Re: [A-List] Eco-Apartheid: Why is the green movement so lily white?

[Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Macdonald Stainsby wrote:
> From: Richard Menec <menecraj@xxxxxxx>
> We know that climate activists will convince Congress to adopt 
> market-based
> solutions (like 'cap and trade'). This approach may help big 
> businesses do
> the right thing. 
Menec has good arguments on race, but on class? Nope, cap and trade is 
the privatisation of the air.


www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9897

Capital's Dangerous Gimmick

by Patrick Bond, Rehana Dada and Graham Erion, December 2006

With climate change posing one of the gravest threats to capital 
accumulation - not to mention humankind and our environment - it is 
little wonder that economists such as Sir Nicholas Stern, establishment 
politicians like Gordon Brown and Al Gore, and financiers at the World 
Bank and the City of London have begun warning the public. They are all 
pushing for more market solutions as the way to reduce carbon dioxide 
emissions.

This was the key theory motivating capitalist states' support for the 
Kyoto Protocol. And since February 2005, when the protocol was ratified 
by Russia and formally came into effect, a great deal more money and 
propaganda has been invested in the carbon market, including at a major 
Nairobi climate conference last month.

Rather than forcing countries or firms to reduce their own greenhouse 
gas emissions, Kyoto Protocol designers created a carbon market - from 
thin air - and gave countries a minimal reduction target (5 percent from 
1990 emissions levels, to be achieved by 2012). They can either meet 
that target through their own reductions, or by purchasing emissions 
credits from countries or firms that reduce their own greenhouse gasses 
beyond their target level.

One of the key carbon trading mechanisms instituted by Kyoto is the 
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This is an arrangement which enables 
countries to offset their carbon targets by investing in emissions 
reduction projects in other countries - such as tree planting or wind 
power projects in the Third World.

But as Larry Lohmann from the British NGO Cornerhouse and the Durban 
Group for Climate Justice remarks, "The distribution of carbon 
allowances [the prerequisite for trading] constitutes one of the 
largest, if not the largest, projects for creation and regressive 
distribution of property rights in human history."

Big oil companies, in particular, can win property rights to pollute at 
the level they always have, instead of facing up to their historic debt 
to the Third World for using it as dumping ground.

South Africa is a good case study of the abuses of carbon trading. In 
mid-2005 Sasol, one of the country's largest companies, admitted that 
its gas pipeline project proposal to the CDM bureaucracy lacked the key 
requirement of "additionality" - the firm doing something that it would 
not have done anyway - thus unveiling the CDM as vulnerable to blatant 
scamming.

At Durban's vast Bisasar Road rubbish dump - Africa's largest landfill - 
community protests against ongoing carcinogenic emissions have derailed 
the World Bank and municipal state's plans to market a methane-capture 
project at the site as a CDM project. According to Sajida Khan, a cancer 
victim leading the fight, "The poor countries are so poor they will 
accept crumbs. The World Bank know this and they are taking advantage of 
it."

Similar protests across the Third World have targeted destructive CDM 
schemes such as tree planting at Brazil's Plantar industrial timber 
plantation and in indigenous communities mass demonstrations are raising 
the profile of the dangerous market.

Carbon trading may also suffer classic contradictions of capitalist 
markets, such as volatility, overproduction and manipulation. In April, 
Gordon Brown made a strong pitch at the United Nations "for a global 
carbon trading market as the best way to protect the endangered 
environment while spurring economic growth".

But ten days later, the European Union's Emissions Trading market 
crashed thanks to the overallocation of pollution rights, and the carbon 
market price lost over half its value in a single day, destroying many 
CDM projects earlier considered viable investments.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot recently explained why CDM schemes 
like tree planting are so dubious: "While they have a pretty good idea 
of how much carbon our factories and planes and cars are releasing, 
scientists are much less certain about the amount of carbon tree 
planting will absorb. When you drain or clear the soil to plant trees, 
for example, you are likely to release some carbon, but it is hard to 
tell how much.

"Planting trees in one place might stunt trees elsewhere, as they could 
dry up a river which was feeding a forest downstream. Or by protecting 
your forest against loggers, you might be driving them into another 
forest. In other words, you cannot reasonably claim to have swapped the 
carbon stored in oil or coal for carbon absorbed by trees. Mineral 
carbon, while it remains in the ground, is stable and quantifiable. 
Biological carbon is labile and uncertain."

The main force for a genuine alternative to capitalism's fake market 
mitigation strategy will be public pressure.

With Third World communities and progressive environmentalists - 
especially the Durban Group for Climate Justice - seeking and finding 
allies serious about the climate crisis, there will be fewer 
opportunities for Nicholas Stern and Gordon Brown to sell bogus market 
solutions to capital's pollution problems.

Bond, Dada and Erion are the editors of the new book Climate Change, 
Carbon Trading and Civil Society, available from Rozenberg Press, Amsterdam







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