Louis Proyect wrote:
Jim Devine wrote:
that's true.
so where will the next bubble be?
The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the
housing bubble collapse.
For some time I've been predicting a new burst of craziness in
energy-related derivatives, especially the exceptionally funky brand new
market in the privatisation of the air known as carbon trading. Lots of
subsidies to prime that pump.
***
GreenLeft Weekly this week:
From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change
by Patrick Bond
In 1997 at Kyoto, Al Gore bamboozled negotiators into adopting carbon
trading as a central climate strategy in exchange for Washington's
support -- which never materialized.
Likewise last month's Kyoto Conference of Parties in Bali allowed the
"everyone v. the USA" debate to obscure much more durable problems.
Even many environmentalists and well-meaning citizens think that
building on Kyoto is the correct strategy for post-Bali negotiations.
These include the most powerful lobby from civil society, the Climate
Action Network of NGOs and corporate-funded environmental groups
including the IUCN, Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Federation, and the
Environmental Defense Fund.
"Fixing a market problem (pollution) with a market solution" is still a
mantra to some light-greens, including some in Australia's Green Party
whom I met during a visit last October, notwithstanding a year's worth
of scandalous reports from practitioners and the press.
A year ago, Citigroup's Peter Atherton confessed in a PowerPoint
presentation that the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS)
had "done nothing to curb emissions" and acted as "a highly regressive
tax falling mostly on poor people."
On whether policy goals were achieved, he admitted: "Prices up,
emissions up, profits up . . . so, not really. Who wins and loses? All
generation-based utilities -- winners. Coal and nuclear-based
generators -- biggest winners. Hedge funds and energy traders -- even
bigger winners. Losers . . . ahem . . . Consumers!"
The Wall Street Journal confirmed last March that emissions trading
"would make money for some very large corporations, but don't believe
for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming." The
paper termed the carbon trade "old-fashioned rent-seeking . . . making
money by gaming the regulatory process."
Speaking to Channel Four news last March, the European Commissioner for
Energy offered this verdict on the ETS: "A failure."
Yvo de Boer, the sanguine head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, warned of "the possibility that the market could
collapse altogether." In April 2006, the price of carbon in Europe's
market fell by half overnight due to authorities' mismanagement of the ETS.
But not just in Europe. According to Newsweek magazine's investigation
of Third World carbon trading (through the Clean Development Mechanism)
last March, "It isn't working . . . [and represents] a grossly
inefficient way of cutting emissions in the developing world."
The magazine called the trade "a shell game" which has transferred "$3
billion to some of the worst carbon polluters in the developing world."
After an exhaustive series on problems associated with carbon trading
and offsets, the Financial Times concluded they were merely a "carbon
'smokescreen.'"
In June, the Guardian newspaper headlined its investigation with equal
scorn: "Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved. . . .
Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming. . . . The
inconvenient truth about the carbon offset industry."
Meanwhile the Big Green groups' professionalism and reasonableness -- or
simple cronyism (since key personnel from CAN now work in the industry)
-- have made them utterly useless as watchdogs on the carbon trade.
So then who do we turn to?
The Bali conference featured an alternative movement-building component
outside the formal proceedings: a Climate Justice Now! coalition made up
of Carbon Trade Watch (the Transnational Institute); the Center for
Environmental Concerns; Focus on the Global South; the Freedom from Debt
Coalition, Philippines; Friends of the Earth International; Women for
Climate Justice; the Global Forest Coalition; the Global Justice Ecology
Project; the International Forum on Globalization; the Kalikasan-Peoples
Network for the Environment; La Vía Campesina; the Durban Group for
Climate Justice; Oilwatch; Pacific Indigenous Peoples Environment
Coalition; Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (Institute for Policy
Studies); the Indigenous Environmental Network; Third World Network;
Indonesia Civil Society Organizations Forum on Climate Justice; and the
World Rainforest Movement.
The coalition criticized carbon trading and called for genuine
solutions: "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."
In October 2004, the Durban Group was founded to tackle the problems in
the carbon trade, warning of all the dangers above, especially Shiva's
point that the transfer of the right to pollute is a multitrillion
dollar giveaway to the people who caused the bulk of the climate problems.
