Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

As for what such a policy might achieve once it is put into effect, the evidence
from practice to date suggests a mixed verdict. To be sure, the pursuit
of pollution credits can lead to emissions-reduction measures. But
the leeway for enterprise-based decisions – and hence for speculation –
can result in other consequences as well. A given enterprise may prefer
to buy pollution credits from other private companies rather than earning
them from a government agency by reducing its emissions of toxins
or of CO2. And even if it seeks to earn the credits, it may choose
to do so by making “offsetting” investments (such as reforestation) in
other regions, thereby frustrating any comprehensive local plan for improving
air quality. Moreover, the amount by which a government might
have to compensate a company for a given level of pollution-reduction
could well exceed the cost of directly subsidizing alternative technologies
(Chafe & French 2008, 99). The whole recourse to market transactions
as a framework for environmental policy is thus a further example of the
flight from accountability on the part of the capitalist state. Advocates of
that approach argue that if the state were to try to impose its criteria, the
companies would block or evade it. But this only confirms the depth of
the problem. If capital resists needed policies on the grounds that those
policies collide with its own interests, this is the clearest possible demonstration
that its power has to be stripped away. This argument needs
to be put forward politically even if the existing state is admittedly incapable
of taking such a step. With the markets in turmoil, there is increasing
public recognition that capital’s bluster does not reflect an ability to
exercise effective control.
If the cap-and-trade approach continues to prevail, in any case, as the
mantra of top policymakers, what is happening at the middle levels of
government, where implementation takes place? It is too soon in the
new administration for us to have a full picture, but some characteristic
instances of the usual conflict-of-interest pattern (see Faber 2009) have
already emerged. Thus the new director of the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, despite a strong earlier record of combating
toxins in the water supply (in the state of New Jersey), appointed as her
senior policy counsel a lawyer named Robert Sussman who had previously
(as a partner in Latham & Watkins) represented some of the leading
manufacturers of those same toxins, and in that capacity had helped
shape some of the extreme business-friendly policies of the Bush II
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