Hansen called for "transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year."

Hansen wrote: "Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly."  

Is the USA a democracy? Has it ever been?

Every struggle for fundamental rights denied at the founding of this nation -- for Abolition, equality for women, desegregation, etc., -- has required more than a generation of sustained, collective, super-human effort. And after all that, "victory" under law turned out to be half-assed.

People in each struggle quickly discovered that arrayed against
them were the laws of the land (symbolized by the Constitution), the might of the nation, the great institutions of the privileged founders, along with July 4 fairy tales.

Slavery and the slave system were legal, were constitutionalized.
Denial of women's rights was legal, constitutionalized. Segregation by race was legal, constitutionalized.

People found that they had no remedy under law. Abolitionists, women suffragists, civil rights workers -- they couldn't even rely on the alleged First Amendment. Or after the Civil War, on the blood-soaked 14th Amendment. So they had to go outside the law. To bleed anew. To die.

The Constitution was constructed to make it exceedingly difficult for emerging rabble majorities to gain basics rights, and then to use their rights to make change. The Constitution
was constructed to privilege men of property and their
institutions -- to protect them from any would-be rabble.

Today's corporate denial of worker rights is legal and constitutionalized. Today's denial of municipal self-governance
is legal and consitutionalized. Today's privileging of a few
behind their corporate shields is legal and constitutionalized.

Reversing climate change is not about "emissions." The "transformative" changes Hansen has in mind are in the categories of investment, production, commerce, work and property -- and in the law of so-called "private corporations."  

Transformative change will challenge property rights and corporate privilege. Transformative change will require disobedience to sacred theories and precedents and laws that even and especially good liberals hold dear....It will require mass disobedience to raw power.

There are, alas, no "legal" or "constitutional" remedies to transformative.

Take Nature. Hansen suggests trying corporate CEOs for
high crimes against nature. Well, "nature" is merely someone's (or some corporation's) PROPERTY. In the USA today, there is no such thing as high crime against "Nature." Indeed,  property "owners" can do pretty much what they want with "their" property. Is Hansen prepared to advocate for the "rights" of nature and biological systems? "Rights" for rivers, mountains,
air, glaciers? For those whom Native peoples called the flowing
people, the standing people, the sitting people, the creeping people...?

But wait! Our courts have decreed that corporate decision-making is a "property right." Corporate future profits are a  "property right." So the might of the Nation protects property owners from any misguided, passionate Rabble.

All to say: major change in investment, production,
commerce, work, corporations and "property" (not to mention Empire) will require challenging a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon law and custom, precedent and wisdom...now backed by
great wealth, armed might, custom, habit, and the teachings
of our best schools and universities.

It's nothing personal. That's simply where so much awful history
has landed us.

So shouldn't we be clear that people advocating transformational change are not simply requesting that a few "special interests" get out of the way. They are calling for dismantling our Corporate State...the end of USA Global Empire.

Can we talk about this as we talk about "low-carbon high-efficiency products"? As we talk about "clean energy"?  As we inject into "transformative" undoing this nation's anti-democratic and rights-denying laws, precedents, theories, governing mechanisms and endless self-praise?  

As we turn to our local governments for remedy and leadership -- in other words, as we turn away from  the men and women in the absurd deliberative bodies that have brought today's messes upon this Earth; as we discover ourselves...in the places where we actually live and breathe, where we raise our children?

And as we explore together the terrible histories of violence, rights denial, subjugation, Earthly plunder and denial that
have characterized these United States.

For we might discover that it will be the communal crackings of those histories that will enable the transformations of ourselves, and of our communities.

-Richard Grossman
West Hurley, NY

I would only add one thing:  The U.S.A. was founded by killing the natives, stealing their land, destroying it, and using slaves to work it.  And a poster on Grist challenged by characterization of the U.S. as an evil country!

