-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Nocarbontrade-l] Obama's allowance auction could raise
$300bn
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:07:55 +0200
From: Patrick Bond <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: CHRIS KEENE <[log in to unmask]>
CC: No Carbon Trade <[log in to unmask]>
References: <[log in to unmask]>
CHRIS KEENE wrote:
> ... Should we support Obama on this? Or is all trading bad?
Speaking personally, I'd say *don't* support Obama on this (or any other
of his neoliberal orientations), even though sure, paying for a permit
is better than McCain's free gifting of rights-to-pollute permits. Below
is more on where (from a long way away) it seems these debates are heading.
Cheers,
Patrick
***
The global carbon trade debate
For or against the privatisation of the air?
by Patrick Bond
Professor of Development Studies and Director of the Centre for Civil
Society
University of KwaZulu-Natal
presented to the SA Sociological Association 15th Congress, Stellenbosch
University
Final Plenary Panel: Climate, Energy, Survival
10 July 2008
“I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking
bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power
plants.” - Al Gore speaking privately, August 2007
What is the state of the strategic debate over climate change? What
kinds of reforms are being contested? Are we in danger of seeing the air
itself – one of our last commons – become commodified, reflecting not
only the core elite strategy to mitigate global warming, but
market-environmentalist acquiescence?
As climate change generates destruction and misery, the people and
corporations responsible for these problems – especially in the
US/EU-centred petro-mineral-military complex and associated financial
agencies like the World Bank – are renewing their grip on power, but
likewise reasserting their rights to property and to inaction on climate
change. And a good many activists once strongly opposed to the corporate
elites have bought in, seduced by the idea that we have to tackle the
climate crisis one step at a time, with reforms that the establishment
can live with, that in turn can be used to leverage substantial cuts in
emissions through clever market incentives.
In this article, four sets of strategies to combat climate change
receive consideration: emissions cap-and-trade options including
investments in Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects, carbon
taxation, command and control of activities responsible for emissions,
and alternative grassroots climate change mitigation strategies. The
latter two are what, ultimately, will be necessary to save the planet,
yet the former two strategies are still ascendant, in part because in
1997 at Kyoto, the idea of a market solution (carbon trading) to a
market problem (emissions as an externality) won approval, along with a
sigh of relief that this strategy would bring the United States of
America to the table. Al Gore, the US vice president, said so, and
promised the US Congress would join the fight – but the US never
ratified Kyoto, instead setting up a “Major Economies” group (including
South Africa) that avoided major cuts.
US intransigence notwithstanding, a scientific consensus now appears
unshakable: by 2050, the world requires 80% reductions in CO2 emissions
to prevent tipping of the world environment into an unmanageable process
and potentially a species-threatening crisis. Yet the options being
contemplated in global and national public policy debates to take us to
80% reductions were nowhere near what is required, for several reasons.
The main reason is that the global balance of forces appears adverse to
the deep emissions cuts desperately required. As a June 2008 report from
Bonn put it,
Another round of talks on the road towards a new global deal on climate
change was wrapping up in Germany on Friday, battered by criticism that
progress had been negligible. The 12-day haggle under the 192-nation
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was the
second since the accord in Bali, Indonesia, last December that set down
a “road map” towards a new planetary treaty... India representative
Chandrashekar Dasgupta deplored “the lack of any real progress” in Bonn
and “a deafening silence” among industrialised countries, save the
European Union.
At the G8 Summit in Japan in July 2008, the ruling parties of the
largest economic powers agreed to only a 50% reduction by 2050, but with
no genuine plan as to how to accomplish this. In this context of adverse
power balance, the debate now divides environmentalists between those
who would want the world economy to slowly and painlessly adapt to CO2
abatement strategies using mainly global governance initiatives, and
those who would advocate dramatic emissions cuts in a manner that is
both redistributive (from rich to poor and North to South, and in the
process male to female), and sufficiently shocking to economic
structures and markets that major transformations in production and
consumption are compelled, beginning with local action that works to
national and then finally global scales once power is sufficiently
redistributed to make global environmental governance feasible.
Market or command?
There are some who argue that, along this spectrum, market-based
instruments – either a “cap-and-trade” system or carbon tax (or some
hybrid) – will have the capacity to rope in the major CO2 emitters and
compel them to reduce greenhouse gases as an economic strategy. A debate
has emerged about how to make mitigation more efficient. As the US
Congressional Budget Office explains:
The most efficient approaches to reducing emissions of CO2 involve
giving businesses and households an economic incentive for such
reductions. Such an incentive could be provided in various ways,
including a tax on emissions, a cap on the total annual level of
emissions combined with a system of tradable emission allowances, or a
modified cap-and-trade program that includes features to constrain the
cost of emission reductions that would be undertaken in an effort to
meet the cap.
