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

58 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingdestruction, biodiversity depletion and so on. By the early 1990s, withthe blessing of the Clinton regime, pollution trading was poised forits leap into the climate arena. In an atmosphere of privatisation, thething to do seemed to be to privatise the atmosphere.‘All that is solid melts into air’The neoliberal approach that currently dominates global warmingpolitics does more than just reorganise the earth’s carbon-absorbingabilities. At a time when ‘oil and state’ are merged at the highest levelsof US government, 100 it is also helping dissolve most of the conventionalboundaries that used to divide private corporations, governments,the UN, scientists, academics, consultancies, think-tanks,non-government organisations and even artists. As institutional bordersdisappear, so do checks and balances that could have restrainedthe blunders and excesses of carbon trading.Pollution trading itself is no corporate conspiracy, but rather a jointinvention of civil society, business and the state. Non-governmentalorganisations (NGOs) have been nearly as prominent in its developmentas private corporations.Are you serious?Completely. Although pollution trading derived from the theories ofeconomists working in universities and think tanks, 101 it was writteninto the 1990 US Clean Air Act Amendments by Environmental Defence,a corporate-friendly NGO that subsequently pushed for it tobe included both in the Kyoto Protocol and in Chinese environmentalprogrammes. 102 The Washington-based NGO World ResourcesInstitute (partly bankrolled by government and UN agencies, internationalfinancial institutions and corporations such as Monsanto,TotalFinaElf, Shell, BP, and Cargill Dow) tirelessly lobbied for carbontrading alongside the World Business Council for Sustainable Developmentand other corporate pressure groups. The World Wide Fundfor Nature (WWF), an organisation with an annual budget 3.5 timesthat of the World Trade Organisation, meanwhile joined the EuropeanRoundtable of Industrialists (UNICE) and the US think tankinspiredCentre for European Policy Studies in support of the EUEmissions Trading Scheme. 103 WWF also helped develop an eco-labelfor the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism projects (seeChapter 4). Greenpeace, for its part, has moved from being critical ofcorporate lobby groups and carbon trading to complete acceptance.As forest conservation NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy andConservation International move in to mop up corporate and World