The ideas of climate/ecological debt as expressed in the readings for this week highlight the failures of the Enlightenment separation of disciplines. By creating economics as a self contained academic discipline it became fundamentally predisposed to the kind of problems that we see in Pigou's theory of pollution mitigation. The structure of our economic system ascribes blame for any large scale problems to the consumer. There is a great similarity between the individualist approach to smoke pollution mitigation described by Kurnekawa and the current climate movement. The idea of "carbon footprint" was popularized by an Exxon Mobil advertising campaign for the specific purpose of shifting blame. It is a reality that there must be an immediate drastic reduction in carbon emissions globally, but especially by Western countries. It is also a reality that unless this is done in a careful manner the brunt cost of these reductions will fall on working class people who are disproportionately less responsible for emissions. It is the a nearly identical situation to coal pollution.
Another chronic problem that we expressed particularly strongly here is the capitalist belief in an unendingly producing Earth. The cornucopian economic view described by Wennerlind and Johnson is exactly this idea. We have seen this belief expressed in Floating Coast and The Organic Machine already in the over consumption of resources on the assumption that human ingenuity will find a naturally occurring replacement. This is of course, not going to be true in this case. The climate debt movement and ideology gives space for a drastic change in the structure of our economic system, a shift to prioritize people and quality of life over production. Although we stand on a tipping point towards large scale catastrophe the other side of that world is one of true deep reform. Because of the nature of the climate problem the solution may give a unique opportunity to finally shift away from Enlightenment era mistakes in economic and political theory.