The “cap” means that each major point source of emissions - usually in
the form of a country and a firm within a country - would be granted an
emissions permit for each tonne of CO2 released into the atmosphere. The
cap would gradually reduce to the point that by 2050, the 80% target is
met. The crucial point is that through the “trade”, flexibility can be
attained so as to achieve more efficient greenhouse gas reduction. Those
with the opportunity to make bigger cuts should do so and sell their
“hot air” - the emissions saved above and beyond what is required at any
given point in time - to those who have a harder time making the
required cuts. Such a trading strategy would keep the high-emissions
businesses alive until they have time to adapt. Auctioning the permits
would give governments a dependable revenue stream which could be used
to invest in renewable energy and other innovations. In the US, $300
billion per year is anticipated as feasible income (at $10-15 per metric
tone of CO2) by reducing emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.
Another version of a market-based climate change mitigation system –
which either enforces underlying economic dynamics or changes them - is
a tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Such a tax would take the production
system as given and alter the demand structure. According to an
assessment by the US Congressional Budget Office,
A tax on emissions would be the most efficient incentive-based option
for reducing emissions and could be relatively easy to implement. If it
was coordinated among major emitting countries, it would help minimize
the cost of achieving a global target for emissions by providing
consistent incentives for reducing emissions around the world. If other
major nations used cap-and-trade programs rather than taxes on
emissions, a U.S. tax could still provide roughly comparable incentives
for emission reductions if the tax rate each year was set to equal the
expected price of allowances under those programs.
The major problems with taxation are tax avoidance capacities of
influential industries, and incidence: namely, the question of who pays
a disproportionate share of the bill. There are ways to design a tax
system with a strongly redistributive outcome, and in the process to
incentivize transformative economic strategies. However, a dramatic
shift in political power is required for such an outcome. The typical
energy taxation strategy, such as British Columbia, excessively
penalises those in the working class least able to change behaviour.
A more equitable version of emissions trading advocacy comes from those
who recommend a per capita strategy oriented to social justice along
North-South lines, combined with trading. The per capita right-to-emit
has been theorised through “Contraction and Convergence” and “Greenhouse
Development Rights” strategies. The former, as advocated by Aubrey
Meyer, takes as the basic principle the need to share rights to pollute
equitably and in the process shrink total CO2 emissions.
The latter, as argued by Tom Athanasiou, accepts equity but also
considers ability to finance emissions reductions. Both assume that if
the right to pollute is established and distributed, a market system –
whereby once allocated, the per capita emissions can then be traded by
those who need them less (in the South) to those (in the North) who need
them more (due to addiction) - would efficiently ease the burden of
transforming economies. Once the system is established, the cap on
emissions could be progressively lowered so that global warming stays
under 2 degrees.
The non-reformist alternatives to market-based strategies typically fall
into state-oriented command-and-control, and activist “direct action”.
The rationale here is, typically, that the application of market
incentives - and in the process, the granting of pollution rights –
cannot generate the cuts needed to save our species from severe damage
due to climate change. Instead, a variety of strategies and tactics that
would explicitly cut greenhouse gas emissions is preferable. Some of the
strategies – a switch to renewable energy, changed consumption patterns,
new production and consumption incentives through punitive taxation, and
“keep the oil in the soil and the coal in the hole” campaigns – are
already being adopted by some activists. Unfortunately, the most
important debating sites in the Northern environmental reform circuits
do not permit these options to be raised in polite company.
US and European debates
In mid-2008, the most important single site of debate was the US
Congress, where a cap-and-trade law proposed by Senators Joe Lieberman
and John Warner was narrowly defeated on June 6. Although there are two
committed US Presidential candidates in the November 2008 election who
have aggressive, non-reformist positions on climate change – Ralph Nader
(Independent) and Cynthia McKinney (Greens) – their chances of winning
are negligible. The two who will set the climate agenda from 2009
onwards are Barack Obama and John McCain, and both support the
cap-and-trade concept. The primary difference is that Obama supports an
auction for emissions permits, while McCain would give out the permits
to large CO2 polluters for free, at least initially, even though this
rewards prior pollution.
The Environmental Defense Fund argues that core support for
cap-and-trade in the US Congress represents an opportunity in 2009 for a
major legislative initiative. However, there was also quite impressive
opposition to Lieberman-Warner by environmentalists and other
progressive organisations – including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth,
MoveOn.org, CREDO Mobile and Public Citizen – because the bill included
support for nuclear energy, because of its inadequate emissions cap,
because of its adverse impact on low-income people, and because of other
problems inherent in carbon trading. Increasingly, there are many
environmental justice organisations lobbying Congress not for
cap-and-trade, but for a robust and fair carbon tax instead.
