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

34 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingThe fi rst strategy works to reshape or suppress understanding of the climateproblem so that public reaction to it will present less of a politicalthreat to corporations. The second strategy appeals to technologicalfixes as a way of bypassing debate over fossil fuels while helping tospur innovations that can serve as new sources of profit. The third strategyappeals to a ‘market fix’ that secures the property rights of heavyNorthern fossil fuel users over the world’s carbon-absorbing capacitywhile creating new opportunities for corporate profit through trade.The knowledge fixOne constant theme of climate politics over the last 20 years has beenthe attempt to engineer public reaction to global warming so that itwill present fewer political threats to, and more opportunities for,corporations and their political clients. Some corporations, particularlyin the US, try to deny that humans are changing the climate atall. Others openly acknowledge the threat while trying to reformulateit in a way that benefits them.So the big companies are arguing among themselves about global warming?Yes, but on another level the different sides are working in similardirections. For example, more regressive factions in the oil industry,working public opinion mainly within the US, may promote theview that the climate isn’t changing or that it’s fruitless to try to doanything about it. Other factions, working worldwide, may arguethat there is a scientific basis for action but read the science in a waythat helps them steer international agreements toward technologicaland market fixes that preserve the inertia of fossil fuel-intensive industries.The broader outcome is the same: entrenchment of corporatepower over carbon dumps.It sounds like the good cop – bad cop technique of police interrogation. It’s as if,like the proverbial bad cop, industry activists within the US go straight for thethroat of any international agreement on climate change – while, like the goodcop, their colleagues outside the US ‘defend’ such agreements, hoping to cajoleand squeeze them into giving them what they want. Have the people who denythat humans are causing the climate to change gone as far as the pro-tobaccolobby used to go in rejecting the evidence?There are certainly some parallels with previous cases of suppressionof scientific evidence, but the antagonists in the climate debate aremore numerous and the issues more complicated.The health effects of tobacco (some of which were noticed as earlyas 1602), 7 were confirmed through extensive research in the 20th