Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

give up – private cars, huge houses, limitless electricity for personal use –
provided only that certain incentives and restrictions at the macro level
are implemented, and alternative forms of energy used. The incentive
structures he proposes are often quite ingenious, as indeed they must
be if they are to elicit transformative outcomes from undisturbed tastes
and behavior-patterns. As he expresses the challenge at one point (286),
“The basic idea is to break the notion that the only way a utility [i.e., a power
company] can make a profit and earn back its investments is by selling
more electricity and natural gas.” The intricacy of his proposed arrangement
is quite dazzling, involving a complex system of compensation
for discrepancies between anticipated and actual revenues, as determined
by an agency of independent auditors. It merits comparison with
the stratagems devised – at considerable cost and with scant success –
to offset the built-in tendency of the private health-insurance industry to
evade its responsibility for maintaining public health. The remoteness of
Friedman’s agenda from one of ecological transformation is epitomized
in a chapter (317 ff.) touting the work of “green hawks” in the US army
who are deploying solar technology to power air-conditioners for the occupation
forces in Iraq. 188
The theoretical principle underlying Friedman’s approach is the idea
that the marketplace, for all its intrinsic virtue, does not always function
as it should. Although this recognition fits awkwardly with Friedman’s
distaste for “regulation,” he is quite explicit: “When markets underprice
goods and services by failing to price their externalities,… it’s the job
of the government to step in and shape the market to correct that failure”
(260). Here Friedman is very much in tune with other writers who,
while equally admiring of the market, are more critical than he is of the
corporations that have become its main players. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
in the concluding chapter of his quite devastating attack on the corporate
corruption of the Bush years, thus affirms:
188 Friedman is not alone among “green” writers in his acceptance of collaboration with
the military. See also Lovins 2008, where the noted liberal environmentalist Amory
Lovins mentions – in the context of lauding the Pentagon for its pursuit of energy alternatives
– that he has “analyzed and advocated for military energy efficiency for two
decades and served as an independent member of two U.S. Defense Science Board
task forces advising the Secretary of Defense." Whatever energy the US military may
"conserve" in its activities, its core function as an instrument of global projection is to
advance an agenda associated with unlimited expansion, and to use maximum force
– including deliberate as well as collateral deployment of toxins – in doing so (see Wallis
2008, 34 f, Sanders 2009, and, on the option of military conversion, Wallis 2009, 100).
247