The other main site of debate is Europe, whose Emissions Trading Scheme
(ETS) has been hotly contested. Due to the large reliance upon
controversial offsets as well as the ETS price crash in April 2006 once
a flood of emissions permits were released to companies on a gift
(non-auctioned) basis, there is doubt about the ability of the ETS
authority to tackle the challenge of regulating emissions. According to
Jutta Kill of Sinkwatch, there are six lessons to be learned from the
ETS experience:
1. Over-allocation of permits due to intensive industry lobbying during
the allocation process led to price collapse of ETS permit prices in
April 2006 and few permit trades for compliance purposes. Similar price
collapse due to over-allocation has been reported for the New South
Wales emissions trading scheme. Lack of a stringent cap has undermined
the emissions trading scheme. Slight tightening of the cap for the
second phase of the ETS from 2008-2012 in the wake of the failure and
price collapse during phase 1 has been offset by increasing the hole in
the cap: across the board, companies are allowed to use significantly
more offset credits from CDM and JI projects during phase 2 compared to
phase 1 of the ETS. Several reports have shown that the shortfall of
permits resulting from the tightening of the cap in phase 2 will be
filled to 88%-100% by increased volume of offset credit influx into the
ETS.
2. Free allocation of emission permits has led to record windfall
profits to energy utilities and some of the highest emitting industry
sectors in the EU. 100% auctioning in the third phase of the ETS
increasingly considered as the only remedy to salvage the ETS. Capping
emissions without 100% auctioning selects against immediate investment
in long-term structural change. Short-term and uncertain price signals
discourage structural change, cost-spreading discourages innovation.
3. Any influx of offset credits into the emissions trading scheme will
undermine effectiveness due to risk of development of a ‘lemons market’
as a result of unverifiable quality of offset credits. . this is of
concern particularly given the increasing evidence that up to 1/3 of CDM
projects [either already registered or in the process of CDM
registration] are considered ‘non-additional’ by CDM experts.
4. There is increasing acknowledgement, including from the private
sector, that emissions trading will not provide the incentives and price
signals required to trigger significant investments and R&D into
zero-carbon and low-carbon technologies which is required to be able to
achieve the emissions cuts required to avert climate chaos.
5. Increasing signs that more effective approaches to switch to
zero-carbon economies are held back for fear of jeopardizing the EU’s
flagship Emissions Trading Scheme. A leaked UK government internal note
for example reveals a deep concern that achieving the 20 per cent
renewable energy target itself could present a "major risk" to the EU's
emission trading scheme, for which London has become a major centre of
exchange. Combined with the EU's drive to greater energy efficiency,
increasing the share of renewable energy could cause a carbon price
collapse and make the ETS "redundant", the note says.
6. Effective and economically viable alternatives to cap-and-trade
approaches include (1) a cap-and-auction approach under which the cap is
reduced annually and will approach zero over mid-term & where auctioned
permits are not traded; where a hole in the cap through an influx of
carbon offset credits is not permitted and where (2) feed-in-laws ensure
long-term minimum price guarantees for and unlimited uptake of renewable
energy into the national grid. Such legislation has led to significant
increases in renewable energy volumes in the national grid in Germany as
well as a booming renewable energy industry, with creation of
significant numbers of new employment, esp. in the wind energy and
photovoltaic sector; where (3) subsidies promoting further use of fossil
fuels are phased out and possibly re-directed towards R&D in the field
of zero-carbon technologies, and where (4) energy efficiency potential,
esp. in the housing and household appliances sectors, is fully utilized.
A crucial determinant of the impact of market mechanisms, whether carbon
trades or taxes, is the problem of our unreliable understanding of
carbon price elasticity: i.e., what happens to demand for carbon-related
products when their price changes, either in small increments or
dramatically. In addition, a series of less publicised alternatives are
in continual evolution, including the Contraction-and-Convergence and
Greenhouse Development Rights strategies for personal emissions rights,
which also involve trading.
In contrast to market-related approaches, command-and-control strategies
for emissions reductions have an important history. However, for public
policy to evolve in a just and effective way on climate emissions, a
much stronger set of measures will be required. These will mix the set
of command-and-control strategies associated with prior emissions
controls (e.g. ChloroFluoroCarbons in the 1996 Montreal Protocol and
many European regulations of emissions) and the national state strategy
known as “leave the oil in the soil” (and “leave the coal in the hole”),
with direct grassroots action against greenhouse gas emission points
(such as coal facilities), as advocated by even Al Gore in 2007. Still,
the main point is that market environmentalism's reform strategies are
not working.
