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

‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 63Three in oneThis chapter has suggested that a market fix, a technological fix and aknowledge fix have come to be intertwined in climate change politicsin an intimate way.The recent US neoliberal innovation known as the pollution market,growing largely out of academic theory, NGO advocacy and an antiregulationbacklash among corporations, moved with startling speedinto international climate politics in the 1990s. Fed by a corporatefriendlyreading of climate science and economics, as well as researchinto technological fixes, it drew UN agencies and activists alike intoits gravitational field, eventually triumphing over early Southern andEuropean opposition through complex and still partly obscure politicalprocesses. An astonishing range of institutions from private companiesto UN agencies, university departments and NGOs are nowaligned around an agenda characterised by rejection of precaution,inability to come to terms with indeterminacy and irreversibility, insistencethat tradeoffs are always possible, and support for growth incorporate power.The market fix, the technological fix and the knowledge fix havecome together to encase international climate politics in a debate inwhich almost the only questions spoken are the narrow ones largecorporations most want to hear. Is there or is there not human-causedclimate change? If there is, what might make continued fossil fuel usepossible? How can more subsidies be channelled to technologies corporationscan profit from? How can privatisation and ‘efficiency’ befurthered in a way most acceptable to the public? Such questions areuniting the most cynical corporate hack and the most innocent environmentalactivist in a single agenda. The consequences of bypassingthe central issues of fossil fuel overuse, ownership, corporate power,free enquiry and democracy will be explored in the next chapter.