Cap in Hand, part 1: Green Realism

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.” 

Cap in Hand, part 2: Peter Barnes doesn't know it, but he is doing it

Peter Barnes wrote last week in a letter to the Citizen that, whatever the validity of my other observations, he is not a neoliberal or a Thatcherite…

Tony Benn records in his diary in 1999 the introduction of a bill in parliament by Tony Blair’s government to privatize the British postal system.  Benn writes that the Conservative Party opposite the supposedly left of center Labour Party were beside themselves, roaring in wave after wave of laughter as the bill was being read out.  The Conservatives couldn’t believe that the privatization of this valued and formerly inviolable public service, the destruction of a public institution that they had failed to achieve in 10 years in power under Margaret Thatcher, was going to be accomplished by their opponents. The Labour Party? Thatcherite? Neoliberal?

In their long exodus from power, the Labour Party adopted the economic policies of the right, neoliberal economic policies.  Peter Mandelson, Blair’s Karl Rove if you like, even declared after a “weekend-long policy brainstorming session” with Blair and Bill Clinton that “we’re all Thatcherites now.” 

The man whose work is the basis of Cap and Trade was called Ronald Coase. In 1990, the year before he received the Nobel Prize in economics for the very theory we are discussing, Coase told the man who was to become the leading exponent of the localist opposition to empire and climate change, Paul Fenn, that Milton Friedman had hijacked his idea, that Cap and Trade couldn’t work because the contracts would be unenforceable – polluters would find ways to cheat.  Whatever their disagreements, Coase and Friedman are considered two of the thought leaders of neoliberalism and Thatcherism. 

That bit about unenforceability is important.  Neoliberals have an answer to Coase’s opinion that Cap and Trade would just be a realm for gaming – fraud – by polluters.  They call for a strong government, and say so, to extend markets across the world and enforce the rules of these markets. Neoliberals are not for weaker government – that is just propaganda for the Bakersfield chapter of the Tea Party.

Cap and Trade was a Republican policy, but in the logic of “triangulation”, the hallmark of Bill Clinton’s “political genius”, some Democrats decided to make it their policy. Then the Republicans dropped it and moved further toward the right. And the Democrats treat their opponent’s idea as progressive.

If you are proposing the privatization of the atmosphere, to create a new market to fix the old market and call for a strong national government to enforce this new economy, what school of thought (tracking back to which politician) do you belong to?

One definition or aspect of ideology – the limits of the thinkable – runs, “They don’t know it, but they are doing it.”

So much of the poverty of our discourse is the assumption that the field of action for these issues is the national or international, that local democracy must be set aside or is irrelevant. But my message here is that there are no imperial solutions to the problems of empire. Even if the federal government did pursue the reregulation of industry, carbon taxes, or cap and dividend, and the largess of these policies do trickle down to the masses as intended, they will cause new terrifying problems.

How will we organize opposition to new crises, or our current wars, if we are all on the federal government’s payroll? The founders of this project, the Enlightenment, believed you could not both have an empire and a democracy. Jefferson said that independence from the government was a necessary condition for a citizen, as opposed to a subject. What will happen, indeed what has happened, to the idea of a citizen, when the empire has the masses on financial life support?

Cap in Hand?

These mass movements are as bankrupt as the ideas they beg the powerful to implement. They say 400,000 marched in New York. In 1995, 870,000 gathered in Washington for the Million Man March – the lives of the overwhelming majority of African Americans have been in continued steady decline since in spite of it. Marching will not melt the hearts of CEOs or Presidents. Remember all of the idea men and activists that went to DC in ‘08 – and had their meetings with senators and the President’s men – believing that they could get Obama’s ear and convince him to address this or that crisis? And they tell us we should now have a new movement, to influence a new President or even the leaders of other countries. Do they really expect a better outcome from Hillary Clinton, supposing it isn’t Jeb Bush?

Anyone who believes the federal government will hear their prayers, over the inducements of industry and the white noise of imperial power will again be predictably disappointed.  Go to the level of politics where citizens still have the ability to impose their will:  the municipality is the sleeping giant of American democracy and the best hope for action on the climate and economy.

I invite Mr. Barnes to publicly discuss our differing positions and how to take action on these crises.