A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 199inadequate valuation of some resources in certain limited contexts, itdoesn’t follow that a trading system of the type currently being set upis capable of improving the ‘scarcity management’ of the earth’s carbondump in a way that could foster a liveable climate.Price is not a ‘useful numerical substitute’, in any context, either forthe ‘intrinsic value’ of carbon-cycling capacity (whatever that mightbe) or its survival value. To suggest that it could be reveals fundamentalmisunderstandings of climate, scientific as well as social, economicand political. The purported carbon commodity is different from establishedcommodities such as wheat or silver. For governments totake it upon themselves to make it an economically scarce good isnot encouraging, but rather hampering, practices that could increasethe chances of a liveable climate in the future. The price assigned bycarbon markets in the course of ‘managing’ that scarcity, accordingly,and the resulting incentives and ‘transactions’, are moving the worldaway from that goal rather than toward it. This is particularly so inview of the facts that the market ‘management’ of this scarcity involvesproviding extensive property rights to corporations, is biasedmainly toward short-term cost reductions for industry, and involves acommodity that is an incoherent amalgam consisting both of ‘emissions’and of credits generated by carbon projects.The argument is also unsound in that its premises are false. In truth,‘markets’ do not, in most circumstances around the world, ‘determinehow resources are used,’ in any sense in which markets can be distinguishedfrom, or do not depend on, commons regimes, state agenciesand other social organisations that don’t revolve around the pricemechanism. To put this another way, it is empirically false that no marketprice entails less responsible stewardship than a positive price. Onlyif, per impossibile, commodification somehow became all-pervasive, andthe price mechanism the sole and all-powerful coordinating mechanismfor all transactions involving land, water, life and so forth, couldthis assertion even become possible to evaluate. Carbon trading, in addition,is no more congenial to anything that might be called the ‘logicof capitalism’ than a multitude of other types of regulation, taxation,planning and stewardship that private corporations themselves have alwaysdepended on – and in this case, given the increasingly obviouscontradictions of carbon trading, may wind up preferring.As in so many areas of contemporary social life, a vague ideology ofmarket effectiveness and market inevitability is concealing a regressive,confused, contested and environmentally dangerous politicaland technical project. The ideology and the project both badly needto be opened to wider public criticism.