Sadly the mention of a Green New Deal (GND) makes some people reach for their untaxed revolvers, but it remains a left issue easily reified as a slogan, and misunderstood in its implications for transforming economies. As always there is a need to transcend the sectarian struggles over how to proceed in terms of political action. It is much more than Biden endorsing GND as it is making important structural changes as the Biden administration rolls back all the crimes of the Trump era.
There are proposals to include the Green New Deal or parts of it, in the recovery program from the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.[29][30] In the European Union, in April 2020, the European Parliament called to include the European Green Deal in the recovery program from the COVID-19 pandemic.[31]
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Economist Edward Barbier, who developed the "Global Green New Deal" proposal for the United Nations Environment Programme in 2009, opposes "a massive federal jobs program," saying "The government would end up doing more and more of what the private sector and industry should be doing." Barbier prefers carbon pricing, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, in order to "address distortions in the economy that are holding back private sector innovation and investments in clean energy."[70]
Although the Green New Deal is often presented as a left-wing proposal, criticism of it has come from left-wing commentators who have argued that the Green New Deal fails to tackle the real cause of the climate emergency, namely the concept of unending growth and consumption inherent in capitalism, and is instead an attempt to greenwash capitalism.[79] Left wing critics of the Green New Deal argue that it is not the monetization of Green policies and practices within capitalism that are necessary, but an anti-capitalist adoption of policies for de-growth.[80]
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Theories devoid of praxis cannot exist in a free market of ideas — this is a notion that assumes like in a conventional market, the convergence of prices and values because at some moment we confront the real nature of a political economy where “prices never converge to value”. That suspicion of unclearable markets has occurred even to those who would assume that nature is exogenous. An environmental market would probably never achieve efficiency even more than the mythic “free market” sold by conservatives and only achievable in fictional capital markets.
Theories are useful logical constructs that help us understand how the world works. They are not meant to be a complete description of reality, which raises the question of what real world frictions are missing from the theory. The efficient market hypothesis does not assume that the price of a security equals its value; it concludes this. This conclusion follows from other underlying assumptions. So which cosmic forces are making markets efficient? The active investors who spend their time and money researching the value of stocks and uncovering which ones are cheap or expensive. The moment that everyone agrees that markets are efficient, then investing in research is a waste of time and money. In this world, no one should invest in research. However, if no one is doing the research, which forces cause prices to converge to their value?
This brings me to the Groucho Marx Theory of Efficient Markets: “Markets are efficient only so long as a sufficient number of people believe that they are not.” My title is, of course, based on the quote from comedian Groucho Marx, who said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” There are some theories that are true because people believe them—we call them self-fulfilling prophecies. This is a theory that can only be true so long as not everyone believes it and acts on that belief.
insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/...
The right-wing National Review sees the carbon tax issue simply due to triggering by the word, “tax”. The political economic problem of carbon regulation remains contentious and even futile as it exhibits numerous inequalities and inefficiencies. Fiscal policy is much more than that, even as the 1% imagined that they can flee to South Sea islands to escape the pandemic and/or the Trump second term.
(2019)
Al Gore proposed a carbon tax back in 1992. The Clinton administration tried, and failed, to impose a “BTU” tax on all forms of energy. The latest iteration of the carbon tax is the “carbon dividend” plan, which was endorsed last month by a group of Nobel-winning economists, chairs of the Federal Reserve, and two former Treasury secretaries.
Proponents claim that a carbon tax would be the most cost-effective way to cut carbon-dioxide emissions. But the carbon tax keeps running aground. There are three big problems with the concept:
- It would disproportionately hurt low-income consumers,
- it would inevitably be watered down by special interests, and
- it would have to be imposed on our trading partners.
[...]
The stickiest problem with the carbon tax is the problem of “border carbon adjustments,” which is another name for the tariffs that would be imposed on imported goods and services. Such tariffs will be needed, supporters say, to prevent “carbon leakage” (i.e., carbon-intensive manufacturing moving overseas) and “enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their global competitors.” That border adjustment would require calculating the greenhouse-gas footprint of nearly every single thing we import. Imagine what it might mean for a big manufacturer like Boeing, which produces airplanes with parts that are manufactured and imported from multiple countries. Some of those parts are themselves made from parts and commodities imported from still other countries. Keeping track of all of those carbon flows, and avoiding constant disputes over the accuracy of the data, will be an accounting nightmare.
