Has The Left Missed The Boat On Climate Change?

Robin Hahnel’s article is interesting to see, for a number of reasons.  Z Magazine is, after all, a long-running US left voice.  And it doesn’t shy away from words like “capitalist,” or avoid asking if the climate problem is too fundamental to yield to small reforms.  Still, for all that, this was a surprising post.  Not because Z was willing to seriously consider the GDRs argument that inequality within countries is a basic matter that cannot be deferred for tactical reasons, but because it challenged other orthodoxies as well.  The discussion is extensive, and the subsequent debate with Patrick Bond is notable.

Update: On Feb 25, 2010, Robin jumped back into the fray with a piece called Why Cap and Trade and Not A Carbon Tax? It’s relevant here because, in the course of his argument, be again cites GDRs.  To wit:

“The second important issue is how the costs of achieving those reductions will be distributed among countries, some of whom bear much greater “responsibility” for current GHG concentrations in the atmosphere than others, and some of which have much greater “capacity” to bear costs of solving any international problems than others… But it is easy to fix this problem … Assigning caps for all countries according to the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework formula would follow in the Kyoto tradition and perfect the system of distributing the costs of averting climate change according to “differential responsibilities and capabilities.”