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

‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 33What Is International Climate Policy About?The 1992 Framework Convention on ClimateChange ‘was not negotiated primarilyto reduce greenhouse gas emissions’ butrather ‘as part of a wider bargain betweenrich and poor countries, competing energyinterests and governments faced withgrowing economic problems making investmentsin the future increasingly moreessential but also more difficult.’ 1Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994‘It is more appropriate to explain the natureof the principal elements in climatepolicy at both national and internationallevels if one assumes that what is drivingthe leading states and firms in this regardis the concern to create new sites of capitalaccumulation, rather than a focus on aggregateGDP growth and the impacts ofclimate policies on such growth.’ 2Karine Matthews and Matthew Paterson, 2005‘Establishing a robust global regime for addressingclimate change is… compar ableto the creation of the international traderegime under the World Trade Organization.’3Michael Zammit Cutajar,ex-Executive Secretaryof the United Nations FrameworkConvention on Climate Change, 2004‘Acceptance of [the carbon trading provisionsof the Kyoto Protocol] represents anarticle of faith, faith in the free market andfaith in the process of globalisation. It restson an ideological stance.’ 4Mick Kelly, Climatic Research Unit,University of East Anglia, 2000You talk about ‘fi xes’ as if there was something wrong with them. But what’swrong with fi xes? Isn’t that what we want – to fi x the climate crisis?The problem is that such ‘fixes’ don’t fix. They promise to deliverthe world from the worst dangers of climate change while leavingeverything else – politics, commerce and so forth – just as it is. Butin fact, as the rest of this special report will demonstrate, they do theopposite. They leave the course of climate change just as it is while exacerbatingthe inequalities that will have to be addressed if the issueis to be touched on at all.This chapter will introduce this subject by sketching the history ofthe processes that trapped official international action on climatechange within a US-style framework of neoliberal policy. It will suggestthat a new enclosure movement has formed around three interlinkedstrategies, or alternatives, each of which interacts with andoften reinforces the others.