Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Naomi Klein in The Nation, on Capitalism vs. the Climate

Planet 3.0 has a critique of Naomi Klein's Capitalism vs. the Climate in "the American hard-left magazine The Nation".
Klein's article is wonderfully written & well worth reading, but as I noted in a comment, I didn't find it satisfying.

Please, go read Klein's piece first, then the P3 critique.

I particularly agree with this criticism of Klein's "go local" focus:
"Klein’s celebration of the local is somewhat ironic. The whole problem is that our system is incapable of adjusting to global constraints. Devolving more power locally will help many things, but it will not help us develop global policies that work."

5 comments:

Don Pelton said...

What would be an example of a "global policy" that would work?

Anna Haynes said...

Global is treaties, and yes Don I agree that they're difficult (and that I'm no expert); but the point, as I see it, is that we should be aiming for increasingly-large scale (region) agreements, not increasingly small ones. Otherwise the situation has all the drawbacks of personal-carbon-footprint efforts - that the polluters are free to continue to pollute, & economically it becomes a race to the bottom (i.e. those manufacturers who foist their externalities onto the public can price their products lower).

We're in this together, so we need to aim toward the policies applying to everyone as well.

"The sky belongs to all of us."

Don Pelton said...

I'm just speaking in a general (thus pretty uninformed) way! ... but ...

"... we should be aiming for increasingly-large scale (region) agreements, not increasingly small ones."

Why not both?

Why couldn't small agreements be mutually reinforcing with large regional ones?

Are they necessarily mutually exclusive?

Don Pelton said...

Hm .. rereading your first response, I see that you have already answered my follow-on question.

Anna Haynes said...

Don, re your "Why couldn't small agreements be mutually reinforcing with large regional ones?" -

Agreed, they could be. But there's a structural problem, in that people whose #1 focus is making local agreements will, when communicating to the public, tend to communicate this priority as well.

Though if they did pair their "we need a local agreement..." outreach with "...but what's most needed is larger-scale ones" outreach, that'd be most helpful.