Market environmentalism as reformist reformism
The most important lessons of environmental politics in recent decades
are the failure of market strategies to date. There are intrinsic,
deep-level problems in the new emissions markets, both on their own
terms and with respect to the climate and peoples most vulnerable. What
is required is agreement on the strategic orientation and the kinds of
alliances that can move the debate forward. To this end, applied to the
debate over market solutions to the climate crisis, consider the late
French sociologist Andre Gorz's distinction (in his book Strategy for
Labour) between “reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms”:
1) Reformist reforms undergird, strengthen and relegitimise the main
institutions and dynamics in the system that cause the climate change
problem, and thus weaken and demobilise environmental and social justice
advocacy communities through co-option
2) Non-reformist reforms undermine, weaken and delegitimise the climate
change system's main institutions and dynamics, and consequently
strengthen its critics, giving them momentum and further reason to mobilise
This distinction helps us assess four market-based emissions mitigation
initiatives along this spectrum:
1) carbon trades without auctions, where pollution permits are
grandfathered in, as in the European Trading Scheme, are now so widely
delegitimised, that only US Republican Party candidate John McCain
supports them
2) carbon trades with auctions will increasingly dominate discussions,
especially in the US if Barack Obama is elected President in November,
in part because they have the support of many mainstream commentators
and large environmental organisations
3) carbon taxes, either aimed to be revenue-neutral, or to raise funds
for renewables and socio-economic transformation, will continue to be
seen as the main progressive alternative to carbon trading, even though
such taxes do not address more fundamental power relations or achieve
systematic change required to avert climate disaster
4) Greenhouse Development Rights, Contraction-and-Convergence and other
per capita “right to pollute” strategies with a North-South
redistributive orientation are also advocated by eloquent
environmentalists and some Third World leaders, and entail a trading
component and the property right to emit
Each strategy has major disadvantages by virtue of being located within
market-based systems, especially during a period of extreme financial
volatility during which energy-related securities (including emissions
credits) have been amongst the most unreliable measures of value. As a
result, we can conclude that the first two are reformist reforms, and
the latter two have non-reformist possibilities. There are two further
non-reformist alternatives – command-and-control emissions prohibitions
and local supply-side strategies (a kind of command-and-control from
below) – that bear consideration once the market-based strategies are
briefly reviewed.
A central problem is that reformist reforms can be counterproductive to
mitigating climate change. In short, it is possible that an exploitative
system becomes even stronger in the wake of an eco-social change
campaign. If campaigners unwittingly adopt the same logic of the system,
and turn for change implementation to the kinds of institutions
responsible for exploitative damage, and moreover also restore those
institutions' credibility, the reforms may do more harm than good.
To illustrate, if mainstream environmentalists endorse World Bank
strategies to commodify forests through the “Reducing Emissions From
Deforestation and Degradation” (REDD) programme, their co-optation
inevitably strengthens the Bank – responsible for vast climate damage as
a major fossil fuel investor – and weakens the work of indigenous people
and environmental activists. The reformist-reform logic appears in the
case of a Brazilian meat packing plant in the Amazon that coincides with
the Bank's investments in forest protection. There are, in such cases,
persuasive advocates of reform, such as Dr Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole
Research Institute, who accept the basic parameters of the system's
logic, namely the ongoing exploitation of the Amazon, and who seek to
tame that process using World Bank resources:
The irony is that at the same time the World Bank was launching the
Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, the International Finance
Corporation [a World Bank agency] was making a loan to the Bertin
meat-packing plant in the Brazilian Amazon. The loan aims to set up a
sustainable supply of beef for an ecological meat-packing facility in
Marab in the state of Para. What upset the protestors was the idea that
the same institution would be accelerating deforestation by expanding
the capacity to process meat in the Amazon region as it creates this
mechanism for compensating nations for reducing their emissions. Our own
feeling on this is that there comes a point where we have to acknowledge
that the region is undergoing an economic transformation and if we can
find a powerful lever for commodifying how this transformation takes
place - putting a premium on legal land-use practices, legal
deforestation, the gradual elimination of the use of fire - we should
take it. For me that trumps the negative consequences of setting up
increased capacity in the region. In other words, I really do believe
that there are many responsible cattle ranchers and soy farmers in the
Amazon who are waiting for some sort of recognition through positive
incentives. The incentive could be a very small mark up - literally a
few cents per pound of beef sold - but it would send a signal to these
ranchers that if they want to participate in the new beef economy, they
better have their legal forest reserve in order or have compensated for
it, maintain or be in the process of restoring their riparian zone
forests, control erosion, and get their cows out of the streams and into
artificial watering tanks. There is a whole range of positive things
that can happen once cattle ranchers see that if they do things right
they are rewarded. This means that as Brazil moves forward as the
world's leading exporter of beef - with tremendous potential to expand -
we have a way to shape that expansion as it takes place to reduce the
negative ecological impacts.
