Tuesday, December 15, 2009

A Communist On Climate Change

The following is by The Barefoot Bum:


Paul Krugman, Digby and Amanda Marcotte all speculate on climate change denialism. But they focus on the politics; they're missing the economic factor. Denialism is rising fast, which means that people with money, serious money, are funding it. And people with serious money aren't stupid: they put their money where their economic interests lie.

The right wing has been against environmentalism in general for many decades, and it's not just to "piss off the liberals". The crux of the biscuit is that in general, labor extended on environmental activities does not produce profitable commodities. You can't bottle clean air, you can't wrap a healthy ecosystem and sell it at Best Buy: you can't rent the capital to workers and take the exchange the surplus labor for your own profit. The only way to improve the environment is by taxes, and these taxes come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the rich.

The only non-commodity production the right wing is interested in supporting is the military and the police. (It's ironic that Libertarians, those soi disant opponents of coercion, support the socialization of only the police and the military, whose only raison d'ĂȘtre is actually coercing people. Libertarianism without coercion is anarchism, and I like anarchists a whole lot better than I like Libertarians... of course, I like rabid weasels more than I like Libertarians.)

3 comments:

  1. The Right: "Don't you see! It's not economically viable to have a clean earth or clean water running into your home! You need to buy it! Taxes, the rich, lost jobs! Buzz words!"

    Except... if we have to make things that are more efficient, we will be producing them and people will have to buy them and that stimulates the economy and jobs. Environmentalism isn't about taxes at all, that's cap and trade (which has nothing to do with environmentalism, as I'm sure you're aware). Environmentalism is expensive and requires purchases, that is how it can create jobs where there were none before. If we had solar-panel factories (a trite example, I know), that would mean jobs for all the people working in factories that don't currently exist.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, there's profit behind taxing co2. A lot of profit. Just not the kind of profit Communists are offended by...

    Bring on mass geothermal power and this whole thing is over.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Geothermal power... that would mean Big Earth would be the main provider of power... so the Earth would lobby congress...

    Oh... my... god...

    Seriously, geothermal is great if it's viable. What's missing, a large initial investment?

    ReplyDelete

If the post you are commenting on is more than 30 days old, your comment will have to await approval before being published. Rest assured, however, that as long as it is not spam, it will be published in due time.

Related Posts with Thumbnails