the new markets 1: selling our
carbon
As the Cambridge University forest
historian Oliver Rackham quips, to tell
people to plant trees to help the climate
is
“like telling them to drink more
water to keep down rising
sea-levels.”
Australian scholars Peter Drahos and
John Braithwaite point out that:
“Lobbying in relation to property
rights should take place under conditions
of democratic bargaining. Democratic
bargaining matters crucially to the
definition of property rights because of
the consequences of property rules for all
individuals within a society. Property
rights confer authority over resources.
When authority is granted to the few over
resources on which the many depend, the few
gain power over the goals of the
many.”
the carbon market: “nature on sale” all
over again
by Larry Lohmann, The Cornerhouse
Nature, food, land, forests, water,
biodiversity, and genes are not any more
“natural” than they are “human”. To try to
make any of them into a commodity is to
reorganize society. It is to create new
kinds of power and knowledge and put them
in fewer and different hands.
Putting “nature” on sale is a
complicated game. Commodification requires
police. It requires fences, accountants and
patents. It requires new laws and lots of
lawyers. It requires schools and public
relations. It requires new state
institutions and new techniques. It
requires subsidies. No market has ever been
created or sustained without a lot of hard
work by institutions, which economists have
wrongly taught us to believe are “outside”
the market.
Nowhere does “putting nature on sale”
cause such complications as in the case of
climate. Here, as with biodiversity, an
emerging environmental disaster has led to
new attempts to commodify that environment.
Business, the state and a lot of expert
institutions are instinctively trying to
evade a crisis they have helped create
using the tools that created it. But in the
climate case this approach is, if anything,
even more pathological, stupid, and
damaging.
climate and carbon
The climate change crisis is an example
of a familiar social problem – the
overflowing waste dump. For over 150 years,
industrial societies have been transferring
fossil carbon from underground deposits of
coal, oil and gas, via the combustion
chamber, to a more active and rapidly
circulating carbon pool, or “dump”, above
ground.
Once carbon is in the aboveground
system, you can’t get it back underground
into fossil fuel or carbonate deposits for
a very long time. The capacity of the
aboveground “dump” as a whole to absorb
carbon from underground is limited and
perhaps half of the fossil carbon
continually being added to the aboveground
pool of carbon is building up in the
atmosphere. The consequence is global
warming and rising sea levels, with
potentially disastrous results for our
planet.
Industrialized societies alone currently
use far more of the absorptive capacity of
the biosphere and atmosphere in which to
stow their carbon emissions than is
globally “available”. Were the global
North’s use of aboveground carbon
“dump”space to be held constant, no space
would be left for others to use, even for
activities which do not involve transfer of
carbon from fossil stocks (such as
breathing).
The thinking person’s solution to this
problem is to slow or halt the production
of the substance that winds up in the dump.
Reduce the dangers of dumped DDT or
chlorofluorocarbons or polyvinyl chloride?
Stop producing them. Reduce the dangers of
climate change? Stop taking fossil fuels
out of the ground.
Yet the elites most dependent on
hydrocarbons don’t see things that way.
They are not inclined to stop producing the
stuff filling up the dumps or to take up
new technologies which could invade their
current core markets. Instead of
restricting and equalizing the use of the
aboveground carbon dump, world elites,
particularly in the North, have been
working, since the 1990s, to turn it into a
privately owned asset. Bit by bit, starting
with voluntary carbon markets and the Kyoto
Protocol, international climate agreements
have become a charter for commodification.
The carbon-absorbing capacity of the
world’s air, oceans, soil and vegetation is
being put on sale.
property giveaways
The Kyoto Protocol currently represents
the main thrust of commodification of the
world’s carbon-cycling capacity and is
divided into two parts. Under the first
part, the United Nations would distribute
billions of dollars’worth of rights to
(over)use existing carbon dumps to 38
industrialized nations who already use them
the most, permitting them to sell portions
of what they don’t use. The Protocol is
intended to bind these countries to
reducing their emissions by an average of
about five per cent below 1990 levels by
2008-2012, although due to various
loopholes these reductions will not be
achieved even if the Protocol is
implemented as planned. The governments of
most of the 38 nations (although not that
of the US), in turn, are quietly
distributing large quantities of their
entitlements to dump space gratis to
hundreds of private companies in heavy
industrial sectors such as power
generation, steel, cement, chemicals and
pulp and paper. Ultimately, the
distribution of carbon allowances
constitutes one of the largest, if not the
largest, projects for creation and
regressive distribution of property rights
in human history.
