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

330 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingrecord of some success across a range of societies and issues. Moststriking of all, many are already being widely used.That raises the question: why should anyone use the word ‘alternative’to refer to these approaches, while speaking as if carbon tradingwere a ‘mainstream’ strategy? Carbon trading is not, in fact, part ofmost climate policy proposals. It is not what people are mainly relyingon in their efforts to tackle climate change. It’s not the only initiativethat has teeth and not ‘what we have to work with’. On the contrary,it’s a dubious sideshow that’s wasted a great deal of time becauseit’s been treated as a main event. It may appeal to Northern advisersat international financial institutions under pressure to offer single‘silver bullet’ solutions to global problems. 1 But it’s not working, andclearing it out of the way would be one good first step towards moreconstructive action.I’m confused. Could you give some examples of the more established and successfulstrategies you’re talking about?Well, you could start with a package of approaches that’s currentlygetting a lot of attention in Northern countries, where immediatesteep cuts in fossil fuel emissions are most crucial. Roughly speaking,this package consists of• large-scale public works• subsidy shifting• conventional regulation• green taxes and other non-trading market mechanisms• legal action– all backed and monitored by popular movements and evaluatedagainst ambitious short- and long-term targets.Sounds like a complicated blueprint to implement.Actually, it’s not a blueprint. Neither is carbon trading. Political actionisn’t the implementation of blueprints. The future isn’t decidedby planners sitting in rooms by themselves and then slotting theirplans into a black box of default political institutions. It’s more a matterof alliance-building, of move and counter-move. The packagementioned above isn’t a theory but a historical observation of the currentstate of an ongoing process of discussion, confl ict, consultationand bridge-building in which a lot of political institutions themselvescome into question. Proposals for action flow out of such processes;the processes do not flow out of them.