“A number of banks, corporations and different levels of government have donated a million dollars each, but a lot of the money collected came from the pockets of ordinary Australians, reinforcing the maxim ‘if you want charity, go to the poor’. Of course, wealthy people don’t get wealthy by giving their money away. But many who achieve wealth are keen to give back to the community, and research shows that those with greater financial capacity give more and more often. However, rather than making spontaneous one-off contributions, they like to plan their giving.”

(my emphasis) The piece then goes on to explain how ‘Prescribed Private Funds’ have been used to structure giving by the wealthy, which then prime minister, John Howard, “announced ‘would have the object of channelling funds … to isolated acts of relief, including public funds for the relief of one individual or family or a community adversely affected by a natural disaster.” Of course, in case you haven’t realised by now, the impetus for the op-ed was the Victorian Bushfires and concern that “as the severity and frequency of bushfires in Australia appears to be increasing, a more focused and long-term approach to philanthropy in bushfire relief is warranted …”

In other words, the role of the state in this case is quite explicitly one of harnessing monies – the commodity produced from ‘alienated production’ as Marx might call it – and channeling it into programs that will strengthen social bonds. The process of giving doesn’t compute in a neoclassical economic framework without some attention to the politics of exchange. The fact that giving to registered charities is ‘tax deductible’ suggests that states are agnostic about the optimum level of charitable giving because the moral difficulties in asserting a level of ‘optimal’ giving run counter to the basic ideals of liberal government.

One can only imagine the cries of ‘Communism’ and ‘Central Planning’ if the government were to set a cap and/or floor on the level of charity.

—

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that the underlying logic of the Federal Government’s emissions target – as opposed to a ‘cap’ – is completely anathema to government as we know it.

We’ve some robust discussions about this in the past, including accusations that I want public engagement for the sake of it. But essentially, the way emissions trading permits are going to be allocated, central planners in Canberra have determined our optimal response to climate change. If you haven’t read Richard Denniss’s discussion paper from November last year [pdf] and/or you’ve been living under a rock since then, you may not realise this.

Richard’s motivation for writing it was quite simple: the targets proposed in the White Paper are not just counter to the commitments required for a safe climate, they spit in the face of what international negotiations have been leading towards over the past decade and a half. We’d effectively be putting a 5 bullets in the revolver and taking it for a spin if such targets were adopted globally (instead of, say, 2 with a target more consistent with the science), putting the welfare of those living on coastlines at tremendous risk, and ensuring the destruction of countless ecosystems.

Everywhere along this chain of reason are questions of value, such as how much should we value our present welfare at the expense of future generations (quite a lot, if public apathy is any gauge)? There is of course a place for economists in determining ways to minimize wasteful expenditure. Waste is, after all, the zero degree of value: which is why the ‘lowest hanging’ abatement fruit should get attention like energy efficiency and solar thermal research. Indeed, economists have an important role as expert gatekeepers of welfare rationality and ensuring that our climate response is maximized.

However, failure to recognise – or indeed an active disavowal of – the underlying social impulses for climate change action (concern for ecosystems, climate refugees, damage to land values etc.) is not just a recipe for apathy, but disempowering; as the growing list of organisations concerned about the Federal Government’s response suggests. Another line of enquiry into waste and utility could be traced back to Thorstein Veblen, who saw the social bonds of an emerging ‘leisure class’ as those driven by ‘rivalrous emulation’ of those wasting desired objects. The point was not, for Veblen, the distinction between waste and value as neoclassical economics understood it (optimal efficiency) but about who was allowed to waste. His was a political critique from someone alienated by the emergent middle classes of the late 19th Century; however, the ‘invidious distinctions’ (between the working and leisure classes) he saw reverberates from the McMansions in Campbelltown to the outskirts of Brazil. The underlying social logic is the same with both ‘battlers’ and ‘developing country’ residents: the role of government is ensure more people have more income to ‘waste’ in this way.

The point is not so much, in a puritanical manner Veblen might approve of – and one followed by Clive Hamilton – to argue for new ways of policing this boundary for moral reasons. Instead, it is to recognise that climate change brings up these problems of waste in a new way: via the values we place on the world-at-risk by climate change. It strikes me that all the table thumping about the political realities of climate change needs to recognize, above all, that if politics is indeed the art of the possible, then ensuring that community groups, local governments, businesses and others with an interest in promoting collective action should have incentives for doing so. And, more importantly, that they may need to do so by harnessing objects that may seem ‘wasteful’ to Martin Parkinson or anyone else gazing from the other side of their desk. Of course, none of this should preclude assessments about the utility each activity plays in the national effort – ie. every project should still be commensurable; but ffs let people who take the risks of climate change seriously make their contribution count above our Federal Government’s politically impotent efforts.

So as the Victorian State government is the latest organisation forced to rethink forced to rethink policies

“… including subsidies for solar farms and panels and a shift to a hybrid car fleet, arguing that they will not contribute to any additional greenhouse gas cuts under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme…”

… I’ll leave it to the Victorians to assess whether those policies should be recognized on the national carbon accounts as contributing to our Kyoto target in some form or another.

I’d like to have that same right as a New South Welshman and Sydney-sider, which is why I signed the GetUp petition.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin comments:

…in the CPRS as it is, and in any alternative that might plausibly exist, the target is bound to be too weak. So, it is important to allow scope for voluntary action to improve on the mandatory targets.