Here's a brief discussion - based on recent comments by 2007 Nobel economics prize winner Professor Eric Maskin - on why we need a combination of good governance and markets with externalities thrown in to deal with goods like the environment. Pure capitalism has never existed, anyway, so it beats me why some economists think everything should be left to the markets to sort out. There has always been some level of government intervention, for better or worse, and there have always been externalities ignored by the market: from slavery to carbon impacts.
To be fair, we can't give capitalism all the blame or all the credit (depending on our point of view), but we are clearly in a mess. In the space of a few decades the industrial complex has used up the energy stored over millennia in earth's solar-charged batteries - coal and oil - and those babies ain't gonna be recharged anytime soon. We have gone into planetary debt. On top of that, we've overloaded ecological systems beyond their capacity to recover. Witness loss of biodiversity, loss of habitat, increased vulnerability to disease, global warming... Something's gotta give.
For a more specific discussion, here is an article on carbon trading and the limits of free-market logic.
And, to come round to today's business news in South Africa, Pick 'n Pay is following the lead set by Wal-Mart in the US and Tesco in the UK in reducing the carbon footprint of their operations. Except the Business Report article doesn't mention what measures the South African retailer is planning to take to actually reduce emissions (although it briefly mentions that there will be "measures to cut out wasteful water usage and reduce electricity consumption"). Rather, the company is planning to offset carbon emissions by planting trees in Soweto.
I am sure the trees will be a welcome addition to the sprawling township, but let's get real here. Planting trees is not the answer to excessive consumption and waste, it's just putting a green sheen on the flagship Hypermarket. Can we see some targets, please? How much energy reduction through improved design and operational efficiency; on-site renewable energy generation; reduced packaging; diverting waste to other uses; recycling greywater?
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