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Questions for discussion: Is the emphasis on ‘growth’ and (old-fashioned) developmentalism constructive, given the latter’s well-documented record of both failing the poor and suppressing climate-friendly practices?
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Questions for discussion: • Is the emphasis on ‘growth’ and (old-fashioned) developmentalism constructive, given the latter’s well-documented record of both failing the poor and suppressing climate-friendly practices? • How might the proposal be developed to support and be supported by local climate justice movements? In what political contexts could its institutional structures for financial and technical decisionmaking be built up in a way that did not undermine democratic struggles?
To what extent do the aspects of the proposal modelled on the New Deal and the Marshall Plan reflect careful study of the structure, objectives and effects of these two historical initiatives?
Carbon Markets’ Conception of ‘Cost-Effectiveness’: Two Difficulties
Constructing a Commodity for a Climate Market Further tradeable “equivalents” are manufactured for additional cost savings and delays in addressing lock-in and added to the commodity pool in circulation (OFFSETS) “Equivalent emissions” are pooled by abstracting from place, technology and history and then marketed (TRADE) Goal is reconfigured as modest progressive state-mandated numerical greenhouse gas cuts (CAP) Contending with climate change: initiating new historical pathway to overcome fossil fuel lock-in or “addiction”
In addition: The sum of fungible greenhouse gas pollution rights that governments create and distribute for purposes of trade are implied to approach, in principle if not in practice, an economically optimal, ‘climatically safe’ level of overall greenhouse gas pollution. As work by the Harvard economist Martin Weitzman and others suggests, this move engenders a degraded conception of the climate problem: the commensuration process inherent in models that aggregate economic growth with simple climate dynamics heightens systemic hazards by ‘presenting a cost-benefit estimate for what is inherently a fat-tailed situation with potentially unlimited downside exposure as if it is accurate and objective’. To disregard the ‘incredible magnitude of the deep structural uncertainties that are involved in climate-change analysis’ by ‘presenting a cost-benefit estimate for [a] situation with potentially unlimited downside exposure as if it is accurate and objective’ is dangerously ‘misleading.’ (Martin L. Weitzman, ‘On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change’, The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 91, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1-19.)
I.e.: Trying to achieve cost-effectiveness through trade becomes incoherent insofar as creating the market framework necessary to make sense of the notion of ‘cost-effectiveness’ entails losing touch with what is supposedly being costed. Hence the quest for ‘cost-effectiveness’ reduces the chance that our actions will be cost-effective.
‘Cost-effectiveness’ ideology … treats a (problem of long-term historical trajectory away from fossil fuels; vast unknowns) as if it were a (problem of finding the right short-term commodity price)
… because only by reducing the to the can you guarantee the possibility of …
* *But as grown-up people this should not be what we aim at in climate policy.
