People who know enough to be unconcerned about global warming will possibly be some of the hardest hit victims because their capacity to prepare and adjust will be too limited.  Of course, the very poorest and lease capable to defend themselves will be VICTIM ONE and we know that much.

I care less about those who care less about glbal warming because I see international trade giants such as the APEC nations beginning to get serious about global warming.  China does not have the internal wealth to survive long-term global warming impacts and it will suffer the loss of the waters of the Himalayan glaciers long before Battery Park is inundated.  Nonetheless, both will happen in time regardless of the Republicans and Ayn Rand's selfish children.

John McCormick

It's a pretty interesting overview of the past 30 years of the Republican Party, their ideas and their future, that touches on this issue.  Essentially, he argues that the party - since Goldwater - has been built on an ideology of change, in the sense that What Government Is Doing Is Bad And We Are Here To Stop It.  So long as they were the upstart party (e.g., the party bucking against the remains of the New Deal, the Warren Court, etc.), that was a viable strategy.  But having achieved majorities, they have been largely bereft of new ideas - or indeed, much interest in the act of governing.

Packer explains this much more eloquently, and it's worth the read - but I think it puts your beef in context, in the sense that the Rs have been the party of ideas since the 1960s.  Some good ideas, some bad ideas, but the party of ideas nonetheless.  Some ideas were policy (think trickle-down economics, or realpolitik), some were political (think Rove, Buchanan), but by comparison to the Ds - they have been the source of most of the really innovative political ideas.  Ironically, they've done a sh*tty job implementing them.  

Anyway, I think all that is cause for some optimism on environmental issues.  A party that holds up Ann Coulter as a great thinker is a party with it's finger on the self-destruct button.  But I am still waiting to see the Ds compete on the idea front...

further, the norms, habits, and values of the epistemological realists also seem to be interfering with getting a grip here; believers in political non-violence taking a butter knife to a gun fight.

verily, are the revolutionaries "the smartest guys in the room."

The New Republic

July 11, 2005 - July 18, 2005

The Case Against New Ideas

BYLINE: by jonathan chait

SECTION: Pg. 19

LENGTH: 4883 words

HIGHLIGHT: Policies aren't what matter in politics.

Ideas--the idea of ideas, anyway--have always held a lofty place in our political culture. But perhaps never before have they been imbued with such power as at this particular moment. Since last November, conservatives have been braying about their victory in the war of ideas, often with a whiff of Marxian assurance. "Conservatism is the ideology of the future," gloated Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman. "Republicans are driving the course of history with new solutions." A GOP operative, even while conceding President Bush's recent difficulties, noted that things would be worse but for the fact that "the Democrats are really brain dead and have nothing positive to put on the table."

Oddly enough, it's not just conservatives who say this. Liberals, too, widely attribute their minority party status to a lack of new ideas. "Feeling outmatched in the war of ideas," The New York Times noted last month, "liberal groups have spent years studying conservative foundations the way Pepsi studies Coke, searching for trade secrets." Or, as Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris wrote last December, "[Y]es, there is plenty of blame to go around, from an admirable but not widely loved presidential candidate to his stunningly ineffective strategists. But at this point, it requires a willful act of self-deception not to see the deeper problem: conservatives have won the war of ideas." Since the 2004 elections, liberals have earnestly set about writing manifestos, establishing new think-tanks, and generally endeavoring to catch up with a conservative idea machine.

The notion that conservatives are winning politically because they are winning intellectually has a certain appeal, particularly for those in the political idea business. And the aspiration of liberals to sharpen their thinking is perfectly worthy. As analysis, though, it's all deeply misguided. The current ubiquity of such thinking owes itself to the fact that liberals and conservatives have a shared interest in promoting it. (Liberals in the spirit of exhortation and internal reform, conservatives in the spirit of self-congratulation.) But, more than that, it reflects a naivete about the power of new ideas, one that is deeply rooted in long-standing misconceptions of how our politics operate.

To begin with, the plain fact is that liberals have plenty of new ideas. Troll websites of the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, or the Century Foundation, and you will find them teeming with six- and twelve-point plans for any problem you can imagine: securing loose nuclear weapons, reforming public education, promoting international trade, bolstering the military, and so on. They get churned out by the shelfful providing more material than any presidential administration could hope to enact.

And these are not merely retreads of old wish lists. The best liberal ideas take account of new information. Noting academic findings that most workers base their savings decisions on simple inertia, Brookings scholar Peter Orszag and others have proposed automatic 401(k) enrollment. Yale's Jacob S. Hacker (writing in The New Republic and elsewhere) has shown that Americans face growing fluctuations in their income, and he is working on a total income security plan.

Indeed, devising earnest new ideas is the very thing liberals enjoy the most. Accusing them of having no new ideas is like accusing a member of the Kennedy family of excessive sobriety: If anything, the actual problem is just the opposite. Liberals have way too many new ideas and don't think seriously enough about prioritizing them. Liberal think tanks have plans for overhauling health care, slashing the deficit, creating progressive savings accounts, beefing up homeland security, and so on. The trouble is that it would be hard to do all these things at once.

Now, one might point out that liberal intellectuals have plenty of new ideas, but Democrats in elected office do not. That, however, isn't true either. In 2004, John Kerry and John Edwards ran on a program that was undeniably substantive. They proposed rolling back a large chunk of Bush's tax cuts and dividing the proceeds between deficitreduction and a number of spending programs, including a fairly innovative health care plan that involved reimbursing employers for catastrophic costs. Democrats in Congress do spend most of their time reacting to an agenda controlled by Republicans. But they have proposed a higher minimum wage, terrorism risk insurance for private businesses, legalizing the importation of prescription drugs, and reinstituting pay-as-you-go budget rules.

You probably don't remember many of these ideas, if you ever heard of them in the first place. But don't feel guilty. There's a perfectly good reason for ignoring these ideas: They have no chance of being enacted as long as Republicans control the White House and Congress. The truth is that liberal ideas aren't getting any circulation because Democrats are out of power, not vice versa. Not long ago, to take an example almost at random, Senate Democrats held a press conference with James Woolsey to unveil an energy-independence agenda. Not a single major newspaper or network covered it. This isn't because reporters harbor a bias against liberals. It's because they harbor a bias against ideas that stand no chance of being enacted. And so, the vast majority of the time, the press will simply ignore ideas put forth by the minority party. Or those ideas will simply be dismissed as impractical. Take this passage from a column last month by Newsweek's Robert Samuelson:

In floor debate, the Democrats never offered a realistic balanced budget. The closest they came was in the House, where they promised balance by 2012.

