Bill McKibben, one of Those Whom You Must Always Read, has an article in the current issue of Mother Jones, The Greenback Effect (emphasis added):

Markets are impotent in fighting the greatest challenge our planet has ever faced because we’ve given them absolutely nothing to work with. They exist in childlike innocence about the crisis because carbon carries no required cost. And in fact almost everything that environmental campaigners are doing at the national and the international level is an effort to fix that problem—to feed information into markets so they can help slow the rise of carbon. That’s right: If there are true believers (or at least true hopers) about markets right now, they tend to be green.

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The point is, markets are powerful precisely because they allow information to filter down quickly and thoroughly, creating new realities—a new medium in the economic petri dish. Given that solving global warming will require huge systemic change over a very short period, that’s a useful mechanism.

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There’s a deeper flaw to my argument: Continuing to rely on a growth economy for change keeps us locked into the wider damage an ever-more market-centered civilization causes—the constant “creative destruction” beloved by economists and hated by those of us who would like to, say, live in the same community for a long time.

Which is why, in my ideal world, we’d use the power of democracy to add even more pieces of information to a market system. Tariffs that encourage local economies, for instance, because the data now show that more self-reliant societies are also more durable and more satisfying. Perhaps we should work for some totally different economic system—I hear pretty regularly from a different breed of skeptic who insists we’ll never solve our problems until we go “beyond capitalism.” But that debate is going to take a while—for the atmospherically relevant time frame, we’re not going to change our basic economic framework any more than we’re going to sign on to some new nature religion that would turn protecting the planet into some kind of Eleventh Commandment. Given how fast the ice caps are melting, speed is of the essence. And markets are quick. Given some direction, they’ll help.

Go read the whole thing. I’ll wait here until you’re done.

McKibben has the rare combination of untouchable green credentials, a deep understanding of how markets work, and a wicked knack for writing about both. Which is precisely why I put him on the Those Whom You Must Always Read list, and, more to the point, it’s why you should pay attention to what he says.

McKibben addresses “the” key notion that humanity, and especially Americans must accept, right down to our DNA: The market isn’t a god to be worshiped or great beast to be left unregulated while we cower under our beds, it’s a tool that we can, must, and (hopefully) will use to save ourselves and our loved ones from the worst impacts of global warming and peak oil. We interact passively with the market as consumers, but we command it to serve our needs via another tool–good, effective public policy.

I’m not a starry-eyed utopian; I know that we have and very likely will screw up some parts of our energy policy beyond all belief. McKibben mentions the almost boundless train wreck of our current ethanol policy, and I’d be hard pressed to top that example without stepping outside the energy realm (unless you assume that the Iraq war was part of our energy policy, in which case all bets are off).

Above all else, I have faith. Not in free markets, despite the astonishing feats they accomplish daily, and certainly not in governments, despite their often stunning ability to rise above their own idiocy and pettiness. I have faith in you. Yes, the American public can be infuriating in their adamant resistance to hard, unpleasant facts–how many SUV’s and pickup trucks do you think were sold in the US today, bought by people who didn’t really need and can’t afford to run such a vehicle?–but ultimately we stop shielding our eyes, we allow ourselves to see the evidence, and enough of us take action. I just hope we do so quickly enough this time around. for our own sake.