Northcott on Carbon Emissions Trading

Michael Northcott gave an interesting seminar at Durham yesterday in which he critiqued CET for relying on market mechanisms to solve political problems. He thinks this reliance on the market for everything, which neoliberalism has fostered for the last 30 years, has deformed us in that it has shaped us as agents who are less able to co-operate, partly because we don’t believe in it. This means when politicians get together to try to hash out deals (e.g. at Copenhagen) they a) think of market solutions first, b) are less able to govern by face-to-face agreement and negotiation, trusting instead to ‘government by algorithm’.