Samuelson is, in a certain sense, correct. Any plan that differs substantially from the Republican agenda is unrealistic, because the Republicans would never even consider it. But to mistake this lack of power for a lack of alternate ideas confuses cause and effect.

Indeed, during the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency, Democrats had all the positive ideas, and Republicans found themselves in a position of reflexive opposition: no health care reform, no deficit reduction, no crime bill. The Washington Post asked at the time, "Why are the Republicans, who generated so many new ideas a decade ago, suddenly reaching backward on economic issues?" Was this because Republicans had run out of ideas? No, it was because they opposed the particular ideas that the party in power had thrust into the national spotlight. Once Republicans won control of Congress on a wave of anti-Clinton anger, it became clear that they had plenty of specific ideas of their own. (At which point the public ran screaming back to Clinton.)

Today, Democrats generally oppose change because "change" means doing things Bush's way. This puts Democrats in the dilemma of either supporting new policies that are almost invariably bad--certainly from a liberal perspective--or appearing wedded to the status quo. Indeed, Bush has shrewdly exploited this dilemma. In 2001, Democrats conceded that the government needed to do something to stimulate economic growth and forestall a recession. What resulted was a Republican plan to shift the tax burden downward and hemorrhage red ink. In 2003, Democrats advocated added prescription-drug coverage to Medicare. Bush used the occasion to hand out hundreds of billions of dollars in giveaways to industry backers.

It's one thing for Democrats to sketch out the sort of alternatives they would prefer if they ran Washington. But, as long as Republicans do run Washington--and certainly as long as Bush sits in the Oval Office--doing nothing is often going to be the best available scenario for liberals. Emphasizing the downside of bad change rather than the upside of positive change reflects political necessity, not intellectual failure.

Some of those who excoriate Democrats and liberals for lacking ideas don't mean, when they say "ideas," specific plans of action. They mean something more abstract--a philosophical schema for governing, which often amounts to a slogan to describe one's ideology. It is certainly true that conservatives enjoy a long-standing edge here. Bush and his supporters have described their policies with simple aphorisms--smaller government, for example, or promoting democracy abroad--that have eluded Democrats. But Republicans often fail to abide by their own ideas. While Karl Rove recently asserted, "We believe in curbing the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government," government has in fact grown significantly under Bush after shrinking under his Democratic predecessor. In this case, the conservative superiority in "ideas" simply reflects a greater capacity for hypocrisy.

Conservatives recognize the administration's failures to abide by its professed principles, especially on the growth of government, but this recognition seems not to temper their ideological triumphalism. They seem to spend half their time complaining about Bush's ideological infidelity and the other half celebrating their unambiguous victory in the war of ideas. An example of the latter can be found in a long, self-congratulatory essay in the May issue of Commentary, in which former Olin Foundation Director James Piereson asserts, "[N]ot only has conservatism risen to prominence in the electoral sphere, but conservative thought has seized the initiative in the world of ideas as well."

The conservatives' celebration of their intellectual triumph is further complicated by their oft-professed hostility toward intellectuals. They attempt to square this circle by portraying conservative intellectuals as merely channeling the authentic popular will. Irving Kristol famously said the role of conservatives was "to show the American people that they are right and the intellectuals are wrong." One imagines Kristol, Piereson, and other conservative elites relaxing in working-class bars; listening to the denizens demand the privatization of Social Security or complain about the burdens of the estate tax; and then discovering, to their surprise and glee, that there were indeed corporations and wealthy individuals willing to fund the expression of such ideas.

While it has been fashionable to call Republicans the party of ideas for the last 25 years or so, it is all the more so now. The best case that can be made for this label is on foreign policy, where Bush has busily set out to expand democracy across the globe while Democrats carp. Yet, even here, there is far less than meets the eye.

The idea of spreading democracy may be a powerful one, but we shouldn't forget that it's an ad hoc rationale for the Iraq war--hastily put forward after Bush's primary justification, weapons of mass destruction, fell apart. If Bush believed in democracy-promotion as a central goal of the war, he didn't trust the public enough to make that argument (rather than the scary prospect of Saddam giving weapons to terrorists) anything more than a footnote to his prewar case. And, when it comes to those places that pose the greatest long-term danger, Iran and North Korea, even conservatives admit the administration is bereft of ideas.

Most important, the president (and his party) always dominate foreign policy thinking. The tools of statecraft lie in the hands of the executive branch. Nearly every modern president, however inept his foreign policy, manages to have a doctrine named after him. (Remember the Carter Doctrine?) Again, a comparison with the Clinton years is instructive. Democrats in the White House talked about a new era of humanitarian intervention, while Republicans grumbled sullenly. ("We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside of our national strategic interests," insisted George W. Bush.) That Bush is the one promoting powerful ideas, with Democrats largely on the sidelines, simply shows the degree to which control of the White House determines which party holds the initiative on foreign policy ideas.

What other examples exist to support the notion that conservatives have built an awesome ideas machine? The one most often invoked is privatizing Social Security. And, on the surface, it seems like a potent case. Conservative think tanks have spent years nurturing the idea of transforming Social Security, partially or entirely, into a system of individual accounts. Certainly, the history of privatization attests to the right's ability to take hold of an idea hopelessly out of the mainstream and inexorably drive it into the center of the national debate.

Yet privatization isn't a good idea. By this, I don't mean that I disagree with the concept of privatizing Social Security, although I do. What I mean is that the idea itself is half-baked. After Bush declared his intention to focus on privatization this year, it soon became clear that conservatives hadn't thought through a number of enormous obstacles to their idea's implementation. For instance, they seem not to have considered that their optimistic assumptions about the long-term return to stocks are nearly impossible to square with their pessimistic assumptions about the long-term finances of Social Security. Nor did they figure out how to offset the costs of new accounts, which caused the administration to propose clawbacks that could lead to such awkward scenarios as a worker dying and his dependents owing money to the federal government. (Don't ask.) And, as Brookings economist Martin Mayer has noted, mandatory annuities proposed by Bush would make retirees enormously sensitive to any changes the Federal Reserve makes to interest rates just before they retire. The list of similar problems is distressingly long. The more policy aficionados study Bush's idea, the more it looks like something cooked up by a throng of idealistic Ayn Rand-reading undergraduates fresh from Econ 101.

