyone's in Washington I'm speaking about this at the Institute for Policy Studies on Feb 19 (and at UC-Santa Barbara on Feb 23&25 and I think in between in NYC).
But the main point behind my forwarding that article is that the standard US public policy brainwash - that only market solutions can solve market problems ('we have to privatize the air to save it') - doesn't seem to be permanently brain-damaging. For those opposed to apartheid here in South Africa, which is where I learned politics, it's akin to the question posed by Rev Leon Sullivan in the early 1980s: 'can't we get corporations to help end apartheid by encouraging them to act a bit less racist?' - to which we all said, 'no, get them outta there: divest now!' And for those working on any eco-social problem, that evolution in awareness is extremely good news.
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