Is green the new red?
- Kate Wing
- NRDC alum
- Blog | About
- Posted May 30, 2008 in The Media and the Environment
Today, I found out I am a communist. I can't believe my parents never told me this, back when I was playing poker in the front yard and gleefully taking my friends' nickels. Apparently I was supposed to divvy up the pot according to everyone's needs. I didn't, I took the cash and liked it and I'd do it again if I could. But who am I to argue with George Will and Charles Krauthammer? If recycling makes me a communist, then let me learn from the hands of the new "would-be masters." I'm talking about the private firms of Ireland.
Yes, according to a report from Grant Thornton International on Corporate Social Responsibility, private businesses in Ireland are hard at work reducing waste and improving energy efficiency. The survey indicates they're doing so to build their brand, recruit staff, and protect their bottom line, but clearly it's really a move towards communism. According to Inc. magazine (which tipped me off to the study) U.S. private businesses were only half as likely as their global counterparts to report they took these responsible steps to "save the earth." Unlike businesses such as Caterpillar and Wal-Mart, which have clearly capitulated to the Gaia-Pinko manifesto, these private businesses appear to following a different type of green - cash. Which still, somehow, makes them communists.
Let's call this what it is: tired writing. The idea of Communism is an old boogeyman, thrown out by columnists of a certain age who need a story hook. Here's a response to the red flag by my colleague David Goldstein, from his recent book:
"Actually, the facts are almost completely opposite: where socialists have expropriated private industry, they have also operated it in a way that is much more irresponsible environmentally than is the case in market-based economies. Centrally planned economies have the world’s worst record on environmental protection, pollution, destruction of natural environments, and the most hostility for citizen-based environmental advocacy...In other words, a free-market economy subject to the rule of law is a much more fertile field to implement environmental policies than a Communist country."
If you want to pick a fight with the environmental movement, at least get a little more creative, like Nordhaus & Shallenberger do. Or take some time to do some digging into those devilish policies and lay it out for us. Like Andrew Leonard does in this great Salon piece breaking down the price of a gallon of gas in California, including a study showing refinery productivity in LA increased even with new environmental regulations. I know you guys have deadlines to meet, but really, "communists"? In 2008? That's just tired. And this country wasn't built on lazy thinking.
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Comments
Philippe Boucher — May 31 2008 05:05 PM
What strikes me about the articles you quote that equate environmentalism with communism is not the "argumentation" as much as the timing. It seems to me this is written because part of the most conservative corporate lobby those writers write for wants to scare readers with the supposedly scariest accusation: communism. After all this still works pretty well to discredit any effort towards universal health insurance although there socialism is usually enough. I assume the accusation of communism is to be taken as a tribute of the (relative) effectiveness of the environmentalists. Why use such scare tactics if they were not concerned or could figure out more effective criticism?
The fact those writers chose this angle reflects the concern of their patrons and their willingness to discredit. Can this "accusation" reminiscent of Mc Carthy still works? They have to be rather desperate to rely on that or do they really believe they have an audience? I hope they don't.
It also looks like some sort of "preemptive strike" because GW and his friends are on their way out and the political landscape should soon become much less comfortable. Let us therefore start crying "communism"...
Earl Killian — Jun 2 2008 11:32 PM
What is creative about Nordhaus & Shallenberger?
Mike Hirshfield — Jun 6 2008 04:09 PM
Hi Kate, actually, some of us old timers remember being called "watermelons"--green on the outside, red on the inside. it's an old tired refrain.
Kate Wing — Jun 7 2008 08:12 PM
Mike: where I grew up, that term had racial implications so hearing it thrown at the (mainly white) environmental community seemed both offensive and irrationally off the mark.
Earl: I give N & S credit for writing two books and helping the Apollo Alliance along, which I think does require creativity in at least the basic sense. The idea of using business to drive conservation may not be their own, but they have created something more than just a magazine column.
Earl Killian — Jun 11 2008 11:31 AM
Kate: I find the Apollo Alliance's idea that reducing the market price of clean energy can eliminate greenhouse gas emissions to be naive. Most of their material suggests that this approach is sufficient to solve the problem, which is dangerously untrue.
Reducing the market price of new clean energy to below the price of new dirty energy will cause most new energy plants built to be be clean rather than dirty. However, the world already has sufficient old emitters capable of increasing CO2 by 2 ppm per year. That 2 ppm per year existing base is sufficient to get us to 450 ppm in just 33 years. It is extremely unlikely that the price of new clean energy can be reduced to the point that sunk-cost dirty energy plants will be closed. Even if the price of clean energy were less than 2 cents per kWh, it is unlikely that dirty plants will be closed in much of the world, without other political changes (e.g. in the U.S. many utilities are operated as regulated monopolies that are guaranteed a return on investment, which would shield them if new energy prices were to decline).
Price can influence new energy plants, but it has little effect on old energy plants. Unfortunately the old energy plants are sufficient to cause serious damage. We need more than cheap clean energy.
The two methods of affecting market price of energy are not equivalent. One can lower the cost of clean energy (e.g. through subsidies) or raise the price of dirty energy (e.g. through taxes or cap-and-auction). One difference is that the latter encourages efficiency and the former encourages inefficiency. (Price alone won’t drive efficiency, but you sure don’t want to reverse the sign of the signal.) The latter is correcting a market failure (by adding in the “externalities” currently ignored by the market), while the former adds to the market distortion. Markets are a useful tool, and we should work to restore their functionality when they are broken.