Gar wrote (thank you for entering the discussion): > When a very visible public policy makes life more hellish > for people in the name of virtue the likely reaction is to > demand a change in that policy rather than further changes > to adapt to it.
You are formulating here the reason why we are past the point where policies can do the trick. Without a broad grassroots movement where people in the developed nations realize that more consumption does not lead to more happiness, but on the contrary the pursuit of more consumption leads to disaster, without a broad awakening that we are all in this together and that humans everywhere have to cooperate and preserve the ecosystem, without such a radical cultural and philosophicl change humanity will not be able to jump out of the groove they are in. Assuming such a cultural change is on the way and people are asking: how can we elicit in a fair way the cooperation of everyone to do the heavy lifting that is required -- I think if this is the situation, then people will embrace individual carbon rationing as a fair framework coordinating everybody's efforts to decarbonize their lives and the economy. > Leading with carbon pricing is bad policy and bad politics. I agree with Gar that public investment must play the leading role. But as long as not all production is socialized, public investment cannot do the trick alone, there is simply not enough tax revenue. We also need private investment, and you will not get private investment without demand and supply conditions that allow renewable energy and other necessary investments to make profits. I think carbon rationing is the best way to create demand in the right areas without distorting the price system elsewhere. > And when we talk about degradation of forests and loss of > forest and farm soil and so on there is a whole other > level of measurement difficulty. For forest management it is not enough to measure CO2 but one also needs to measure the other ecosystem services provided by forests. The report "World in Transition -- A Social Contract for Sustainability" by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (Schellnhuber) writes on p. 300: > a purely climate protection driven transformation does not > make sense in forest management. The WBGU recommends > increasing the overall focus on ecosystem services, as the > availability of safe water and soil quality are also > decisive for the transformation. I can recommend this report highly, it can be downloaded for free from http://www.wbgu.de/en/flagship-reports/fr-2011-a-social-contract The WBGU is naive about carbon trading (they recommend a business-level cap and trade system), they do not mention that many of their recommendations go against the spirit of the capitalist world system, and their extensive literature list has neither Scheer nor Lohmann. Nevertheless this report makes a lot of valid points which I have not found elsewhere assembled so neatly. I consider it obligatory reading for anyone concerned about the climate. I am going to use it and the video-taped lectures of the associated "Transformation Seminar" for my environmental economics class next Spring. Hans _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
