Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Upsetting the Offset
Given the dominant ideology of the current politico-economic system, our
earth doesn’t seem to be allowed to get a rest. As most economic policies seem
to be, more than ever, plagued into a logic of continued and relentless economic
growth, what we are effectively doing is to keep our earthship working hard,
while it is already running a high fever. Carbon markets, with all of their rhetoric
of market efficiencies and cost and benefit analyses, are seemingly the
continuation of a system that has got the earth-body into the situation it is in at
the moment. With all the hustling about the technical and economic ways of
introducing carbon markets we are given the impression that something is really
being done about climate change. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be more
than an illusion. In fact it is worse; carbon markets are the emperor’s new ‘green
clothes’. Hence, they are not just about ‘buying time’ in order to delay the
introduction of the necessary structural changes needed to ‘our way of life’.
Instead, they are the active attempt to provide a new system of legitimation and
accumulation that enables the status quo of capitalism to continue during an era
when humankind is extremely concerned about climate change and other grave
environmental as well as social degradations.
It should therefore become obvious that larger things are at stake here.
Carbon markets and climate change mitigation are not merely about the
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, we have to talk about wider
issues of social, economic, environmental and climatic justice. The key problem
is that, through the commodification of carbon, climate change is turned into a
numbers game, inviting all sorts of creative accounting techniques that don’t
actually correspond with the reality on the ground. As business school
academics, we know that accounting can be used to make all sorts of claims
about reality. The problem is that the reality often looks different.
So, if anything, this book calls on us to start facing reality. Climate change is
already affecting millions of people’s lives around the world in very real terms.
What can we do to help them? What can we do to reduce our fundamental
addiction to fossil fuels? What techniques do we have at our disposal to bring
about radical changes to the way we run our economies and societies, given that
without fossil fuel most ‘developed’ nations would simply collapse? It is
questions like these that we need to start to address, realizing that climate
change is an immense social, economic and political issue. Carbon markets are
merely a ‘market fix’, and, as Larry Lohmann points out, ‘fixes do no fix’. 47 We
need to start dealing with the underlying symptoms of climate change.
A Ray of Hope and a Call to Action
What is often forgotten in the hustling and extremely technical discourse of the
science and political economy of climate change is that there are many
alternatives to a fossil fuel centred economy that are already functioning in many
communities around the world. That is, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel
here. Humanity has, by at large, lived fairly sustainably alongside the world’s
ecosystems for many thousands of years. Perhaps there is something we can
learn from our ancestors and the way they have engaged with nature. Perhaps
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