“We can’t shop our way out of the ecological crisis”
`We can’t shop our way out of the ecological crisis’ - John Bellamy Foster
The Story of Cap & Trade - Annie Leonard
Fate of Planet Rests on Mass Movement for Climate Justice - Naomi Klein
John Bellamy Foster: `We can’t shop our way out of the ecological crisis’
John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Max van Lingen. Source: MRZine
Max van Lingen: Consciousness about climate change has increased enormously; however, it also seems as if there is a lack of criticism of business and government actions. Instead it appears as if people are thinking: it doesn’t really matter why people act, as long as they act.
John Bellamy Foster: I think people on the left often try to be “practical”, which they interpret as somehow trying to accommodate themselves to the status quo, so as to make minor improvements. Often this is a kind of desperation to effect change. However, Copenhagen is already a dead deal before it begins. The United States and the other leading powers have indicated that there will be no binding agreements, no significant changes, and no non-market solutions.
James Hansen, arguably the world’s greatest climate scientist, has called the latest US climate legislation passed by the House of representatives “worse than nothing” in that it locks in a “temple of doom.” The changes, if we are to avoid planetary collapse, need to be much more massive and need to come from below. Hansen himself has called for mass “civil resistance” and has been arrested while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.
The climate justice movement, which tends to be more radical, is where to take one’s stand at present. The truth is that we need some extremely strong, short-term solutions to be followed by a long-term strategy of ecological and social revolution. I have written about this in my new book Ecological Revolution and in an article to appear in the January 2010 Monthly Review.
At the same time people are making “green” choices, which are sometimes much more expensive. There is a lot of criticism from this group towards people who are opposed to environmental measures because they are afraid they are going to lose their jobs. Does this contradiction stand in the way of a solution?
There is no doubt that the growing need to make lifestyle changes is important and critical. A great deal is being learned in this process, which could play into an ecological revolution of the whole society — as part of a total revolutionary dialectic. Seeking to have a smaller ecological footprint is important on an individual as well as a social level. But divorced from fundamental economic and political change, such individual, voluntaristic changes, primarily in the realm of consumption, are limited. We cannot shop our way out of these problems.
What matters right now is if people are willing to block coal-fired plants, whether we are engaged in a struggle for climate justice, etc. In many ways it is extremely difficult if not impossible for working people in our society to make the right environmental choices as long as the structures of production, consumption, transportation and urban development, along with the dominant systems of profit, accumulation and finance, are left intact. So it is primarily a question of collective struggle and creating a wider movement and culture for ecological and social revolution.
It stands to reason that trade unions in our society, which have become increasingly business unions, would demonstrate a lot of hostility to environmental regulations, insofar as this threatens jobs. People who are worried about losing their means of subsistence, their livelihood and their homes, as are most working people, will necessarily struggle to retain these. In capitalist society, being a wage worker means that you are divorced from the means of production, including the land. Your entire existence in the society is dependent on your wage, mediated usually by a corporation. What has to be done is to eliminate the job blackmail whereby people lose their jobs and income if environmental regulations are introduced. It is worth recalling that workers have historically been involved in environmental struggles related to toxic wastes in plants and sometimes in their communities. I think also that working people and unions are capable of rising up to protect future generations.
And yet, besides the fear of losing jobs and income, there also seems to be a fear that government intervention will limit the freedom of the individual.
I think that one of the tragedies of our society is that freedom has been reduced to the freedom to shop and perhaps the freedom to drive. We are invited to enjoy Pepsi Freedom or Coke freedom. This is nothing but the alienation of human freedom, which sometimes seems non-alienated only because it feeds distorted fantasies of individual self-expression and escape.
Today we advertise ourselves via the corporate logos on our clothing. But we disappear behind those corporate logos. Genuine freedom is what Marx once called “freedom in general”. It is indivisible: “The free development of each is the basis of the free development of all.” It can only be truly achieved and enjoyed in a social context. It has nothing to do with commodity fetishism. It has everything to do with collective action and political organisation.
With Marx’ Ecology you have delivered an enormous statement when it comes to the relation between socialism and ecology. However, critics, like Joel Kovel, have been pointing at the absence of ecological thinking within the socialist movement and say there have only been “recent attempts” to adjust this. What do you think about this? Has the socialist movement neglected ecological issues?
In some ways consistent ecological thinking is quite new (at least in the modern world), so one might argue that all traditions of modern thought have neglected ecology. I am impressed, however, by how deep the ecological thinking was in the work of socialists of one kind or another. An underlying ecological perspective was evident not only in the work of Fourier, Marx and Engels, but also Bebel, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bukharin and Vavilov. Sergei Podolinsky, often considered the founder of ecological economics, considered himself a Marxist and was in touch with Marx and Engels (who were in many respects more ecologically advanced that he was).
