'Ships Passing in the Night'
According to the logic of neo-liberal economics, it is perfectly acceptable for thousands of lorries and ships to be ‘passing in the night’, carrying almost identical goods or with produce that could be produced locally, without consideration of the environmental impact of needlessly burning fuel. The UK, to give a small example, exports one-and-a-half thousand tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany each year, and imports practically the same amount from the same country,[20] a practice of ecologically wasteful trade that is not only repeated with every material product made, but is endlessly encouraged by the values of a purely capitalistic financial system.
Similar pernicious examples could be repeated ad infinitum, as in recent studies that show how deforestation – which added 5,000 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere between 1989 and 1995 without even mentioning the profoundly deleterious effect on essential oxygen production from trees – is perversely encouraged by the values of economic globalisation and now threatens to annihilate some 60 percent of all species.[21] As succinctly concluded by the NEF; “To build the global economy on the foundations of fuel-intensive international trade and consumption is to build a castle on shifting and treacherous sand.”[22]
The predominant market-based approaches to tackling climate change, not least the carbon cap-and-trade schemes endorsed by the Kyoto Protocol, are equally a part of the central problem owing to their implicit approval of unlimited economic expansion. As argued extensively by alternative and green economists, it is markets that “got us into this crisis in the first place”[23] and now it is markets, somewhat sardonically, that are touted as the only solution, as reflected in the conclusion of the Stern Review that climate change is the “greatest market failure the world has seen”.
Free-market proposals like carbon-trading, advocated by a growing list of prominent economists, high-profile politicians and ‘green NGOs’ (including Sir Nicholas Stern, World Bank chief economist Larry Summers, Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Richardson, Eliot Spitzer, and not least Bill Clinton and Al Gore who both quipped that “the invisible hand has a green thumb”)[24] are not only deficient measures that give the illusion that suitable action is being taken, but are also prolonging the environmental crisis by creating new market opportunities for corporate profits and by delaying investment into renewable energies.
Commodification and overconsumption
“The act of commodification at the heart of offset schemes assigns a financial value to the impetus that someone may feel to take climate action,” reports the Carbon Trade Watch, “and neatly transforms this potential to bring about change into another market transaction. There is then no urgent need for people to question the underlying assumptions about the nature of the social and economic structures that brought about climate change in the first place.”[25] By turning nature into a ‘market’, in other words, attention is temporarily diverted from the reality that “today’s ecological problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological destruction as a necessary condition of its existence.”[26]
The clearly sane response to the emergency of global warming is for all developed nations to considerably reduce their levels of consumption, but this platitude will remain a fantasy until the inherent inequities of the world economy are first addressed. Only then, coupled with an international acceptance of the need to drastically limit the quantity of fossil fuels being extracted and burnt from the earth, can a workable framework for climate change mitigation be meaningfully discussed.
The evidence so far, judged in the context of a continuing “great global coal rush”, is that such an admittance is still critically ignored; China, who remains reluctant to cut any CO2 emissions if it means sacrificing economic growth, has doubled its annual coal production in six years; India will construct more than 100 coal-fired plants over the next decade; US power corporations are frantically pushing ahead with plans to construct around 150 new coal-fired stations; and the UK Labour government is quietly resurrecting two deep coal mines in Wales with furtive plans to reopen several more.[27] “Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination,” says the eco-activist George Monbiot, “we drift into catastrophe.”[28]
It is possible to feel an acute sense of foreboding when comparing the basic threats of global warming with government inertia and denial, but climate change as the “moral question of the 21st century” also holds the potential to initiate global justice on a scale never seen throughout history.[29] This is best illustrated through a key concept promoted by many environmental campaigners as a guide for agreeing a solution to CO2 emissions: carbon debt. If the wealthiest countries first acknowledge that their unequal use of the global commons has run up an enormous and unpaid ecological ‘debt’ to the world, runs the argument, then the stage is set for a new kind of dialogue between rich and poor countries. Any future negotiations on emissions reductions or the sharing of reductions, therefore, must also focus on just recompense for the damage already done to the atmosphere.
Carbon debt
A plethora of reports and articles constantly reveal how developing countries, who have done comparatively little to contribute to global warming, have become the world’s ‘climate change canaries’ and will pay the highest price in years to come through increasing droughts, storms and vector diseases, therefore requiring a moral ‘pay back’ of the carbon debt accrued by industrialised nations. The impoverished living standards of the billions of people living on less than two-dollars-a-day, in this respect, is the immoral safeguard preventing the planet from even worse disaster. It would not be alarmist to conjecture that if everyone shared the same lifestyle as the average American, the “holocaust predicted for the distant future would have already visited us.”[30]
A consensus of environmentalists now propose that the only acceptable solution to redressing CO2 emissions must be equity-based, thereby conceding “each individual’s logical claim to the atmosphere”.[31] The proposed mechanism of ‘contraction and convergence’, as formulated by the Global Commons Institute, incorporates these principles by first establishing how much carbon dioxide can be produced each year within a safe limit, then basically dividing that sum between each individual in the world. On a set date, all nations would ‘converge’ to an agreed level of emissions.
This straightforward concept, which is already approved by the European Parliament and key government spokesman in Africa, India and China, embodies more than just equal rights to the atmosphere for every citizen. The implementation of contraction and convergence, based upon an international acceptance of ecological limits, would necessitate a sustainable world economy, an enforced reduction in consumption levels by the wealthiest nations, and hence a vast redistribution of resource usage between nations.
If contraction and convergence can be imagined as a potential model for future world development as a whole, it could also lead to a greater emphasis on sharing through a reformed economic system that prioritises sustainability and basic human needs. The large-scale implications for global justice would be immense and all-encompassing, reflected in a necessary reorientation of the values and driving forces behind the economy. Rather than the blind pursuit of maximum instant gratification and profit, the underlying priorities governing social development would need to focus on the collective desire for human survival, an end to poverty and gross inequality between countries, and the beginning of an international culture defined by cooperation and the shared purpose of averting mass catastrophe.
Man's Ingenuity
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