A BBC report here.
I am very sceptical of the climate bill and the cuts, too late too late, also very market based, we buy and sell the right to pollute...the clean development mechanism has huge potential for fraud.
Also we need to put the structures in place so we can all go green without pain. I am woken up by Heathrow jets, I have problems getting around in Berkshire cos of poor public transport...a cycle ride into my nearest town Windsor, either involves long detour or a brush with death down the hill.
Rainforests and other carbon sinks are still under threat.
Carbon policy makers are in market based denial.
lets all support the 8th December march and build the Green Party into a serious force and go on next year's climate camp.
More from me here.
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Derek Wall ’s article entitled Imperialism Is the Arsonist: Marxism’s Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles , argues that Ma...
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Canvassing in Brighton back in 2017 to support Green Party MP Caroline Lucas’s re-election efforts, I knocked on a door and came acros... -
Sat at a computer in the library, I am aware that the woman looking at the screen next to me is becoming increasingly agitated. ...
1 comment:
The essential problem is that no market based solution can offer any real chance of dealing with the reality of climate change.
Greens and other progressives must drop the blinkered old fashioned notion that market forces are of any service in dealing with the problems now facing humankind.
We require a forward looking, open-minded and hardheaded realistic politics to replace all this wooly-minded idealistic right-wing pie-in-the sky so called "free" market economics.
Only by embracing a "realist" economic policy can we hope to surmount our problems.
We need to introduce into government the very best of modern economic thinking as practiced by the most successful transnational corporations. Never let it be said that as Greens we cannot learn from business.
What is the key characteristic of the most successful modern corporation?
Is it a robust application of free-market principles?
Poppycock.
It is economic planning.
Globally centralized economic planning.
This is the only way we can deal with climate change.
We have to get rid of outdated economically inefficient approaches.
We need to get hardheaded, tough efficient realistic women and men into positions of responsibility for the economy.
We must import proven successful business techniques into government.
Market forces might be of some use for the allocation of trivial and irrelevant luxuries but as a technique for the rationing of perceived scarce resources under condition of perceived scarcity they are as about much use of a cheese knife to a jellyfish.
Letting the proponents of free-market economics have anything to do with averting climate catastrophe is, to coin a phrase of former Irish Deputy Prime Minister Michael McDowell, “as pregnant with possibility as a chimpanzee approaching the back of a television set with a screwdriver”.
We need to see what we can learn from the application of business principles to government. Let’s reflect on what one politician who did this wrote.
His name was Salvador Allende.
He brought in the UK management consultant Stafford Beer to offer some ideas about how to modernize and organize the Chilean economy.
For the official launch in early September 1973 of the system Beer had designed Allende wrote:
“Modern science and in particular electronic communication offer to the government a new opportunity to deal with complex modern economy problems.
We have found that in what we call the developed countries the power of science has yet to be utilized. We have developed such a system with our own proper passion.
What you will listen to today is revolutionary - not simply because it is the first time this has been developed in the world - but it is revolutionary because we are in front of a deliberated effort to give to the people the power that science gives us in a way in which the people may use it freely”.
(Text from http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html)
We need to adopt and update the insights of Allende and apply them to deal with the problem of climate change.
Brian
Florida
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