The Planet’s Trouble With Markets

[marmar]

The Planet’s Trouble With Markets
Posted on Apr 23, 2013


On the occasion of the collapse of the European emissions trading scheme, Guardian environment correspondent George Monbiot explains why markets are no substitute for governments, especially when it comes to avoiding global warming, one of the worst mass disasters humankind will yet see.

Try as they might, the middle managers who call themselves lawmakers cannot wholly ignore the will of the people in favor of the corporations that pay for their campaigns, Monbiot writes. Therefore they have to come up with some ruse that allows them to claim they are acting in the public interest. That ruse is called the market, and it is unfit to regulate and execute power for the common good.

New schemes based on the same principle are already being designed to replace the failed carbon market. This surrender of responsibility to the animal will of the market is responsible for our plunge into oligarchy and will only hasten our descent into a warming, uncontrollable planet, Monbiot argues.

“When governments pretend they no longer need to govern, when they pretend that a world regulated by bankers, corporations and the profit motive is a better world than one regulated by voters and their representatives, nothing is safe,” he writes. “All systems of government are flawed. But few are as flawed as those controlled by private money.” ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/the_planets_trouble_with_markets_20130423/

[NYC_SKP]

1. Well said.

Still, those in power are unlikely to care.

K/R

[scarletwoman]

2. Thank you for posting this! I haven't read George Monbiot for far too long.

I used to visit his web page all the time during the bush* years, he was one of my favorite dissenting writers. He's a damn good thinker and writer.

From Monbiot's article in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/faith-markets-misplaced-governments-save-planet

In an important respect the scheme has been worse than useless. New airports and roads and power stations have been justified with the claim they they will not raise emissions, as the greenhouse gases they produce will be absorbed by cuts made elsewhere. The one lasting impact of the European carbon market has been to rationalise polluting projects which might not otherwise have been built.

But even as this scheme collapses, governments are launching new ones, creating markets that are far less appropriate – even in theory – than the trade in carbon. Last month, the UK's Ecosystem Markets Task Force, a body set up by the government but largely composed of company executives, . It invokes the magic of the markets to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of democratic governance.

<snip>

This is an example of what happens in a market-based system: any clash between generating profit and protecting the natural world is resolved in favour of business, often with the help of junk science. Only those components of the ecosystem that can be commodified and sold are defended. Nature is worthy of protection when it is profitable to business. The moment it ceases to be so, it loses its social value and can be trashed. As prices fluctuate or crash, so do the fortunes of the ecosystems they are supposed to protect. As financial markets move in, with the help of the environmental bonds and securitisations the taskforce champions, the defence of nature becomes ever more volatile and uncertain. The living planet is reduced to a subsidiary of the human economy.

As an aside, it was George Monbiot's incisive writings against the Iraq war, and U.S. imperialism in general, that gave rise to the right wing epithet for liberals and leftists, "moonbats". Monbiot>moonbat.

sw

[Jim Lane]

3. Wikipedia disputes your aside about the origin of the term "moonbat"

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbat#Etymology:

According to a 2006 article by New York Times self-described "language maven" William Safire, the term was first used by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in 1947.[1] Heinlein used the term in a 1947 short story, "Space Jockey," as the name of a rocket spacecraft used for the third step of a journey from the Earth to the moon. Descriptions of bat-like people on the moon were part of the 1835 Great Moon Hoax.

A long poem, "The proving of Gennad: a mythological romance" by Landred Lewis (1890), uses the term "moonbat" to refer to unsound ideas, but not specifically political ones.

The Wikipedia article does note the association with Monbiot's name but it's certainly not definite that that association was the origin. The Wikipedia article links to a Safire "On Language" column, "Moon Bats & Wing Nuts", that doesn't mention Monbiot at all.