On Nov 4, 2013, at 10:33 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Anything the present national governments, most if not all of them
composed of naked or genteel kleptocrats (I'm talking about you
Wall Street, Qingnanhai, Qatar, Nairobi, the Kremlin, The City et
tutti quanti), would set up is sure to be a fully gameable
authoritarian technocratic labyrinth. The proper solution is quite
different and very simple, needing only(!) popular *national*
movements to implement, starting right here in the USA. It is a
substantial, annually increasing, tax on the carbon content of all
fuels imposed at the wellhead or mine pit. It would be imposed ad
valorum on all imports (based on each county's carbon-fuel usage
per dollar of GDP).
Disagree: did you not see the Krugman review of Nordhaus? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/climate-change-gambling-civilization/
... even those two guys admit the strategy is too marginalist, not
transformational. You need heavy-handed regulation at this stage,
they concede.
Krugman writes as a DP apologist--see how he deprecates carbon
taxation as politically impossible because of the Repugs when it was
just as impossible when his Dems had big majorities. He and Nordhaus
are devotees of "cost-benefit" despite the utter subjectivity and,
worse, the static nature of its whole conception. In their article
there is simply no mention of the dynamic nature of alternative-energy
technologies and the social transformations they could enable--not
even the established fact of economic history that every long period
of upswing in economic activity expresses a new and disruptive
energetics technology. Nordhaus is entirely too moderate in proposing
a tax that would "double by 2030." The amount of the increase is
presently only speculative. What counts is the programmatic
determination to raise it to the point that all hydrocarbon extraction
becomes uneconomic within a decade--and of course to start at a level
high enough to force substantial immediate changes. "heavy-handed
regulation" is the New Deal formula, the hallmark of state
capitalism. We know who, under the present political dispensation,
will regulate the regulators! The carbon tax, in contrast, is
"regulated" automatically by the computers without which no
hydrocarbon extraction or importation would even be conceivable.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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