seattle indymedia center

the wider reason to oppose the cap and trade is in the trade mechanisms. They are undemocratic, not transparent and mostly, the economists recognize they are to round about to get the touted results. This is worse than "caving in " to political demands and denying (an open issue) This is favoritism and pretending to fix. Ah- just like the "bailouts."

No issue except he could have reached more people without the partisan narowness and political purity high hat. Show the absurdity. Everyone can comprehend that, even if they are not in the Global War on Temperature camp.

Obama's program for carbon emissions hinges on market measures and corporate subsidies. He doesn't like direct environmental regulation and instead wants to rely on "cap and trade" to achieve cuts.

Well, "cap and trade" is a method developed for years by American politicians and neo-liberal economists to avoid environmental regulation. As applied to greenhouse gases, it would mean that the government issues carbon permits to allow the emission of greenhouse gases. It distributes them to companies to cover most of their past pollution. The "cap" refers to the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed by all the permits taken together, and "trade" refers to companies being allowed to buy and sell these permits among themselves. Thus a company can either reduce its greenhouse gas emissions if it didn't receive enough permits to cover its needs, or buy additional permits from other companies, who may find they have an excess of permits or who may wish to reduce their emissions so that they will have spare permits to sell. Thus in theory, firms which can reduce carbon emissions at a reasonable cost will do so, and sell their excess permits, and other firms, which would find it harder to reduce emissions, will blithely go on polluting with a seal of government approval, being required only to buy some permits to cover their pollution. In theory, the total amount of emissions are gradually lowered as the "cap" is lowered year by year, and the existence of a free-market in emission certificates is supposed to ensure that this is done in an efficient and low-cost manner. In practice, it just didn't work that way under Kyoto. It was easy to get around; companies could get exemptions; it encouraged the biofuel disaster; the enforcement was lax; and so forth. Markets, even in emission certificates, have their own logic, and it is an anti-environmental logic.

Thus "cap and trade" is a market measure: it creates a new artificial market in pollution -- you might call it a death market. It is sort of like trying to deal with workplace injuries and deaths by replacing safety regulations with a system of permits allowing corporations to maim or kill a certain number of workers, allowing them to trade in these permits, and then gradually reducing the number of permits year by year. It is supposed to be simple because it avoids direct government regulation of how power plants are supposed to generate power and so forth, but in practice it is a nightmare. For example, how does one distribute the pollution permits and decide which major corporations get them? This is one of many sore points, and a clear opportunity for corruption.

Obama sometimes recognizes in words that this plan has had problems when used in Europe and Japan under the Kyoto Treaty. So his version says that all these problems will be avoided if only the permits are auctioned off, rather than by granting them freely to companies. Thus the government won't have to decide who to give permits to, but companies will compete for permits. However, if this is done, it will amount to a gigantic immediate tax on fuel, and so will have its own problems. It combines cap and trade with something called a carbon tax, which is dealt with in another issue of Communist Voice (www.communistvoice.org/42CarbonTax.html), so I won't go into it further here.

Obama is somewhat more serious about the environment than McCain and Bush, but the methods he proposes are pretty much the same, and they are going to lead to disaster. This is because they are neo-liberal measures, that seek to avoid regulation and to work through market incentives and subsidies.

. You can't leave it to the big corporations to decide what's environmentally sound themselves: they are after profits. When cap and trade schemes are set up, the companies are still after profits. And they trade in pollution permits in ways that are profitable for themselves, but hurt the environment.

. The experience of the Kyoto Protocol shows what happens when one tries to replace overall planning and regulation with profitability and market incentives. One unexpected disaster after another takes place. For example, biofuels were declared a promising green method of generating energy. Thus a firm could satisfy its environmental requirements under Kyoto by using biofuels, which it was allowed to get from anywhere. A firm could buy biodiesel, diesel fuel made from palm oil or soybean oil or other organic source, and say it was being environmentally responsible. The firm wasn't responsible for where this biofuel came from, nor was anyone else, and Europeans bought tremendous amounts of biofuels from Brazil and Asia, where forests are being devastated to provide agricultural fields to grow biofuels.

. Instead, there has to be overall planning on a regional, national and even global level concerning carbon emissions and the ways of generating energy.