In addition to determining the right level of tariff, a carbon tax must overcome the “free-rider” problem. William Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale University who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year (2018) for his work on climate-change policy, is a long-time advocate for a carbon tax. Nordhaus has underscored the “importance of near-universal participation in programs to reduce greenhouse gases.” In 2007, he estimated that if only half of the world’s countries agreed to participate in a carbon-tax effort, there would be an “abatement cost penalty of 250 percent.” In other words, the countries that have imposed the carbon tax will have to more than double their carbon-tax rates in order to compensate for the free-riding countries.
www.nationalreview.com/...
The real problem remains some fundamental structural change not unlike how universal healthcare requires rethinking the nature of social insurance. The discourse is not about “taxes” as it is about bearing costs, social costs that are inevitably ecological costs.
The transition to the carbon-free economy will require systemic transformation — a reconciliation of our social and ecological realities with the entrenched infrastructure of the capitalist economy. It’s a far bigger job than what carbon pricing could be expected to achieve.
“A carbon tax is the most straight-forward and efficient strategy for quickly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” That statement, from Bernie Sanders in 2014, was accepted as gospel in climate policy circles for many years.
Today, not so much. The evolving political consensus, at least on the left, has relegated carbon pricing to second-tier status, while measures involving more targeted government intervention have gained prominence.
Adding a tax to the price of carbon-based fuels to capture their real cost to society has long enjoyed broad appeal. Taxing pollution produced by the fossil fuel industry resonates with progressives, and, as a broad-based market mechanism, it also finds favor with conservative economists.
A few states and regional coalitions have successfully implemented some form of carbon pricing. Here in the Northeast, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is credited with playing a role — albeit minor — in reducing emissions from power generation. The Western Climate Initiative, which currently includes California and Quebec, has a more ambitious emissions cap-and-trade program that encompasses industrial sources and transportation fuels.
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A recent draft of the 2020 Democratic Party Platform is silent on carbon pricing. This omission is undoubtedly intentional because it was included in the 2016 platform — it called for greenhouse gases to “be priced to reflect their negative externalities.”
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The Green New Deal, an evolving progressive policy framework introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, is likewise agnostic on carbon pricing.
And although Joe Biden told Anderson Cooper last September he’d support a carbon tax, no mention of that support — nor for any other carbon-pricing scheme — appears in the climate action plan he released in mid-July.
Around the country, states have initiatives in the works to reduce their carbon emissions. Some of them include cap-and-trade, cap-and-invest, fee-and-dividend, or another variant of carbon pricing. Citizens Climate Lobby, a grassroots advocacy organization, and the Climate Leadership Council, whose members include noted mainstream economists and numerous Fortune 500 corporations, have both consistently promoted — as the centerpiece of a climate strategy — a carbon-fee-and-dividend approach that rebates tax receipts to households.
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Furthermore, to achieve meaningful emissions reductions, carbon pricing has to ramp up rapidly. When asked about why he has cooled off on carbon pricing, Jay Inslee said, "To actually get carbon savings, you need to jack up the price so high that it becomes politically untenable."
That price level is critical. In an interview about the Green New Deal, Ed Markey noted that fossil-fuel giants such as ExxonMobil have publicly endorsed a carbon tax, but at a price point that wouldn’t substantially reduce oil consumption. And the major energy companies want immunity from lawsuits as well as the repeal of environmental regulations in exchange for the imposition of a carbon tax.
www.wbur.org/...
Another fundamental issue remains with the form of capital investment represented by green activity.
(2009)
The International Institute for Environment and Development, a British think-tank, says the global carbon market could be worth $118 billion a year, whilst others estimate that carbon-trading could become a financial industry worth trillions. Like most other transactions in the financial sector, this carbon-trading is what Marx referred to as “fictitious capital” – capital without any real value, which only serves to create asset bubbles, temporarily helping the bankers and stock-brokers to make a tidy profit. New Scientist reports that, “The potential for making a profit from buying or selling carbon-credits has encouraged a whole landscape of speculators, hedge funds, carbon brokers, and complex financial instruments to spring up”, and then goes on to point out that, “If we cannot trust financiers with something as apparently straightforward as the housing market, why should we imagine they can triumph at controlling global pollution?”. Meanwhile, in a recent report entitled “A Dangerous Obsession”, the environmental group “Friends of the Earth” (FotE) say that, “The complexity of the carbon markets, and the involvement of financial speculators and complex financial products, carries a risk that carbon trading will develop into a speculative commodity bubble that could provoke a global financial failure similar in scale and nature to that brought about by the recent subprime mortgage crisis”.
