Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Critiques
problems that will arise will evolve as the market does itself. But more
importantly, the evolution of this market, and the way that it is regulated or
regulates itself, is driven precisely by the exposés of the problems of offsetting
per se. Whether driven by NGOs attempting to improve the sorts of projects
investors engage in, or avoid the worst sorts of projects, or companies seeking
to avoid exposés and seek good PR, it is the opposition to carbon offsetting
which is playing an important role in shaping what sorts of offsets can be
pursued, how they need to be justified, and so on.
Conclusions
So, resistance makes markets. The character that carbon markets have – the
operational rules, informal norms, changing dynamics – is produced at least in
part by the reactions to opposition to carbon markets as a means of responding
to climate change. Resistance is indeed, thus fertile. The process here is very
much a microcosm of a more general phenomenon identified by writers such as
Hardt and Negri, or in a rather different way, Naomi Klein. 18 That is, the
overarching projects of ‘global neoliberal governance’ (or Empire, if you prefer)
have been generated as strategies by powerful global forces to overcome, coopt,
or destroy opposition to its power. At times (as in the many examples given
by Klein in The Shock Doctrine) the strategy is to eliminate opposition, often
physically through torture and murder. But at other times the approach is more
subtle, involving an appropriation of the themes and ideas of critics and a
twisting to enable further accumulation of capital and extension of global
power. The appropriation of many ideas in the 1970s ‘counterculture’ for
capitalist purposes, from Ben and Jerry’s to ‘flat hierarchies’, to the ‘new
economy’, is a classic example. 19
Carbon markets could precisely be interpreted as a sort of ‘disaster
capitalism’, in Klein’s terms, where climate change was articulated as an ‘urgent
disaster’ in order to legitimize the opening up of new frontiers for investment
and financial trading, all the while deploying climate as the legitimizing signifier.
But while this is clearly a strategy by big, globally organized business to serve its
interests, it is nevertheless the case that the impetus to do so was to appropriate
the energy and desire to act on climate change, and forestall and respond to
criticism of corporate capitalism for failing to act. 20
But the effects here are of course contradictory. For many involved in
opposing carbon markets, the point is to get rid of them, not make them work
better. We are thus in the awkward position of shaping the form of something
we may prefer didn’t exist.
And of course we should not over-emphasize the power of resistance.
Carbon markets in general are still expanding rapidly and show little sign of
slowing down overall, despite the financial crisis and generalized calls for reregulation
of finance and a ‘green new deal’. New schemes are likely to come on
stream in New Zealand, Australia, and perhaps Canada in the next couple of
years, and cap and trade still seems to be the centrepiece of any legislation likely
to come out of Washington. In the ‘post-Kyoto’ negotiations, the CDM still has
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