Markets and Solutions

As the articles we read for this section emphasized, most significantly in Klein's piece, climate change does not jive with a right-wing worldview.  In fact, decreasing numbers of conservative voters even acknowledge the existence of global warming.  Klein's reasoning behind this increasing ignorance is the defense of capitalism and the free market.  These ideologies emphasize the jobs created through free market enterprises, while ignoring the negative impacts of the raw material mining, the energy usage, and the emissions behind these enterprises.

Companies that export products like oil, food, and other necessities are making money off of the ever increasing price of these resources.  Since the prices continue to climb, the eventual result of this inflation will either be to exploit increasing areas to extract these resources, or that these resources will run out, leaving the world without its raw resources (NY Times).

Lovins and Hawken's chapter 12 discussion focus on the significance of fossil fuels and the possibility of energy efficiency.  Hawken specifically emphasized co and tri-generation, which are different levels of energy reuse.  Co-generation makes use of heat, instead of adding that to the atmosphere, increasing the global temperature.  Tri-generation reuses the heat and uses it to provide a number of services.  Hawken further emphasized that, from a capitalist perspective, these new forms of energy efficiency would create new jobs instead of just killing old ones that fueled deleterious energy economies.

Chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics discussed the movements behind climate change arguments.  They argue that the climate change movement feels like a religion of sorts: that people are the source of this problem and the solution is to repent of our energy sins and return to a minimalist lifestyle.  One of the main arguments of the chapter is that too little is being done too late and that we are too optimistic about the outcomes.  One example of this is that people buy more energy efficient cars, and drive them to the supermarket to buy meat and dairy products, that are obtained from animals that emit methane gases on a massive scale.  People need to internalize the external costs of energy use.  These costs are not easily perceived, and might not be immediately felt, but they are present nonetheless.