The Climate Leadership Council - 13:5 Ratio Of Investment Bankers/CEOs To Environmentalists On Board
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The mission statement sounds good: they focus on “Nature Based Solutions (NBS)”, meaning reforestation, grasslands, wetlands, sustainable land management, land trusts – all good, congruent with a progressive agenda that would include desert greening, halophytes crops, sea grasses & mangroves, farming soils regeneration, etc. But the other prong of their policy advocacy is pairing this with carbon offsets, which has so far been anything but revolutionary, a “transition” mechanism leading into carbon taxes, which is another transition mechanism. It is a tactic that advocates of more progressive carbon tax policies with a higher social cost of carbon, have had to accept as a negotiated, political alternative, for decades now. Which is not to say carbon offset programs, like RGGI for example, have not had some success and effectiveness, but they cannot be said to have closed the emissions gap appreciably, in part because adoption has been limited, again because of the effectiveness of fossil fuel lobbying in opposition. TNC has posted a huge repository of downloadable papers https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-insights/reports/ (their domain name is deceptively close to Nature.com, the prestigious science journal). One such paper makes a solid case for nature based solutions, and undoubtedly many of the other papers also have merit. NBS will be an important part of the overall solution.
The CLC’s economic attack dog is Gregory Mankiw who argues in favor of a carbon tax based on Pigou consumption tax model, & tries to downplay the IMF’s $5tr subsidy accounting. But nattering for shifting costs of a carbon tax to consumers obscures the point of the IMF’s radical analysis, which is to make visible the scale & invisibility of this subsidy, to confront the fact that the planetary system itself is making this invisible economic assumption manifest as a thermal behemoth.
The CLC’s approach is very business friendly. But there are two kinds of “business friendly” that should be distinguished. One is the path that supports a more libertarian “free market” & corporatist dominance perspective, which is a massive disinformation project since the very scale of both explicit and implicit subsidies constitutes evidence that these “market” adherents are beneficiaries of a market unfairly skewed to their advantage.
The other is the kind of advocacy seen from Rocky Mountain Institute & its affiliates, which has contended for decades that aggressive conservation & transition to renewables should be pursued because a) failure to do so has a big downside to profitability, & b) that renewable entrepreneurship has a huge upside potential, will be a boon, not a burden. RMI’s posture is different than the much more dilute advocacy from Nature Conservancy, which is oriented to protecting existing capital & enterprise structures from the burdens of re-internalized externalities and the potential for huge stranding of fossil fuel assets. RMI may not overtly advocate like the Nation or Jacobin for nationalization, but neither would I expect to see RMI advocate against climate liability litigation, in favor of liability waivers. That last step, supporting waivers, constitutes an admission by TNC that they are a FF captive, despite posing a very convincing presence as an environmental activist organization from their mission statement & published papers.
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http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2019/05/nature-conservancy-endorses-trojan-horse-tort-liability-waiver/
