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Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don't really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve.

 Municipalities themselves can be big-time landowners, and groups can even create large-scale community land trusts so that the land is held in common. In any case, we have to stop letting rich people pretend they privately own what nature provided everyone.

Hoarders blow. Take, for instance, the infamous one percent, whose ownership of the capital stock of this country leads to such horrific inequality. "Capital stock" refers to two things here: the buildings and equipment that workers use to produce goods and services, and the stocks and bonds that represent ownership over the former. The top 10 percent's ownership of the means of production is represented by the fact that they control 80 percent of all financial assets.

You know what else really blows? Wall Street. The whole point of a finance sector is supposed to be collecting the surplus that the whole economy has worked to produce, and channeling that surplus wealth toward its most socially valuable uses. It is difficult to overstate how completely awful our finance sector has been at accomplishing that basic goal. Let's try to change that by allowing state governments into the banking game.

There is only one state that currently has a public option for banking: North Dakota.

Therefore, so the theory goes, the buyer pays to emit greenhouse gases while the seller is rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than their quota. There is only one problem. It does not work like that.

The market always chooses the easiest means to save a given quantity of carbon in the short term, regardless of what action is needed for long-term reduction. The result is that the system reinforces technological lock-in. For instance, small cuts may often be achieved cheaply through making a technology a little bit more efficient, whereas larger cuts would require massive investments in new technology.

The problem with most of the established green organisations is that they seek mechanisms, such as emissions markets, green taxes, green laws or other technical fixes to the problem of polluting fat cats.

The carbon trade system is bad in itself. But the fact that governments or other capitalist controlled bodies allocated the emissions permits in the first place, the logic of the market meant that they handed out too many permits out of fear of being in a disadvantage with competing capitalist powers. Today, there are more permits in circulation than there is capacity to pump out greenhouse gases!

MANY CDMS ARE about dams. The push for mega-dams has been justified by both development banks and multinationals as being necessary for the development of Africa and to combat carbon emissions. While governments, such as the US, Britain and China, announce mighty plans to electrify Africa, and other ‘aid’ schemes, the companies set in action the Boot model – Build, Own, Operate and Transfer – emptying the rivers of Africa to feed the growing energy needs of Europe, etc. And it is a very lucrative business when they can earn more carbon emission credits in the process. Large dams provide electricity for multinational companies, water for mining, and irrigation for large-scale foreign-owned farms.

In a study of 50 dams in Africa, professor Thayer Scudder, formerly the leading resettlement consultant for the World Bank, found that landlessness affected 86% and joblessness 80% of the displaced people. Lack of food security impacted on 79% of the people displaced by these ‘green dams’.