In Britain there were strong socialist ecological figures such as Henry Salt (an animal rights theorist) and William Morris. Marx was very close to the socialist scientific materialist E. Ray Lankester, the leading Darwinian biologist in Britain in his time and one of the greatest ecological critics (a pioneering opponent of species extinction).
Among Marxian critical theorists ecological thinking is present in the work of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Schmidt, Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Bahro.
Scott Nearing, one of the great socialist intellectuals in the United States, and a columnist throughout the 1950s for Monthly Review was a pioneering environmental thinker. Paul Sweezy wrote important pieces on ecology from the 1970s on, beginning with his “Cars and Cities” and later extended to essays on “Capitalism and the Environment” and “Socialism and Ecology”. The list could go on and on.
One can of course point to the tragic anti-ecological perspective adopted in the Soviet Union from the 1930s on (resulting in the purging of many ecologists) and the fact that socialists were, like their bourgeois counterparts, often more committed to economic growth than the preservation of nature. Both left and right in the early twentieth century adopted productivist visions. But none of this changes the fact that socialists have frequently been at the forefront in the development of ecological analysis. Marx’s own ecological vision went beyond anything that we can find today — insofar as we are looking at the social-environmental relation.
Kovel also argues in his book Enemy of Nature that we need a new form of socialism, ecosocialism, in order to change our society. I’ve read a lot of your articles and books and you seem to be very reluctant to use this term. Is this a conscious decision?
You are right that I generally avoid the term “ecosocialism”, especially when this is seen as related to a movement, as opposed to a form of interpretation. This does not reflect a major area of dispute, since my views overlap with many of those who characterise themselves as “ecosocialists” and I am happy to be in alliance with them.
But it does reflect a difference in emphasis. To me the objectives of socialism and ecology are ultimately the same, but their starting points and to some extent their histories are different. So it is an organic, dialectical relation, not one that can be approached by grafting one upon the other. I like to think that I am in the tradition of Marx who was a socialist and ecologist. Indeed, Marx is probably the figure who best exemplifies the principles of ecosocialism. But to see him as such almost negates the term, since Marx was clearly an unhyphenated socialist.
The closer we get to Copenhagen, the clearer it becomes that the summit will fail. Thus the question arises: Are we doomed?
Copenhagen has already failed. Its failure was declared in advance. It is a victory for the powers that be, who are concerned more with capitalism than the planet. But it may be a Pyrrhic victory because it will signal to the world that what we need is not an elite-led process but an ecological revolution, i.e. a world mobilisation from below.
We are still being fed the illusion that these problems can be solved by technological fixes and market mechanisms without a fundamental overturning of our whole system of production and accumulation. But the reality is that the leading capitalist powers and the vested interests have no intention of addressing the problem on the scale necessary. So the issue has to be forced from below. I have been impressed by the recent meteoric rise in climate justice mobilisation, much of which is willing to question the system itself. A merging of climate justice and socialist struggles is crucial. All of this suggests that the leadership in the climate struggle has to come from below.
Right now we need to find ways to keep most of the remaining fossil fuels (especially coal) in the ground. Government regulation of carbon dioxide emissions also has to be considered. Internationally, there has to be a recognition of carbon imperialism and ecological imperialism in general, and measures taken to alleviate the devastating burdens on the global South.
Longer-term solutions mean ecological (and socialist) revolution. They are likely to emerge first where the human and environmental devastation is greatest, in the global South, but also becoming universal, with climate justice struggles hopefully expanding in the global North as well. Marx called for the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth, in such a way as to conserve energy and promote the full development of human beings. Ultimately, there is no other way.
[John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review and teaches sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written on numerous subjects, from political economy to Marxist theory, including the just-published The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace With the Planet. Max van Lingen is a student of political philosophy and modern history at the University of Amsterdam and a journalist for the Dutch monthly The Socialist.]
The Story of Cap & Trade
By Annie Leonard. This article appeared in Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal
I am so glad that the world is finally getting together to try to stop climate change.[1] When I first heard that our leaders were meeting to talk about solutions, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Didn’t you?
Then I said, wait a minute. What exactly are they planning to do about this problem? So I looked into it. And I gotta tell you, not all the solutions they’re working on are what I’d call solutions. In fact, the leading solution, known as cap and trade or emissions trading, is actually a huge problem.
Now I know this is the last thing you want to hear, but the future of our planet is at stake, so we gotta take the time to understand what’s going on here.
Okay, meet the guys at the heart of this so-called solution. They include the guys from Enron[2] who designed energy trading, and the Wall Street financiers like Goldman Sachs[3] who gave us the subprime mortgage crisis.
