Re: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Doug Henwood on elite climate change strategy
On Apr 23, 2007, at 2:39 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
I suggested you please not think of carbon taxes as market mechanisms but, ideally, as anti-market mechanisms:
I’ve never claimed they were either market or non-market mechanisms.
I’d like to do something that raises the cost of hydrocarbons
significantly to discourage their use.
if done properly (with an intense focus on disincentivizing luxury consumption and, in the process, on cross-subsidisation of energy for basic needs), they would ‘distort
the markets’ (get the ‘prices wrong’), because they would work against the inexorable capitalist logic of declining short-run marginal cost
curves.
I’d love a progressive carbon tax in principle, though, aside from
something like a residential electricity bill, I can’t think of how
to structure it. Should an aluminum plant pay a proportionally higher
tax than an ad agency, just because the production of aluminum is
very energy-intensive, and the production of seductive bullshit isn’t?
So, since Chris Doss doesn’t get this either, let’s sum it up like
this: market mechanisms commodify life; our job is decommodification. Ok?
Our first job is to prevent climate catastrophe. I can’t imagine any
configuration of the U.S. Congress over the next decade that would
pass the kind of tax you’re talking about. Right now it’s either cap
and trade or carbon tax, with a carbon tax - the far better option -
a much more remote political possibility. I’d certainly agitate
happily for a progressive carbon tax, and suggest it whenever cap and
trade reveals itself to be a scam. But since we’ve got to get going
on getting GHG emissions down seriously, it’d be dangerously
sectarian to hold our breath until they pass the right tax.
Doug