Spotlight Durban: A REDD and green paradox

Edward B. Barbier
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

In a previous post (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!) I posed the question: What do the worldwide debt crisis and global warming have in common?

They both represent economies drawing down assets faster than they can replenish them.

In the case of the debt crisis, economies are spending more wealth than they are accumulating.  In the case of global warming, we are using up nature’s capital and its vital services at an alarming rate.  Rather than adding to wealth – both financial and natural – economies are squandering it.  This problem has occurred throughout history, although the tendency to waste economic and natural wealth has accelerated in recent times.

Which leads me to the climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, and especially the efforts to establish a financial mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) in developing countries.

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Economics 4 People, the Planet, and the Future

James K. Boyce

Our current economic crisis is not only a crisis of the economy. It is also a crisis of economics. The free-market fundamentalism of the closing decades of the 20th century today has been thoroughly discredited – or at least, should have been – by financial collapse, swelling inequality, global imbalances, mass unemployment, and environmental degradation.

The public is hungry for an economics that is tuned into the realities of the 21st century. Yet the talking heads of the media conglomerates continue to preach old-time economic orthodoxy, blaming our economic woes on regulation, taxes, foreigners, or a few rogue bad apples in the Wall Street barrel. To the public, economists seem unhinged from reality and oblivious to the human consequences of economic malfunction.

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Spotlight Durban: National Interests, Ethics, and Climate Change – Don’t Listen to (Most) Economists

Julie Nelson, Guest Blogger
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

What are the ethical responsibilities of sovereign nations? How can we expect nations to behave, in regards to climate change? We often hear that  nations will inevitably try to shape policy in ways that serve their own interests, where “interests” are largely defined in terms of short-run economic growth. Yet, if every nation sets this as a goal, we are—to use a particularly apt colloquialism—cooked.

I’m afraid that economists are particularly to blame for this perverse framing of the issue. In the economics mainstream, people are thought of as autonomous individuals who are driven by a desire to maximize their own levels of personal satisfaction.  Sociality,  care, ethical responsibilities, and environmental impacts are not part of the story. The insistent teaching of this approach over the last century or so has led many people to believe that selfish and even opportunistic behavior is simply “natural” or “standard” in commercial life—and therefore both excusable and unavoidable. A number of scholars of economics, law, and politics have extended this approach to thinking about governments, considering states as simply  “economic man” writ large.

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