Whilst New Scientist and FotE are both correct in pointing out the flaws of carbon-trading, they are not revolutionary organisations, and ultimately they both point to government “regulation” and “intervention” as the solution to climate change. The British Government, however, has shown no desire to regulate or to intervene, and will never do so as long as it supports Big- Business. The Government nationalised the banks to protect the bankers, not to direct investment into green-technologies; for example, nearly 20% of GDP in the UK has been spent to prop up the financial sector, compared to just 0.0083% on green economic stimulus. Meanwhile, instead of regulating important industries such as the cartel of energy companies, which make huge profits from selling electricity and gas at extravagant prices to poor pensioners, the Government chooses to liberalise these markets even further.
Friends of the Earth, like many others, propose the idea of a “carbon tax” instead of establishing a price for carbon through trading schemes. Socialists, however, must oppose such a suggestion, as a carbon tax would be a regressive tax, driving up energy prices for the unemployed, pensioners, and other people in “fuel-poverty” who, according to academic studies, already spend up to 19% of their income on heating in some cases.
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Capitalism is a system that is run solely for short-term profit, and does not place any value in the environment or the planet. Climate change is an inherently long-term problem, and can never be solved by market-based solutions such as carbon-trading or by governments such as New Labour that buy into Capitalism. If you accept Capitalism, then you must also accept the logic of Capitalism. This logic dictates that you cannot regulate Capitalism and try to create a greener, more benevolent version of it. Any attempt to tame the damage that Capitalism causes on the planet will inevitably eat into profits, and is therefore unacceptable to the Capitalist system. Creating a commodity out of carbon just exposes the environment to the same anarchy of the market that has created the latest deep recession and all other recessions before it.
www.marxist.com/...
The issue has been that commodifying carbon could be catastrophic. At some moment when the market clears, environmental damage is not reversable.
While climate scientists warn that climate change could be catastrophic, economists such as 2018 Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus assert that it will be nowhere near as damaging. In a 2018 paper published after he was awarded the prize, Nordhaus claimed that 3°C of warming would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, compared to what it would be in the total absence of climate change. Even a 6°C increase in global temperature, he claimed, would reduce GDP by just 8.5%.
If you find reassurance in those mild estimates of damage, be warned. In a newly published paper, I have demonstrated that the data on which these estimates are based relies upon seriously flawed assumptions.
Nordhaus’s celebrated work, which, according to the Nobel committee, has “brought us considerably closer to answering the question of how we can achieve sustained and sustainable global economic growth”, gives governments a reason to give climate change a low priority.
His estimates imply that the costs of addressing climate change exceed the benefits until global warming reaches 4°C, and that a mild carbon tax will be sufficient to stabilise temperatures at this level at an overall cost of less than 4% of GDP in 120 year’s time. Unfortunately, these numbers are based on empirical estimates that are not merely wrong, but irrelevant.
Nordhaus (and about 20 like-minded economists) used two main methods to derive sanguine estimates of the economic consequences of climate change: the “enumerative method” and the “statistical method”. But my research shows neither stand up to scrutiny.
braveneweurope.com/...
And as we’ve seen, a RW insistence that making the US pandemic from Trump’s greatest crime into one less blameless will continue.
the Environmental Protection Agency is on the cusp of finalizing several rules that would make it harder to justify pollution restrictions or lock in soot levels for at least five years. The agency wants to keep the soot standard unchanged over the objections of independent scientific advisers and despite emerging evidence that links particulate pollution to additional coronavirus deaths.
www.propublica.org/…
Inevitably there will be algorithms and equations and there’s the asymmetry of a metabolic rift that extracts more from nature and from anthroprocene labor. A science that resists ignorance becomes more fundamental with the rise of social conflict over the basic trust in scientific “facts”, and not in alternative realities conjured up by RW media. No amount of redefining costs will stop the oncoming crisis. This returns us to the fallacy of pricing one’s way out of disaster. You cannot breathe a pollution “credit” in an emissions trading system.
