Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

governance S 37
chairman of the U.K. Sustainable Development Commission,
puts it this way:
it is clearly politicians who have to make the most decisive interventions
. . . it’s governments that frame the legal and constitutional
boundaries within which individual citizens and corporate entities
must operate; it’s governments that set the macro- economic
framework through the use of fi scal and economic instruments;
and it’s governments (by and large) that set the tone for public
debate and that can take the lead on controversial and potentially
divisive issues.” 30
In other words, “the current approach to corporate responsibility
simply isn’t up to the task in hand. . . . the primary responsibility for
making it all happen still lies with government” (p. 220).
To work effectively, in other words, markets have always
required energetic, fl exible, and imaginative governments to set
the rules, level the playing fi eld, enforce the law, and protect
the larger public good over the long term. That is only to say, as
Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom argues, that “the market
system can be understood only as a great and all-pervasive part
of the structure and life of society,” not the other way around
(Lindblom, 2001, p. 277). Or, as Amory Lovins puts it, “markets
are only tools. They make a good servant but a bad master and
a worse religion . . . That theology [economic fundamentalism]
treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billion
years’ design experience as casually discardable, and the future as
worthless” (Hawken, Lovins, Lovins, 1999, p. 261).
Corporations can do a great many things better than they
have, and markets can be harnessed to better purposes than
they have served in the past. Some major corporations such as
Wal-Mart are greening their operations and supply chains. Others
have joined together in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership to
support climate legislation. Some survivors in the fi nancial management
community are developing instruments and investment