Privatization also points to another weakness in the conservative idea machine: its inability to address the problems of the day. The concept of privatization has slowly ground forward over 25 years or more, propelled by an endless stream of conferences, papers, and articles from conservative think tanks and magazines. And Bush has sold it as a response to a looming fiscal disaster. By any objective measure, though, Social Security is not a major fiscal problem compared with the deficit or health care. Health care, in fact, is rapidly bankrupting both the government and the private sector.

Here the comparison between right and left is instructive. Liberals are brimming with ideas about reforming health care and taming the deficit. Conservatives have little to say about either of these problems. On the deficit, they are theologically opposed to raising taxes, and they have learned from Newt Gingrich that massive spending cuts are political poison. On health care, controlling costs means controlling waste, yet much of that waste is income for interest groups closely aligned with the Republican Party, such as pharmaceuticals, HMOs, and insurance companies. The GOP, then, may be the party of ideas in the sense that its ideas have slowly and inexorably ground forward over a long period of time like glaciers over the Ice Age landscape. But, if this process leaves them unable to confront the actual problems facing the country, you have to wonder why this is something liberals ought to emulate.

The point here is not that conservatives want for new ideas. It's that the question of which ideas hold sway is a function of which party holds power and what priorities it has. It is certainly true that conservatives have devoted more energy to the question of fundamentally reshaping Social Security. But this difference has nothing to do with who has more or better ideas and everything to do with priorities. Liberals like Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs have devoted lots of energy to devising plans to end world poverty. Liberals have devoted enormous attention to the problem of global warming, while the Bush administration insists it will kill any action on the topic.

Is this because conservatives have no ideas, or are committed to (as Bush recently described Democrats) "the philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the roadblock"? No, it's because conservatives philosophically disagree with those ends. These aren't contests of which side has more or better ideas. These are ideological battles over resource allocation. When Democrats regain power, their ideas will again control the agenda, and Republicans will again find themselves devoted primarily to the task of resisting change.

Given all this, why does everybody say the right has won the war of ideas? To answer the question, you must first understand that different people mean completely different things when they say that Democrats have no new ideas. And some of those who call for Democrats to come up with new ideas don't actually mean that at all.

One meaning has surfaced from Republicans with particular frequency during the Social Security debate. "[T]he only idea offered by Democrats is that [Bush] abandon his plans to reform Social Security altogether," lamented Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes last month. "George Bush has been willing to address a long-term, politically thorny problem," observed David Brooks in the Times. "But his Democratic counterparts are behaving like alienated junior professors. No productive ideas. No sense of leadership." In reality, Democrats have explicitly stated their willingness to address Social Security's future deficit as long as privatization is off the table. So, when conservatives decry Democrats' lack of ideas, they mean a refusal to adopt conservative ideas.

Liberal pundits also like to flay Democrats for lacking positive ideas, but they mean something else entirely. "If the Democrats had a brain, they'd. ..." is a familiar mainstay of the op-ed pages and the chat shows. For instance, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argued two months ago, "A sensible Democratic leadership would gather this very weekend to begin formulating a plan to address America's looming economic crises. These party leaders would develop specific proposals to reduce the trade and budget deficits that are spooking the financial markets.... They would reject Bush's half-baked plan for private accounts, but at the same time they would give the president political cover to do what's necessary to begin matching future benefits to future revenue."

Just last month, another Post columnist, Steven Pearlstein, chimed in, "Having railed against them in vain for the past five years, you'd think Democrats might try to reframe the issue on tax fairness." In a recent Times column, Thomas L. Friedman wrote, "Democrats [are] so clearly out of ideas." Friedman's ideas? Promoting alternative fuels, "a new New Deal to address the insecurities of the age of globalization," stem-cell research, and action on global warming.

Of course, the above describes the Democratic position almost perfectly. It seems odd, but in fact this sort of thing is quite common: One constantly hears impassioned demands that the Democrats do exactly what they are already doing. Often, this confusion simply reflects the Democrats' inability to publicize their ideas--or frustration at their inability to win political victories in GOP-dominated Washington. (I can't tell you how many conversations I've had in which liberal friends ask why the Democratic leaders aren't simply saying that Bush's tax cuts are unaffordable and go to the rich, when in fact they are doing so with stultifying repetitiveness.) Sometimes it's merely a rhetorical device used by pundits to express their own liberal views while appearing nonpartisan.

But the constant invoking of the idea gap isn't entirely, or even mostly, disingenuous. Lots of politicians and analysts earnestly believe it. They believe it because they buy into a set of shared assumptions, usually unstated, about how U.S. politics works. The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas--rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances--and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future.

Because this interpretation is so widely shared, it is usually offered as a statement of faith, with little or no substantiation. Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby articulated this conviction in a column last year. "Candidates (and especially challengers) win elections by offering compelling visions, and those visions have to be based on real policies," he wrote. "Clinton won in 1992 not just because of Carville's slogan, catchy though it may have been; he won because he was prepared to grapple publicly with thorny issues, from the sources of American competitiveness to the pros and cons of nafta." In June of 2000, U.S. News columnist and longtime Washington eminence David Gergen wrote, "There is a good reason why Governor Bush is forging ahead in this race: He is becoming the candidate of fresh ideas."

This sort of interpretation is common among journalists. Up until the day of an election, the energies of the candidates and their observers revolve around which side has the stronger turnout operation, whose ads work more, which candidate hurts himself by putting the wrong kind of cheese on his cheesesteak sandwich, and other minutiae. Immediately after the voting, the locus of analysis switches completely, and the election is retroactively determined to be a referendum on the candidates' platforms.

Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildy optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. "The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven," explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. "They don't know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas."

Political scientists have shown how factors like economic performance and the rally-around-the-flag effect can exert enormous influence over voting behavior. A recent study in Science magazine was even more disturbing to those who believe in the power of ideas. Scientists showed the subjects pairs of photographs, which turned out to be matched candidates in Senate and House races. The subjects had to judge within one second which candidate looked more competent, on the basis of appearance alone. Their choice matched the candidate who won an astounding 71.6 percent of the time in Senate races. If you consider that a decent share of Senate races pit unknown, underfunded challengers against popular incumbents in highly partisan states, that is a remarkably high percentage. Faith in the discernment of the public is not based on proof, it's premised on, well, faith.

This idealistic belief in the power of the voters to judge superior policy ideas has deep roots. Alexis de Tocqueville noted how it is customary for Americans to speak flatteringly of the public in the unquestioning way that Europeans speak flatteringly of their monarchs. More to the point, it is often in both sides' interest to think this way. Bill Clinton's 1992 victory has been widely attributed to his bold New Democrat-populist platform, in contrast with George H.W. Bush's tired defense of the status quo.

