We can wield capitalism? Who’s the “we” you’re talking about? Unless I’m *greatly* underestimating the net worth of folks blogging here, I don’t think that includes us. And until economic power is in the hands of those who work it (instead of those who own it, or those who “regulate” it), we’re going to run into these problems. Until the legal and economic imperative of ever-increasing profit over all else is gotten rid of, we’re going to run into these problems. Think of the kind of literal disaster it took for politicians to pass the New Deal; should we pine for something like that, to get politicians off their butts? As Naomi Klein argues so well in her book The Shock Doctrine, elites (on both sides of the aisle) are now using catastrophes to push even more reactionary changes through.

One of Murray Bookchin’s most important insights was the realization that the way we treat the environment around us mirrors the way we treat each other, and that to truly stop the institutionalized domination of people over the planet, we need to stop the institutionalized domination of people over other people. That’s why seemingly disparate social issues are actually deeply connected to things like ecological issues, and why simply tackling them separately and one at a time won’t get us anywhere.

I think that, as Insurgent Sociologist alluded to, there are great examples of alternatives being experimented with, particularly in places like Argentina and Venezuela. We’ve also seen very specific, adoptable economic models put forth like Albert’s Parecon and Schweickart’s Economic Democracy. If we feel that (all or parts of) those models represent the kind of values we hold dear, and will create a better world, then we should adopt them and keep them in mind when engaging in fights today.

“We can only hope to inform our markets to make the best choices possible.”

Wow, I’m glad there are people out there more hopeful than you. And it’s unnerving to read you talking as if “the market” was an actual “thing,” that makes decisions for itself, that has agency.

I think you don’t realize just how much planning by people goes on in this economy - though I doubt it’s covered in that Econ 101 class. Looking at the extreme amount of both vertical and horizontal integration in pretty much all sectors of the global economy, many multinationals could easily be viewed as individual, self-contained command economies. There are CFOs out there directing, top-down, more economic activity than most nations even see. Because megaconglomerates generally function outside the constraints of what economists call “market discipline,” simply tweaking those rules will do very little to affect their operations, and if somehow the inclusion of some externality were to threaten their profitability, all they’d have to do is swing through Congress and tell them to make Company X exempt.

Governments literally cannot afford to allow their biggest corporations to go out of business, or even have their profitability reduced - so the status quo continues with impunity.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that our current economic situation is not inevitable, it has been (like you’ve said) intentionally constructed by people, and as a result people can intentionally construct alternatives: alternatives that promise a better world.

Capitalism: get beyond it.

clowns, sports mascots, Yippies, anarchists, and now climate activists…great company

standing ovation for friedman after he cleaned up and spoke for an hour, VICTORY!

A culture changing climate movement shouldn’t just be those of us on the blog, Powershift attendees, etc. it’s gotta be EVERYBODY and yep, Friedman’s in too. Yes, we may have fundamental differences with him but throwing dessert leaves an “us vs. them” dynamic and most likely leaves us out of the conversation. We always compare this climate movement to the civil rights movement right…so, WWMLKP?

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Colonel Custard (aka the corporate criminal creamer)

Greenwash Guerillas: contact@GreenwashGuerrillas.org

Footage available: http://www.GreenwashGuerrillas.org

Greenwash Guerrillas Pie Thomas Friedman at Brown University

YouTube Censors Video; Pie Thrower Faces University Disciplinary Procedures

Providence, RI - New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman was pied by the Greenwash Guerillas while giving an Earth Day Lecture at Brown University. The Greenwash Guerillas targeted Thomas Friedman because of his support for U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, neo-liberal economic policies that harm the world’s poor, and especially for promoting bogus solutions to the global climate crisis.

“We sought to expose the hypocrisy of allowing Friedman, who is known for his influential support of U.S. wars for oil in the Middle East, to call himself an environmentalist,” explained Greenwash Guerrilla Margaree Little. “He has blood on his hands that no amount of ‘green’ can wash away.”

Little, a Brown University student identified as one of the pie throwers, faces University disciplinary hearings, potentially including expulsion. Colonel Custard, the second pie thrower, remains at large.

Little and Custard jumped on stage as Friedman began his talk, entitled “Green is the new Red, White & Blue.” The talk focused on how green technology and corporate environmentalism can restore the United States to its “natural place in the global order.”

They tossed two green-colored cream pies at Friedman and dashed off as leaflets denouncing Friedman were thrown to the crowd. According to the pamphlets, “On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists – we, the Greenwash Guerillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s ‘Green’ as fake . . . as the cool-whip covering his face.”