I don't dispute the urgent need to put corporations back in chains, under democratic control. Gus Speth's book underscores this. But I want to address Richard's rhetorical question about whether we will recognize the "rights" of Nature. It is probably useless to address this question to the free marketeers and other components of corporate capitalism. It is more important to address this to traditional liberals who have studiously ignored Nature and the earth's ecosystems in favor of various social justice issues such as sexism, racism, poverty, etc. It isn'tthat these should be ignored. It is that these need to be addressed in the CONTEXT of nature.  Ecological sensibility and consciousness is a rare trait among liberals, who have preferred to put ecology on a laundry list of Things We Like rather than at the center of their world view and values. Since Earth Day 1970 ecological understanding has radically decreased even as progressive social justice movements and campaigns have accelerated. Too many liberals still see the environment as an amenity, not as our life support system. Calls for political change start from the viewpoint of human needs and demands, not from a biocentric viewpoint that places humans in an interconnected web where nonhuman species and systems are afforded the rights and deference we afford to humans under the guise of "the rights of man". Overcoming anthropocentrism and the assumption that humanity must take precedence, and that progress is measured only by the improvement of human society, must be our first order of business. In the light of ecological necessity, democracy becomes a subset of an ecologically based society as well as a mechanism to defend all aspects of nature and the earth's ecosystems.

I admire Hansen and had the pleasure of hearing him speak and meeting him not too long ago.  But I find it hard to believe that Democrats are going to introduce anything called a carbon tax in the forseeable future, and I can't blame them.  It's suicide.  (And most Republicans in Congress are buffoons on global warming -- look up Senator Inhofe, who they made Environment Chair.)  We got 48 votes to cut off debate on cap-and-trade this year.  We need to get rid of five or six more of the Senate's buffoons, elect Obama, and get cap-and-auction passed in the next year or two -- preferably in 2009.  The point is we need a price on carbon emissions.  I just don't think a tax is politically possible -- at least not without a long effort to sell it as a replacement for some other taxes.

Mr. davedenali: In reference to your post "Cap and Auction Instead", do you have any clue as to what makes cap-and-trade politically viable, while a carbon tax is political "suicide"; and why would an auction be more politically palatable than a tax?

Overcoming anthropocentrism and the assumption that humanity must take precedence, and that progress is measured only by the improvement of human society, must be our first order of business.

i think the best we can do on this is get people headed in that direction. beyond that i'd expect it to be about as successful as any other abstinence program. there's not a species on earth that doesn't prefer itself. for a darn good reason, if you ask me. i mean, i'm glad to be here. but of course that's wired in. if i weren't i'd be defective.

Isn't it more true that "We Must Price Carbon"?  

A Cap and Auction strikes me as a better way to price carbon.

Here's why: A descending cap on carbon would allow the market to arrive at a carbon price based on the scientifically necessary carbon reductions.  

That strikes me as better than trying to find the price necessary to drive the necessary carbon reductions.  

We don't know what price is necessary, we do know what reductions we need.  Let the necessary reductions drive the price.

I'd love you to talk more about why a tax is better than cap & auction to arrive at a price.
 

Re "Here's why: A descending cap on carbon would allow the market to arrive at a carbon price based on the scientifically necessary carbon reductions."

Here's why not: Nobody is willing to mandate GHG caps remotely close to the "scientifically necessary carbon reductions" and to enforce such caps at any cost. A tax (or price floor) at least motivates you to spend as much as you are willing to spend on emission reductions - there will be no price erosion or collapse like what occurred with the US SO2 trading program and the EU-ETS. Regulatory price control would provide a stable investment climate that is more conducive to long-term investments in low-carbon technology and infrastructure.

We do not know what reductions are necessary or how much they will cost, but we should know how much we are willing to pay. Let the price incentive drive the reductions until such time as we are able to impose environmentally sustainable caps.

Your argument, heard constantly from anti-environmentalists (though I realize that you're not one, I've read many of your posts) -- that all species prefer themselves and that, therefore, if the bears, for instance, were in charge they'd be destroying the planet, too -- is anthropocentric B.S.

First, humans have intellectual capacities that, coupled with their ability to stand and walk upright and use their opposable thumbs, gives them great powers that other species lack.  With those powers come responsibilities.  Unfortunately, with the general exception of hunter-gatherer societies, humans have not exercised those responsibilities and have instead used their powers to destroy ecosystems, pollute every inch of the Earth, cause extinctions -- including the current great extinction -- and unnaturally alter our atmosphere.  All this is done by overconsumption and overpopulation, and there's no evidence whatsoever that other species would engage in this behavior if they could.