Democrats accede to this interpretation for the obvious reasons. Republicans accede to it because they see Bush as an ideological apostate and are therefore eager to paint his defeat as a consequence of his infidelity to conservative dogma. But, while Clinton's innovative platform surely helped him seize the political center, other factors--a sluggish economy, a third-party candidate disproportionately hurting Bush, and Clinton's charisma--surely mattered more.

This idealism retreated somewhat after the 2000 elections. (Given that his opponent received more votes, it was awkward to paint Bush's triumph as a consequence of his ideas.) But it has returned in full force after the 2004 elections. There is plenty of evidence that the rise in Bush's stature after September 11, as well as John Kerry's ineptitude as a candidate, played a decisive role. But both sides have emphasized instead the role of ideas.

If elections themselves don't hinge on competing ideas, then at least ideas can shape the long-term ideological terrain, right? That's the story both right and left have been telling. In his Commentary essay, Piereson wrote that, in the immediate postwar years, American businessmen "did not understand the link between ideas and political movements, and therefore did not see the need to mount a sustained intellectual defense of their own interests." Piereson does not explain what persuaded them to abandon their lack of interest and aggressively fund conservative think tanks and foundations. Liberals--who have developed a fascination with corporations and the rise of conservative institutions--have an explanation of their own. They invest enormous importance in a memo written by Lewis Powell in 1971, making the case that corporate America must aggressively defend its interests.

My colleague John B. Judis, though, has a far more convincing explanation than a memo that changed the world. In February, he wrote in these pages that businesses adopted a more aggressive and self-interested stance because the U.S. economy changed. In the 25 years after World War II, U.S. business enjoyed a dominant and cushioned position. Therefore business leaders could afford to accommodate unions and reasonable regulations. But, as the rest of the world eventually caught up, profit margins shrank and businesses began fighting unions and looking to Washington to cut their taxes, eliminate regulations, and institute other changes geared toward their bottom line. The cultivation of conservative ideas certainly played a role. But the great shift in U.S. politics resulted not from the persuasive powers of conservative intellectuals but dramatic changes in underlying material conditions.

Arelated assumption is that new ideas are better than old ones. This meme has gained particular currency during the Social Security debate. For instance, conservative privatization advocate Peter Ferrara dismissed liberal foe Robert Ball as a "well-meaning gentleman who hasn't had a new idea in 40 years." The accusation resonates with many liberals. The Democrats' economic policy, as labor leader Andrew Stern told Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine, "is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating twenty-first-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas."

The elevation of new over old is one of those beliefs that can only survive as a background assumption, without any critical scrutiny. Nobody tries to explain why new is inherently better, because the notion is obviously ridiculous. Take Social Security, for instance. Whatever you think of the general virtues of privatization, the program has actually grown more, not less, suited to the character of the U.S. economy over the last several decades. Social Security is designed to safeguard individuals from various risks. As the economy has grown significantly riskier, the need for a program that offers people a risk-free financial bedrock has grown stronger, and the case for subjecting the program itself to more market risk has grown more dubious.

The final cause of the idea-centric view of U.S. politics is that ideas are sexy. Wealthy donors seem to be particularly prone to ideophilia. Bai recounts how Democratic operative Rob Stein showed a now semi-famous slide presentation detailing the $300-million-per-year conservative message machine to venture capitalist Andy Rappaport. "Man," Rappaport replied, "that's all it took to buy the country?" Both conservatives and liberals talk about the "battle of ideas" as though political success were simply a matter of having one thousand policy entrepreneurs chained to one thousand keyboards.

This conception of U.S. politics is especially compelling to intellectuals. It is a vision of a noble landscape in which philosopher kings hold sway. Each side has its visionaries, wonks, and pamphleteers, beavering away to see whose ideological manifestos, new syntheses, and ten-point plans will prove decisive in the next election. Writers and thinkers enjoy a heroic central role in shaping history: We--not grubby factors like attack ads or the state of the economy or the candidates' ease before the cameras--hold the future in our hands. Twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe appeared before a gathering of conservatives in Washington and declared that Marxism's appeal lay in its "implicit secret promise ... of handing power over to the intellectuals." The promise is not confined to Marxism. It seems to have seduced everybody.

But the phenomenon that you refer to indeed exists.  It is more accurately called a pluralistic approach to morality.  It is characterized by a general preliminary tolerance, which results from recognizing that we often do not have enough information to make a fair judgment, and that our perspective is usually limited and culture-bound.

With respect to something like global warming, the approach is also characterized by a humble confidence in the words of experts.

Those in the Republican base, by contrast, have neither humility, nor confidence in the words of anyone except those who are certified as belonging to their side in the on-going Us vs. Them conflict.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Perhaps you could cover this:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/sunshade-geoeng.h ...

Surprise surprise.

Geoengineering to retroactively solve our climate problem has critical drawbacks.

• Droughts
  
• Acid Oceans

1. Republicans have proven vastly more adept at political ideas over the last thirty years.  From Nixon's dirty tricks to Rove's efforts to mobilize the base (and, to be sure, many other less malevolent strategies), it seems to me that the Rs are consistently more politically saavy than the Ds.  This many not be nearly as sexy as great political ideas, but it is no less intellectual an exercise to figure out how to slice and dice the electorate and then make sure that those slices favorable to you are more likely to vote.  Indeed, many of the so-called conservative think tanks really specialize in this level of political (as opposed to policy) idea-manufacturing.

2. Both parties contain a wealth of ideas that are internally inconsistent.  Thus can a stereotypical R support tax cuts, spending growth and present themselves as the more fiscally responsible candidate.  But this is arguably no less logically inconsistent than a stereotypical D who bashes corporate manipulation of government coffers while simultanenously trying to make sure that their favorite green tech gets tax breaks (and praising Gore for investing in same.)  The place where the Rs have been much more effective - and again, this may be more of a political success than a policy success - is in coming up with a few central pillars around which to hang their other ideas, no matter how incoherent they may be.  Small Government.  Personal Freedom.  Adam Smith.  Never mind the bollocks deficits/gay bashing/lobbyist scandals, we're the Sex Pistols Republicans.  The Ds have, in my opinion been unable to articulate their coherent, big tent, big idea platform around which their other ideas can be dressed, if not quite support.  As such, it has been all too easy for the Ds to be portrayed as (and to some extent, fall back on) the last set of big ideas that they had, of the New Deal / vaguely Socialist variety.  We're for immigrants / women / gays / underpaid teachers / Steinbeckian little guys / etc.  That caricature may be too broad, but I don't really see anyone who is articulating a big vision of what the Ds stand for.  Yes, I see lots of policy detail, but what is the soundbite?  On this front, I think the Rs have a clear edge.