Their job is to develop brand new markets. They stake their claims and then when everyone and their grandmother wants in, they make off with huge amounts of money as the market becomes a giant bubble and then bursts.
Well their latest bubble just burst and now they got a new idea for a market – trading carbon pollution. They’re about to develop a new $3 trillion bubble,[4] but when this one bursts, it won’t just take down our stock portfolios, it could take down everything!
So how does cap and trade work?
Well, pretty much all serious scientists agree that we need to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to 350 ppm if we want to avoid climate disaster. [5] In the U.S., that means reducing our emissions by 80% – maybe even more – by 2050. 80%![6]
Now the problem is that most of our global economy runs on burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon: the factories that make all our stuff, the ships and trucks that carry it around the world, our cars and buildings and appliances, just about everything.
So, how are we gonna reduce carbon 80% and not go back to living like Little House on the Prairie?
Well, these Cap and Trade guys are saying that a new carbon stock market is the best way to get it done.
The first step would be getting governments around the world to agree to a yearly limit on carbon emissions. That’s the “cap”. I think that part’s great.
So how do they want to insure that carbon emissions stay under this cap? Well, governments would distribute a certain amount of permits to pollute. Every year there would be fewer and fewer permits as we follow the cap to our goal.
Innovative companies will get on board building clean alternatives and getting more efficient. As permits get scarcer, they would also become more valuable, so naturally, companies who have extra will want to sell them to companies who still need them.
That’s where trading comes in.
The logic is as long as we stay under the cap, it doesn’t matter who pollutes and who innovates. [7] We’ll meet our climate deadline, avoiding catastrophe. And oh yeah, these guys take their fee as they broker this multi-trillion dollar carbon racket, I mean market.
Save the planet, get rich, what’s not to like, right? Some of my friends who really care about our future support cap and trade. A lot of environmental groups that I respect do too. They know it’s not a perfect solution and don’t love the idea of turning our planet’s future over to these guys, but they think that it is an important first step and that it’s better than nothing. I am not so sure.
And I’m not the only one. A growing movement of scientists, students, farmers, and forward thinking businesspeople are saying “wait a minute!”[8]
In fact even the economists who invented the cap and trade system to deal with simpler problems like fertilizer pollution and sulfur dioxide, say cap and trade will never work for climate change. [9] Here’s why I think they’re right.
When it comes to any kind of financial scam, like subprime mortgages or Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme, the devil is always in the details. And there are a lot of devils in the details of the cap and trade proposals on the table.
Devil number one is known as Free Permits, which is why some people call this system Cap and Giveaway.[10] In this scheme, industrial polluters will get the vast majority of these valuable permits for free. Free!
The more they’ve been polluting, the more they’ll get.
It’s like we’re thanking them for creating this problem in the first place.
In Europe where they tried a Cap and Giveaway system, the value of the permits bounced around like crazy, energy costs jumped for consumers, and guess what?
Carbon emissions actually went up! [11] The only part that did work was that the polluters made billions of dollars in extra profits. MIT economists say the same thing would likely happen here in the US. [12]
Those billions come from OUR pockets. A real solution would put that money to work stopping climate change.
Instead of just giving permits away to polluters, we could sell them and use the money to:
- build a clean energy economy[13]
- or give citizens a dividend to help pay for higher fuel prices while we transition to that clean energy economy [14]
- or share it with those who are most harmed by climate change. Some people call this paying our ecological debt. [15]
Since we in the richest countries released the most carbon for centuries, and lived a pretty comfy lifestyle in the process, don’t we have a responsibility to help those most harmed?
It’s like we had a big party, didn’t invite our neighbors and then stuck ‘em with the clean up bill. It’s just not cool.
Did you know that in the next century, because of the changing climate, whole island nations could end up underwater[16] and the UN says 9 out of 10 African farmers could lose their ability to grow food. [17]
Wouldn’t a real solution benefit these people instead of just polluters?
Devil number two is called Offsetting.
Offset permits are created when a company supposedly removes or reduces carbon. They then get a permit which can be sold to a polluter who wants permission to emit more carbon. In theory, one activity offsets the other.
The danger with offsets is it’s very hard to guarantee that real carbon is being removed to create the permit. Yet these permits are worth real money.
This creates a very dangerous incentive to create false offsets – to cheat.
Now in some cases cheating isn’t the end of the world, but in this case it is. And already there’s a lot of cheating going on.
Like, in Indonesia, Sinar Mas corporation cut down indigenous forests, causing major ecological and cultural destruction. Then, they took the wasteland they created and planted palm oil trees. Guess what they can get for it? Yup, offset permits. [18]
Carbon out? No. Carbon in? You bet.
Companies can even earn offsets for not doing anything at all.
