As Democrats endeavored to “end welfare as we know it,” adopting the racist language of “superpredators” from the Right, greens worked with companies like Walmart and McDonalds on sustainability strategies — even as those same companies were facing down challenges from environmental justice advocates. By design, each warmed to the corporate world, embracing, as Ezra Klein would put it, “liberal ends through market means.” [...]
Technocratic demands like cap-and-trade, in other words, make it easy for the fossil fuel industry and the Right to paint climate change as a concern of elites, who can afford to drive hybrid cars, install solar panels on their homes, and bear the cost when corporations send regulatory fines downstream. Any politically viable climate policy will have to give working people a material stake in supporting it — not a fear that that they’ll be forced to shoulder its costs. [...]
It’s true that coal plants are closing, largely as a result of market forces. But driving that decline has been an explosion in natural gas, the proliferation of which is hardly a sum positive for the planet. Despite impressive growth, renewables like solar and wind still only meet a tiny percentage of Americans’ demand for electricity. Meanwhile, whatever piecemeal climate policy was created over the last four years is in the process of being systematically stripped away by the Trump administration. [...]
Carbon pricing, per se, is an eminently reasonable and common-sense policy: Polluters should pay for what they pollute. Fortunately, its less dogmatic proponents — Sanders among them — see pricing as a piece of the climate puzzle rather than the whole thing. If there are conservatives willing to get behind it, so be it. But framing the carbon tax as a silver bullet for the planet’s ills runs a deadly serious risk of obscuring how big the changes physics demands really are: Namely, sweeping transformations in nearly every sector of the economy, led by the state rather than the market, and a swift liquidation of the fossil fuel industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment