The Market Will Cure the Environment?

Misguided greens

There's no doubt the environment is going up the agenda but it's often as a vague concern rather than as a precise engagement with specific science.
Organic food, for example, is more popular than it was five years ago but with no real knowledge of whether it's better for the environment - it's really part of a consumer movement rather than an environmental one. In the trendier supermarkets, the check-out staff ask you what sort of bag you want: "Paper or plastic?" Some green shops offer pens made of wood rather than plastic. It's not clear which is friendlier to the Earth and the suspicion is that a vague feeling of doing good is being addressed rather than an informed judgement. If American popular concern is less focused, American attitudes to policy are less dogmatic. Republicans are mistrustful of big statements made by politicians on the environment and mistrustful of big treaties which might not deliver very much improvement - so they are coming up with ingenious ideas that might actually work. In Chicago, for example, there is a market in pollution where companies can buy and sell the right to pollute from each other, giving them a monetary incentive to reduce emissions. Each company has a bench-mark of pollution - if it exceeds the mark, it pays a penalty; if it pollutes less, it can sell its savings to another company. California is as tough as any country on cleaning up cars and is advanced in promoting non-gasoline vehicles. The view of the Right in America is that there are compelling reasons to cut consumption of oil - it's a product that comes from politically volatile, often hostile countries. The market may push Americans towards cleaner technology; shouting by green activists and politicians won't. ...[bbc]

Hold on there chief. Big business is the main reason that we have the environmental problems in the first place. Corporations are producing goods solely for profit with few considerations for their environmental effects. Are you seriously trying to suggest that these same corporations are going to fix the environment? Those ingenious ideas that you're talking about aren't solving the problems of pollution - at best it's just managing the problem. And why do you think they're even attempting to implement this ingenious ideas? Decades of public and private pressure has force polluters to change their wasteful practices. The reason the environmental debate in American appears to be solely consumer driven is because the will of the public is only recognized through it's spending. None of the major television, radio, or print sources in the United States advocates aggressive environmental solutions. There are no rabidly anti-corporate greens on talk radio. The environmental lobby is pushed off to the margins in discussions of American public policy. You can pretend that they get equal say, but that is completely not true. The Republicans, your champions for coming up with solutions to save the environment, are also looking (as you mentioned) to open up wilderness areas to oil drilling. So are they going to save the environment, or destroy it? I'm confused.