Like, operators of a polluting factory can claim they were planning to expand 200% but reduced the plans to expand only 100%. For that meaningless claim, they get offset permits – permits that they can sell to someone else to make more pollution! That is so stupid! [19]
The list of scams goes on and many of the worst ones happen in the so-called Third World where big business does whatever it wants, to whomever it wants. And with lax standards and regulations on offsets they can get permits for just about anything. [20]
Devils one and two, Cap & Giveaway and Offsetting, make the system unfair and ineffective. But the last devil, which I call Distraction, makes it downright dangerous.
See, there are real solutions out there, but cap and trade with its loopholes and promises of riches have made many people forget all about them. [21]
We’re not even close to a global agreement on a carbon cap to begin with, and duh, this is the whole point of cap and trade. But instead of hammering out a fair and strong deal, we’re putting the cart before the horse and rushing off to trade schemes and offsets.
With all the bogus offset projects, huge giveaways to polluters, and the failure to address the injustices of climate change do you think the Third World will get on board with a global cap? I doubt it. [22] If a cap and trade proposal is stopping us from actually capping carbon, it’s a dangerous distraction.
We don’t need to let these guys design the solution. We – us, our governments - can make laws and do it ourselves.
In my country, we already have a law – the Clean Air Act – that confirms that carbon is a pollutant which our environmental agency is allowed to cap. So what are we waiting for? Go EPA go! Cap that carbon! [23]
Instead, a U.S. cap and trade law proposed in 2009 guts the Clean Air Act, leaving it to the market to fix the problem. [24] If a cap and trade proposal weakens our ability to make strong laws, it’s a distraction.
Concerned citizens around the world need to speak out and demand we redesign our economies away from fossil fuels. [25] But cap and trade makes citizens think everything will be okay if we just drive a little less, change our light bulbs and let these guys do the rest. If cap and trade creates a false sense of progress, it’s a dangerous distraction.
These cap and trade proposals are mostly about protecting business as usual.
Right now, the US subsidizes fossil fuels at more than twice the rate of renewables. [26] What? We shouldn’t be subsidizing fossil fuels at all!
These guys don’t seem to realize that the simplest way to keep carbon out of the atmosphere is to leave it safely in the ground. [27]
US congressman, Rick Boucher, a well-known friend of the coal industry voted for cap and trade. He said it “strengthens the case for utilities to continue to use coal.” [28]
No law that encourages coal use can stop climate change. Period.
Solid caps, strong laws, citizen action, and carbon fees to pay off ecological debt and create a clean energy economy, that’s how we can save our future.
Next time someone tells you Cap and Trade is the best we’re gonna get, don’t believe them! Better yet, talk to them. They probably want a future safe from climate change too. Maybe they’ve just forgotten that you can only compromise to a point before a solution isn’t really a solution.
I know we’d all love to sacrifice nothing, save the planet and get rich doing it. But get real! This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.
We can’t solve it with the mindset – their mindset – that got us into this mess. We need something new.
It won’t be easy, but it’s time we dream bigger. It’s time to design a climate solution that will really work.
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References
[1] The main body working on global climate governance is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - http://unfccc.int/2860.php . See Alex Kirby, Climate in Peril: A Popular Guide to the Latest IPCC Reports. Arendal, Norway, United Nations, 2009.
[2] Full critiques of carbon markets can be found at http://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban/. In an August 2009 report about Enron alumni in the carbon markets, the Financial Times offers not a hint of irony: “‘People who were attracted to Enron and its desire to open new and cutting-edge businesses are also likely to be attracted to the carbon market,’ says Lynda Clemmons, who started the emissions trading desk at Enron in 1994. It also innovated in the electricity, gas and coal markets, to which carbon is highly correlated, which makes former Enron traders particularly suited to trading carbon. ‘They bring a breadth of cross-product coverage that makes them natural candidates to look at emissions,’ according to one industry insider.”
Uh oh, when the Financial Times offers me ‘natural candidates’ from Houston to help solve the climate crisis, I say, No Thank You! I’m sad because we had all hoped that the retrenched staff from Enron’s bankruptcy would go get a job, not continue playing at those speculative financial casino games that caused so damage to Californians like me, and to the firms’ shareholders. (See Markus Sommerauer, ‘A strange alliance making profits for a cleaner cause’, Financial Times, August 5, 2009; and Solomon Lawrence, ‘Enron’s Other Secret’, Financial Post, May 30, 2009, http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/30/lawrence-solomon-enron-s-other-secret.aspx.)
[3] For Goldman’s role in the subprime scandal, see Matt Taibbi, ‘The Great American bubble machine’, Rolling Stone, July 9-23, 2009. Taibbi warns:
“Instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an ‘environmental plan,’ called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance… This is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion. Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profit-making slice of that paradigm, and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than [Mark] Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.)… The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes… Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market? ‘Oh, it’ll dwarf it,’ says a former staffer on the House energy committee. Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected… The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.”
