Green Market Hustlers

The market cannot save us from anything, unless the people demand it in such a way that the Moneyed-marketeers are scared shit-less of what the people might do to them.

Green Market Hustlers:

On the opening panel of the Arctic Science Summit Week, Jeff Miotke announced, “Climate change policy must be based on sound silence.” It was a poignant and telling slip of the tongue. Miotke, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Scientific Affairs, joked that his error might have “just cost me my job.” Then he promptly corrected himself: “sound science not silence.” The audience at the March 2007 meeting, a veritable who’s who of leading polar scientists, burst into laughter.

Miotke’s Freudian slip was bittersweet given the failure of leadership on climate change from Washington in general and the White House in particular. The Bush administration’s legacy of denials has morphed into present-day foot-dragging. In November 2006 the shrill pronouncements of President Bush and his advisors prompted outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to note that climate skeptics “are out of step, out of arguments, and out of time.”

While scientists agree that climate change is human caused, there is no consensus on the litany of proposals to check this leading and growing threat to humanity. There is, however, a widely held assumption that the market might be able to rescue us from climate catastrophe.