Going Green but Getting Nowhere

[XemaSab]

YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things.

Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action.

You refuse the plastic bag at the register, believing this one gesture somehow makes a difference, and then carry your takeout meal back to your car for a carbon-emitting trip home.

Say you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/going-green-but-getting-nowhere.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. K/R, and the article concludes:

It won’t change until a regulatory system compels us to pay our fair share to limit pollution accordingly. Limit, of course, is code for “cap and trade,” the system that helped phase out lead in gasoline in the 1980s, slashed acid rain pollution in the 1990s and is now bringing entire fisheries back from the brink. “Cap and trade” for carbon is beginning to decrease carbon pollution in Europe, and similar models are slated to do the same from California to China.

snip

Never mind that markets are truly free only when everyone pays the full price for his or her actions. Anything else is socialism. The reality is that we cannot overcome the global threats posed by greenhouse gases without speaking the ultimate inconvenient truth: getting people excited about making individual environmental sacrifices is doomed to fail.

snip

Don’t stop recycling. Don’t stop buying local. But add mastering some basic economics to your to-do list. Our future will be largely determined by our ability to admit the need to end planetary socialism. That’s the most fundamental of economics lessons and one any serious environmentalist ought to heed.

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To me, education is the key. One out of Four Americans is in a school as a student or as staff, and energy and the environment offer enormous teaching possibilities across all content areas and all grades, and there's a huge career technical opportunity around these topics.

Great read, thanks!

:patriot:

[jwirr]

3. Not sure why they are calling it planetary socialism?

[Terry in Austin]

5. You had me right up to "end planetary socialism"

Didn't see that one coming -- can anyone explain WTF that means?

:wtf:

[Nederland]

6. Capitalist theory assumes the total cost of a good is reflected in its price

In practice, this means that practically everything in our economy is not produced by the glorious free market that the right wing loves to celebrate but some form of socialism. Capitalist theory demands that the price of a good must include the cost to create the good, the cost of destroying it once its useful life is up, and the cost of everything in between. Anything that does not include all of these things is in effect socialism because it means some portion of the cost of the good is being born by the government, not private enterprise. For example, if a company that makes bleach doesn't have to pay the cost of cleaning up after itself, that means the cost of cleanup is paid by the government and people are getting their bleach at subsidized prices. Consider what would happen if people had to pay the true cost of a car upfront. The cost to make it, pay for all the pollution it emits, the cost of destroying it, the cost to build the roads it needs, the cost to maintain a military presence in the Middle East so it can have cheap fuel, the list goes on and on. If all of those things were included in the price of a car very few people would be able to afford them. It is only because the true cost of a car is hidden by numerous layers of government spending that people are able to buy them. Putting an end to this form of corporate welfare and making the system truly a capitalist system would go a long ways toward stopping many of the environmental abuses that occur today.

[madokie]

7. If you don't mind

Lets put this going back to the 1800's off until I'm dead and gone, I'm 63 now so it won't be too awfully long to wait. :-)

[Nederland]

9. We can't afford to wait

Hiding the true cost of things is what created the consumer culture that is destroying the environment.

[madokie]

10. Oh I know

but its been a while so lets put it off a little while longer. Actually I'm being a little tongue in cheek here. :hi:

[kristopher]

11. And how, in your opinion, do you make it a "truly capitalist system"?

[Nederland]

12. I'm not entirely sure it is possible

Attempts to incorporate pollution costs and other externalities into products happens in a number of cases already, and that is good. However, it is very hard to know what the costs "should" be, and often times politicians have an interest in make the cost higher than it should be or lower than it should be.

[kristopher]

13. Then what was the point of your post?

What is the message you were trying to convey.

What you've written is, I agree, one set of issues with creating functioning markets, but I'm more inclined to think that is a rather minor part of the problem overall. I see the real difficulty -the one most pervasive and profound - arising from the fact that accumulated capital is a locus of power that rivals (and too often dwarfs) democratic initiatives. This inevitably corrupts any efforts to realize the goal of capitalism as being subservient to the needs of the masses. Look at Obama's efforts to do something about climate change for example. There are a large number of good policy solutions that could solve the problem by releasing market forces, but they are not implemented because of the strength of accumulated capital.

[Nederland]

14. To answer the question asked in post #5 (nt)

[The Wielding Truth]

2. Like it says, "Don't stop recycling."

[GliderGuider]

4. Every time you change a light bulb

the light bulb changes you.

That's the point of individual action.

[Odin2005]

8. Yup. IMO most of this stuff is a guilt-salve that distracts from the real problems.