[4] The $3 trillion doesn’t even include the danger of a bubbling derivatives market, which could boost the figure by a factor of five or more. See Nina Chestney and Michael Szabo, ‘Emissions traders expect U.S. carbon market soon,’ Reuters, May 28, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE54R4YP20090528, last accessed October 11, 2009.
[5] http://www.350.org.
[6] Gar Lipow, ‘How soon do we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions?,’ Grist, January 25 2009, http://www.grist.org/article/How-soon-do-we-need-to-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions/, last accessed October 11, 2009.
[7] Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, special issue of Development Dialogue, Uppsala, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD2006_48_carbon_trading/carbon_trading_web_HQ.pdf. See also Lohmann, ‘Neoliberalism and the calculable world: The rise of carbon trading,’ http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Neolib&Calc.pdf.
[8] The movement for climate justice dates back well before Kyoto, to the 1992 Rio Earth Conference at which equity was emphasized as a global green value. A network specifically critical of carbon trading was initiated in South Africa at an October 2004 workshop which founded ‘The Durban Group for Climate Justice’. By 2007, at the Bali Conference of Parties summit, the Durban Group and many other organizations whose environmental commitments included social equity and economic transformation launched the global network ‘Climate Justice Now!’ But in addition to environmental activists, a great many other experts and practitioners also oppose the use of emissions trading for climate control, including the leading US climate scientist, James Hansen, and financier George Soros, who argue it will be ineffective. The latter was quoted in 2007:
“The cap and trade system of emissions trading is very difficult to control and its effects are diluted. It is pretty much breaking down because there is no penalty for developing countries not to add to their pollution. You count the saving but you don’t count the added pollution going on… [The Clean Development Mechanisms developed under the Kyoto Protocol] are not effective: you buy credits in third world countries that don’t have a cap on emissions and you can get carbon credits whether you can sell them or not… It is precisely because I am a market practitioner that I know the flaws in the system.” (See Hugh Wheelan, ‘Soros slams emissions trading systems: Market solution is “ineffective” in fighting climate change’, Responsible Investor, October 18, 2007, http://www.responsible-investor.com/home/article/soros_slams_emissions_c…)
[9] Jon Hilsenrath, ‘Cap-and-trade’s unlikely critics: Its creators - economists behind original concept question the system’s large-scale usefulness, and recommend emissions taxes instead,’ Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2009:
”When he was a graduate student in the 1960s working to reduce pollutants, Thomas Crocker devised a cap-and-trade system similar to one being considered in Congress… ‘I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon,’ says Mr. Crocker, 73 years old, a retired economist in Centennial, Wyo. He says he prefers an outright tax on emissions because it would be easier to enforce and provide needed flexibility to deal with the problem… The other, John Dales, who died in 2007, was also a skeptic of using the idea to tame global warning. ‘It isn’t a cure-all for everything,’ Mr. Dales said in an interview in 2001. ‘There are lots of situations that don’t apply.’ Mr. Crocker sees two modern-day problems in using a cap-and-trade system to address the global greenhouse-gas issue. The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. ‘It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,’ he says. ‘There are no institutions right now that have that power.’ The other problem, Mr. Crocker says, is that quantifying the economic damage of climate change — from floods to failing crops — is fraught with uncertainty. One estimate puts it at anywhere between 5% and 20% of global gross domestic product. Without knowing how costly climate change is, nobody knows how tight a grip to put on emissions… Mr. Crocker says cap-and-trade is better suited for problems where the damages are clear — like acid rain in the 1990s — and a hard limit is needed quickly.”
[10] Even pro-corporate lobbies like the American Enterprise Institute admit this is a bad idea. See Alan Viard, ‘The cap-and-trade giveaway,’ The American, June 26, 2009, http://www.american.com/archive/2009/june/the-cap-and-trade-giveaway, last accessed October 11, 2009.
[11] The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme failed, according to Grist columnist Gar Lipow: “During the three year period where we have verified emissions, emission among traded entities rose by 1.8%. (During that same period emissions for the EU as a whole fell.) According to preliminary figures emissions fell by 3.06% for 2008. It is widely agreed that much of this was due to economic recession, and warmer weather, and widely argued that a substantial minority was due to the trading system. However just as EU emissions fell a bit while ETS emissions rose, I suspect that once the data is out we will find EU emissions dropped much more steeply that the comparatively small drop in greenhouse gases from traded entities. The overwhelming evidence is that the European Trading Scheme is retarding rather that driving emission drops.” Gar Lipow, ‘Cap-and-trade: filling up the political space that should be used for real solutions,’ Grist, May 31, 2009 http://www.grist.org/article/cap-and-trade-filling-up-the-political-space-that-should-be-used-for-real-s http://tinyurl.com/suckLemon, last accessed October 11, 2009.