Such logic is also evident in efforts to reform carbon trading by
advocating the auctioning of emissions permits. In opposition to
reformist reforms, a coalition of 32 Indigenous Peoples (and
environmental allies) lobbied against the REDD programme:
Given the threat to Indigenous Peoples' Rights that REDD represents, we
call on the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to
recommend strongly to the UNFCCC, the UN Forum of Forests, concerned UN
agencies such as UNEP, the World Bank, the Special Rapporteur on Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples and nation states
that REDD not be considered as a strategy to combat Climate Change but,
in fact, is in violation of the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples.
Moreover, we also urge the Permanent Forum to recommend strongly to the
Convention on Biological Diversity that the implementation of the
programme of work on Forests and biodiversity prohibit REDD. We also
further urge that Paragraph 5 be amended to remove “clean development
mechanism, the Clean Energy Investment Framework, and the Global
Environment Facility”. These initiatives do not demonstrate good
examples of partnership with indigenous peoples. There are many CDM
projects that have human rights violations, lack of transparency and
have failed to recognize the principles of Free, Prior and Informed
Consent.
>From reformist to non-reformist reforms
Two crucial questions emerge which will help determine whether reforms
proposed by advocates of carbon taxes and per capita emissions rights do
more harm than good. The first is whether the kinds of reforms proposed
– which entail putting a price on carbon and exposing that price (and
all manner of related negotiations) to corporate-dominated national and
global-scale “governance” initiatives – can be assured of both genuinely
addressing the climate crisis and also redistributing energy and
economic resources from rich to poor. The “devil is in the details” in
relation to both a carbon tax and per capita emissions rights, yet as
noted, the presumptions entailed in taxation (which often has a
maldistributive impact, as shown in the British Columbia gas tax) and
allocations of property rights will make a constructive outcome unlikely.
We are left asking, as a result, whether non-reformist reform
opportunities might emerge so that a carbon tax can redistribute
resources to both renewable energy investments and to low-income people
who, through no fault of their own, are most vulnerable to higher energy
prices? Could a per capita rights mechanism be designed and adopted that
move forward the agenda of the environmental and social justice
movements without falling victim to market distortions? These are not
impossible outcomes, but given prevailing power relations are quite
unlikely.
The second question is whether pursuing these sorts of reforms will
contribute to the expansion and empowerment of the environmental justice
movement. Remarked the originator of the Greenhouse Development Rights
concept, Tom Athanasiou,
Global justice activists will also have to shed old skins for larger,
more capacious frameworks and approaches. There's much to say here, but
the key is that a “radical” movement -- which has, to this point, made
its mark by exposing the charade of the Clean Development Mechanism and
then going on to oppose all market mechanisms -- is now visibly
confronting a larger challenge in which mere opposition is not enough.
If it would speak effectively for the poor and the vulnerable, then it
must find a larger frame.
That frame was indeed found at the December 2007 Bali Conference of
Parties, when a movement called “Climate Justice Now!” emerged to unite
“green” and “red” demands:
* reduced consumption;
* huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical
responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs
paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt
cancellation;
* leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate
energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy;
* rights based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land
rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and
water; and
* sustainable family farming and peoples’ food sovereignty.
The alternative strategies proposed above do not rely entirely upon
command-and-control, for that in turn requires national and ultimately
global state power, which is not likely to be exercised by
environmentally-responsible political parties for many years if not
decades, notwithstanding encouraging signs from Ecuador. Instead, a new
approach to command-and-control-from-below is being adopted which takes
forward community, labour and environmental strategies to maintain
resources in the ground, especially fossil fuels and especially in cases
where “resource curse” economic power relations prevail. It is in such
cases where activists have an unprecedented opportunity.
Leave the oil in the soil
In contrast to reformist reform initiatives such as REDD, non-reformist
reforms are generated by campaigns that explicitly reject the underlying
logic of climate change, i.e., fossil fuel exploitation. Such reforms
legitimate the opponents of the system, not the system itself, and lead
to further mobilisation rather than to the movement's cooptation. An
example is the partially-successful struggle to “keep the oil in the
soil” in the Yasuní National Park waged for several years by the Quito
NGO Accion Ecologia and its Oil Watch allies. The campaign advanced
rapidly in 2007, when Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa declared his
intent to leave $12 billion worth of oil reserves untouched in
perpetuity, in exchange for anticipated payments from international
sources - not as a carbon offset, but instead to be considered part of
the North's repayment of its “ecological debt” to the South.