. And there has to be a struggle against the corporate interests who have been devastating the environment. Instead of giving subsidies to big oil to run a few green demonstration projects which they trumpet in TV ads, there has to be a struggle against big oil and big coal and the multinational corporations firms which have been devastating the environment.

. Moreover, the struggle to clean up the environment has to be linked to measures to help people survive the coming hardships: the major changes needed to radically reduce greenhouse gases; the changes resulting from climate change, a certain amount of which is already inevitable; and the economic insecurity and devastation facing large masses of workers. If environmentalism means giving subsidies to corporations, while taxing people more and more for the necessities of life, then such an "environmentalism" is going to be hated. Instead there has to be an environmentalism that is based on siding with the people against the polluters. It is only the masses of workers who, having eyes everywhere, can ensure that the corporations don't really pollute and violate environmental regulations. It is only the masses of working people who can provide the political and social strength to oppose what the corporations are doing.

. In the long run, protecting the environment just isn't compatible with capitalist production for profit. So long as the world's resources and manufacturing facilities and infrastructure are owned by a relative handful of capitalists, they will run it for their profit. It is only when the world is owned by those who do the work that makes it run, under socialism, that there can be stable environmental protection. It is only then that overall regulation will be done in the interests of the mass of the population and of the environment.

. But we need to do something to protect the environment now. Even if we can only achieve partial measures under capitalism, we need to do that. But those measures must be measures of real regulation, and moreover this regulation must be opened to supervision by the working masses as far as possible. The government is controlled by the capitalist ruling class, and so the working class has to be constantly vigilant about how the government agencies operate. The fight for environmental regulation is not just a fight for government regulation, but a fight against the way the capitalist government is run.

. The government is not some neutral body. Just as the Bush government and Congress are talking about regulating Wall Street by giving it a $700 billion bail-out, so the capitalist government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, is quite capable of giving huge subsidies to capitalists under the guise of environmentalism. So the workers have to fight constantly to ensure that government regulation really does protect environmental interests, and that the workers themselves have a role in overseeing what happens. This is why environmentalism is subject to the class struggle; we cannot rely on the establishment environmentalists, who work closely with the capitalists, but must build up the environmental movement of the working masses.

Obama promotes a neo-liberal version of environmentalism. He won't even accept government regulation as in the old days, to say nothing of letting the workers play a role in environment supervision. His administration is searching for new ways to find market incentives. This is why whatever the government does it will be a fraud: it will be the ethanol disaster repeated over and over again.

I worked in downtown Seattle this Saturday.This person was an absolute nuisance! I consider myself to be a part of the "green" movement, & all for "green" legislation. But, I don't think the streets of Seattle (on a weekend morning) was the right venue. Really, who do you think heard this message? I think it was a WASTE of tax payer dollars to have 8 or 9 Seattle police babysit this crazy person. You really think it did any good? Judging from the views (on YouTube) ... it didn't do much of anything. *Then actually from reading a bit further, come to find out officers from Homeland security had to surround the Federal Bldg. because of this joker ... absolutely unnecessary waste of tax payers money!*

I worked in downtown Seattle this Saturday. This person was an absolute nuisance! I consider myself to be a part of the "green" movement, & all for "green" legislation. But, I don't think the streets of Seattle (on a weekend morning) was the right venue. Really, who do you think heard this message? I think it was a WASTE of tax payer dollars to have 8 or 9 Seattle police babysit this crazy person. On top of the countless Homeland Security Officers that had to surround the Federal Bldg! You really think it did any good? Judging from the views (on YouTube) ... it didn't do much of anything AT ALL.

Progressive environmentalism embodies the reality that we don't have to pit the environment vs. economics, and we can in fact use economic thinking and mechanisms to improve environmental policy.

Proponents of "progressive environmentalism" live in a fantasy world, if they think they can reform capitalism in such a way. The capitalist system is inherently and fundamentally anti-people and destructive of the environment, and no reform can change this. The article I posted earlier explaining the basic problem with "cap and trade" should have been enough to show most people how screwed up this approach is. Wake up and smell the coffee! As long as you refuse to recognize that the system of private property in which the capitalist class owns and controls most of the means of production, and controls the state machinery in every country also, there can be no reform that will really solve these problems.