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

‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 45China ‘spend fossil fuels…without doing what we’ve done to the atmosphere’.54With the help of on-the-ground corporate experiments in Norwayand Algeria, the initiative helped disseminate this little-testedand hazardous techno-fix 55 into mainstream discourse. A Scientifi cAmerican article entitled ‘Can We Bury Global Warming?’ 56 appearedin 2005, along with a parlour game for industry, academic and NGOaudiences that conveys the message that carbon capture and sequestration,biofuels, tree plantations and nuclear power can all be reasonablyplaced alongside energy efficiency and solar energy as componentsof a climate action portfolio. 57 By 2004, Ron Oxburgh, nonexecutivechairman of Shell, was on record saying that ‘if we don’thave sequestration I see very little hope for the world’. 58Not to be outdone, Exxon-Mobil, General Electric, SchlumbergerTechnology and Toyota agreed in 2002 to funnel usd 225 million toStanford University for a Global Climate and Energy Project assignedto investigate carbon capture and sequestration, production of hydrogenfrom fossil fuels, biomass energy, and other fields on a list set outin the contract with the four corporations. 59The market fixThe third strategy for containing the political threats implied by climatechange – while at the same time using it to create new opportunitiesfor corporate profit – is the ‘market fix’.The market fix began to take shape in the late 1980s and early 1990s.Public pressure was growing for governments to agree to do somethingabout global warming. Some of the changes needed had beenobvious since the 1970s. 60 These included long-term shifts in thestructure of Northern industrial, transport and household energyuse away from wasteful expenditure of fossil fuels toward frugal useof solar and other renewable sources. Tackling the problem internationallymeant addressing the institutions and power imbalances thathad resulted in both the overuse and the globally unequal use of theearth’s carbon-absorbing capacity.That sort of action would have been hard for corporations, governments andUN agencies to accept unless they were under a lot of public pressure to do so.Yes. It also required a historical and political perspective unfamiliar tomany climate scientists and technocrats. It was easier to view globalwarming’s causes in simple physical terms – ‘too much greenhousegas’ – without looking too carefully at what would have to be done