A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 121No empirical evidence exists that current greenhouse gas tradingprogrammes are functioning as transitional solutions on the way to afossil carbon-free future. In fact, all the available evidence is on theother side. Major oil corporations such as BP and Shell, both enthusiasticinitiators of internal trading schemes, have never voiced anyserious intention to curb their main activities of oil exploration orproduction at any time. Although it has changed its name to ‘BeyondPetroleum’, BP committed itself in 2002 to expand its oil and gas outputby 5.5 per cent per year over the succeeding five years. Its emissionsin 2001 were equivalent to almost two years’ carbon dioxideemissions from the UK. 205 The firm’s investment in renewable energyremains at a mere 1 per cent of the usd 8 billion it spends on fossil fuelexploration and production every year. 206Similarly, the World Bank treats its carbon trading wing as what oneprominent former staff member scathingly refers to as a mere ‘epicycle’208 of an overwhelmingly fossil-oriented approach to energy andtransport.Karl PolanyiEfficiency and hot spotsThere’s another problem with the procedure of creating ‘efficiencies’by spreading emissions cuts around so that the cheapest can be madefirst: it tends to harm the weak and benefit the powerful. That meansthere are going to be political limits – defined by popular resistance,among other things – to the extent that pollution in location A canbe made ‘the same as’ pollution in location B.Similar problems arise with the privatisation of land, privatisation ofhealth care and the privatisation of biodiversity. As the great economichistorian Karl Polanyi pointed out more than 60 years ago, certainvital things such as land, labour, water and medicine are only ‘pseudo -commodities’. 209 They can never become fully tradable without societyas a whole ceasing to exist.I don’t understand.Take land. From a narrowly economic point of view, land is all thesame, wherever it is, just as emissions reductions are said to be thesame wherever they are made. Land creates economic value, whereverit is and whatever it is used for, just as, other things being equal,emissions reductions are good for the climate, no matter where orhow they are made.But suppose land became completely interchangeable with anythingelse, a completely fluid commodity, so that one piece of land could