Second, this argument is completely without merit, because it makes a nonsensical and oxymoronic assumption, which is that other species that we know of could act like humans.  What differentiates humans from other species are the attributes I listed above.  If bears, for example, had those attributes, they wouldn't be bears.

Third, the big problem with that argument is that it give humans a lame excuse to just keep destroying the Earth.  It's like a kid saying, "(s)he does it, too!"  Even if you think that other species can evolve to be like humans in the ways I described so that they'd be capable of doing the same harms, shouldn't humans be setting a better example?

The natural proclivity to prefer one's own species is fine when living in nature.  When humans began living in civilization, i.e. when they began using agriculture, they should have reigned in that proclivity and began to recognize the importance and rights of others.  Humans have a choice: they can either do that, or they can perish, unfortunately taking many species and ecosystems with them, and possibly making this planet uninhabitable for life as we know it until the sun burns out.

oh no no no no. i don't blame or position bears in our place doing the same. or ever really imagine bears driving cars, outside the circus, and i know that's a trick. you can tell because the car only goes around in a circle. but anyway.

nor do i put a sit around pointing out biological imperatives in daily human life though you know it's not hard to see some of them in operation.

all i meant was to say that species-centrism, which for us includes a hefty social pressure sensitivity, makes genuine individual ecological insight -- without the constant reminder of actual resource constraints -- very hard to create or maintain. and when you pair that species-centrism with our unique capabilities you get the rest of nature getting out-competed.

i don't think that's necessarily our destiny but it is how the whole shebang is set up and for us to have wiped out ecosystems by growing out of our niche -- maybe because our niche was fundamentally changed by the glacial period -- that doesn't surprise me at all.

it's to us to discover that we as a river jumped the levees and to find a new course that lets the rest of nature grow. but it's not an inherent responsibility and that's part of our trouble. we just don't have to built-in wiring to make this leap of understanding easily. we have a hard time seeing past our own tribe's grasp of the environment.

and as that social grip on reality got further from the physical, into the metaphysical -- everybody seems to get to the point where they feel like their gods are irrelevant to their lives, those gods being various metaphors for important physical and social limits to be taught, but with time you just beat those old limits, and then you tumble -- with that dynamic always at work, our wiping out the world in which we live is so predictable, and so regular, you can see the predictions and the results throughout history.

my feeling is that we got where we are more through error than trial. our competitive advantage is we're ass-stupid reckless but can insulate our own groups from the worst of the consequences. this is a very different idea than that of us as essentially rational.

my favorite justification for this is that, if we were built from the ground up to take responsibility for our actions, we wouldn't have such complicated court systems.

Yeah, I don't think what people are willing to pay should be the standard.  I'd start with what needs to happen to save the world, and go from there.    

If your main issue is political cowardess, why not just institute a weaker cap?  At least then we'd have a system in place that allowed us to crank carbon down based on science when "we are able to impose environmentally sustainable caps".

In case you haven't noticed, the word TAX is powerfully unpopular politically.  

We do have at least a fair idea of the necessary reductions-- 80% by 2050 would be a start.  

And the EU and SO2 markets failed because they weren't actual markets (permits were given away).

And finally, if nobody is willing to mandate the necessary ghg reductions we're all screwed.

I have done a number of financial turnarounds for businesses. Put simply, if you don't have set targets, making choices on how you are going to improve operations becomes very difficult. Carbon tax sets the target. Carbon cap & trade sets a moving target, making it very difficult to establish management strategies.

Quick questions:

How would the tax be set? Would it be based at all on achieving some specific level of carbon reductions?

What would those reductions be based on?

Why is it better for politicians to set the carbon cost vs. the market & science?  

(I'm sorry, I just don't agree that we have no idea how much we need to reduce carbon. What about 80% by 2050? Would that be such a bad place to start?)

I'd like to hear more about how/why a steadily declining cap (say 2 percentage points/year) would create such volatility in price. I can't believe that we wouldn't be able to forecast carbon costs based of reduced carbon supply years ahead of time. Cap & Trade created price instability because of offsets, giving away of permits and offramps.  

Is it really that different pushing down supply vs. demand?