But establishment figures will continue confusing matters. At the Bali
meeting, a key Third World leader was South African environment minister
Marthinus van Schalkwyk -- successor to FW de Klerk as leader of the
National Party after serving the apartheid police as a spy against
fellow students (he later folded the NP into the ruling African National
Congress and was rewarded with a do-little ministry). His strategy for
bringing the US into the fold came at the price of evacuating any
emissions target and accountability mechanism in the official
declaration and reinforcing the carbon trade.
Van Schalkwyk's leadership is a travesty, for he has said nothing about
South Africa's own $20 billion in new investments -- partly privatized
through the US multinational AES -- in cheap coal-fired electricity
generation for the sake mainly of large corporations. And he endorses
nuclear energy expansion.
SA already has an emissions output per person per unit of GDP twenty
times worse than the US, and van Schalkwyk's official carbon trading
policy argues that it is primarily a "commercial opportunity."
This is true only if there is no resistance to this strategy. In Durban,
Sajida Khan fought carbon trading before her death by cancer caused by
an apartheid-era landfill next door -- SA's Clean Development Mechanism
pilot for methane-extraction.
In contrast to carbon trading, what is reverberating within grassroots,
coalface, and fenceline struggles in many parts of the world is a very
different strategy and demand by civil society activists: leave the oil
in the soil, the resources in the ground.
This call was first made as a climate strategy in 1997 in Kyoto by the
group OilWatch when it was based in Quito, Ecuador. Heroic activists
from Accion Ecologia took on the struggle to halt exploitation of oil in
part of the Yasuni National Park. This led President Rafael Correa to
declare in mid-2007 that the North should pay Ecuador roughly $5 billion
in compensation for its commitment to permanently forego exploitation of
Yasuni (albeit with concern amongst indigenous people about nearby oil
extraction especially by the voracious Brazilian firm Petrobas).
A year ago 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. For example, women community activists regularly disrupted
production at oil extraction sites with sit-ins in which, showing
maximum disrespect for the petro multinationals, they removed their
clothing.
In my own neighborhood, which includes two of Africa's largest oil
refineries, the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance has
been mobilizing against corporate and municipal environmental crime,
including three major explosions and fires since September and a massive
fish kill over Christmas from irresponsible dumping and inadequate state
surveillance of big industries in Durban's harbor, the busiest in Africa.
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 at a conference last October, 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.
Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George
Monbiot, so it was revealing that last month, 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."
Canada is another Northern site where activists are working to leave the
oil in the soil. In an Edmonton conference last November, the
University of Alberta's Parkland Institute and its allies argued for no
further development of tar sand deposits (which require intensive sand
heating -- hence vast fossil fuel inputs -- so oil can be extracted, and
which devastate local water, fisheries and air quality).
Institute director Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for
exceptionally strict limits on the use of water and greenhouse gas
emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic land reclamation plans and
financial deposits; 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).
I have raised 'leave the oil in the soil' as a strategy in many places
I've visited over the past two years, enthusiastically commenting on the
moral, political, economic, and ecological merits. 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: with dear
comrades in petro-socialist Venezuela.
Never mind, there are a great many 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, disincentivizing political corruption,
and workforce health and safety.
The highest-stake cases here in South Africa at present are against
Anglo American and LonPlats in the vast Limpopo Province platinum
fields, and against Australia's Mineral Resources Commodities which is
searching for titanium and other minerals in the Wild Coast dunes
(where, ironically, the film Blood Diamond was shot).
In these sites, tough communities are resisting the multinational
corporations. But they will need vigorous solidarity, because corporate
extraction of these resources is extremely costly in terms of local land
use, peasant displacement, water extraction, energy consumption, profit
outflows and political corruption.
Still, the awareness that local activists are generating in these
campaigns makes us all more conscious of how damaging bogus strategies
like carbon trading can be, in contrast with a genuine project to change
the world.
Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal in Durban (www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs) and can be reached at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] His books include Climate Change, Carbon Trading and
Civil Society: Negative Returns on South African Investments.
