Recesion is a green issue

I think that George Monbiot may be right here: "If the world is sliding into recession, it’s partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology. " Though, as I have argued before, I am doubtful that an unassisted market-led solution is going to do what we need; I doubt that the market is showing the kind of reponsiveness we clearly need and I think that the market historically has tended to 'handle' massive structural readjustment with misery and enriching the next nouveaux-riches.

Monbiot in thi article declares his former support for contract and converge is being replaced. The reasons are interest and should be looked at. It flows from reading a report on Kyoto2 by Oliver Tickell. Monbiot' summary is that Tickell's critique of contract and converge outcomes flounder on the shore: "Carbon rationing, he argues, requires a level of economic literacy that’s far from universal in the most advanced economies, let alone in countries where most people don’t have bank accounts". Good point. To which I'd add that some outcomes do not seem especially friendly to a free society.

The proposed solution, which does seem to address the concerns, is

"... setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations - running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example - rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world’s central banks. There’s a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn’t fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn’t cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years."

And I was particularly interested in one of the final comments:

Tickell’s proposal could represent a classic Keynesian solution to economic crisis. The $1, $2 or even $5 trillion the system would cost is used to kick-start a green industrial revolution, a new New Deal not that different from the original one (whose most successful component was Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which protected forests and farmland(10)). This would not be the first time that business was rescued by the measures it most stoutly resists: there’s a long history of corporate lobbying against the kind of government spending that eventually saves the corporate economy.

Looks like a book to wtch out for and to see the responses by Green lobbies.