Matters are coming to a head.
China, Japan and South Korea have all followed the European Union in pledging to cut emissions to “net zero” in recent weeks, where they release only as much as they remove from the air. U.S. President-elect Joe Biden made the same promise in his election campaign.
Next year they are set to lay out the first practical measures to meet these targets, as part of commitments under the Paris climate accord, and putting a price on carbon will be front and centre, experts told Reuters.
“Each country will have to come up with its own path to reaching net zero, but the expectation is carbon pricing is going to be a very important part,” said Wendy Hughes, Carbon Markets and Innovation Manager at the World Bank.
The principle is simple: a carbon price establishes how much companies need to pay for their emissions. The higher the price, the greater the incentive to pollute less and invest in low-carbon technology.
Governments can force these payments through a carbon tax - a levy companies must pay when they pollute - or through an emissions-trading system (ETS).
An ETS sets a maximum cap on the amount of emissions that a sector, or group of sectors, can produce. It creates “carbon permits” for those emissions, which companies can buy for each tonne of CO2 they emit.
Many countries, from Europe and South Korea, to China and Kazakhstan have already launched schemes, of various scope.
More than fifth of global emissions are covered by 46 national carbon-pricing schemes operating today or in the planning stage, as well as 32 regional systems within countries, according to the World Bank.
The biggest of those - the EU carbon market - is preparing for a major overhaul.
Since the European system was launched in 2005, emissions from participating power plants and factories have dropped by 35% – a sharper drop than seen in sectors not covered by the scheme.
“The ETS has proven its efficiency,” said Frans Timmermans, head of EU climate policy. “The ETS shows how carbon pricing is a strong driver for immediate change in energy consumption.”
www.reuters.com/...
Ultimately it is still about negative “externalities” which in a global context have endogenous consequences. Dead coal mine canaries everywhere.
From a neoliberal perspective, a species should only be preserved – even if it is privately owned – if it is profitable, only if the market decrees it. Although conservative economists pen paeans to the market’s sagacity in husbanding scarce nature, neoliberal economists are much blunter. From the point of view of capital, organisms have no intrinsic value – even the last few individuals of a species – but are merely different capital assets in a varied and constantly changing portfolio. This characterisation of nature as capital comes from Canadian fisheries economist, Anthony Scott, whose insight has been picked up by other neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek and Dieter Helm (Oxford don and chair of the Natural Capital Committee). This logic is laid out clearly in Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, where he argued ‘from a social as well as from an individual point of view, any natural resource represents just one item of our total endowment of exhaustible resources, and our problem is not to preserve this stock in any particular form, but always to maintain it in a form that will make the most desirable contribution to total income.’ Yet, it was another Canadian fisheries economist, Colin Clark, who laid out the logical terminus such arguments in the starkest fashion in the 1973 article ‘Profit Maximization and the Extinction of Animal Species’. ‘Roughly stated,’ he wrote, ‘the following are shown to be both necessary and sufficient conditions for extinction under present-value maximization: (a) the discount (or time preference) rate sufficiently exceeds the maximum reproductive potential of the population, and (b) an immediate profit can be made from harvesting the last remaining animals.’ For Clark these two factors mattered much more than whether a creature were privately or commonly owned; privatisation was no salve for extinction.
Although neoliberals have hardly hidden how they view nature, as just another asset, it has taken the Left far too long to realise that this is where the centre of debate lies. Capital’s control over flora and fauna is not as a special branch of the economy requiring its own theory, but just as industrial as the manufacture of steel and microchips. This insight is elaborated by Kenneth Fish in his Living Factories – perhaps the best book in Marxist animal studies. Fish characterises genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as ‘factories – living factories. Microbes, plants and animals, indeed life itself, was, through techniques of genetic engineering, being harnessed as a force of industrial production.’
GMOs, however, were only an extreme case of what capital seeks to do to all life. That is, capital erases distinctions separating organism from machine. ‘For all the technological mastery marked by the coming of the machine, then,’ observes Fish, ‘the significance of the factory for Marx lies in how it approximates a living organism, that most natural of beings.’ Marx’s comments on the factory being an ‘organism’, that it is ‘dead labour’ that comes ‘alive’ when attached to a ‘force of nature’, is less a metaphor than a near-literal description of machines as capitalist beasts of burden.
