Welcome to Durban (excerpt from new book, 'Durban’s Climate Gamble')

Links
Nov. 24, 2011

The following is an excerpt from a new book, Durban’s Climate Gamble: Playing the Carbon Markets, Betting the Earth, launched on November 23, 2011, ahead of the November 28–December 9 COP17 climate change talks by UNISA Press.

* * *

By Patrick Bond, Durban

Durban’s Climate Gamble is devoted to exploring two interlocking, overlapping scales of political ecology: local eco-social conditions and environmental justice campaigning in Durban, South Africa and climate justice advocacy against market-based “false solutions” at the global scale. Their fusion at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) links up myriad battles over ecosystems that mainly revolve around “neoliberalised nature”.

For example, the pricing of socio-ecological services has been extreme when applied to carbon sequestration and Durban is a leading site. More generally, the tendency to commodify nature has become the defining philosophical stance behind global environmental governance, with inevitable conflicts of which Durban’s are emblematic. For example, “cost-reflective” (unsubsidised) pricing of South African electricity at a time of increased coal-fired power plant construction has generated an intense battle over access to energy in Durban’s informal settlements where illegal connections are rife.

The struggle over the price of water and sanitation has led to South Africa’s famous water wars. The “green economy” (often interpreted as multinational corporate promotion of biofuels and geoengineering) and “Payment for Environmental Services” are set to become conventional wisdom at the Rio+20 summit in mid-2012, but not to ensure that the North’s ecological debt to the South is properly acknowledged, but rather to establish a range of financialised investment options that securitise “natural capital”.

Read more HERE.

Carbon Trading: An Ecosocialist Critique

Climate and Capitalism
March 23, 2008

Despite its popularity among advocates of market solutions to global warming, carbon trading cannot produce the quantitative and qualitative changes that the world needs

Daniel Tanuro is the ecological correspondent of La Gauche, newspaper of the Belgian Socialist Workers Party. This is the text of his talk at the Conference on the future of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading in the EU organized by the Slovenski E-forum, Focus and the National Council of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, on March 21, 2008

Fundamental Inadequacies of Carbon Trading for the Struggle Against Climate Change

By Daniel Tanuro

This contribution identifies 5 fundamental reasons why carbon trading is inadequate for the struggle against Climate Change. It focuses in particular on the European Emission Trading System (EU-ETS) but most of the conclusions are generally applicable.

1. Carbon trading is a source of windfall profits for polluting sectors. They invest little or none of that profit in low carbon technologies, and instead try to slow or delay the implementation of climate policy.

The over-allocation of quotas in the phase 1 of the EU-ETS provided the steel sector a windfall profit of 480 million Euros at the end of 2005. In the same period, RWE, a German utility, made a huge profit of 1.8 billion Euros. Even the oil businesses made windfall profits: Esso (£10 million), BP (£17.9 million), Shell (£20.7 million).

Trading on Thin Air

New Feature Documentary Just Released Nationwide on Hulu and Rodgers Cable in Canada.

Trading on Thin Air explains the methods used by the financial oligarchy in the past to extract the wealth of the nation and shows how the same strategy is being used today to subvert a movement for conservation and sustainability and harness it in order to create the next big bubble.

From huge investments to influence public opinion, to the lobbying of government, the film shows that environmental protection is not truly the goal, but the institution of a system that will extract a de facto tax on most human activities, avoid regulation of industries and artificially inflate the money supply by creating money out of ….. Thin air.

The fact that business has embraced the publics' interest in greening the economy is great. Really reducing their pollution of the environment would be wonderful. But if all they are up to is finding a new way to make a buck, setting up another system to self regulate, like they did on Wall Street with the real estate bubble, well then, it's still just business as usual.

Trailer below.


Untitled from The site on Vimeo.

Green schemes are ‘wide open to major corruption’

Climate Connections
May 2, 2011

Note: Yet another reason why Capitalism cannot be used to stop the problems it has historically caused. Fortunately the article also makes mention of the corruption in our so-called “developed” countries. Billions in giveaways to corporations every year. Bogus climate mitigation schemes designed first and foremost to enhance corporate profits. Democracy? Right. System change any0ne?

–The GJEP Team

Millions of pounds in grants and aid are being siphoned off by fraudsters, warns report By David Connett and Chris Stevenson Independent (UK), Sunday, 1 May 2011

Corruption among underresourced forest guards in Kenya has led to deforestation. The Western Mau forest, north-east of Nairobi, was densely wooded 40 years ago.

EU Emissions Trading System: failing at the third attempt

Corporate Europe Observatory
7 April 2011

Emissions trading is the European Union’s flagship measure for tackling climate change, and it is failing badly. In theory it provides a cheap and efficient means to limit greenhouse gas reductions within an ever-tightening cap, but in practice it has rewarded major polluters with windfall profits, while undermining efforts to reduce pollution and achieve a more equitable and sustainable economy. The third phase of the scheme, beginning in 2013, is supposed to rectify the “teething problems” that have led to the failures to date.

This joint briefing from Carbon Trade Watch and Corporate Europe Observatory shows that:

- The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) has failed to reduce emissions. Companies have consistently received generous allocations of permits to pollute, meaning they have no obligation to cut their carbon dioxide emissions. A surplus of around 970 million of these allowances from the second phase of the scheme (2008-2012), which can be used in the third phase, means that polluters need take no action domestically until 2017. Proposals to curtail this surplus were discussed in the context of the EU’s 2050 Roadmap, but have been watered down in response to lobbying from energy-intensive industries.