Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Afterwords
and pollution from unregulated sources – few of which even pay their share of
tax. To be fair, some players in big business have called for clear and binding
standard regulations to make their global business simpler – but professional
communities interested in ‘environmental’ investment now understandably
guard their own scarce resources too.
As we have seen, it was in this context that ‘carbon markets’ were created.
The sale of climate-related ‘indulgences’ for energetic and emitting ‘sinners’
certainly opens up lucrative new streams of products for devotees of the kind of
magical thinking embodied in financial sector-dominated economies: if the work
of a Goldman Sachs employee can be valued a thousand times more highly than
that of a nurse or farmer, then it is not much of a stretch to believe that the
value of CO2 sequestered in a monoculture pine, eucalyptus or oil palm
plantation really is worth more than the complex old growth forest grubbed up
to lay it out. This logic that defies scientific understanding can be extended to
biodiversity – of course it makes sense for a company to drown or poison a
valley full of endangered wildlife with a mine or dam, as long as you can claim
that nobody will do the same to the next valley too on your watch. Makes total
sense – as long as you are not a tree, beast or mycelium in that first valley. Or a
scientist, tourist, or local resident who studies, or loves, or gardens, hunts, and
gathers in that valley sustainably. In fact, only as long as you somehow do well
out of mines or dams, whether from your pension fund’s investments, or the
minerals and energy to make the products you choose to consume, it makes
sense. But otherwise, not much. Watch out if anyone tries to apply this logic to
your family. ‘OK, let me torture your little boy, and I’ll pay for your girl’s
education.’ This appeal to the desperate, could only come from the unethical
mighty – who may well do something that starves you and your little girl later
anyway... if it benefits the bottom line.
In 2009 Prince Charles and the World Bank were among those declaring
‘war’ on climate change – a little sibling perhaps for the existing pretend ‘wars’
to disguise failure in our governments' policies on poverty, cancer, drugs, ‘terror’
etc? So who is supposed to be the enemy this time – Gaia? Profit maximizing
CEOs and the shareholders they report to? Opponents of energy efficiency
regulation? An ubiquitous atmospheric gas called CO2? Winning a real war with
an engaged enemy demands troop numbers, strategy, preparation, luck,
intelligence, learning from history, taking territory and indulging the
confrontational machineries of violence. Real war leaves fighters and victims
mutilated, shellshocked, grieving and displaced. War of any kind lies, breaks
hearts and minds, and benefits few. Oh dear, not more...
Like bankers’ bonuses, critical researchers’ grants and the World Bank’s
Carbon Investment Funds, the costs of any war must be conjured out of debt
and/or extracted from taxes on the surplus of others’ increasing ‘productivity’.
Most production is still not regulated for energy efficiency, so the money to
wage a climate ‘war’, as for salaries of consultants etc in the ‘carbon market’, will
likely be derived from activities generating greenhouse gases. To protect the
(energy) ‘security’ of their enduring freedom to grow their markets, ideological
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