Ecosocialist Resources, 1
November 1, 2009
Four important new articles: Patrick Bond on Copenhagen; Carter Burke on Cap-and-Trade; Michael Löwy on perspectives for ecosocialism; and Jubayr on the broader context that must inform our strategy and tactics.
When the Climate Change Center Cannot Hold. Patrick Bond discusses what green left activists should do and demand, when “it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in Copenhagen on December 18.”
“Obama’s climate legislation is so far off on the wrong track – by commodifying the air as the core climate strategy and empowering the fossil fuel industries – that the train cannot be steered away from its over-the-cliff route. Just let it crash.”
The Cap and Trade Debacle. Carter Burke examines the “climate change solution” that was designed “by American and European industrial interests to essentially make money from privatizing the atmosphere, permitting themselves to pollute it for free, and creating an entire bureaucracy for quantifying and trading various offset ‘products,’ regardless of their ability to actually limit the emission of greenhouse gases.”
“It is one thing to support something imperfect but functional. But it is another thing to support something that is imperfect, decidedly non-functional, and that has the potential for additional destruction.”
Climate Change – a contribution to the debate Michael Löwy offers some “some criticisms and reservations” regarding Daniel Tanuro’s recent report to the Fourth International on how Marxists should view and respond to the climate change crisis.
“The ecosocialist project implies the establishment of democratic planning of the economy which takes into account the preservation of the environment and, in particular, prevents a catastrophic disruption of the climate. … The necessary prerequisite for this democratic and ecological planning is public control of the means of production: decision-making on matters of public interest concerning technological investment and change must be removed from the banks and the capitalist companies, if we want these decisions to serve the common good of society and the safeguarding of the environment.”
Tanuro’s essay is available on the web, and, in a different translation, in The Global fight for Climate Justice.
The Ecology Movement, Climate Change & US Empire. On the Gathering Forces blog, Jubayr discusses “how the broader political terrain today forms the hot topics of the ecology movement if we’re to effectively plan our campaigns and strategies.”
“In a period of diminishing returns, the ruling classes are both unwilling (just look at the climate bills) and unable to grant concessions to the ecology movement. But the crisis in ruling class legitimacy opens up space for new struggles by the ecology movement.”
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Comments Policy: If you want to argue that global warming isn’t real, please go elsewhere: comments from deniers and similar trolls will be deleted. Otherwise, we encourage comradely discussion and debate on the subjects covered in this journal.2 Responses to “Ecosocialist Resources, 1”
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Thanks for these views
- I am with Carter Burke!
There are many reasons why Cap and Trade is wrong,
whether or not one believes that action is needed to specifically
reduce CO2 emissions
http://www.ceolas.net/#cce5x
Emission Trading (Cap and Trade)
Basic Idea — Offsets — Tree Planting –
International Trade: Manufacture Shift — Fair Trade — Surreal Market
– Allowances: Auctions + Hand-Outs — Allowance Trading –
Companies: Business Stability + Cost — In Conclusion
As it happens,
if there is to be an emission policy,
Electricity and Transport sectors alone (80% of CO2 emissions) are
sufficient to meet emission reduction targets,
with measures advantageous in themselves (including energy renewability, and that emissions contain much else, whatever about CO2),
long term funded for reduced consumer price impact,
without efficiency regulation, industrial carbon taxes or cap and trade schemes
http://www.ceolas.net/#cc1x
.
Regarding Daniel Tanuro and Michael Löwy:
Ian, your translation of Tanuro’s report for The Global Fight for Climate Justice was far and away better than the one now published in International Viewpoint, which I doubt was the work of a native speaker of English.
Michael Löwy’s “contribution to the debate” is very useful for its discussion of how an ecosocialist society would apply democracy to economic planning and control; his proposal for the selective application of both growth and “degrowth” (what his translator calls “decreasing” or “negative growth”) strategies; and his response to objections about “human nature” making ecosocialism unworkable. These are all issues that require a great deal more exposition, and I hope Löwy will provide further elaboration in due course.
I thought some of his criticisms of Tanuro’s report (specifically Löwy’s points 3 and 4) were perhaps based on a misunderstanding of what Tanuro was saying.
On point 3 I had understood Tanuro to be saying the same as Löwy: that we should be demanding, as a minimum, the most stringent measures recommended by the IPCC.
On point 4, Löwy leaves out the crucial part of Tanuro’s sentence, by quoting only part of it. The full sentence reads as follows (in Ian’s superior translation): “In his analysis of the Industrial Revolution, Marx did not see that the transition from wood to coal involved a shift from renewable to non-renewable energy, and that exploitation of the latter would inevitably come into conflict with the need for rational regulation of the exchange of carbon between society and its environment.” Tanuro is saying that the shift to non-renewable energy would inevitably bring about an imbalance in the carbon cycle, in the absence of “rational regulation” of its use. Löwy seems to miss this point when he talks instead about “exhaustibility” of fossil fuels.
He then proceeds to site the error of Marx and Engels in their allegedly promethean conception of the limitless development of productive forces – a position he has apparently expressed elsewhere as well, and one that has been seriously rebutted by John Bellamy Foster and others.
Thanks, Ian, for bringing this important material to our attention.