Market economics is still no solution to environmental (or any other) problems

Why carbon trading will increase carbon pollution [excerpt]

Other babble threads illustrating the failure of market-based economics to solve environmental problems:

Climate Change Paradox

Recycled waste goes from Ontario to China and back

Unrealistic Moderates

Thanks, M. Lots of good reading here.

..hudson paints a picture of the future.

... Farmland, forestry, hydroelectric power, geothermal, clean air that allows people to live longer and be more productive, eco-tourism, sustainable fisheries, fossil fuels... Yes, by definition nature is a form of capital. If it wasn't we wouldn't have a country, since the only way we were able to get the most basic infrastructure (a railway) built was by offering the companies that ponied up the finances in the late 1800's some massive swaths of that capital.

I think we should be reclaiming land and restoring watersheds for numerous reasons, and yes, that it looks pretty, and that we have an obligation to leave things better than we found them (that whole contract between the dead, the living, and those to be born, that classical conservatives like to go on about) but we're never going to reclaim, preserve, and repair, nature so long as we view it as something separate. Our environmental policy needs to be a little more bloodless than a Pete Seeger song.

We can have a green economy, expand the earth's carrying capacity, or place nature as something separate from humans and the industry that we create. We can't do all three, and I'm sorry, but animism is last on my list and it's last on the list of a subsistence farmer in Burundi farming the less than two-acre plot that is the national average.

Is that last post by Red Tory Tea Girl a quote from somewhere?

By whose definition of what is nature "a form of capital"? By the definition of "nature"? No. By the definition of "capital"? surely not. The example given of the railroads was one of the conversion of nature into capital by privatizing it.

And who here mentioned "animism"?

Yes, corporate greed will help us to curb our insatiable appetites for fossil fuels and finite resources. Markets will safe us from rack and ruin. All that's required is to have a leap of faith in an invisible hand god. Everyone knows it's true. Long live Caesar.

You've fnally explained for me the meaning of "invisible hand" Fidel. Thanks. :)

I think you have, yes. I'm not arguing for markets, but yes, there is an inherent value to the environment, and anybody who makes a living from the land could tell you as much. Will free markets solve the problem? Not likely. But yes, attaching a tax, of, say, $20 a tonne to the price of carbon emissions would raise the price of crude by about $6 a barrel. When thermal depolymerization is only economical at $80 a barrel at the moment, for example, that six dollars does say a lot about encouraging us to switch from artificially cheap fuel sources that aren't renewable and cause long-term environmental harm.

Especially when the revenue is used to improve renewable resources, like land reclamation, expansion of desalination powered by renewables, solar, wind, tidal power, etc.

And yeah, there aren't a lot of proper conservatives out there. I know. I'm doomed to be a member of a movement where most of the membership doesn't really understand the central tenets and acts out of truthiness, confirmed prejudice, and miopic analysis that treats the working poor and lumpen as an enemy to progress... but that's okay, I'm also a feminist and a nationalist, so this isn't anything I don't experience elsewhere.

Because the fundamentals of the philosophy are sound. Socialists don't stop being socialists just because the Russians did it wrong.

And have I struck you as a believer in laissez-faire policies, really Fidel? You can't reconcile 'disposition to preserve and an ability to improve' with public ownership? You can't reconcile a belief that society is an organism with the belief that firms are most efficient when they're controlled by the people who make and buy the goods that firms produce?

Heck, you could read Adam Smith if you liked. Not even he believes in the kleptarchal policies ascribed to him. I believe the commanding heights of the economy should be publicly owned. We'll take some of our taxes in common stock, thank you. I believe that there is such a thing as social income and that it should be equally distributed, contempt for the lumpen that some have expressed aside... and I believe that yes, we ought to know what an unspoiled environment produces in quantifiable terms for human benefit, if only so that it becomes easier to make the political case for environmental preservation and farmland dearidification.

So you can put me next to bourgeois oligarchy masquerading as capitalism if you like, and claim that because I think we should recognize that emitting a tonne of carbon does at least X damage, I somehow believe that BP should be trusted to be environmental stewards. You can do that. You just can't do it with my acquiescence. Conservative does not mean the same thing as right-wing, or socially-repressive, or holding a capital-first mindset... and usually, I'm busy explaining it to all the right-wing, socially-regressive, appropriators of the word. But they're too busy worshipping at the feet of those who own but don't create to listen.

I think the game can be fixed, but it involves changing some of the fundamental motivations for it, so that 'the game' would only resemble what we currently have going on on an ephemeral level.

We're reaching a level of income where we can guarantee a Western subsistence lifestyle for all, if the political will can be found. Per capita global GDP is over $11K a year in terms of purchase price parity, 10.5K if you measure in nominal terms, which I tend to think is a better measure of well-being, since PPP doesn't count clean air and water, for example... That's right around what someone needs to have a fairly basic, though nowhere near average, Western standard of living, splitting a 2 bedroom apartment, using public transit, being able to enjoy a show or a new book a couple times a week, more than adequate clothing...

