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Corner House - news and information
Sent: 17 June 2008 19:22
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Subject: Moving forward on climate
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18 June 2008
MOVING FORWARD ON CLIMATE
'Billions wasted on UN climate programme'
'European Union's efforts to tackle climate change a failure'
'UN effort to curtail emissions in turmoil'
'Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved'
These recent newspaper headlines tell the story. The world's dominant
approach to dealing with the climate crisis -- carbon trading, the
centrepiece of the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union Emissions Trading
Scheme -- isn't working.
Yet, as if sleepwalking, international agencies and government authorities
around the world continue to squander millions of taxpayer dollars trying to
build or repair carbon markets.
As country after country undertakes its own complicated efforts to partition
the world's carbon cycling capacity into saleable commodities, and
entrepreneurs flood news media with unverifiable claims that they are
increasing that capacity, fossil-fuelled industries are getting a new lease
on life.
As speculators seek quick profits in a fast-growing 'wild west'
marketplace, the need to find reliable ways to promote the structural change
that would allow fossil fuels to be kept in the ground is being ignored or
forgotten.
Why is this happening? What lies behind the belief that carbon markets can
somehow be 'fixed' or 'regulated'? What can be done to move climate politics
onto a saner path?
The Corner House has recently posted nearly a dozen new items on its website
that shed light on these and related questions. We hope you find them useful
and informative.
Best wishes from all at The Corner House
NEW ADDITIONS
ARTICLES FOR ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
1)
'Carbon Trading: Solution or Obstacle?'
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Indiachapter.pdf
More and more commentators now recognise that carbon markets are not helping
to address the climate crisis. But more discussion is needed of:
how carbon markets damage more effective approaches; whether carbon markets
could ever work at all; and why carbon trading has been successful in
political terms despite failing in climatic terms.
2)
'Carbon Trading, Climate Justice and the Production of Ignorance:
Ten Examples'
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Ignorance.pdf
Carbon trading schemes have helped mobilise neoclassical economics and
development planning in new projects of dispossession, speculation,
rent-seeking and the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich and from the
future to the present. A central part of this process has been creating new
domains of ignorance. What does the quest for climate justice become when it
is incorporated into a development or carbon market framework?
3)
'Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting:
The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit'
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/EnvAcctg.pdf
Many mainstream environmentalists suggest that calculating and internalising
'externalities' is the way to solve environmental problems.
Some critics counter that the spread of market-like calculations into
'non-market' spheres is itself causing environmental problems. This article
sets aside this debate to examine closely actual conflicts, contradictions
and resistances engendered by environmental accounting techniques and
suggest what the long-term political and environmental consequences are
likely to be.
4)
'Gas, Waqf and Barclays Capital:
A Decade of Struggle in Southern Thailand'
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Waqf.pdf
Slowing and halting new fossil fuel developments must eventually move to the
top of the global climate change agenda. But what are the obstacles to, and
resources for, such a project? The 10-year struggle against a large natural
gas development project in one corner of Southeast Asia offers lessons in
some of the relevant themes of global politics: the use of military force to
secure and transport fossil fuel resources; the regulation of international
finance; sectarian violence; corporate social responsibility; intensely
locally-specific yet internationally-reinforced, forms of class conflict and
racism; and the question of how a more tenacious solidarity for the defence
of community and commons might be built among diverse and all-too-often
isolated movements in different geographical and cultural locations.
POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS
5)
'Pictures from the Carbon Market, Part 2'
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/OffsetsMarket2.pdf
This slide show of photographs continues a series portraying the practical,
on-the-ground effects of the trade in carbon credits through the United
Nations' Clean Development Mechanism and the voluntary 'offset'
market.
6)
'How Carbon Trading Undermines Positive Approaches to the Climate Crisis'
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/CTvsPos.pdf
Carbon tradingproponents often assert that trading is merely a way of
finding the most cost-effective means of reaching an emissions goal. In
fact, carbon trading undermines a number of existing and proposed positive
measures for tackling climate change. These include the survival and spread
of existing low-carbon technologies, movements against expanded fossil fuel
use, and well-tested green policy measures. Carbon trading also undermines
public awareness and political participation, as well as creating ignorance.
VIDEO PRESENTATIONS
7)
'A Chicago Conversation on Carbon Trading' (at De Paul University)
http://www.blip.tv/file/778753
A discussion hosted by the Climate Justice Chicago Coalition at De Paul
University examines how carbon trading creates transferable rights to dump
carbon, slows social and technological change, promotes socially and
ecologically destructive practices and is ineffective and unjust.
8)
'Carbon Trading: A Lecture at Brigham Young University'
[log in to unmask]&pas" target="_blank">http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=17937&[log in to unmask]&pas
sword=9999&publish=Y
WRITINGS BY KEVIN SMITH OF CARBON TRADE WATCH
9)
'The Limits of Free Market Logic' (published in 'China Dialogue')
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/LimitsFML.pdf
Carbon trading, its backers claim, reduces emissions and brings sustainable
development in the global South. But in fact it may do neither, and is
harming efforts to create a low-carbon economy. A Chinese version is
appended.
10)
'Pollute and Profit' (published in Parliamentary Brief)
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/ParlBrief.pdf
When will it be publicly admitted that the European Union Emissions Trading
Scheme is not working? Industries are not switching to clean energy
technology. The Scheme's guiding principle seems to be 'polluter profits'
rather than 'polluter pays'.
11)
'The Carbon Neutral Myth: Offset Indulgences for Your Climate Sins'
(published by the TransNational Institute)
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/CarbonNeutralMyth.pdf
Buying 'carbon offsets' to 'neutralize' your carbon emissions is all the
rage in middle-class society in Europe and North America. This book explains
why offsets are not a constructive approach to climate change.
For a full listing of climate-related documents, go to:
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/climate.
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