"TerraPass is part of a larger market that allows consumers to determine the quantity of greenhouse gases they are generating and neutralize the damage through funding energy projects such as wind farms, tree planting and methane capture plants."

I'm writing an article on the new "green developmentalism" and i'm beginning to feel like scrooge. But the logic seems so faulty I refuse to be convinced that buying into nature cartels is the solution to our environmental problems.

Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe the only way to stop global warming is by pitching in with a donation to help build a windmill every time you fly to Europe or drive your SUV to work. Maybe the upper classes CAN save the world from themselves.

Have we become so cynical that we are willing to accept that direct or indirect payments for these "environmental services" are the only possible victory in the wars against poverty, disease, and eviction? Or, as Zizek asks an audience in Brazil, are we more willing to believe that the earth will explode due to a falling meteor (front page of Newsweek) than to believe that there could be an end to capitalism?

Maybe I'm wrong here. But the "solutions" presented to environmental problems seem to fall into four categories. Neo-liberal, direct payments, indirect payments, and regulation. They are all extremely different systems - but they all share a common cynicism, a common ontology: that no moral case can convince humans to act in any way but selfishly, self-interestedly and liberally, that is, within a system of formal laws. To conserve nature, for example, we have to put a price-tag on it - that is the only incentive that matters anymore.

Maybe they're right. Neo-liberal, direct and indirect payments, and regulation all bear further explanation, I know. But I am tempted to lump them altogether into what Harriet Friedmann calls "the corporate-environmental regime." There we were, demanding ecological products, and business obliged us, creating a new tier of capital in the process: "value-added." In other words, we got "green" capitalism: vitamins in our flour. But not only big business obliged: non-profits and governments and small businesses and small farms, are all changing the world, one product at a time.

But these are systems of power. Proponents of buying fresh air argue that an environmental service differs from a commodity in that no one is excluded: fresh air, unlike an iPod, is something everyone benefits from, no matter who buys it. But governments and individuals around the world do not have enough money to buy up every endangered species, every unique ecosystem, every last seed. It will fall to the future generations... the responsibility will keep be passed on and passed on forever.

There are no solutions to environmental problems. As Bradley Bryan says, "The environment is not a problem to be solved." Another ontology is possible. Not another world, but another way of being in the world. At least I hope so.