The Refuge for Realists
Cap and Trade or Dividend is an old idea, an old Republican
policy, and I am told an updated version of this Trojan horse, presented as a
great gift by Peter Barnes, is creaking on its wheels as it rolls into West
Marin from the darkest corners of 20th century economic philosophy for us
townsfolk to gawk at. Cap and Trade solves thorny problems for the timorous
thinker. First, you don’t have to blame corporations. It isn’t their essential
activity that is destructive to nature, and must be stopped. It is that markets
have not been created to account for their behavior and “price-in” their
destructiveness. Once they pay the right price for the smoke they produce, or
at least the carbon in the smoke, they will correct their behavior.
And who is going to enforce this new market? Well, the same
politicians who are presently beholden to the corporations who pollute. Cap and
Trade asks the corporations and the government to go into a room together and
solve the problem by creating a new market to fix the old market. Of course, because the intellectuals refuse
to take a stand directly against the corporations themselves, attempting only
to modify corporate behavior over time, the politicians don’t even have a basis
from which to resist them. As Paul Fenn put it, “It is like putting the tobacco
companies in charge of the strategy to stop people from smoking.”
Where these Cap and Trade schemes have been tried various
tricks are used, often built into the markets themselves, to allow polluters to
evade the cap – to not reduce carbon emissions. These markets have failed
repeatedly in practice. But how is it supposed to work in theory? Well polluting
corporations, like power plant owners, have the amount that they pollute grandfathered
into the scheme. Then starting from year one the cap gets lower, polluters
must emit less carbon, until say 2050 when carbon emissions will be at a level
that, based on the enormity of the problem, they need to be today. It is
a proposal on a timeline so long that only people who believe in cryogenics
won't find themselves utterly dismayed.
That last bit, sadly, isn’t entirely a joke. Hedge fund
founder and Googleian Ray Kurzweil eats 150 pills a day in a bid to live until
technology will make him immortal. The grand old man of the convenient fantasy
California-style Stewart Brand has his own “Long Now” foundation which asks us
to look forward to the year 10,000 and start planning on that basis. No wonder
he is so untroubled by the half-life of nuclear waste. Not to be outdone, Peter
Schwartz, business partner of Brand, both longtime consultants to Shell Oil
amongst others, once told an audience in San Francisco that he wasn’t concerned
about climate change because through the advances of bio-technology his son
would live forever, giving him ample time to deal with the problem. Does it
bother anybody that our intellectuals sound like a group thirteen year-old boys
in a treehouse trying to write a Star Trek script?
Cap and Trade does not even rise to
the level of tragedy because either foolishly or shamelessly it serves the
powerful interests that are destroying the world. It is no compensation
to be paid $5,000 a year by polluters in exchange for the loss of our future as
a species. For even with this addendum of a dividend scheme, where will this
money be spent in the climate change conditions that Cap and Trade cannot halt?
Ideas like Cap and Trade flow from
people like Friedrich von Hayek and Ronald Coase (who ultimately disavowed it)
through Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, though the locals who tout them
seem not to know it. They are predicated on a worldview that believes there is
no such thing as a society, that only when we make a market out of the whole
earth, including the air we breathe, can our problems be solved. In an
effort to be “realistic”, Barnes and the serious men have become, perhaps
unwittingly, dominated by the ascendant ideology of our time: Neo-liberalism.
Though they probably think they are just helping the Democratic Party – supposedly
a force for good – the Party leadership beginning with Bill Clinton has moved
in earnest to adopt the economic policies of the right as well. I am reminded
of the line from a terrible early 80s fantasy film, “It used to be just another
snake cult, but now, it’s everywhere!”
Remember that these local thinkers talk to some extent about
the forces that govern our world, but not about the structures that holds all
of these interests in place. Those underlying structures they think of as a
natural and immutable ecology of power in which we need to find the right
balance between participants – a balance, for instance, between the interests
of the coal industry and the people whose water and air are poisoned. That is
right, this line of thought says that companies mining coal are a part of
nature as well, and any solution will have to balance their need to survive
with ours. This false ecological view of
the world causes blind spots in their vision, narrowed further by the fears
they confuse for wisdom. Many of them, of course, are simultaneously rich,
distracted and unevenly educated, and the combination of these cardinal West
Marin qualities often compels these men and women to speak, with great
confidence, opinions that are useless, trivial or demented (sadly for those
dependent upon their patronage, the service population in its various forms are
often compelled to listen to them).
What are these fears that pervert the minds of our
intellectuals? The first and most obvious is the fear of the empire itself.
Take our institutions of higher learning: although universities usually allow
each department a token radical, they too are increasingly entranced by “free
market” ideas and are endlessly constructing new buildings that require
wealthy, often corporate, donors and federal funding. To jeopardize either patron would be fatal to
the growing university bubble, and their chancellors dare not alienate them.
Energy corporations, like BP and PG&E, are notorious (or should be) for
constraining the debate on politics and policy within universities in favor of
technological research – which when it comes close to showing promise – is
often defunded. With John Yu whose odious mind produced the Bush
administration’s rationale for torture as a tenured professor of law and former
head of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano now the
Chancellor, you can’t slide a postcard between the most malevolent interests of
empire and the University of California.
Older fears possess our thinkers when writing about changing
the world for the better, based in memories of the political upheavals of the
1930s. Remember FDR was a compromise; he was going to protect businessmen from
those they more deeply feared like Huey Long. But the ultimate and to some
inevitable danger of political unrest is represented by figures like Stalin and
Hitler who remain bidden or unbidden in our political memory. If, like those
two, a leader says he has the formula for a new and better society, to achieve
our dreams of freedom and prosperity, what then will he do to those who oppose
it, or whom the leader has designated as the enemies of the dream?
The consequence of these persistent
half-remembered memories is an unwillingness to speak out in opposition to
either corporations or the government. These are the “realists”, and their
sober and stable managerial approach to crisis explains the poverty of the
solutions they present to climate change or the “Great Recession.” Writers like
Peter Barnes refuse to directly confront the sources of climate change or
declining living standards in America for fear, I believe, of arousing
political ideas.
Today, there are ideas that say you
can change the world by disallowing through law the abuse of the planet or its
people, ideas that simultaneously allow our local governments to provide
investment in infrastructure to replace the burning of fuel. Such direct actions
are considered, “unserious” or “unrealistic”, because if we identify corporations
as the culprits of global and domestic decline, the realists fear we will march
toward Communism. If we identify the government as the cause of failure,
we will unwittingly bring to power fascists and a greater tyranny. And let’s
pull away the curtain for a moment, lurking in the shadows is perhaps the true
fear of the portfolio men and women: the capricious Index, like the Dow Jones
Industrial Average, to whom they must make endless sacrifices in an effort
raise share prices ever higher, because without those particular dividend
payments, survival in West Marin is truly unimaginable.
West Marin is nestled in the center of American empire, not
at some rural margin. That is why what we think, and still more to know who we
truly are, is very important. Some of us believe we are really out in the
country and receive the terrible events on TV or the internet as fragments from
a distant world. Our lives feel stagnant as climate change, war, government
spying and declining prosperity demand serious collective answers to the
question of how we and our children will survive. Unfortunately for us, our
local intellectuals are proposing answers to the big crises of our time which
in their pursuit of the “real” are ironically more utopian than any Bolshevik
dream. The realist says, “Ask the polluters not to pollute, ask them instead to
pay the poor.”