Reviews for The institutional economics of market-based climate policy

The average rating for The institutional economics of market-based climate policy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-11 00:00:00 Laura Thickbroom The conflict is not (only) the struggle [Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites]. The book clearly defines the scope and objectives of political ecology and ecological economics, siding with the material as opposed to constructivist strand of the discipline. But contrary to its claims, it does end up being a catalogue of anecdotal environmental struggles from below. However significant and inspiring, these episodes do not exhaust the meaning of ecological distribution conflict, which can (and should) be conceptually interpreted also on a systemic and global scale. Ecological distribution conflicts are active and powerful even and especially when they are not marked by protests, but are smoothed out by the intricacies of contemporary financialized capitalism, which separates the two sides of the distributional zero-sum game by inserting in between many (network theory) degrees, miles and temporal lags. Not acknowledging protest-less conflicts would be equivalent to falling victims to the 'Brimblecombe principle', whereby people tend to protest only against 'visible single-point sources' of pollution. It is the job of poltical theory and activism to make subterranean, muted conflicts emerge and be recognized by the parties affected, so that change can take place. Before being 'exacerbated', as the author proposes, conflicts need framing. To stay within the boundaries of the struggles of the poor, Gandhi's genius consisted in seeing (ecological) distribution conflicts where Victorian capitalism saw only peaceful trades. The overdue boycott against British cotton cloth and the rise of home spinning as a symbol of national unity were the result of the identification of a conflict that had never manifested itself in protests. Therefore, 'learning from the poor' is not enough, as for Gandhi simply leveraging existing protests would have meant renouncing his political leadership role. But if we want to learn from active or past struggles, a modicum of (materialist / constructivist) analysis is required, to avoid assimilating situations that only share very superficial traits. For example, if the shrimp farm/ mangrovia forest is a horizontal, direct conflict, also striking for its genocidal overtones, it is more difficult to read the famous shrimp fishing / turtles controversy, which opposed the US to developing countries within WTO rules, under the same rubric of ecological distribution conflict. Very interesting for the pioneering reconstruction of the history of political ecology and ecological economics, and for the rich overview of popular environmental struggles in contemporary history and across five continents.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-17 00:00:00 Kerry Carson strangely easy to read. The arguments are complex, deep and the author has a strange tendency to mix multiple arguments in a way that one should be able to see each paragraph as a whole, not starting the first sentence and reading up to the last but instead to read both the first and the last simultaneously and work your way up to the middle, where the arguments meet and only then the paragraph attains it meaning. Am I crazy? Anyways, it is also easy to read (1+1=2). If you're, say, a first year student you may want to put this underneath in your to-read stack, on the other hand reading this first may protect you from becoming too indoctrinated with all the myths preventing you from thinking.