3. My take on the Packer piece was that as long as you are the party out of power, you don't have to provide details to back up your grand pronouncements, and the Rs have had that luxury up until the Reagan revolution.  Since then, they've had to deliver on details and - per your article - largely missed.  This is perhaps the most important element in my mind, because it raises the question: if not the Rs, who?  The Ds are still largely focused on governing.  Lots of small ideas (like the 401k one), but few big ones (like Deregulation).  Maybe this is a topic for a whole separate post (since surely no one but you me, and three other wonks are actually reading this far down the comment thread!).  What are the Ds three big ideas, upon which the rest of the platform is based?  Who is communicating that message to the public?  Who is turning D policy into D politics?

Economic justice, non-zero-sum internationalism, and ecological sustainability -- that's my three.

What would yours be?

grist.org

Add that all up, and I really don't think the Ds have three big ideas.  If it's support for the little guy, then is free trade good or bad?  Or, put another way, does a little-guy-advocate prefer cheap chinese goods at WalMart but fewer US mfg jobs, or more US mfg jobs but no access to cheap goods?  (To vastly oversimplify.)  Do we support economic conditions that support investment, growth of new businesses and demand-driven job-creation, or do we support heavy corporate oversight and New Dealian government-led job creation?  

These are admittedly complicated questions, and I don't mean to portray them as any less gray than they are.  But I don't see that the Ds have three central pillars yet.

As to my personal three?  

1. Competitive markets where possible, government regulation elsewhere.  
   
2. Non-zero sum environmentalism (e.g., econ/envt win-wins)
   
3. Churchillian vision.  I want leadership that stands up and says "step 1 is going to be hard, but it's the only way to get to step 5.  And if you don't take step 1, the alternative sucks".  

It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

So too with meaningful action on AGW, resolution to any number of awkward foreign entanglements, economic growth, etc.. We need a leader who tells us that the best path forward may not be the easiest one at this juncture.  To be fair, the Churchills/Lincolns/FDRs who had that skill only come along once in a generation.  But man do we need one.  And I think it's an idea you could build a party platform around.

Sound bites:  Green jobs.  Clean Energy. Health care for all. Get off foreign oil. Etc., etc.

Anyway some of us are still reading down this far.  Keep on trucking.

Thanks.

personal freedom, achieved by warrantless wiretapping.

adam smith, rolling in his grave at cronyism, "too big to fail," bubble economics, and market destruction by merger.

these aren't big ideas that went bad in practice, they're lies. intellectual fig leaves in front of anti-democratic politics. if outright lies are political heroism -- and if playing one group of americans against another to achieve the goals of a minority is honorable -- then this country is lost.

He isn't trying to speak directly to the general populace.  His audience is the choir, and he's clear about that.

A couple years ago, Jon Stewart was interviewd on Larry King and King asked him whether he was a Democrat or Republican.  Stewart's response was "even a graph has a y-axis".  That's the crux of my beef with the Lakoffs of the world, that the frame issues as if they are natural D or R issues rather than asking "what is good policy?", and then building a party platform around it.

I rant, therefore I am.

Some african muslim cultures have a tradition of enslaving other africans and selling them.  That is their cultural choice, therefore it is "right" for them.

Here in our culture, that shuns slavery, it would be "wrong".

Liberals clearly oppose this POV.  Liberals believe there is a universal standard for what is right and wrong.  Not necessarily determined by God, though there are a lot of liberal religionists, but part of the human condition never-the-less.  Slavery is wrong at every time in every culture.

The corporate hoodwinked limboob right believes that kidnapping, torture, and murder are aok, as long as we are the ones doing it to the enemy.  That is moral relativism.

Liberals believe that kidnapping, torture, and murder are always wrong, and especially egregious if carried out by the state.

Isn't the political/ethical dichotemy instead along the lines of what constitutes moral questions?  The moral values of the corporate media right are the familiar ones highlighted daily in tabloid politics. Morality only comes into the picture where sex or illegal drugs are concerned.  Rights extend only to the right to stop income redistribution (commies) at all costs and bear arms.

Liberals interpret morality as mainly pertaining to the bigger questions of social and economic justice and limiting the tyrannical power of the mob over the individual.

The bill of rights, habeus corpus, the constitution are important because they put that moral view into law.  To the president, the constitution is just a "god damnned piece of paper".

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_777 ...

On the other hand his bible is sacred to him.

We would tend to hold the reverse to be true.

So no, liberals believe in universal moral principles, corporightzis believe that anything we do to the infidels is fine.  If mistakes are made in the course of correcting the attitude and beliefs of others, in converting them to western values, well that's the fortunes of war.

100s of thousands dead in Iraq, brought about by lies, that's ok.  A better middle east will be created.  A middle east open to western values.  Meaning we will get control of their oil and pay them whatever exxonmob thinks is enough.  And they won't complain.

The corporight is built upon the faulty ground of moral relativism.

We believe that matters of right and wrong are written in the history of the human heart and mind and for all of us to discover.  Not set down in stone (tablets), but even more tangible, because they are operative in us all at every moment.


http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

A historical vantage point, which I think still resonates: In the early 1900s, Churchill was arguing for that era's version of NAFTA - namely, British import/export duties, and their opponents who were very proudly Socialist.  (Recall that this was pre-Stalin, when socialism was a theory put forth by German philosophers without a lot of implementation experience.  The socialists of that era - who were quite similar in many regards to the protectionist end of the US Democratic party today - opposed free trade and supported wealth redistribution in the name of the "working man".  Right or wrong, there is no doubt that these were morally-motivated people.)  

Churchill vehemently disagreed, largely on moral grounds of his own.  He felt that something in our human nature is squashed if our successes must be shared - and if people's freedom to trade were constrained.  In a typical Churchill oratorical flourish, he summed up his position by saying that:

Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not a gulf of method, it is a gulf of principle. ... Socialism seeks to pull down wealth. Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference ... Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital, Liberalism attacks monopoly.

(Recall that in Churchill's day - and even today - "liberalism" in the UK has a meaning much closer to center-right libertarianism in the US that a more protectionist, left-wing use of the phrase that would be understood in the US.)

Personally, I agree with Churchill.  And while you may or may not agree, I would bear in mind that Churchill was hardly a moral relativist.  He simply had a different opinion of the best way to achieve the same long-term moral goals.  This is still true today of many who would be painted by your "corporight" brush.

