Green capitalism and democracy
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of three ‘flexible mechanisms’ that allows signatories of the Kyoto Protocol (all developed countries) to purchase ‘credits’ which they can then ’spend’ by investing in clean energy projects in the developing world.
On April 15th last month, the CDM approved its 1,000th project. Analysis and disclosure of its impacts is of critical importance, argued Patrick McCully in the Guardian on Wednesday, because a system intended to help reduce CO2 is instead supporting polluting and often corrupt programmes to benefit from huge pots of money.
According to McCully,
evidence is accumulating that it is increasing greenhouse gas emissions behind the guise of promoting sustainable development. The misguided mechanism is handing out billions of dollars to chemical, coal and oil corporations and the developers of destructive dams - in many cases for projects they would have built anyway.
Green Capitalism
Sociologists of the Ecological Modernization school would call emissions trading a mechanism of ‘green capitalism’, a paradigm of capitalism where “production processes are increasingly constructed using ecological criteria” (Mol and Sonnenfield, 2000: 4). As referenced by Constance Lever-Tracy in the latest issue of Current Sociology, this school was influenced by Huber’s arguments in the 1980s “that a green capitalism was both possible and desirable” (Lever-Tracy 2008: 458).
But green capitalism is failing the environment. And its mechanisms are receiving limited coverage in the media to help the public to make informed judgements on important environmental issues. Is the paucity of media coverage contributing to a lack of democratically accountability?
According to research conducted by Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool, there were just 23 stories carrying ‘emissions trading’ or similar in their headlines in the mainstream British press between Oct 2000 and Dec 2006. It has increased since, but emissions trading has still to break through as a key mainstream issue within the climate debate.
Pretence Capitalism
Much of the earlier coverage of emissions trading did not reflect well on the schemes, but as Gavin argues, “this is not necessarily a case of unjustified bias” for the schemes have definitely come under attack throughout their time of existence. Early critics have been environmental activists and NGOs; for example Patricia Granda exposed how projects to plant forests in Ecuador, paid for ot offset a new Dutch coal-fired power plant, were decimating the land and local communities. Patrick Mcully works for internationalrivers.org, a programme to help protect the world’s rivers from ‘destructive dams and climate change scams’.
Quoted by Gavin, the journalist Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, describes emissions trading as:
the ugly stepchild of the new mania to replace regulation with schemes that pose as ‘market’ solutions…It provides a pretence of action to the public while giving winking assurance to industry that the status quo is not disturbed. (Observer, 17/7/05).
Palast’s view is one of incredulity, not so much as to the business lobby, who are expected to look for market mechanisms to get them out of the climate mess, but with the environmentalists who backed the legislation. Why should even climate-aware groups (the EU, the British Government, Greenpeace etc) support the implementation of such mechanisms, brought into existence by the document we all understand as the bedrock of international action on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, when they are easy means by which corporations and governments can dodge their reduction targets?
It is not just journalists investigating the market trading systems. Legal academics are also taking an interest, such as David Driesen in the Indiana Law Journal, who in a forthcoming article sees the emissions trading schemes as a shotgun wedding between sustainable development and market liberalism. Generally looking at two different types of governance (markets = short-term economic, sustainable development = long-term and social), he argues that:
Market actors fail to take positive spillovers, e.g. benefits accruing to competitors and thence to future generations, into account in making technological choices. Because of this failure to take long-term economic development into account, the international trading markets have contributed far less to sustainable energy development than more targeted programs.
I’m wholeheartedly with both Driesen and Palast here. A close (political and textual) analysis of the Kyoto Protocol shows that it is a document of an exploitative capitalism, albeit green capitalism, that provides CO2 producers with an imperfectly administered mechanism to buy their way out of actually reducing emissions. As McCully argues,
Off-the-record, industry insiders will admit that deceitful claims in CDM applications are standard practice. The carbon trading industry lobby group, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), has stated that proving the intent of developers applying for the CDM “is an almost impossible task”. Industry representatives have complained that “good storytellers” can get a project approved, “while bad storytellers may fail even if the project is really additional”.
No US, no mechanism
The truth is, the Kyoto flexible mechanisms added to the watering down of the original document. As argued by Begg (2002) and Dessai and Schipper (2003) in the journal Global Environmental change, the “environmental integrity” of the Kyoto Protocol “has been wrought at a price” (Begg, 2003). The negotiations, in particular the CDM, was a method of appeasement to the US negotiators in an effort to get the States to sign up to Kyoto. That failed as the American refuseniks of Bush and his oil entourage went their own voluntary way to continue emitting. And now profit-oriented corporations are exploiting the schemes.
As McCully references, three-quarters of the projects that have successfully applied for CERs were already under production or finished by the time they applied. Yet the CERs can only be given to ‘additional’ programmes; i.e. programmes that would provide additional CO2 savings to projects that would have gone ahead anyway. It is this ‘additionality’ that is proving so difficult to police, both because of corrupt manipulation and broader environmental concerns. Amazingly, the need to report on environmental impacts of projects is only optional, compared to the economic impacts of projects, which are mandatory.
In the next round of discussions, the texts and legislation, and therefore the market systems, that we choose to replace Kyoto must consider these issues and reform or replace the current, flawed system.
References
Begg, K. (2002) Implementing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change: environmental integrity, sinks and mechanisms. Global Environmental Change 12, 331-336.
Dessai, S., & Schipper, L. (2003) The Marrakech Accords to the Kyoto Protocol: analysis and future prospects. Global Environmental Change 13, 149-153.
Gavin, N. (fortchoming) Global Warming and Peak Oil in the British Media: The Limits of Policy Development. Paper given at Energy Security in Europe conference, Lund University, Sweden, September 2007.
Lever-Tracy, C. (2008) Climate Change and Sociology. Current Sociology. 56, 445-466.
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May 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
[...] shifting from specialist to mainstream, and having more chance of pushing the issue–which I began following about six or seven years ago, through my work with OneWorld and then ID21–into public [...]