[12] Sergey Paltsev, John M. Reilly, Henry D. Jacoby, Angelo C. Gurgel, Gilbert E. Metcalf, Andrei P. Sokolov and Jennifer F. Holak, ‘Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-Trade Proposals’, 2007, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, http://web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/ MITJPSPGC_Rpt146.pdf, last accessed October 11, 2009. The authors note that ‘If the allocations are distributed on some “grandfathering” principle to firms at the point of regulation [which is the case in the main 2009 legislation], then these firms receive the asset value or scarcity rent,’ which to some extent would deflect higher prices for US consumers, depending upon how regulations emerge. But we do actually need to have higher prices on fossil fuels, in order to change behaviour and also raise funding for important ecological investments and ecological debt repayment. It would be a tragedy if the US knew the problems in the EU example and followed the grandfathering of free permits anyhow, which appears to the be likely outcome of the congressional process.
[13] Colby Itkowitz, ‘Cap, trade, bike and carpool,’ CQ Weekly 67:26, June 29 2009: 1501-1501
[14] Peter Barnes, ‘ Cap and dividend, not trade,’ Scientific American Earth 3.0 18:5, December 2008: 20-21
[15] A seminal definition came from ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier and the NGO Accion Ecologica in Quito, Ecuador: “ecological debt is the debt accumulated by Northern, industrial countries toward Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases, from the industrial countries.” How much is the ecological debt the North owes the South already? Not even including the coming damage from climate change, a team from the University of California at Berkeley estimated partial costs of $18 trillion: Srinivasan, U., S.Carey, E.Hallstein, P.Higgins, A.Ker, L.Koteen, A.Smith, R.Watson, J.Harte and R.Norgaard (2008), ‘The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, 5, http://www.pnas.org/content/105/5/1768. The African Union estimates that at least $67 billion per year should be paid as ecological debt by 2020. See J. McLure, ‘Ethiopian Leader chosen to Represent Africa at Climate Summit,’ Addis Ababa, 1 September.
[16] Geoffrey Lean, ‘Rising Seas, Caused by Global Warming, have for the First Time Washed an Inhabited island off the Face of the Earth’, The Independent, June 5, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/disappearing-world-global-warming-claims-tropical-island-429764.html, last accessed October 11, 2009
[17] R.K. Pachauri, ‘Summary of Testimony provided to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming,’ US Congress, Washington DC, 2008, globalwarming.house.gov/tools/assets/files/0342.pdf. Moreover, the Climate Change Vulnerability Index, calculated in 2009 ‘from dozens of variables measuring the capacity of a country to cope with the consequences of global warming’, listed 22 African countries out of 28 across the world at ‘extreme risk’, whereas the United States is near the bottom of the world rankings of countries at risk even though it is the leading per capita contributor to climate change. Agence France Press, ‘Albania to Zimbabwe: The Climate Change Risk List’, September 2, 2009.
[18] David Fogarty, Reuters, ‘Indonesia Forest Projects Target 13 mln CO2 Offset,’ July 21 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSP436960, last accessed October 11, 2009
[19] Terry Macalister, ‘Britain’s big polluters accused of abusing EU’s carbon trading scheme’ January 27, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/27/industry-abusing-ets-carbon-trading, last accessed October 11, 2009.
[20] See the video by Environmental Protection Agency officials Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams, The Huge Mistake, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLHCvYj0kzk, 2009. The EPA tried to suppress the video in November 2009.
[21] The solutions are, as Climate Justice Action – the group organizing popular protests at Copenhagen – puts it:
• leaving fossil fuels in the ground;
• reasserting peoples’ and community control over production;
• relocalising food production;
• massively reducing overconsumption, particularly in the North;
• respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights; and
• recognising the ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of the South and making reparations.
[22] For eloquent voices of the Global South, listen to Climate Justice Now!, Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, the Peoples Climate Justice Movement and a wide range of other organizations. The most sophisticated voices believe that petroleum/mineral extraction, cash cropping the land (especially for biofuels), export-led growth and other old-fashioned strategies should be dispensed with in the search for a more thoughtful, ecological, feminist, race-conscious, indigenous-oriented development.