The second part of the Kyoto Protocol
attempts to open up, create property rights
in, and market new, speculative, cheaper
types of carbon dump. The aim is to help
industrialized countries avoid restrictions
on, or democratization of, their use of
existing dumps. As carbon allowances
awarded to Northern industry become scarcer
and more expensive over time, those sectors
most in need of them will be able to buy an
alternative, cut-rate supply from a new
production line. Among those active in
trying to create this market in new dumps,
are oil companies, heavy industries,
national research establishments,
universities, think tanks, carbon brokers,
consultancies, forestry industries, United
Nations agencies, the World Bank, marketing
firms and international business lobby
groups.
One new type of carbon dump is to be
carved out of land, forests, soils, water
and even parts of the oceans. Fast-growing
eucalyptus monocultures, for example, may
be established or financed on cheap land in
the South and the carbon they
“sequester”then sold. The idea is that
these trees are “new” and thus make up for
the fossil carbon, which continues to be
pumped out of the ground. Many such “carbon
sink”projects have already been set up in
countries ranging from Brazil and Uganda to
India and the UK.
There are, of course, a few problems
with this project of constructing new
carbon dumps in the biosphere. First, in
addition to licensing continued overuse and
unequal use of the existing carbon dump,
the attempt to build new biospheric dumps
inevitably means taking over or using
people’s land, water, forests, air and
communities. The result is, inevitably,
local resistance as has already been
experienced in many countries, in both rich
and poor areas of the world.
dumping science
A second difficulty with the attempt to
build new carbon dumps in the biosphere is
that they can’t be verified to be working.
For one thing, scientists are radically
uncertain about the fate of carbon dumped
in the biosphere. In fact, scientists can’t
even know in advance all the factors
related to biotic carbon that will affect
climate, and all the nonlinear or
discontinuous ways they may interact,
making the problem even worse than mere
uncertainty. The paths carbon takes above
ground are not only much less stable but
also, more importantly, much less
predictable, than the paths taken by fossil
carbon left under the ground.
Moreover, no matter how much additional
biospheric carbon could be cultivated, it
could never be of an order of magnitude
remotely comparable to what would be
required to “fix” the emissions from
remaining unmined fossil fuels. As the
Cambridge University forest historian
Oliver Rackham quips, to tell people to
plant trees to help the climate is “like
telling them to drink more water to keep
down rising sea-levels.”
In short, a verifiable climatic
equivalence between fossil carbon and
biotic carbon cannot be established,
rendering the claims of the Kyoto Protocol
and firms such as Future Forests nonsense.
Planting trees cannot be proved to make
fossil fuel burning “carbon-neutral”.
away from the
market
An important part of the formulation of
the Kyoto Protocol has been the market bias
of many of the other actors who are
attempting to turn the world’s
carboncycling capacity into a commodity:
international financial institutions,
consultants, lawyers, traders, technocrats
and some large NGOs. Many such technically
sophisticated people are unlikely even to
consider more constructive and democratic
approaches unless public pressure on them
increases.
constructive ways
forward:
1. Encourage discussion and negotiation
about all the different possible ways of
dividing up existing carbon dump space
equally, including ones that do not involve
tradable private property.
2. Work towards keeping remaining fossil
fuels in the ground, for example by
-
Supporting and linking existing
movements, setting their local areas off
limits to mining, drilling, power
production, etc.
-
Supporting energy efficiency,
renewables, non-fossil-fuelled
technologies and responsible
tree-planting, but without trading them
for continued fossil fuel
extraction.
-
Regulation, taxation and other
measures that do not start with an
assumption that corporations already own
the world’s carbon-cycling capacity.
That will require ensuring that the
politics of climate – like the politics of
biodiversity, water, genes, ideas, food,
health and land – is not confined to back
rooms occupied by politicians and experts
but is brought into the light of day. In a
recent book on intellectual property,
Australian scholars Peter Drahos and John
Braithwaite point out that:
“Lobbying in relation to property rights
should take place under conditions of
democratic bargaining. Democratic
bargaining matters crucially to the
definition of property rights because of
the consequences of property rules for all
individuals within a society. Property
rights confer authority over resources.
When authority is granted to the few over
resources on which the many depend, the few
gain power over the goals of the many.”
more information
Sinks Watch
Carbon Trade Watch
CDM Watch
The Cornerhouse