The Greenwash Guerillas object to Friedman’s support for nuclear power, coal power, industrial biofuels, and carbon trading markets. “These false solutions are smokescreens, intended to generate massive corporate profits while creating global humanitarian and environmental disasters,” said Colonel Custard.

Video of the pie throwing incident was posted on YouTube, and received close to 70,000 views in 36 hours, making it one of the most popular videos on the site. Without notice, YouTube abruptly censored the video, removing it from the website. Hundreds of news outlets, blogs, and websites had linked to the video. The Greenwash Guerillas have reposted the clip at: http://www.GreenwashGuerrillas.org

“Given the many other pieings on YouTube(1), the removal of the video can only be understood as an act of political censorship,” said Little. “One has to wonder whether Friedman, a billionaire with a lot of connections, has more influence than “you” on YouTube.”

“The Greenwash Guerillas chose the harmless and humorous tactic of pie-throwing because our goal was to take this perpetual charlatan off his new green pedestal,” said Colonel Custard. “Friedman’s support for coal and nuclear power is as misguided as his counsel on Iraq.”

This is the second time Friedman has been hit by a pie. In October 2002, he received a banana pie to his face while promoting his writings on free-market globalization in Boston.

Footnote:

(1) e.g., http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/04/thomas-friedman.html

Capitalism has created the global warming issue by undervaluing climate and overvaluing profit. This can be altered. Carbon taxes or carbon caps, assuming they appropriately value carbon emissions, will incentivize markets to find replacements, increase efficiency, or reduce consumption of fossil fuels. Everyone on this blog knows this.

What some fail to recognize is that markets are the most effective tools in the world to create change. Individuals, such as the president, or groups, such as congress, do not have the intelligence or foresight to induce the massive changes that global warming requires. They can allow markets to make the most efficient changes possible by internalizing the externality of global warming.

Let me repeat: Markets are the most effective tools in the world to create change. By change, I mean change for the better. Look at communism, in the attempt to make everyone wealthy, it makes everyone poor. This happens not because people want other people to be poor, but because people want to be wealthy and there is no incentive to make an individual wealthy in communism.

China is the prime example, of course, and many will point to the massive environmental devastation and inexcusable emission of greenhouse gases that have resulted. This pollution has happened not because China got rich, but because it made a choice between quality of life and quality of environment. I disagree with their choice, but I maintain that allowing 500 million people to rise from the deepest poverty is a human rights MIRACLE. (Did I just call China a human rights miracle? Yikes. You know what I mean.)

Unfortunately, capitalism necessarily creates winners and losers. In our form of capitalism, we have created unbelievably wealthy winners at the expense of some unbelievably poor losers. This too is a human rights issue. However, I maintain that capitalism can be tweaked to create a more, though not completely, just society, just as it can be tweaked to reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gases.

Jesse has appropriately asked how the posters on this blog would replace capitalism, with nary a coherent answer. That is because individuals will never be able to plan an economy with any sort of effectiveness. We can only hope to inform our markets to make the best choices possible.

Capitalism: get behind it.

Yah, I’m on family vacation this weekend! Spending way to much time on here…

How some folks find time to post so much on here is beyond me…while obviously it’s your prerogative, I kindly ask continued patience and understanding for the rest of us who don’t have as much time and my apologies in advance if someone insists upon my response to this and I don’t have time. Don’t get me wrong: it’s been a great discussion and I thank everyone who has taken time for it!

While I think there is MUCH to say about the roots of climate change and the relationship between fossil fuels, climate change, globalization, corporate power, it might be worth narrowing the discussion for the sake of simplicity.

Regardless of how problematic it is it is a given that capitalism will not be disappearing from the Global North within the next decade or so. So the question is really “can we hope to avoid really bad climate change scenarios (ie, tipping points) without SERIOUSLY checking corporate power and moving toward a less and less corporate controlled society?” and equally importantly “does the market tend to help promote “climate justice”"?

My firm belief (since none of us can know for certain) is a strong NO on both accounts. Bottomline (pardon the pun) there is simply too much influence of corporate profit in politics, resource consumption, *strategies* for co2 reduction, deployment of technologies, etc., etc.

If we want to survive, we need to have MUCH more power (and ideally all power) to direct things in a way the prioritizes the needs of communities and the planet’s climatic systems and not be distracted by big businesses influence.

