[p2p-research] does green capitalism manufacture artificial scarcity ...

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends:

What to think of this:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-02-heartfield-en.html

It's basically a critique of higher energy prices, I find the critique very
weird, and would appreciate any commentary,

Not building more power plants, distributing solar and wind energy locally,
and hiking up prices is all seen as a plot to manufacture artificial
scarcity by 'green capitalists'

I also don't see the author offering any alternative,

Excerpt:


The old-fashioned market incentive for energy efficiency is the savings
people make on their bills when they insulate their homes, or turn down the
air conditioning. Businesses, too, have every interest in keeping overheads
low by using the energy they pay for wisely. Normal prices would give
customers the incentive to reduce their electricity consumption.

But amazingly the Enron-Lovins model of restricting supply is the one that
is being adopted around the world. Utility companies are rewarding consumers
for reducing their consumption from central power stations and encouraging
domestic-sited energy generation, through windmills and solar panels.
Playing on Californians' distrust of the power companies, the Environmental
Protection Agency is planning to add solar power to one million new homes –
paid for by another surcharge on utility
bills.[8]<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-02-heartfield-en.html#footNoteNUM8>In
Britain, the government is introducing regulations to make all new
homes
carbon-neutral. The current goal of carbon-neutral homes reverses the
division of labour that saw specialised energy producers distribute
electricity, turning it into an eighteenth century cottage industry. The
simple economic lesson that mass production avoids reproduction of effort
has been lost. Nothing could be more wasteful, or more certain to create new
scarcity.

California's "negawatt revolution" is only one of the more extreme versions
of the way that green priorities work in tandem with profiting by
manufacturing scarcity. South African radical Dominic Tweedie argues that
recent electricity blackouts there happened because of "a campaign to impose
artificial scarcity". The failure to build power stations to meet the
growing demand from South Africa's black townships was not recognised as a
problem by activists there because they bought into the green prejudice that
social aspirations could be met by redistribution alone, at the expense of
increased output. Now supply companies are hiking up prices to the people
who can least afford them.

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