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

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 279such details – will accept carbon-offset projects that involve not onlydubious carbon accounting, but also blatantly exploitative conditionsand the reversal of poverty alleviation efforts.This is another reason for doubting how long-lived undertakings likePacificCorp/SELCO’s will be. From the beginning, they have been moreabout ‘preserving the economic status quo’ and promoting cost efficiencyin Northern countries than about supporting equity in the South. 120OK, I can see there were some problems. But surely social and environmentalimpact assessments could have identifi ed some of these problems in advance.With proper regulation, they could then have been prevented.This is a key issue. For example, the solar technology could have beenreconfigured so that an entire line of families could have pooled resourcesand benefited, rather than just individual houses.But setting up an apparatus to assess, modify, monitor and overseesuch a project isn’t by itself the answer. Such an apparatus, after all,would have brought with it a fresh set of questions. Who would havecarried out the social impact assessment and would they have beensensitive to local social realities? Would its recommendations havebeen acceptable to Neeyamakola? Would its cost have been acceptableto PacificCorp? What kind of further oversight would have beennecessary to prevent an assessment from merely adding legitimacy toa project whose underlying problems were left untouched?Just as a technology is never ‘just’ a neutral piece of machinery whichcan be smoothly slotted into place to solve the same problem in anysocial circumstance, so the success of a social or environmental impactassessment is dependent on how it will be used and carried outin a local context.But if success is so dependent on political context, how will it ever be possiblefor new renewable technologies to make headway anywhere? If it isn’t possible,then we might as well give in and keep using fossil fuel technologies! We mightas well go along with ExxonMobil when they claim that we have to go on drillingoil since anything else would be to betray the poor!The alternative is not to accept the dominance of fossil fuel technologies.Their continued dominance also does nothing to improve theposition of disadvantaged groups such as Sri Lanka’s estate Tamils.Nor is the alternative simply to accept the system of global and localinequality exemplified in Sri Lanka’s estate plantation sector.The alternative, rather, is to act using our understanding that whatkeeps marginal communities such as that of Sri Lanka’s estate Tamils