Witness our experience — just in the past few years! – ethanol instead of electric cars, carbon trading (eg, the tree plantation offsets, the over allocation and give-a-way of permits), the pre-imminence of nuclear power and clean coal over wind and solar, the focus on Priuses instead of public transit, on lightblubs instead of high-effiency houses, of green products instead of reducing wasteful consumption, on individual consumers instead of supply-side or system-wide waste.

Time and again, the prominent “solutions” taking the MUCH longer route to addressing the problems, and even backtracking in some cases, despite the gravity of the crisis. We cannot ignore this as background noise, or just keep doing the right thing and hope it will go away.

Further: I think it’s all but impossible to argue this stuff is just mistakes, bumps along the road because in EVERY case people have been vocally opposing these mistakes from the blogs to the science magazines to the halls of congress. What are the “root causes” of these problems?

I think there is a mountain of evidence that solutions (and “solutions”) that involve high profits get FAR and away more prominence and attention then solutions that work but don’t make (as much) money.

Simply put, people and the planet must come over profits.

I understand the argument that one solution proposed for this pickle is to get “breakthrough” technologies that are both maximally profitable and minimally damaging. I just have no faith that a process toward that can be immune to these corrupting influences. Furthermore I think most of the changes we need — public transit, localization of food, energy efficient less consumeristic communities, an end to deforestation – aren’t going to be effected much one way or another by technology. Moreover, they require serious social changes that are likely be opposed by much of the business world because they will decrease profits (“Who Killed the Electric Car” is just the tip of the iceberg – at least there is still something to sell!).

Regardless, the likelihood of an amazing technological breakthrough is much higher if we have science and concern for humanity (not profit) as the sole, undistracted, drivers for the innovation,

The good news is more and more people are waking up to this all around the world…surveys — even in this country — find that 75% or more americans agree that corporations have gained too much power over American life. Notably, that’s a higher percentage than believe global warming is a crisis.

on what study, or better yet firsthand experience, are you basing your claim that “billions of people worldwide” in not-so-industrialized areas are aspiring for… what? coal plants? wal-marts? friedman would argue mcdonalds i guess.

I live in Harrisonburg virginia. We have a large working class immigrant population here, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Did these folks leave their homes and in many cases families and travel thousands of miles away to live in virginia, subject to racist government policies and cultural behaviors; do these folks in my town and many others choose to live in the U.S. without legal documentation of citizenship, constantly in fear of being outed and deported because they aspire to exist in a more industrialized world? no. they have come here because NAFTA and other products of the U.S.-led, Friedman-endorsed global capitalist economy have removed them from their land with U.S. trained and resourced military violence or by making it too hard for small farms to operate south of the border facing the competition of subsidized north american crops. so they must enter into sweatshops or risk it in the U.S. to support themselves and their families. I quite suspect that these folks would prefer to be at home farming in traditional ways than in Harrisonburg working in Cargil’s industrial poultry operations.

the not-so-industrialized world only aspires to exist within industrial systems of production and consumption when global capitalism destroys (or privatizes) the natural alternatives always with the help of industrialisms best friend, guns.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on that question. Given that scientists warn global emissions of greenhouse gases must peak and begin to fall by around 2015, what should be our top priorities for reform/change such that we can accomplish the changes we need to do that, and what do we need to compromise with or tolerate for the time being? In short, what are our priorities?

There’s a lot of injustice in the world, and we can only do so much at one time. I’m sorry if that sounds callous, but it’s also true. Tackling the climate crisis will require - and enable - transformational changes, but I’m not sure we can afford to hold out for a perfect silver-bullet revolution to sweep across the globe.

Ryan, you write “Part of this problem is that markets do not allow us to “deliberately decide” anything but rather allocate decision making power based on wealth and access to capital.” While this may be true to the extent that there is (or ever was) a real “free” market, my point above is that such a free market never really exists. Governmental regulation/taxes and the broader societal norms they are generally reflective of constantly shape and create the rules under which markets function. Just look at how different “capitalism” looks in the United States, or Sweden, or France or China. That’s why I said when you say “capitalism,” I’ve gotta ask what kind of capitalism.

To the extent that we do live in a (more or less!) democratic society, we have a chance to set up the market’s rules such that it can properly function. If natural and human capital is properly valued, externalities are closed, labor can organize, government agencies regulate, etc., markets can function such that doing well by the market means doing well by people and the planet.

I recognize that’s a bit of an optimistic reach. But as I said above, it’s not any more (and probably quite a bit less) of a reach than assuming we’ll overthrow capitalism entirely. I advocate reforms to capitalism not out of some reverence for capitalism, but out of a shear pragmatic belief it offers our best and most likely chance at solving climate change and creating a more just and sustainable future.