“Environment Is Part Of The Economy; Must Be Properly Integrated So That Growth Opps Are Not Missed"

[hatrack]

EDIT

It is not just that neoliberalism has failed spectacularly in that this creed – which was supposed to prevent state spending and persuade us that we didn’t need state spending – has required the greatest and most wasteful state spending in history to bail out the deregulated banks. But also that it has singularly failed to create the great society of innovators and entrepreneurs that we were promised by the originators of this doctrine, by people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who insisted that it would create a society of entrepreneurs.

As Thomas Piketty, a name which is on everybody’s lips at the moment, so adeptly demonstrates in his new book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, what has happened over the past thirty years or so has been a great resurgence of patrimonial capitalism, of a rentier economy, in which you make far more money either by owning capital or by positioning yourself as a true self-serving flea upon the backs of productive people, a member of an executive class whose rewards are out of all kilter with its performance or the value it delivers(3). You make far more money in either of those positions than you possibly can through entrepreneurial activity. If wealth under this system were the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

So just at this moment, this perfect moment of the total moral and ideological collapse of the neoliberal capitalist system, some environmentalists stumble across it and say, “This is the answer to saving the natural world.” And they devise a series of ideas and theories and mechanisms which are supposed to do what we’ve been unable to do by other means: to protect the world from the despoilation and degradation which have done it so much harm.

I’m talking about the development of what could be called the Natural Capital Agenda: the pricing, valuation, monetisation, financialisation of nature in the name of saving it. Sorry, did I say nature? We don’t call it that any more. It is now called natural capital. Ecological processes are called ecosystem services because, of course, they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests, rivers: these are terribly out-dated terms. They are now called green infrastructure. Biodiversity and habitats? Not at all à la mode my dear. We now call them asset classes in an ecosystems market. I am not making any of this up. These are the names we now give to the natural world.

EDIT

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/07/24/the-pricing-of-everything/

[appal_jack]

1. A truly excellent, incisive read. Monbiot is brilliant.

More of Monbiot's powerful analysis deserves to be seen here:

What we are talking about is giving the natural world to the City of London, the financial centre, to look after. What could possibly go wrong? Here we have a sector whose wealth is built on the creation of debt. That’s how it works, on stacking up future liabilities. Shafting the future in order to serve the present: that is the model. And then that debt is sliced up into collateralised debt obligations and all the other marvellous devices that worked so well last time round.

Now nature is to be captured and placed in the care of the financial sector, as that quote suggests. In order for the City to extract any value from it, the same Task Force says we need to “unbundle” ecosystem services so they can be individually traded(11).

That’s the only way in which it can work – this financialisation and securitisation and bond issuing and everything else they are talking about. Nature has to be unbundled. If there is one thing we know about ecosystems, and we know it more the more we discover about them, it’s that you cannot safely disaggregate their functions without destroying the whole thing. Ecosystems function as coherent holistic systems, in which the different elements depend upon each other. The moment you start to unbundle them and to trade them separately you create a formula for disaster.

(snip)

People have known for centuries the tremendous benefits that mangrove forests deliver. But has that protected them from being turned into shrimp farms or beach resorts? No, it hasn’t. And the reason it hasn’t is that it might be worth $12,000 to the local impoverished community of fisher folk, but if it’s worth $1,200 to a powerful local politician who wants to turn it into shrimp farms, that counts for far more. Putting a price on the forest doesn’t in any way change that relationship.

You do not solve the problem this way. You do not solve the problem without confronting power. But what we are doing here is reinforcing power, is strengthening the power of the people with the money, the power of the economic system as a whole against the power of nature.

k&r,

-app

[The2ndWheel]

2. That toothpaste was out of the tube a long time ago

There's only one thing that will stop it, and that's if we're not physically able to do it anymore. Beyond that, everything will be measured to fit a single species.

[appal_jack]

3. It's not that simple: framing and organizing matters.

It's not that simple: framing and organizing matters.

Here is an excerpt from the OP that shows that our system of politics, belief, power, and money is more complex than a tube of toothpaste. It also includes an incisive summation of the challenges faced by the Democratic Party here:

That’s not how it works. That is not how politics has ever proceeded, except in one or two extremely rare cases. You do not win your opponents over. What you do to be effective in politics is first, to empower and mobilise people on your own side and secondly, to win over the undecided people in the middle. You are not going to win over the hard core of your opponents who are fiercely opposed to your values.

This is the horrendous mistake that New Labour here and the Democratic Party in the United States have made. “We’ve got to win the next election so we’ve got to appease people who don’t share our values, so we’re going to become like them. Instead of trying to assert our own values, we are going to go over to them and say, ‘Look, we’re not really red; we’re not scary at all. We are actually conservatives.’” That was Tony Blair’s message. That was Bill Clinton’s message. That, I’m afraid, is Barack Obama’s message.

(snip)

As George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist who has done so much to explain why progressive parties keep losing the elections that they should win and keep losing support even in the midst of a multiple crisis caused by their political opponents, points out, you can never win by adopting the values of your opponents(15).

You have to leave them where they are and project your own values to people who might be persuaded to come over to your side. That is what conservatives have done on both sides of the Atlantic. They have been extremely good at it, especially in the United States, where they have basically crossed their arms and said, “We’re over here and we don’t give a damn about where you are. We don’t care about what you stand for, you hippies on the Left. This is what we stand for and we are going to project it, project it, project it, until the electoral arithmetic our stance creates means that you have to come to us.”

So what we’ve got there is a Democratic Party that is indistinguishable from where the Republicans were ten years ago. It has gone so far to the right that it has lost its core values. I think you could say the same about the Labour Party in this country.

-app

[The2ndWheel]

6. There are a few thousand years, at least, of history, momentum, and complexity

that have been moving us to this point. That's the toothpaste. It's about the control of everything. That's what progress is. As long as we have the external energy to do it, it's a matter of time before we've privatized the wealth of the planet for 1 species. Not enough people wish to stop that.

There's nothing stopping humanity from doing it, except physical limitations. Even then, we build robots to do whatever for us. I'm pretty sure that if we could, we'd build robotic trees of some sort that act like trees, and then we wouldn't have to worry about cutting down every tree in order to mold the world into what we want it to be. We'll figure out synthetic meat, and then cows, pigs, and chickens will be completely superfluous, as they will have less than no reason to exist. Maybe put a few in a zoo just to do it, or even CGI a cow, just to see what it looked like. From agriculture, to domestication of various forms of wildlife, to whatever else, that's what we do. As long as the energy is cheap enough, that's what we'll keep doing.

[phantom power]

4. Each time I read that title, I die a little more inside

[caraher]

5. Same here

And the expression "ecosystem services" has long grated for me. It's all so obviously and horribly backward, treating this malleable human invention called "economics" as if it were fixed, unchanging, and the touchstone of all that is real, when we need to be inventing economies that reflect the non-negotiable scientific laws that govern the very basis of all life...

[raouldukelives]

7. WTF? Crazy assholes. nt