[23] I know that reducing carbon through the Clean Air Act isn’t going to be simple and won’t bring us to a national or global cap by itself; still, it is a useful approach to reducing carbon emissions that is being underutilized, and that could quickly be applied to several thousand emissions point sources to force major cuts right away. Following a lawsuit decided by the US Supreme Court, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an ‘endangerment finding’ in April 2009 which allows the agency to mandate emissions reductions without legislation. The EPA made the finding because as a ‘pollutant’, six greenhouse gases could be shown to be responsible for severe damage, including an increased risk of droughts and floods, sea level rise, more intense storms and heatwaves, and harm to water supplies, agriculture and wildlife. In addition, the EPA drew its mandate from a 2007 report by former US generals and admirals claiming that that climate change was a ‘national security challenge.’ The EPA now can regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson began to stand up for strong regulation of the largest greenhouse gas emitters despite opposition from industry, but more pressure is needed. See U.S. Congressional Budget Office, ‘Policy Options for Reducing CO2 Emissions,’ February 2008, online at: www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/89xx/doc8934/02-12-Carbon.pdf. Richard Black, ‘Obama to regulate “pollutant” CO2’, April 17, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8004975.stm; Jay Austin, ‘Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency: global warming, standing and the US Supreme Court’, Review of European Community & International Environmental Law 16:3 (2007) 368-371.
[24] ClimateSOS is one of the main groups fighting against the kind of legislation – such as sponsored by Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer in 2009 - that sets back the climate justice cause. For an explanation of the broader problems in power relations, see James Hansen, ‘G8 Failure Reflects US Failure on Climate Change’, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/10-8, last accessed October 11, 2009.
[25] See http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/ for more information on how communities are beginning to envision a post-carbon-based society.
[26] Tina Seeley, ‘US fossil fuel subsidy twice that of renewables’, Bloomberg News, 18 September, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a2ygdsSj.KQI, last accessed October 11 2009.
[27] Citizen action against unreasonable fossil fuel extraction is intensifying. The Nigeria-based network Oilwatch and some of its key members – such as Accion Ecologica and allied indigenous groups in Ecuador, Environmental Rights Action in the Niger Delta (in the tradition of Ken Saro-Wiwa), groundWork and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance in South Africa, and Native Canadians and environmentalists in Alberta fighting tar sands extraction – have a set of slogans: ‘Keep the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sand in the land.’ The sentiment is also endorsed by Rising Tide (especially in Australia and the UK), Climate Camp, and US activists fighting mountaintop coal, coal electricity generators and oil extraction in places as diverse as West Virginia, Washington DC, California and Alaska.
[28] Hank Hayes, ‘Boucher seeks Change in Cap-and-Trade’, Times News, August 29 2009, http://www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=9016458, last accessed October 11, 2009.
Naomi Klein: Fate of Planet Rests on Mass Movement for Climate Justice
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday night, Shock Doctrine author and journalist Naomi Klein addressed a packed hall at a panel on ecological debt and climate justice.
NAOMI KLEIN: Over at the Bella Center, a particular model of dealing with climate change is dying. It is revealing itself before the world as nothing more than a final scramble for the remaining resources of a planet in peril. That’s what’s going on at the Bella Center. And when you’re in there, you can feel it. It feels really ugly.
There was a protest yesterday of people from Tuvalu, and they were making themselves visible. They were—I see all you nodding, because it’s been very odd in there. They were talking about the absence of their future, the disappearance of their country, which is a form of genocide. It meets the UN definition of genocide, which is the acts that lead to the disappearance of a people. And as they were staging this protest, you watched people in business suits file by and look at their shoes and try not to meet their eyes, in the way that you see people in the streets avert their eyes in the face of a homeless person. But this was a country that was disappearing. And that’s what it feels like over there.
Here, another model is finding its voice. And this is a historic gathering. It is a historic gathering, because Jubilee South has been organizing these types of gatherings in the South. There was a climate debt tribunal in Bangkok during the negotiations. This discussion has been happening. But I don’t think there’s ever been an event this large in the Global North.
We are seeing a redefinition of environmentalism, which has always been a bit of a kind of, sort of touchy-feely movement here in the North. “We’re all in it together. Let’s hold hands,” right? There’s nothing wrong with holding hands, but the fact is, we’re not all in it together in the same way. There is an inverse relationship between the people who created the problem and where the effects of those problems are being felt. There’s an inverse relationship between who created the problem and who can afford to save themselves from the problem, and it isn’t only in the Global South. Think about New Orleans. Right? It’s also the South in the North. The people who had resources could drive out of the disaster zone; the people who depended on the state were left on their roofs, a kind of a climate apartheid, in the United States.
So we have this discussion of reparations. In the United States, when you talk about reparations, it’s not about the stealing of resources as much as it is about the stealing of people. So this movement that we are talking about today is part of that movement, as well. In fact, at a conference in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, the Conference on Racism, the issue of ecological debt was one of the issues on the agenda, but so was reparations for slavery. And I think there are some people here from N’COBRA from the United States, which is the national coalition calling for reparations for slavery. And they deserve to be acknowledged, because this movement is building on their work, as well.
