Page 2 of 2 The green market
hustlers By M K Dorsey
valued at $550 million. Such a
purchase made Brin one of the largest individual
owners of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Later, in October 2005, Google inaugurated
its long-awaited Google Foundation, endowed with
1% of annual profits and 3 million Google shares
(now worth about $1.42 billion). Larry Brilliant,
the foundation's executive director, told Wired
magazine last July that the new foundation has
"three big areas: climate
crisis, global public heath,
and global poverty, not necessarily in that
order".
With such a huge pot of money
available for those "discovering and advancing
market-based solutions", green NGOs are scrambling
to get a piece of the action.
US-CAP Recently a group of US
industry and environmental non-governmental
leaders came together under the catchy title of
US-CAP, or "US Climate Action Partnership". The
group links "market leaders" such as Alcoa and
General Electric with four leading NGOs - ED, WRI,
PCGCC, and the Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC).
US-CAP has called for atmospheric
carbon dioxide at 100-105% of present levels over
the next five years and 90-100% of present levels
within 10 years. The US-CAP Manifesto thus binds
its inaugural members (as well as subsequent
followers) to increase carbon dioxide in five
years and provides them a tacit license to do
nothing for five more years after that.
Few news reports covering US-CAP's
announcement commented on this presumably minor
detail. The CAP "cuts" were announced in time to
coincide with the January chief executive
officers' cafe klatch at the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, and on the eve of the
release of latest IPCC report. Yet some IPCC
scientists argue that we may need far more drastic
reductions in our emissions of carbon dioxide - as
much 50-80%, in 10 years or less - and in other
greenhouse gases to prevent dangerous human-caused
interference to the global climate system.
US-CAP underscores the growing convergence
among "market leaders", select environmental
organizations (upon whose boards some of the
"market leaders" sit), leading scientists, and
economic mavens. They all rely dangerously on
economic models that produce the same bottom line:
"We cannot do too much now, it will cost too
much."
"If we unquestioningly accept the
value judgments of anonymous economic modelers
hidden in their models, we abdicate our own
decision-making responsibilities in a democratic
society," said Ruth Greenspan Bell of Resources
for the Future. "The models are not capable of
capturing the unique and swiftly moving challenge
of climate change and its jagged and unpredictable
edges."
To overcome the convergence of
corporations and market-dazzled environmental
NGOs, the United States needs at minimum the
vision of the late president John Kennedy coupled
with the wherewithal of earnest, reality-based
Rockefeller Republicans of old. Such a
configuration is perhaps closer than one might
believe. More than 300 US mayors across the
political spectrum have committed themselves to
action (although results from a recent survey by
Hunter Lovins and colleagues of a selection of the
300 reveals that they have not the foggiest idea
of what they signed on to do). Nevertheless,
engaged citizens, critics and researchers are
pushing them to make the signed commitments come
to fruition.
Other countries are currently
ahead of the United States. Last year, tiny Sweden
committed to completely ending its dependency on
fossil fuel by 2020. In the United Kingdom, George
Monbiot's new book Heat spells out how to
get the UK to reduce 90% of its emissions by 2030.
Such bold moves and proposals hint at the
possibility that large nations like the United
States can at least marshal the leadership and
know-how to cut fossil-fuel use by 75% over the
same time period. The World Bank spends as much as
20:1 on fossil-fuel projects over renewable ones.
As the bank's largest contributor, the US can take
the lead by cutting this ratio in half in a decade
and reversing it by 2020.
Climate
justice Climate injustice is clear.
"Greenhouse gangsters are pushing the
world to the edge of global ecological havoc,"
CorpWatch declared in 1999. "They continue to
relentlessly destroy the health and well-being of
local communities and ecosystems where profits
from oil are to be found - be it in the mangrove
swamps of the Niger Delta, the far reaches of the
Amazon basin, or the fragile environs of the
Arctic."
In more general terms, climate
injustice is the idea that harm from the
deleterious effects of climate change and the
production and materialist processes associated
with it is unevenly distributed and deliberately
falls disproportionately on the marginalized and
the disadvantaged.
Beyond specific
non-market proposals, an increasing polyphony of
actors is going further still and demanding
climate justice. In March 2004, anticipating the
present preponderance of market-only solutions,
scholars, scientists, and activists from around
the world gathered in the US state of Michigan for
a three-day conference to develop and advance the
theoretical notion of climate justice, which
CorpWatch defined in 1999 as:
Holding fossil-fuel corporations
accountable for the central role they play in
contributing to global warming. This signifies
challenging these companies at every level -
from the production and marketing of the fossil
fuels themselves, to their underhanded political
influence, to their PR [public relations]
prowess, to the unjust "solutions" they propose,
to the fossil-fuel-based globalization they are
driving. Climate Justice means stripping
transnational corporations of the tremendous
power they hold over our lives, and in its place
building democracy at the local, national and
international levels.
Groups as
diverse as Ecuador's OilWatch, the US Indigenous
Environmental Network, and the South Africa-based
Center on Civil Society are echoing the
conference's Declaration for Climate Justice by
arguing that "industrialized-country governments
and transnational corporations owe the victims of
climate change and victims of associated
injustices full compensation, restoration, and
reparation for the loss of land, livelihoods, and
other damages".
The demand for climate
justice is thus a subset of a wider set of
discussions and demands for environmental justice.
These demands are not just positions against
authority. To the contrary, demanding climate
justice is an expression of hope - indeed, desire
and love - and a demand for objectives rooted in
collective decision-making that are well beyond
the provisional scope of power as currently
conceived. The climate-justice movement is
therefore one of liberation as well as economic
and ideological sovereignty. Prophetically, the
struggle for climate justice dares to demand
changing the world without reproducing
hierarchical state or market power.
Those
articulating the demand for climate justice are by
no means uniform in belief or message. Yet they
represent a coherent if eclectic mix of ways of
knowing, bound together by one common belief: that
the present market orthodoxies are insufficient to
resolve the crisis of climate change, and other
paths are necessary, practical, and possible.
To the extent to which the dominant
ideological and economic orthodoxies fail to
address the crisis, they are increasingly
beleaguered and withering. The demand for climate
justice at its broadest coincides both
pragmatically and inspirationally with playwright
and former Czech president Vaclav Havel's
suggestion: "We must not be afraid of dreaming the
seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly
impossible to become a reality."
M K
Dorsey is professor of global environmental
policy at Dartmouth College and a contributor to
Foreign Policy in Focus. In 1992 he was a member
of the US State Department delegation to the
United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development. He is finishing a volume on Amazonian
bio-commerce. Direct correspondence to
mkdorsey@dartmouth.edu.
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