The aim of the proposal is to provide a creative solution for the threat
posed by the extraction of crude oil in the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha
(ITT) oil fields, which are located in the highly vulnerable area of
Yasuní National Park. The proposal would contribute to preserving
biodiversity, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and respecting the
rights of indigenous peoples and their way of life.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has stated that the country’s first
option is to maintain the crude oil in the subsoil. The national and
international communities would be called on to help the Ecuadorian
government implement this costly decision for the country. The
government hopes to recover 50% of the revenues it would obtain by
extracting the oil. The procedure involves the issuing of government
bonds for the crude oil that will remain “in situ”, with the double
commitment of never extracting this oil and of protecting Yasuní
National Park. It is important to keep in mind that if Ecuador succeeds
in receiving the hoped for amount – estimated at 350 million dollars
annually – it would only be for a period of ten years beginning after
the sixth year, since production and potential revenues would
progressively decline at the end of that period.
A more promising alternative would be a strategy to provide the
government with the 50% of resources in such a way as to provide a
consistent income for an indefinite period of time. This resources would
be channelled towards activities that help to free the country from its
dependency on exports and imports and to consolidate food sovereignty.
The proposal is framed within the national and international contexts
based on the following considerations:
1. halt climate change
2. stop destruction of biodiversity
3. protect the huaorani people
4. economic transformation of the country.
The very notion of an “ecological debt” is also a non-reformist reform,
because although it asserts the calculation of the monetary value of
nature, payment on such an obligation would revise such a range of power
relationships that massive structural change would inevitably follow.
Such linkages between environmental stewardship and social justice
provide the only sure way to generate political principles that can
inform lasting climate mitigation.
How, then, do we move the environmental agenda from the reformist
reforms that market environmentalists have bogged the debate down in, to
non-reformist reforms? The only sure route to any non-reformist outcome
is, as ever, via the grassroots.
Elite inaction, grassroots revolt
Because of the failure of elites to properly recognise and address
climate change, and because their strategy of commodifying the commons
through the Clean Development Mechanism was already a serious threat to
numerous local communities across the Third World, the Durban Group for
Climate Justice produced a Declaration on Carbon Trading in 2004, which
rejected the claim that this strategy could halt the climate crisis. It
insisted that the crisis has been caused more than anything else by the
mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the oceans,
air, soil and living things.
The Durban Declaration suggested that people need to be made more aware
of carbon trading threat, and to actively intervene against it. By
August 2005, inspiring citizen activism in Durban’s Clare Estate
community forced the municipality to withdraw an application to the
World Bank for carbon trading finance to include methane extraction from
the vast Bisasar Road landfill (instead, the application was for two
relatively tiny suburban dumps).
But the heroic battle against Bisasar’s CDM status was merely defensive,
and the loss of Sajida Khan to cancer in July 2007 was a great blow to
the struggle there. Community residents have a proactive agenda, to
urgently ensure the safe and environmentally sound extraction of methane
from the Bisasar Road landfill, even if that means slightly higher
rubbish removal bills for those in Durban who are thoughtlessly filling
its landfills, without recycling their waste. Khan’s brother Rafiq is
one who will pick up Sajida’s banner. Clare Estate’s apartheid-era dump
should now finally be closed, a decade after originally promised.
Simultaneously, good jobs and bursaries should be given to the dump’s
neighbours, especially in the Kennedy Road community, as partial
compensation for their long suffering. Their fight for housing and
decent services has been equally heroic; the current handful of toilets
and standpoints for six thousand people should shame Durban municipal
officials, whose reprehensible response was to mislead residents into
believing dozens of jobs will materialise through World Bank CDM funding.
At the time the Durban Declaration was drafted in October 2004, only
cutting-edge environmental activists and experts understood the dangers
of carbon trading. Others – including many well-meaning climate
activists – argued that the dangers are not intrinsic in trading, just
in the rotting ‘low hanging fruits’ that represent the first and easiest
projects to fund, at the cheapest carbon price. Since then, however,
numerous voices have been raised against carbon colonialism. These
voices oppose the notion that, through carbon trading, Northern
polluters can continue their fossil fuel addiction, drawing down the
global atmospheric commons in the process. Rather than foisting
destructive schemes like the toxic Bisasar Road dump on the South, the
North owes a vast ecological debt. For playing the role of “carbon
sink”, to illustrate, political ecologist Joan Martinez-Alier and UN
climate change commissioner Jyoti Parikh calculate that an annual
subsidy of $75 billion is provided from South to North. Many advocates
of environmental justice signed the Durban Declaration and sponsored
debates within their own organisations and communities.
