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

lessons unlearned 167Ownership againI thought we already talked about this.No, our previous discussion was about the difficulties created bythe need of emissions trading to create and distribute property rights.Carbon - saving projects such as those created under the Clean DevelopmentMechanism raise property rights problems of their own. Asthe next chapter will document, the new carbon dumps that largepolluters need usually have to appropriate someone else’s land, someoneelse’s water, or someone else’s future. Confl icts over ownershipare inevitable.Some of the easiest examples are carbon projects that involve treeplanting.Jayant Sathaye of the US’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryonce observed breezily that anxieties about the rich cleansing theiremissions by taking over the poor’s land for forestry projects couldbe relieved simply by ‘ensuring that the title to the land is separatedfrom the title to carbon.’ 379 The reality is not so simple. First, mostplantations that are candidates for carbon finance are already in thehands of powerful corporations or state bureaucracies. Many of thesecorporations or bureaucracies are already embroiled in confl ict withlocal people over their takeover of local land and water. In such circumstancescarbon finance is likely to be viewed merely as anothersubsidy for an exploitative status quo. Second, land whose tree andsoil carbon has been signed over to a utility is going to be less able toprovide livelihood goods to local people. 380Carbon is not some unexploited ‘extra’ product that is simply lyingaround unused, waiting to be plucked and sold to fossil fuel users,with no other social effects. Its presence is intimately bound up withother uses of the land. Since, under the CDM, the land in questionlies in the South, carbon plantation projects are likely to magnify existingNorth-South inequalities.The case of bioenergy plantations presents an interesting case study.Bioenergy schemes are increasingly attracting carbon finance (includingover 100 projects registered with the CDM by May 2006).Insofar as they are expected to replace a substantial percentage of theoil or coal used in today’s industry and transport systems, however,they foreshadow a future in which vast tracts of land in the South areturned over to producing biofuel for export.That raises the question of whether such plantations would be anymore successful for the countries that establish them than traditionalagricultural export monocultures, given familiar problems of