I want to tell a little story about how—what we’re up against in terms of reparations. I’ll try to be brief. The other people, of course, who are owed reparations in the Global North are First Nations people, or indigenous people, whose land has been stolen. And I had this experience a few years ago. It was 2004. I remember because it was a presidential election in the United States, and I was in New York for protests against the Republican convention, where George Bush was being reelected. And a couple of First Nations activists from Canada were also in town for those protests.
And as part of that, they—we went on a side mission to Moody’s. Moody’s is, as you know, a credit agency. It gives countries their credit ratings. And I was with the very powerful First Nations spokesperson for the Haida, named Gujao, and Arthur Manuel, who is a former chief for the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation in British Columbia. And Arthur had decided that one way to get Canada to acknowledge the debts that it owed to First Nations people was to meet with the credit agencies that give Canada its triple-A credit rating, which is the highest possible credit rating, and explain to Moody’s that actually Canada carries a huge unpaid debt in the form of the lands that it stole, without treaties, from First Nations peoples. So Arthur managed to get a meeting between him and Gujao—and they let me tag along—with the person at Moody’s who issues Canada’s credit rating. So we went on up to like the thirty-fifth floor, and we got the meeting with this guy and one of his colleagues, who was from Argentina and fell asleep in the meeting.
But what was interesting—so Arthur and Gujao presented all the documents, the writs, the legal rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada, that proved their case that this land was stolen and that they were owed billions in unpaid—in unpaid debts. And they said, “Canada is not a great place to do investment, because what if we called in these debts?” And it was very interesting, because the guy from Moody’s nodded, and he said, “You’re right. We’ve been following these court rulings, but we have decided that you are not going to collect on these debts. So it is not affecting our credit rating.”
And that’s a very important thing for us to remember, because debt is political. Right? You can make your argument. And when we make these arguments, frankly, no one even bothers arguing with us, because it’s so obvious. The science is there. The legal treaties are there. But really what they’re saying is, “You and what army? How are you going to get this money out of us? You are not powerful enough to get the money out of us.” And this is where social movements come in, because, you know, we can talk as much as we want about debt, and we can talk as much as we want about reparations, but they’re going to laugh at us, until there is some movement muscle behind those concerns, behind those demands. And that’s our task.
Now, I think there’s all kinds of things we can do. You know, as the only person from a debtor nation on this panel, I have to acknowledge that Canada, boy, we owe a lot. We are the climate criminal of all climate criminals here in Copenhagen, because we signed the Kyoto Protocol, unlike the United States. They didn’t sign. Canada, we signed, so we are actively breaking a legally binding agreement when we increase emissions by 26 percent. Now, we know when people break their WTO commitments, they sure as hell hear about it. We know when Bolivia decided that they didn’t want Bechtel to steal their water and make it illegal to collect rainwater and threw Bechtel out, that they were sued by Bechtel for $26 million for breaking a contract. What happens when Canada breaks its contract with the world, with Kyoto? So we need to start putting pressure on governments that say that they do care about these issues to do things like launch trade retaliation, kick Canada out of the Commonwealth, things like that. There has to be some muscle. There has to be some consequences. And so, these ideas are on the table.
We can’t get to all of that right away, but I just want to talk a little bit about what we can do this week. Angelica asked us to make our voices heard, and I think we really do need to do that. We need to really show the face of this counter-movement here before this summit is done.
I said at the opening of Klimaforum that there’s a place for rage and there’s a place for civil disobedience. I was not saying, as some news reports claimed, that Copenhagen should be trashed. I really don’t think so. I think that’s a very bad idea. And I’m going to say that explicitly, even though people are always telling me, “Don’t say it’s bad. Don’t say it’s bad.” Listen, the reason why it’s bad is precisely because of what we’re seeing here. This conversation that has started here about the real face of environmentalism, as a class war that is being waged by the rich against the poor, has never happened before. There has never been global media attention on this discussion. If we allow the media to change the discussion into broken windows in Copenhagen—which is the boringest discussion in the world, OK?—we have truly failed.
But I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be direct action. There should be direct action. And I want to call on all of you to support, participate in the terrific action that is being designed for December 16th. There is going to be a march to the Bella Center. And hopefully there’s going to be a march out of the Bella Center. And it’s an opportunity for the groups that are inside the Bella Center who are so frustrated, who want to say no to all of these market mechanisms, who know that there isn’t going to be a deal that is actually going to solve the climate crisis, to not just issue a press release after the fact to say, “Actually, we really don’t like this,” but to go out, sit in the streets with the people who have come to the Bella Center, and make our voices heard together.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, and also tenth anniversary edition of her No Logo is just out. She was speaking at the Klimaforum. She’s also blogging from Copenhagen at thenation.com.