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Real subsumption begins when the capitalist introduces machinery, transforming production through the ‘conscious application of the natural sciences, mechanics, chemistry, etc.’ Instead of the worker using a tool with her hand as during formal subsumption, the worker now uses a machine powered by a ‘force of nature’ (Naturkraft), like hydropower or coal. These changes allow the concentration of labour and increase productivity, facilitating the deskilling and devaluing of workers, but, perhaps more significantly, it forces workers to toil at the machine’s pace and thus the pace set by the capitalist herself.
Marx’s conception of subsumption is dynamic: formal subsumption often comes first, but once machine-made commodities begin to compete with hand-made, then handicraft workers will likely be destroyed as a class. ‘History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers.’ Most Marxists tend to hover here, out of concern for the hand-loom weavers and their unfortunate successors. Yet, just by slightly shifting one’s perspective, it becomes possible to see what happens when capital extends its reach into the kingdoms of flora and fauna.
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“As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.” This idea of a mediated commodity in an ecological metabolism must be reconciled in the first instance as the transformation of nature as destruction in the advance of culture and the second as a conservation which by necessity is ecological.
The separation from nature with which this universal metabolism reckons necessarily implies that human life is never immediate and always-already mediated, insofar as no aspect of the world around arrives ready to hand. It must first be apprehended by human subjects who, stood astride nature, objectify their subjectivity in the products into which they transform the natural world. For Marx, what distinguishes ‘the worst of architects from the best of bees’ is a separateness of humankind from nature encapsulated in the capacity of the former to conceive of designs and enact them in products in which both external nature is transformed into something useful and humans realise their subjectivity as such (Marx 1976, pp. 284-285). These products, in the shape of commodities, money, the state and so on, then take on a life of their own, standing astride their producers whose lives and subsistence they mediate in turn. This is to say that humans transform nature but under social and historical conditions not of their choosing and with different and sometimes unintended consequences (Foster 1999, p. 390).
To this extent the social metabolism under capitalism represents only the current ‘particular, alienated form’ the metabolic relationship between humans and nature assumes in practice (Foster 2016, p. 404). This alienation, however, stems from something intrinsic to the human condition and cannot be easily wished away. The conceptualisation of the metabolism rests upon the continuity constructed between Marx’s early work on the separation of human subjects from nature and its culmination in Capital (1976) as a theory of, on the one hand, metabolism, and the other, fetishism (Lefebvre 2008, pp. 79, 89). Rather than a caesura between Marx’s early and mature work a common thread remains in the dialectical relationship posited between subjects and their subjectification and reproduction by means of an objective world that springs from their creation but dominates them from without (Pitts et al 2019). The development of this idea through an account of capitalist production and exchange in capital depends upon the separation from nature outlined in the early work as its logical basis. What first appears as alienation is later expressed in the account of social and monetary abstraction under capitalism and the historically-specific forms of mediation that serve to bridge the gap between subject and object characteristic of the human relationship with nature.
Pitts, F. H. “Creative Labour, Metabolic Rift and the Crisis of Social Reproduction.” In M. Banks, & K. Oakley (Eds.), Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis: New Approaches for Policy Palgrave Macmillan.
The left cannot assume that science has some exogenous autonomy much as ecosocialism has critiqued the climate crisis, with inevitable sectarian disagreements. Yet some issues remain.
The environmental and the corporal (bodily) — the body is a part of nature — constitute the fourth substantive part of society, which has been subjected to capitalist abuse and which therefore is an important component of Marxism. Marxism gives serious attention to the analysis of the ecological problems (there is a common process — a dual metabolic rift — in which capital takes more out of labour and nature than it returns to them), as well as to the issues surrounding the human body-mind complex (disease, malnutrition, etc.). Indeed, the economic mechanisms of capitalism reveal its deeply violent character. This means that Marxism must learn from sciences (STEM) (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) whose insights Marxists take seriously in its study of the social dimensions of the environment/nature and the body. Marxism is also concerned with the social context in which sciences operate and with society in its scientific context (e.g. does a state policy or people’s belief in certain things make sense from the scientific ground)?
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