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

42 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingAre they really still around?Well, these days they’re fighting a bit of a rearguard battle. And therewere never many of them in the first place. Still, as late as May 2006,the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute was laying out hundredsof thousands of dollars for a US television advertising campaignattacking ‘global warming alarmism’ as an attempt to ‘suppress energyuse’ based on dubious science. 35 As before, such efforts are targetedmainly at the US public. 36 But they also remain visible elsewhere. 37Still, it’s in the US that the infl uence of the global warming sceptics reallycounts.Yes. What with the dependence of US elected officials on corporatefinance, extreme and often bizarre views about climate change thatwould not be heard elsewhere in the world have endlessly reverberatedin the echo chamber of Congress as well as on US televisionnews programmes. Also, while many US scientists do continue to beoutspoken about the biophysical dangers of climate change and theglobal inequalities that underlie the overloading of the atmospherewith fossil carbon, they are seldom able to draw conclusions fromthese views in a way that challenges conventional economic developmentideology and its corporation-first pieties. All too often, theyfollow warnings about the need for drastic action on climate changewith claims (for instance) that more nuclear energy or tree plantationsare needed, or that ‘we should not have a strategy that results in prematureretirement of capital stock’. 38The same institutionalised weakness of imagination is reproducedin US universities, schools, newspapers and popular entertainment.The global warming movie The Day after Tomorrow, for instance, hasplenty of scenes of New York streets awash in an icy Atlantic ocean,but, just as in UN negotiations, the words ‘oil’ and ‘corporation’ arenot mentioned. The crisis the film is about, it is implied, can be tracedmainly to the failure of political leaders to ‘listen to scientists’. Asidefrom the slightly cheeky suggestion that Mexico might soon be facedwith a tide of middle-class environmental refugees from the US, themovie’s main contribution toward stimulating its viewers’ politicalimaginations is to declare itself ‘carbon-neutral’ – a marketing strategywhose pointlessness will be explored later in this report. FormerUS vice-president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, releasedtwo years later, presents more climatology, but also winds uptrying to channel action into carbon trading, responsible consumerism,tree plantations and other ‘fixes’. Meditating on Hollywood disastermovies, literary critic Fredric Jameson once observed: ‘It seemsto be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration