elusiveat ([info]elusiveat) wrote,
@ 2008-05-06 16:28:00
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Global Climate Change: Individual Action won't work...
...and the current trend favoring minimalist government needs to end.

Or so says the author of this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7385615.stm

What do you guys think?

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[info]noneuklid
2008-05-06 09:27 pm UTC (link)
I agree. The "one person at a time" approach has an appealing theoretical grounding, but an appalling historical one.

I don't know that the author is saying government minimalism need to end, although she is critical of it as an ideology. I will be so bold, however; the government ought to exist to regulate the public sphere, especially the behavior of large businesses.

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[info]mikecap
2008-05-06 09:29 pm UTC (link)
The "minimalist government" trend is in actuality the "rise of corporations" trend. Individuals really do have very little to do with the whole thing. Multi-national corporations have effectively gutted government completely and are plundering national treasuries through lobbying and deregulation and starting wars and awarding themselves the contracts make more weapons and rebuild what they blow up.

Maybe what we should really be focusing on is: how do we get multi-national corporations to go green? How do we force Wal-Mart to reduce its footprint? Is it even possible, seeing as how they've declawed and removed the teeth from the government?

Failing that, maybe it's time for state governments to take charge of all their own affairs and start ignoring the federal government completely (in the U.S. anyway).

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[info]marmota
2008-05-06 09:33 pm UTC (link)
Well, sure. I find it infuriatingly inane when people claim that market forces will take care of environmental concerns. From a purely market-oriented perspective, the environment is a resource to be exploited, and it will 'take care of it' by racing to see who can use it up first. Argh.

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[info]jkao
2008-05-07 03:58 pm UTC (link)
I tend to think that economic forces have generally done a poor job of accounting for the value of things like clean air, or natural spaces.

Presumably it is the duty of governments to step in to make sure that these things ("the commons") are properly valued, but they have not done so.

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[info]jkao
2008-05-07 03:59 pm UTC (link)
Which is to say, I think that may market forces *could* take care of environmental concerns, *if* the values of things weren't so horribly skewed to short-term local profit.

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[info]notoriousrh
2008-05-06 11:23 pm UTC (link)
Agreed. The popularization of individual consumer actions can still be slightly useful: as a signal to the government that popular opinion is shifting in a certain direction, or in terms of helping people think through the relationships between their environment/technologies and a society's cumulative energy use. It also, certainly, serves a psychological function of assuaging the guilt of participating in such a destructive culture...

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[info]truthspeaker
2008-05-08 09:58 pm UTC (link)
The contents of that article completely contradict what I know about the political situation. There certainly are attempts to deal with the problem, especially in the EU and carbon-trading, and there are organizations that got that done. That's certainly not enough, we're not there yet, and there's a lot of work to do, but the point is that there are organizations pushing for it, unlike what the author claims.

As for market forces, there are not enough checks on air pollution, especially in the US. Companies are allowed to incur damage without being assessed any costs. So, market forces can't do anything when there is no cost for the undesirable behavior. There is no individual entity to charge for the privilege of emitting carbon, so this is where some entity (presumably the government) needs to step in and charge companies for emitting carbon. Only then can market forces even begin to act. Until then, market forces are not going to help.

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