In October 2004, the Durban Group also noted that the internal
weaknesses and contradictions of carbon trading are likely to make
global warming worse rather than “mitigate” it. We are ever more
convinced of that in South Africa, partly because in mid-2005, a leading
official of state-owned Sasol publicly conceded that his own ambitious
carbon trading project is merely a gimmick, without technical merit
(because he cannot prove what is termed ‘additionality’). The ‘crony’
character of the CDM verification system may allow this travesty to pass
into the market, unless our critique is amplified. In October 2004, we
worried that ‘giving carbon a price’ through the emissions market would
not prove to be any more effective, democratic, or conducive to human
welfare, than giving genes, forests, biodiversity or clean rivers a
price. Over the past years, the South African government’s own climate
change strategy has been increasingly oriented itself to the ‘commercial
opportunities’ associated with carbon.
Conclusion: Direct action to protect the climate commons
It is here, finally, where the most crucial lesson of the climate debate
lies: in confirming the grassroots, coalface and fenceline demand by
civil society activists to leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the
hole, the resources in the ground. This demand emanated in a systemic
way at the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1997 from the group OilWatch
when it was based in Quito, Ecuador, as heroic activists from Accion
Ecologia took on struggles such as halting exploitation of the Yasuni oil.
Within a decade, in January 2007, at the World Social Forum in Nairobi,
many other groups became aware of this movement thanks to eloquent
activists from the Niger Delta, including the Port Harcourt NGO
Environmental Rights Action. (ERA visited Durban in March 2007 to expand
the network with excellent allies such as the South Durban Community
Environmental Alliance and the Pietermaritzburg NGO groundWork, and in
turn these groups committed in July 2008 to campaign against the
proposed pipeline from Durban to Johannesburg which would double petrol
product flow).
But the legacy of resisting fossil fuel abuse goes back much further,
and includes Alaskan and Californian environmentalists who halted
drilling and even exploration. In Norway, the global justice group ATTAC
took up the same concerns in an October 2007 conference, and began the
hard work of persuading wealthy Norwegian Oil Fund managers that they
should use the vast proceeds of their North Sea inheritance to repay
Ecuadorans some of the ecological debt owed.
Canada is another Northern site where activists are hard at work to
leave the oil in the soil. In a November 2007 conference in Edmonton,
the Parkland Institute of the University of Alberta also addressed the
need for no further development of tar sand deposits (which require a
litre of oil to be burned for every three to be extracted, and which
devastate local water, fisheries and air quality). Institute director
Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for strict limits on the use of
water and greenhouse gas emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic
land reclamation plans (including a financial deposit large enough to
cover full-cost reclamation up-front); no further subsidies for the
production of dirty energy; provisions for energy security for Canadians
(since so much of the tar sand extract is exported to the US); and much
higher economic rents on dirty energy to fund a clean energy industry
(currently Alberta has a very low royalty rate). These kinds of
provisions would strictly limit the extraction of fossil fuels and
permit oil to leave the soil only under conditions in which much greater
socio-ecological and economic benefit is retained by the broader society.
(I raised this issue in many sites in 2006-08, enthusiastically
commenting on the moral, political, economic and ecological merits of
leaving the oil in the soil. Unfortunately, in addition to confessing
profound humility about the excessive fossil fuel burned by airplanes
which have taken me on this quest, I must report on the only site where
the message dropped like a lead balloon: Venezuela. At a July 2007
environmental seminar at the vibrant Centro Internacionale Miranda in
Caracas, joined by the brilliant Mexican ecological economist David
Barkin, our attempts failed to generate debate on whether
petro-socialism might become a contradiction in terms.)
There are many other examples where courageous communities and
environmentalists have lobbied successfully to keep nonrenewable
resources (not just fossil fuels) in the ground, for the sake of the
environment, community stability, disincentivising political corruption
and workforce health and safety. The highest-stake cases in South Africa
at present may well be the Limpopo Province platinum fields and Wild
Coast titanium finds, where communities are resisting foreign companies.
The extraction of these resources is incredibly costly in terms of local
land use, water extraction, energy consumption and political corruption,
and requires constant surveillance and community solidarity.
Finally, one of the most eloquent climate analysts is George Monbiot, so
it was revealing that in December 2007, instead of going to Bali, he
stayed home in Britain and caused some trouble, reporting back in his
Guardian column:
Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I
have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from
runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it to you
for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this
technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing
a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be
deployed straight away. It is called ... leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to
prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this policy
into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at
Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down
the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads
in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will be
used... The coal extracted from Ffos-y-fran alone will produce 29.5
million tonnes of carbon dioxide: equivalent, according to the latest
figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the
sustainable emissions of 55 million people for one year...
