by
Jacobin
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Cap and trade doesn't disciple capital; it coddles it. It does alarmingly little to force a sharp break from fossil fuel dependence. In fact, it actually establishes barriers to the comprehensive zero-carbon transition we need by giving big emitters an easy out. Instead of making the big, risky investments necessary to ditch carbon-intensive technologies outright, they can simply purchase cheap offset credits from other countries, deferring the vital work of building a carbon-free future.
"discipline" I think
[...] We have to recognize that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature. Even those who acknowledge this in one breath will still fall back on metaphors like reduced “carbon footprint” — as if we could just step more lightly and allow nature to repair itself. This is, paradoxically, one of the most anthropocentric positions imaginable, since it presumes that it is the eternal and natural state of the world to be habitable for humans. But God didn’t create the world specifically for us. Natural history is indifferent to humans and every other living being, and is characterized by chaotic change and mass extinctions, not homeostatic balance.
In response to the charge of hubris and Prometheanism, it is just as important to emphasize that though we accept the inevitability of attempting to “plan” nature, the socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature is never under our control, and there are always unintended consequences. But just as we cannot trust either the market or a policy elite to automatically produce just economic outcomes, we cannot assume that an unmolested nature will provide us with a safe and abundant world in which to live, in this or any other social system. And so, in the process of achieving the post-scarcity order that the Marxist biologist David Schwartzman calls “solar communism,” we will take up the task of cleaning up the mess capitalism has made, and creating an Anthropocene more rational, democratic, and egalitarian than the one we now inhabit.
Venture capital is designed to demand large returns in the short term. This makes VC firms unlikely to support the sort of research that produces technological breakthroughs, which requires generous financing over long periods of time. Science operates on a different timetable than capitalism.
Bill Gates' fund is a 20-year one, as opposed to the more usual 10-year one, but that's not enough
[...] the Right may be onto something when it describes global warming as a Bolshevik plot: curbing climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of our economic system and the role of the state in orchestrating it. Conservatives grasp at a visceral level just how vast the implications of the ecological crisis really are. For them, rejecting climate change is a perfectly rational political position.
We shouldn’t think for a moment that popular GOP denialism is set in stone. The Right’s fundamental mission is to preserve capitalist class power — if we let them, they’ll find a way to use climate policy to do that.
But as Adorno put it, “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.” This aesthetic aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity communicates precisely the wrong message about what must be done to address new environmental dangers and improve people’s lives.
What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable. Worse still, many things that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence remain profitable, and, without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to produce them.
This — the market’s profit motive, not growth or industrial civilization — caused our climate calamity and the larger biocrisis.
How will a carbon price build a network of electric-vehicle, fast-charging stations? Tesla only builds them in cherry-picked areas where it can rely on profits. Like a private bus company or an internet provider, Elon Musk won’t provide a service where that doesn’t make money. The market leaves the public sector to fill the gap.
Miranda furrowed her brow and gnawed at the edge of her fingernail. She had the raw, swollen nail beds of a chronic biter. It was always these self-devouring types who ended up here, hating Nike. (Nike, like Starbucks, originated in the Northwest and then exploded in horrendous global ubiquity. The local kid culture obsessively focused on these formerly local corporations. They had a sense of entitlement when it came to making them targets, even as they still loved and desired the products on some level, too. That love seemed to increase their desire to undo the corporations that made them. It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique, Nash thought. And more futile, naturally.) Nash figured there were worse ways for these kids to expend their anger and energy. Way worse ways. So he listened to them rant and plot against Nike, and it was good.