How Privatization Fuels Catastrophic Climate Change – In These Times

Source: How Privatization Fuels Catastrophic Climate Change – In These Times

In a democracy, it is the public’s job — not the market’s — to decide what to cede to the private sphere. In some cases, even if something is not a public good in the economists’ sense, the public has the ability to decide that we will treat it as such. In a democracy, we get to decide that there should be no exclusions — no winners or losers — when it comes to education or clean water, or a fair trial, or a vaccine, even if it’s possible to do so. We decide there are things we should do together. We give special treatment to these goods because we realize that they benefit everyone in the course of benefiting each one — and conversely, that excluding some hurts us all. 

Privatization is the transfer of control over public goods into private hands. In all of our thinking about how public goods are created and distributed, our concern should be focused on control: Who has ownership, rights, and the power to make decisions? As public agencies go about their business of serving the people, they will use all manner of arrangements, including contracting, outsourcing, and public-private partner ships, to get things done. All of these arrangements should be judged by how much control the public retains. We should not object to government contracting or outsourcing per se, but we should resist giving control of a public good over to a private concern.

When it comes to the threat of climate change, public control over policy making is critical. Private forces guided by profit-motive, like fossil fuel companies, may seek to enrich shareholders at the risk of causing catastrophic environmental impacts. As such, privatization deals in the realm of climate hand over decision-making from the public, which stands to face the consequences of these impacts, to the profiteers who benefit from them. That’s an untenable situation if we hope to build an environmentally sustainable future where everyone is afforded the right to a healthy planet.