TEN: THE POLITICAL ADVANTAGES OF A CARBON METHODOLOGY.

The Carbon theory of value provides an invaluable measuring device to estimate the seriousness of the Planet's ecological predicament. It can determine the most urgent ecological issues to address and which policies should be given priority. It can help to regulate the climate and avert a global warming disaster. A global Carbon budget would enable an evaluation to be carried out into the ecological validity of proposed green policies and thus prevent these policies from damaging the Planet's geophysiology. It enables the Green party to develop a strategy and a set of tactics to campaign for a sustainable Planet.

i) The Political Advantages of a Carbon Budget.

A few years ago the Green party produced a 'green budget'. Greens had learnt the lesson that political parties must cost their policies or risk being criticized for fiscal irresponsibility - as the tories successfully pilloried the Labour party throughout the 1980s. Whilst this 'green budget' pre-empted criticisms of the Green party's economic policies there was one small drawback - it was not based on any understanding of the Earth's geophysiology. The Green party is leaving itself vulnerable to attack if it doesn't show how its policies fit into a geophysiological budget. Conversely, however, if the Green party adopts a national Carbon budget, it could use this to expose the ecological irresponsibility of mainstream political parties.

If the Green party does not adopt global, national, and regional, Carbon budgets and Carbon costed policies it could find itself advocating a huge number of environmentally friendly policies (so-called alternative transport, alternative energy, and recycling projects etc.) which not merely fail to protect the environment but lead to considerable, and perhaps even critical, ecological damage. Green policies could easily destroy as much of the country's ecology as carboniferous capitalism. For example: 'Roads to the Future' outlined a set of transport policies to meet the ipcc's recommended cuts in carbon emissions but did not calculate the effect of these policies on the country's Phytomass. As a result, it would have allowed even more of the country to be covered in tarmac and cement and THIS MAY HAVE MEANT AN OVERALL BOOST TO GLOBAL WARMING. Without a global Carbon budget and Planetary policies, green policies are just so much green sounding wishful thinking. The policies put forward in the Green party's manifesto are irrelevant because they are not located within a geophysiological context.

ii) The Quantification of Green Politics.

To date, green politics has been solely about values - finding better, less destructive, ways of living; trying to persuade people that they ought to respect the Earth, etc. The problem with values is that they tend to be open to an almost infinite range of interpretation. Green values are also slowly becoming more and more corrupted because everyone who is damaging the Earth claims they are doing so to protect the Earth - even greens, even the Green party. How is it possible to denounce a particular act of ecological destruction when everyone is claiming that they need to destroy some part of the Earth in order to protect it?

So far it has not been possible to convert green values into any measuring unit (not even economically) that would make it possible to evaluate the legitimacy of ecological destruction. Many conventional political policies are not merely promoted on the basis of specific cultural/ideological values they are also measurable in terms of their financial implications. Very often, the public is not bothered about the values in which a policy is wrapped (given that values can be twisted into any shape they are virtually meaningless) so much as the policy's financial implications. They assess the acceptability of values in terms of how much money is involved.

The Carbon methodology enables greens to quantify what they are doing and what is happening to the Earth's life support system. It can be used not merely to recommend a limit of 'x' tonnes of Carbon pollution or set a minimum of 'y' tonnes of Carbon absorbed through Photosynthesis, it can determine how many hectares of land should be put aside for Animals, for the Earth and for humans. Under these circumstances, it doesn't matter whether how persuasive permaculturalists may be in demanding that a certain area of land is turned into a permacultural plot or whether Earth-rapist shits use green language to try and make a large profit from a green construction project, if the land has been reserved for non-human purposes or if the Carbon budget has been filled, then they won't be given the go-ahead.

No matter how much green politics is about intangibles or the quality of life it needs to be underpinned by a quantification system because this would enable people to assess the justice of green policies. Donella Meadows recently called for the introduction of a simplistic, ecological, measuring device to replace gross domestic product as a guide to a country's well being. Carbon may be the most suitable device.

It might be argued that the nature of the sustainable green Planet outlined above is faulty either in detail or as a whole. However, those who put forward a different vision of a sustainable Planet are still obliged to provide a Carbon costing for their own utopia and to indicate the sort of climate which this utopia would create. Given the ecologically spendthrift ways of many decentralists and tough minded, green 'realists', it is all too likely that their utopias would produce climates not unlike that found on Venus. What's your climate?