ABSTRACT
This failure endlessly frustrates all market-based efforts to allocate a global pool of emittable greenhouse gases (and even the powers that be know it cannot be anything less than global [Stiglitz 2013]). The constant intrusion of the pesky politics of the unpriceable history of the present-inequality, colonialism, and underdevelopment-simultaneously legitimates southern resistance and explains affluent nations’ shirking of historical and moral accountability. For the south, it justifies the rejection of petty payments to forget the crimes of history. For elites of the north, for whom the ways and means of liberal capitalism are presumed, the way forward is via the erasure of the record of past wealth-producing emissions, and the declaration of an atmospheric blank slate. “Save our global village,” “we’re all in this together”: This is the political adaptation proclaimed by the Global North. No mention is made of assisted mitigation. It is adaptation qua consolidation.