Before oil peaks, demand is likely to outstrip supply and the price will
soar. The result is that the oil firms will have an even greater
incentive to extract the stuff.
Already, encouraged by recent prices, the pollutocrats are pouring
billions into unconventional oil. Last week BP announced a massive
investment in Canadian tar sands. Oil produced from tar sands creates
even more carbon emissions than the extraction of petroleum. There’s
enough tar and kerogen in North America to cook the planet several times
over.
If that runs out they switch to coal, of which there is hundreds of
years’ supply. Sasol, the South African company founded during the
apartheid period (when supplies of oil were blocked) to turn coal into
liquid transport fuel, is conducting feasibility studies for new plants
in India, China and the US. Neither geology nor market forces is going
to save us from climate change.
When you review the plans for fossil fuel extraction, the horrible truth
dawns that every carbon-cutting programme on earth is a con. Without
supply-side policies, runaway climate change is inevitable, however hard
we try to cut demand.
Real solutions to the climate crisis are needed, and with its
world-leading CO2 emissions, South Africa must be at the cutting-edge of
progressive climate activism, not a lead partner in the privatisation of
the atmosphere. That, in turn, will require resolution of another vast
challenge: the lack of synthesis between the three major citizens’
networks that have challenged government policy and corporate practices:
environmentalists, community groups and trade unions. More work is
required to identify the numerous contradictions within both South
African and global energy sector policies/practices, and help to
synthesise the emerging critiques and modes of resistance within
progressive civil society. Only from that process of praxis can durable
knowledge be generated about how to solve the climate and energy crises
in a just way.
***
[1] Cited in Greenpeace (2007), “Greenpeace climate activists refused
bail in India, as Al Gore and IPCC win Nobel Peace Prize for raising
global climate awareness”, Kolkata, 12 October.
[2] My earlier reports on the struggle over commodification of the air
as a climate change mitigation strategy include the co-edited books with
Rehana Dada (2005) Trouble in the Air (Durban, Centre for Civil Society
and Amsterdam, Transnational Institute) and with Dada and Graham Erion
(2007, 2008), Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society
(Pietermaritzburg, UKZN Press and Amsterdam, Rozenberg Publishers); and
articles such as Bond and R.Dada (2007), “A death in Durban: Capitalist
patriarchy, global warming gimmickry and our responsibility for
rubbish”, Agenda, 73; and “Privatization of the air turns lethal: ‘Pay
to Pollute’ principle kills South African activist Sajida Khan”,
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 18, 4.
[3] Agence France Press (2008), “Progress falters on road map to new
climate deal,” Bonn, Germany, 13 June.
[4] US Congressional Budget Office (2008), Policy Options for Reducing
CO2 Emissions, Washington DC, February.
[5] US Congressional Budget Office, Policy Options for Reducing CO2
Emissions.
[6] http://www.gci.org.uk/Animations/BENN_C&C_Animation[Tower&_Ravens].exe
[7] Butler, R. (2008), “55% of the Amazon may be lost by 2030 But
carbon-for-conservation initiatives could slow deforestation”,
mongabay.com, 23 January.
[8] Organizations that Endorse this Statement : Indigenous Environmental
Network, CORE Manipur, Federation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in
Asia, Na Koa Ikuiku Kalahui Hawaii, Indigenous World Association, CAPAJ-
Parlamento del Pueblo Qollana, International Indian Treaty Council,
Amazon Alliance, COICA, Instituto Indigena Brasileno para la Poropiedad
Intelctual, The Haudenosaunee Delegation, Agence Kanak de Developpement,
Mary Simat-MAWEED, Marcos Terena-Comite Intertribal-ITC-Brasil, Land is
Life, ARPI-SC-Peru Amazonia, Asociaciones de Mujeres Waorani de la
Amazonia AMWAE, Kus Kura S.C., Indigenous Network on Economic and Trade,
Aguomon FEINE, Friends of the Earth International, Amerindian Peoples
Association, FIMI North America, L. Ole L. Lengai-Sinyati Youth
Alliance, Beverly Longid-Cordillera Peoples Alliance Philippines, Red de
Mujeres Indigenas sobre Biodiversidad de Abgatala, Fundacion para la
Promocion de Conocimiento Indigena, Asociacion Indigena Ambiental,
INTI-Intercambio Nativa Tradicional Internacional, Global Forest
Coalition, Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu, Caf' ek
[9] Athanasiou, T. (2007), “Where do we go from here? The Bali meeting,
and the lessons learned,” Grist, 17 December.
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