The subtitle of The Story of Cap-and-Trade — the short film released this week by The Story of Stuff Project, Climate Justice Now, and the Durban Group for Climate Justice — is “Why you can’t solve a problem with the thinking that created it.”
Our goal in releasing the film was to make a simple point: climate change is, as Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review on Climate Change, noted, the largest market failure we have ever known. And yet, in spite of this, we’re looking to cap-and-trade, a “market solution” that has failed to deliver results, in a time of grave economic crisis, to save the planet from an environmental meltdown.
The film — for which I was a content advisor — has generated significant discussion on Grist (see here and here) and elsewhere, and we’re glad for that. If there was ever an issue that merited broad, even heated, public debate, this is it. We’d far rather people argue about cap-and-trade and other policy options than ignore them or silently go along with the crowd, even when their guts tell them the solution on the table is inadequate to the task.
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