I haven't had time to read this lengthy article, but it appears to offer an excellent critique of "green capitalism" and a clarification of the profound contradictions between a capitalist system and a sustainable ecosystem. I recommend that you print out this pdf document and read it at your leisure.
...for all the green initiatives, corporate business practices have changed little -- or the little they’ve changed has had no great effect. From Kyoto to Cancun, governments have all made it abundantly clear that they will not accept binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. They will not sacrifice growth today to save the planet tomorrow. Europe’s cap and trade scheme, the first large scale effort, enriched traders and polluters but failed to put the brakes on the relentless rise of greenhouse gas emissions. What few carbon taxes governments actually imposed have likewise failed to stem emissions. At the end of the day, the project of green capitalism is in disarray.
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Paul Hawken was right: We need a “restorative economy,” an economy that lives within nature’s limits, that minimizes and even eliminates waste from production, and so on. But he was completely wrong to imagine that we could ever get this under capitalism. In what follows I will explain why this is so then discuss what I think are the implications of this critique.