Of course, it's really quite impossible to have completely equal resource distribution, so disparity will continue, but as we work to ameliorate all absolute poverty in the Western world, one of the big political rationalles against development projects disappears. Also, again, if I manage to get my way and we get a Guaranteed Annual Income indexed half to per-capita GDP and half to inflation,  it will do a lot to shift the political economy to focusing on productivity, not jobs, since a late-industrial economy can't employ everyone, it just can't, but what that shift in thinking will do is focus the minds of policy makers on how to increase productivity, which means irrigation, which means land reclamation, and the only way to do that for arid areas is going to be desalination, and the wide-spread use of renewable energy... Aid will start to be measured in arable acres and bushels of wheat instead of military hardware.

Yes, there will be free markets, but they won't be free to impoverish people. This is what I go back to with A GAI. Giving someone the ability to walk away from a bad deal without facing poverty will be the best thing you can do to blunt the implicit market power that an employer has. People will do work that makes them better off and work that feels like a mutually beneficial exchange instead of wage slavery. Post-Secondary Education will cease to be a subsidy to the children of the professional class, because every child who decides against post-secondary, not that I think they should, is going to have about $50,000 in their pocket (today's money) with which to put 50% down on a starter home, or start that small business they've been thinking about, or whatever else they've had in mind that will best give them a future and fulfillment.

The market isn't really good for marshalling investment with positive externality. The market isn't as good at picking winners when it comes to R&D either, as we've found, but what the market remains good at is rationing goods and services when everyone has sufficient income. The market's really good at stuff like that. For a simple example: The market's good at selling T-shirts, not so good at making sure the land that grew the cotton is in better shape than it was last decade or that the working standards of the person who put the shirt together are fair and safe.

We have chocolate prices, for example, that are skyrocketing because cultivated cocoa land is slowly dying out and the farmers aren't paid enough to stay in the business... so if we assume that there's a social benefit to ensuring that the cocoa farmer is paid, say, $5 a day up from the $2 she's getting, and if we assume that there's a social benefit to having that same land around and still productive seventy years from now, and if we assume that there's a social benefit to having cocoa, then we need the state to become a wholesaler of this commodity, buy the cocoa from farmers at a higher price, buy land for improvement and hire agricultural farmers at a non-exploitive wage, and sell the cocoa on a commodities market to finance the purchase of cocoa and cocoa land and land improvements... the market, however, is good from that point. They're good at taking that commodity and making a thousand different products. They're good at marketing those products, distributing them, setting price points, and with a Guaranteed Income, they'll even be okay at hiring workers. It's the power dynamic of a worker-employer relationship that makes it dangerous, nothing else.

If we were all working for extra money over and above what covers a basic lifestyle and all knew our rights, those employers, and I know it's hard to envision, but you see this in the professional class where people have liquidity, those employers would be unable to coerce employees into work, and suddenly, yes, the game may look the same, but the outcomes, and for that matter the strategies employed, cease to look the same.

And we can make it so that there's free entry into the marketplace, even by someone with no capital. Enterprise zones where we set up 50 sq. ft. kiosks, row upon row, charging $100 a month, deducted automatically from a GAI cheque. I don't think it will do much for the economy to have those, though venture capital makes money just that way, throwing darts at a wall and seeing what sticks, but really it's more important that people understand that an economy which makes provision for every person to be able to get into business for themselves without fear that they'll be homeless if their business is a flop has a lot more of what the right likes to call 'economic freedom' than their Fraser Institute utopias ever will.

So yes, I think we can have a mixed economy without exploitation. It's just a question of giving everyone sufficient bargaining power, and ensuring that no economic mistake is fatal. I'll stop now because I'm rambling.

That much is painfully obvious. We have had class war openly prosecuted in the West by the owners of property, and more importantly, their rentier managers, for forty years. It's going to take a counter offensive on many, many, fronts.

As to the level of democracy tolerated in Nixon's America, I'm going to side with Hunter S. Thompson's fully elucidated view, complete with the benefit of hindsight, of the president.

Debts of 150% of GDP are definitely repayable, just like homes that cost three years' income are... Canada's total public debt-GDP ratio is 84% at the moment, and on gargantuan long-term, inflation-adusted yields of forty-nine basis points, we really don't have anything to worry about when it comes to taking on debt for infrastructure in a liquidity trap.

Should we raise taxes? Yes, dramatically. What's being sold as a brave agenda for people-driven change?

