Climate crisis, carbon market failure, and market booster failure: A reply to robin hahnel's "desperately seeking left unity on international climate policy"

Robin Hahnel is an important blueprinter of post-capitalist 'Parecon' participatory economics and will always be regarded fondly along with those who have tackled conceptual problems of future democracy and genuine participation within complex economic systems. Since the late 1980s, the prevailing balance of forces, heavily influenced by multinational corporations, have favored, in ideological terms, either neoliberalism, neoconservatism, or Barack Obama's fusion of the two. There are a great many other problems with Hahnel's market boosterism in the political and ecological spheres, especially in relation to deforestation. Typical of his reasoning, Hahnel argues the need for a major fix to Kyoto's incentivization of cutting old-growth forests to put up monocultural fast-growing timber plantations. Further time and energy spent in advocacy for carbon markets at this political conjuncture is counterproductive, given what we know about emissions trading in practice and given the urgency of finding practical bottom-up solutions at a time of global climate malgovernance and spreading financial market failure.