Take global warming. Frank Luntz wrote his now-infamous memo outlining how his focus-testing research had identified "climate change" as the most non-threatening term to use, and promptly that became the term of choice in the corporate media and from the mouth of every republican politician and mouthpiece. Gingrich's "Contract on, er, With America" is another prime example. There were no real "ideas" there, just a laundry list of chicken-in-every-pot political promises. With a great gimick to package them and give them the appearance of being innovative.

I disagree with this article about the subject of "moral relativism." That too is a right-wing framing argument meant to play into the conservative mindset of certainty of belief. Amazingdrx covered that well.

So what should the environmental movement do to make their ideas stick with the public?

I always thought of the left/right divide as, the left wants power to be distributed as equally as possible among all people, both politically and economically, while the Right wants power concentrated, as much as possible, in large institutions (like corporations and the military), and wealthy and powerful individuals.  That's why I always thought that the USSR was a right-wing military dictatorship.

Indeed, look at the whole carbon tax vs. cap & trade debate on Grist.  Do you support putting fees on rich polluters and distributing proceeds amongst various affected parties?  If so, then you're probably a carbon tax guy (or cap & dividend, which is essentially the same ends via different means).  And a socialist, in the Churchillian sense.  

Do you instead support creating a market for carbon emissions and trust businesses to allocate capital in response to that market signal?  If so, then you're a cap & trade guy.  And a liberal, in the Churchillian sense.

(And if you're hopelessly confused, but believe we should dress something up in cap & trade clothes, only collect fees from a small percent of those rich polluters and then distribute to various affected parties that have very little to do with pollution abatement, then you're a Lieberman-Warner guy... but that's another story entirely.)

That tax vs. cap & trade debate is not really a D vs. R issue.  As I've noted before, the R's have long ago abandoned their claims to be the party of Churchillian liberalism.  But the left - very broadly - is a lot closer to the theory of socialism than the right is to Churchillian liberalism.  In my view, this is a broader problem with US politics - namely, that the center is vacant.  Whether you're a D or an R, this suggests an opportunity for repositioning, if only because the extremes of both parties are f***ing dangerous.  Just for different reasons.

One final point - your characterization of the "left-right divide" may be an apt characterization of the current US democractic-republican positions, but I wouldn't characterize it as left/right per se.  Maybe it's semantics, but to my way of thinking, the "right" has many good, very moral ideas which the republicans have largely abandoned.  Painting all those ideas with a DeLay/Inhofe brush is no more accurate than painting all on the left with a Karl Marx brush.

And the right has never governed according to those moral ideas you seem taken with -- never, not in the U.S., not anywhere. There was no golden age where Adam Smith's economics and social tolerance ruled the day. In any given polity, the reactionary party uses crude populism and fear of outsiders as tools to manipulate the electoral viscera, as cover for accruing economic and political power in the hands of a small plutocracy. It was ever thus.

grist.org

The trouble with the word "socialism" is that it has a marketing meaning - to use your term - that makes it hard to use it in it's precise way.  I intend it in the latter way, but appreciate the fact that I could have been taken to be throwing around buzz words.

With that caveat - and without any intended slight that is inevitable when one is labelled as a "socialist" - many of the political philosophies underpinning the current environmental movement are socialist.  I personally think this greatly cheapens the environmental movement because as a capitalist (again, intended in the pure sense, without any marketing baggage), I find that layering environmental goals with a profit motive achieves vastly greater environmental gains than simply mandating top-down controls.  And yet the environmental movement is much more receptive to socialist political theories.

This was my underlying reason to raise the Churchill quote.  Two reasonable people can be in complete agreement on goals (namely, environmental benefit) while being in great disagreement on the path to get to that goal (gov't vs. market-led).  That latter distinction has certain left vs. right overtones that are lost the moment we hold up all things on one side of that political divide as being morally superior.  Other than party platforms, there is no logical reason why one's love of guns must coincide with opposition to abortion.  Similarly, there is no reason why one's environmental responsibility must coincide with one's theories on the optimal means of capital allocation.

Where we may disagree is whether GHG mitigation is an issue that can be resolved within the context of a competitive market.  If you believe that it cannot be, then I can see the intellectual appeal of C&D.  I believe it can.  Thus, for the same reason I think socialism is a crummy way to distribute bread (or electricity, to take a US-version of socialism in practice), I think C&D and carbon taxes are a crummy way to regulate CO2.

Re your point about the right's governance, that may be true, but I'm not sure it's material.  Lenin didn't follow Marx all that closely.  Bush doesn't follow Buckley either.  But that doesn't mean that one can't find elements of both left- and right-wing political thought - including those thoughts that have never been put into political practice - that would be societally beneficial.  To by earlier point, the center is empty in US politics, and I freely confess that I am articulating a political philosophy that is not particularly espoused by either party.  But that doesn't mean I'm not right! : )

But you're just framing C&D in an incredibly tendentious way.

Say a factory has been operating next to a watershed and dumping pollutants in it, for free, for years. People drinking from the watershed have been getting sick. So we lay a hefty tax on that factory and distribute the revenue to the ensickened people.

Are we "redistributing wealth"? Well in some sense, yes, obviously. If you crap on my porch and I make you pay to clean it up, I'm redistributing wealth from you to me. But I am doing so on the principle that you took value from me without paying me for it, so you owe me. Taking something from me without paying is theft. That is as pure a capitalistic principle as you can ask for.

Fossil fuel companies have been taking value from us without paying. C&D forces them to pay.

Now, we quickly get into fairly philosophical questions about what counts as economic value and what counts as common property. But "markets" cannot answer those questions. They are ultimately questions of morality, of values. In other words: all markets are socially constructed. Arguing that they should be constructed differently -- that things not previously assigned value should be assigned value -- is not "socialist," though it is frequently called so by people fighting to defend the current (contingent) status quo. It is just politics, in the broadest sense.

C&D is not primarily a carbon reduction strategy. It is primarily a legal remedy for theft. It leaves the question of emission reductions aside. There's no reason smart, market-based emission reduction policies cannot exist alongside it.

grist.org

I never liked the word "socialism", not because it's radical, but because it is basically undefined.  Communist at least has the advantage of having obvious real world examples, although as I said I think Communism was (is) basically a right-wing phenomenon (while Castro brought great health care to Cuba, Bismark brought social democratic measures to Germany).