Wow. 0.191% of GDP in additional taxes. Remember, they have to be corporate because Canadians don't comprehend that corporations, like governments, are a nexus of arrangements with people, we just think that government and corporations are holes from which money is either spewed or sucked depending on your political prejudices. Zero. Point. One. Nine. Percent. Yeah, the NDP really knows how to present serious solutions to serious problems. Call me when someone from your vanguard finds the intestinal fortitude to say, "We need to raise taxes, across the board, including the GST, that or abolish the GST and raise income and gas taxes even more."

Instead we get weak-as-water moralizing about three billion dollars. Three billion... it's quite literally nothing. It's thirty-five cents a day for a year. (Which is also why I never understand the right's animus against properly funding the CBC)

Let's talk about real change. Let's talk about moving three hundred billion back into the wages-and-transfers column.

Politics may be the art of the possible, but so many people automatically assume the modifier, 'immediately' belongs in that sentence.

A)Market economics trump environmental considerations

B)Gaians posts make me want to slap someone in the face.

Fidel, you're definitely right not just about neo-liberals selling the rope with which they will be hung but angrily demanding reduced taxes on the manufacture of said rope. And when you talk about the three decades of post war hope and prosperity, it's an object lesson: Marx was right about what would go wrong. FDR, Ford, Diefenbaker, MacMillan, et al, were right about how to prevent that kind of decline. I think we need different structures than the early Fordists had for sharing the gains in productivity, since we're approaching a point where full employment in a formal for-profit economy is becoming a fantasy, but the point remains: Make sure a rising tide lifts all boats.

stevebrown

A) Human considerations are often tandem with environmental considerations, but human considerations should be paramount, and are often quantifiable. Market mechanisms are part of the way we measure those human considerations, even in centrally planned economies.

B) People who don't reinforce an absolutist mentality tend to have that effect on some.

RTTG: "B) People who don't reinforce an absolutist mentality tend to have that effect on some.*

Absolutely. And a most perspicacious observation.

RTTG in response: "I think the game can be fixed, but it involves changing some of the fundamental motivations for it, so that 'the game' would only resemble what we currently have going on on an ephemeral level.

We're reaching a level of income where we can guarantee a Western subsistence lifestyle for all, if the political will can be found."

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Wouldn't you have to fix the system's schools, first? It's not just the Fraser Institute and like institutions at fault. The University of Chicago has been the font of all that has gone bad about economic theory and analysis.

Roger L. Martin poiinnts out in a chapter on "The Origins of our Current Theory: In 1976, finance professor Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling of the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester published a seemingly innocuous paper in the Journal of Financial Economics entitled "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure." The authors likely had no idea that it would go on to be the single most frequently cited article in business academia and that it would form the prevailing theory of the role of the firm and proper conpensation in our society today."

I just chanced across the obit of Michael Mussa, the IMF's chief economist through most of the 1990s, learning that "Mussa taught at the University of Chicago before joining the IMP and also served a a member of the U.S.Council of Economic advisors under former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. (my insert, edit., at the same time as David Stockman).

"He was also once on the faculty of the University of Rochester."

I guess what I'm sayinig, RTTG, is that your reforms would have to begin with the expunging of University of Chicago school of thinking from the centers of power.

As for the GAIncome, a "subsistence" life...it does sound all too 1984ish,too dependent on the master's good will. :) Although incorporated as a basic income along with universal acceptance of investments in agriculture like Slow Money (and I believe agriculture in high on your reform list) and the incorporation of co-operatives as work and living places, it might mean the grandkids could count on collectivization as an antidote to today's piracy.

That's good, because now I don't have to speculate on the gender of said balls... though that was where I was tempted to go. ^_^

RTTG: "@Gaian as to the Chicago School, you'll find Lord Acton's belief in circumstances moulding people in positions of power is a strong one indeed."

Quoting dear old Acton is not going to change the power of the Chicago School to skew thinking. Your arithmetically correct idea can never come to fruition, but would be "drowned in the bathtub" along with everything else "statist", at birth. We are now in a period of severe contraction of state involvement in the name of fiscal responsibility. Sorry, but I am always concerned about the political-economy of change, and the dominant schools of thought - together with current investment of savings of the hoi-polloi - have a stranglehold on political thought at the moment. :)

And when climate change has finally forced people to consider the "completely corrupt" nature of our ideas, GAI is not likely to seem a way out simply by providing support for the pursuit of a standard of living that in 2012 seems at the root of our faux concern for sustainability.

The only help that I could offer him was this, SJ :" And I'm sorry about that spontaneous sensation of yours, steve. Sometimes it helps to talk about it. :)"

To which he simply responded : "B)Gaian likes sweaty balls," and left me hanging. I'm sure you are not considering such a retort, but I am again left wondering? Leaves a nasty feeling just by itself. Like the silent smirk.

Is that it, RTTG?

The silly bastard has not returned to disturb discussion.