Questions for discussion:

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• Questions for discussion
• Is the emphasis on growth and (old-fashioned)
  developmentalism constructive, given the latters
  well-documented record of both failing the poor
  and suppressing climate-friendly practices?
• How might the proposal be developed to support
  and be supported by local climate justice
  movements? In what political contexts could its
  institutional structures for financial and
  technical decisionmaking be built up in a way
  that did not undermine democratic struggles?

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• To what extent do the aspects of the proposal
  modelled on the New Deal and the Marshall Plan
  reflect careful study of the structure,
  objectives and effects of these two historical
  initiatives?

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• Carbon Markets Conception
• of Cost-Effectiveness
• Two Difficulties

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• Constructing a Commodity for a Climate Market
• Further tradeable equivalents are manufactured
  for additional cost savings and delays in
• addressing lock-in and added to the commodity
  pool in circulation (OFFSETS)
• Equivalent emissions are pooled by abstracting
  from
• place, technology and history and then marketed
  (TRADE)

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• In addition
• The sum of fungible greenhouse gas pollution
  rights that governments create and distribute for
  purposes of trade are implied to approach, in
  principle if not in practice, an economically
  optimal, climatically safe level of overall
  greenhouse gas pollution. As work by the Harvard
  economist Martin Weitzman and others suggests,
  this move engenders a degraded conception of the
  climate problem the commensuration process
  inherent in models that aggregate economic growth
  with simple climate dynamics heightens systemic
  hazards by presenting a cost-benefit estimate
  for what is inherently a fat-tailed situation
  with potentially unlimited downside exposure as
  if it is accurate and objective.
• To disregard the incredible magnitude of the
  deep structural uncertainties that are involved
  in climate-change analysis by presenting a
  cost-benefit estimate for a situation with
  potentially unlimited downside exposure as if it
  is accurate and objective is dangerously
  misleading. (Martin L. Weitzman, On Modeling
  and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic
  Climate Change, The Review of Economics and
  Statistics, vol. 91, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1-19.)

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• I.e.
• Trying to achieve cost-effectiveness through
  trade
• becomes incoherent insofar as creating the
  market
• framework necessary to make sense of the notion
  of
• cost-effectiveness entails losing touch with
  what is
• supposedly being costed.
• Hence the quest for cost-effectiveness reduces
  the
• chance that our actions will be cost-effective.

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Cost-effectiveness ideology

• treats a
  (problem
  of long-term historical
  trajectory away from fossil
  fuels vast unknowns)
• as if it were a (problem
  of finding the right short-term
  commodity price)

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• because only by reducing the
• to the
• can you guarantee the possibility of

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But as grown-up people this should not be
what we aim at in climate policy.