The interesting differentiation which you implied is the one of government(left) vs. market(right).  As revealed in many discussions here, that's much too simplistic, although I suppose you could have gradations.  Of course you want to have as much of a free market economy as possible, the question is, how much is possible?

As to the environmental movement being ...well, let's call it left, I don't really see it.  Certainly, the environmental movement is focusing on carbon taxes and cap-and-whatever -- let's call that carbon pricing -- which is actually a nice example of government guiding the market.

But what I have been advocating in my posts (perhaps ad nauseum) is that the government should directly intervene in the economy and either finance the reconstruction of society or simply do it itself.  Both can actually involve the market -- if you provide finance capital, and some guidelines, this still gives the buyer almost complete freedom to choose private firms to buy from.  And when governments buy things, they almost never buy them from government-run firms.

In fact, if you want some definition of socialism, maybe it would involve the idea that most of the economy is government-owned and operated (although even here, not necessarily centrally planned).  I can see the benefit of some broad goals -- virtually eliminate fossil fuel use by 2050, say -- and various mechanisms and timelines, such as building train networks or mandating the building of renewable energy sources -- but I don't think anybody is advocating government owned and operated firms, and nothing about central planning.

The main problem I have with the Churchill quote, without getting into the particular clauses, is that it paints the Left as being only anti, not pro anything.  As I think I have shown in my posts, you can be mostly pro, even on the Left -- although I may rant at some later date on the state of the American Left (particularly the left media), which has gotten into the rut of only doing muckraking.

Two beefs with your framing:

1. On the economic side, the crux of the question is whether we treat CO2 emissions as a commodity to be bought and sold or a crime to be taxed.  I prefer the former, obviously.  But if we do the latter, you cannot then magically come up with some other, equally sized pot of money to run a market.  The math simply doesn't work.  Polluter pays into a pot.  Pot gets distributed amongst the polluted.  A market with buyers and sellers then comes from where, exactly?

2. I'm all for criminalizing people who crap on my porch.  Or even yours, for that matter.  But it's morally slippery to equate porch-crapping with CO2 emitting.  After all, we all bear a fair amount of culpability for those CO2 emissions.  As I write this sentence, I will confess that I am relying on the electricity to run the computer.  And dammit, I like that electricity.  I also drove to work today.  Liked the gas.  Et tu, Brute?  My point is that if we're going to compare this to porch-crapping, let's at least pretend that the porch-crapper is crapping medium rare, perfectly marinated T-bone steaks, and we are not only eating them, but we are paying them to come back and crap more T-bones.  Turns out that our cholesterol's up, the crapper is chewing up all our grassland to produce more T-bones and is also actively funding a campaign to obfuscate the science of heart disease and grassland destruction.  But deep down in your soul, you want him to come back and crap on your porch tomorrow.

What is right is to acknowledge that societally, we need to get the CO2 concentration down by any means possible, as quickly as possible.  Do you really believe that the best way to do that is to criminalize it's production - or that we can accurately finger the criminal?

And Sean, when you say

we need to get the CO2 concentration down by any means possible, as quickly as possible

Side note on the "center." Check out this post:

http://www.thenextright.com/josh-kahn/poll-is-our-message ...

In terms of ideas for governance, the Democrats are far more in line with the majority of the people. The actually existing center is very different from the center as typically defined by the American intelligentsia. It is far more in the direction of social democracy than elite opinion or policy reflects.

People conflate the two definitions of center, sometimes to invoke the moral authority of the former in order to advocate for the policies of the latter. It's called Broderism. (Sean, not accusing you of such, just to be clear.)

grist.org

how a tax is not a price signal is beyond me.

how families are supposed to budget around market-driven carbon prices is even more confusing. is there some impression that the average american has 25% disposable income, to handle spikes? take a look at the savings rate.

we want steep cuts, we need steep prices and high standards. those can't be turned over to the casino crazies.

It has always seemed to me that the extreme right and the extreme left are only barely distinguishable.  Both think they know what is best for society, and believe that the role of government is to ensure that the Best prevails.  Their only difference of opinion is what the Best is.  If you believe that that the Best means no abortions, no gay sex, free guns and no individual obligation to protect the public welfare, turn right.  If you believe that the Best means trade restrictions, racial/sexual preferences and mandated selective catalytic reduction on top of every smoke stack, turn left.

My definition of the center has always been that worldview that is honest enough to admit that certain knowledge of anything is damn hard for mortals to come by, and therefore crafts policies that point us in an appropriate direction based on our current knowledge, but retain enough flexibility to adapt in the event that our mortal wisdom proves fallible (yet again!)

And yes, this definition of the center is damn near antithetical to government regulation of any type.  Indeed, a big part of the reason that markets work so much better than markets is because they are innately flexible.  Capital gets invested and destroyed on a daily basis in all sorts of markets.  Sony bets on betamax and loses.  Apple bets on iPods and wins.  Government, by contrast, stipulates that Nuclear is Good, creates the Department of Energy to promulgate that thesis and 50 years later finds it impossible to change course in spite of three decades of cost-overruns, equity losses, the bankruptcy of PSNH, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  (Note that Lieberman-Warner is repeating this path, by stipulating all winners and losers for the next 42 years.)

So by my definition, the center is a pro-market place.  And in the realm of policy, it is a very lonely place.

Note though that this is not to say that policy doesn't have an extremely important role in directing resources towards the problems of the day.  It simply shouldn't stipulate which resources get directed where, by whom and under what terms.  We shouldn't reward people for burning bags of crap on my porch (although I am starting to think it's OK to burn them on David's porch...)  But we also shouldn't reward people for investing in Magic New Technology X (or protecting Affected Class X, etc.) just because we haven't yet thought of the consequences thereof.  My usual goals vs. paths schpiel.  Remember that we encouraged auto development as a pollution control technology that reduced manure.  We encouraged efficiency-penalizing investments in the Clean Air Act because we didn't realize CO2 was also a pollutant.  We wrote electric regulations that penalized efficiency because we thought the only challenge we faced was the need to rapidly electrify.  We sent nerve gas to Sadaam Hussein because we thought that would help him counter the Soviet threat in the middle east.  Need I go on?

The point isn't that people used to be stupid and now they're smart.  It's that all people are fallible*, and an honest policy ought to recognize it rather than stipulating who ought to win, who ought to lose and cementing those rules in place that will make it impossible to quickly change course once we again have to confront our fallibility.

* There is one exception to human fallibility: me!

how a tax is not a price signal is beyond me.

It is, but that's not the problem with a tax.  The problem is that it doesn't provide any incentive to invest in alternatives.  If your goal is to drive fossil producers bankrupt, simply give them a high tax.  It can be done, and will send a very clear price signal.

But if your goal is to reduce GHG emissions, you better also have a way to make sure that you are encouraging investments in alteratives to fossil fuels.  And a tax is an extremely inefficient, indirect way to do this encouragement, because it is dependent on (a) the tax being permanent, (b) the tax being fully passed along in fossil fuel prices (e.g., none of the pain of carbon-taxing is absorbed by the owners of carbon-producing industries),  and (c) the tax being passed along equally to all fossil fuel customers, such that those with the greatest ability to shift their consumption to other, non-carbon energy sources have just as much of an economic incentive to do so as those who have no choice.

None of these three conditions can be relied upon to happen.  But unless all of them happen, the carbon tax isn't providing an incentive to build a low-carbon energy infrastructure.  And unless we can guarantee that all three will happen, we're exposing ourselves to a huge amount of policy risk.  Per my prior post to David, we're far better off building policies with carrots and sticks (which a market fundamentally is: one person pays while the other gets paid) to make sure we've got incentives and penalties in place, and if our theory doesn't work, it can evolve into one that does.

Argument from analogy is only as valid as the analogy, and I think the "crapping T-bone steaks" analogy while entertaining isn't that valid.

First, it conflates the desired value with the undesired outcome.  I want my steak (electricity/heat).  I don't want the crap on my porch (CO2, sulphur, etc).  By conflating these, you imply that I can't have one without the other.  While that is in large part true at the moment, it does not have to be that way (in fact, that's the point of any carbon policy).  Also, as an individual consumer, I had very little to do with the fact that it is that way currently.

Which brings me to my second point, which is that
the use of polluting energy is pretty much a necessity of participation in modern life, and this fact is for the most part not the fault of the consumers.  Don't get me wrong: I am sick to death of Americans' wasteful ways and sense of resource entitlement.  And we all do, in fact, bear individual moral responsibility for the negative consequences of our consumption choices.  But that being said, if I want to live a lifestyle that is even remotely normal in this culture, I have to consume oil and fossil-sourced energy.  While I can (and do) minimize my consumption, to avoid it altogether would require unreasonable levels of sacrifice.  And that fact is mostly not my fault: it is the result of historical, economic, and political patterns which are in large part the result of the fossil industries acting to advance their own ends.
So it's not really fair to say that I am a hypocrite for complaining about the crap on my porch, because I actually want the porch crapper to make regular visits.  I don't.  However, I need the porch crapper to come by regularly because currently he is the only practical source for the energy that I have to have to participate in modern society.

Thirdly, you equate a tax or dividend approach to the criminalization of CO2 emissions, based on DR's assertion that the wealth redistribution that is taking place here is morally justifiable redress for harm.  I endorse that element of DR's position, but I do not think that equates to criminalization of the activity.  The goal of these schemes is not to end the production of CO2 overnight, nor to send the carbon producers to jail.  That's not what we want.  The goal is much more akin to what happens in a civil suit: one party harms another, and redress is made.  Rarely, if ever, is the redress sufficient to destroy the entity required to make the redress -- that isn't how that part of the legal system is supposed to work.  (Granted that civil suits against individuals by e.g. the media industries for copyright infringement often lead to ruinous judgments, while companies receive small fines for willfully and knowingly engaging in acute toxicification of places people live, which really ought to be a criminal act.  To my mind, those are symptoms of a broken legal system, but that's yet another subject).

One more point: There is a sound reason, if not a good reason, while environmentalism is so often equated with socialism.  It is because much of environmentalism and environmental justice is an effort to redress a taking of the commons by private interests.

You can argue, if you want, that invoking the idea of common property is equivalent to socialism.  I hope that you won't make that argument, but will instead readily recognize the following points:

1. Some environmental goods (e.g. clean air) are by their nature hard to divide up into private pieces.

2. Others (like land) may be easily parceled up, but the ecological services associated with them are not so readily divided.

3. The moral basis for claiming individual ownership of most of these goods is tenuous at best, as they predate, and will (hopefully) outlast, any particular individual's lifetime.  Thomas Jefferson himself recognized that there is no right to obligate the land to debts exceeding the lifetime of the occupant because if there was, the earth would belong to the dead.

1. It's too proscriptive to lay the blame at the feet of the "fossil industry" - to the extent it is even easy to define that term.  Fossil extraction has proceeded apace through a combination of entrpreneurial and government activity, and a few external forces as well.  We (and our predecessors, of course) elected the officials who created incentives to explore, granted subsurface mineral rights to explorers, provided discounted commodites to energy producers and refiners, etc.  As a democracy, we cannot collectively dodge accountability for those laws.  And where exactly does the fossil industry lie?  Those who pull it out of the ground?  Those who refine it?  Those who distribute it?  Those who sell it with a side of beef jerky and a big gulp?  Those who provide in-field services to the E&P majors?  It's an awfully fuzzy line, and all of those businesses depend not only on one another, but on the regulatory environment that created them and a whole host of external factors.  I for one, would like to see the whales take some responsibility.  After all, if they hadn't died so fast in the 1800s, whale oil would have been cheaper and provided less incentive for people to pull the petroleum out of Pennsylvannia!  (Less cynically, should we blame Churchill?  After all, he led an effort to convert the British Navy from coal to oil in the 1900s to enhance their mobility, and as a result found it necessary to create an oil concession in Saudi Arabia that ultimately begat BP.  He too, was an elected official - but by the British, so at least that won't hurt my pocketbook.  Whales and Brits it is!)

2. To your second post, we agree.  This is why I said that there is a role for socialism for those activities that cannot be more efficiently brought about by a market.  I'm not arguing for anarchy.  I'm simply arguing that GHG abatement can be much more rapidly and cheaply achieved by a market than by a central planner.  If this wasn't true, I would accept that C&D or a carbon tax is ideal.  But it isn't.  Property rights are externalities only to the degree that they cannot be bought and sold in a market.  I'm simply arguing that we're better off making a market than assuming that they must perpetually be externalities.
   

Apropos of this whole thread:

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

But ultimately, I accept your criticism that picking Churchill quotes to bolster my own theories is a somewhat cheap way to make my wordy thoughts pithier.  Criticism taken.  But I still say that even in my wordier phrasing, competitive markets have an innate superiority to government regulation, for those activities that are amenable to regulated markets.  So I pose the question back to you as follows:

1. Do you agree that - when they can - markets trump government regulation?

2. Do you agree that GHG emissions can be priced and traded in a competitive market?