Climate Change Politics

A struggle over the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity?

Kolkata, 17 March 2007

• The earth might possibly have the capacity to “handle” the equivalent of 5 cubic kilometres of graphite being released to the air each decade.

• But in fact the equivalent of 28 cubic kilometres of graphite are going into the air every decade.

  

• Not a problem caused by “the world”

• The US alone “occupies” roughly all of the “available” world carbon-cycling capacity

Two kinds of climate action:

Continue extraction but find new CO2 dumps.

Overuse? Cut extraction.

Entrench inequalities through

Unequal use? privatization so big users can keep using most dump space.

Find ways of using dump more equitably.

Conflict among US elites over the Kyoto Protocol

Continue de facto superpower “occupation of the atmosphere”* (status quo)?

- OR -Accept some limits but “propertize” carbon-

cycling capacity to ensure continued dominance through trading mechanisms (Kyoto)?

*”Economic super powers have been as successful today in their disproportionate occupation of the atmosphere with carbon emissions as they were in their military occupation of the terrestrial world in colonial times.”

Andrew Simms, New Economics Foundation

“No Kyoto! No limits!” “Kyoto! Carbon trading!”

“[I]t is not an exaggeration to brand the mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol as ‘Made in the USA.’ . . . The sensitivity of the Protocol to the market was largely instigated by the negotiating positions of the USA.”

Michael Zammit Cutajar,

former Executive Secretary, UNFCCC, 2004

“. . . the EU – now fully committed to emission trading – was insistent [at first] that trading should be supplementary to domestic action . . . seen as essential to the development of technologies that would open the way to a low-carbon future.” -- Zammit Cutajar

“No Kyoto! No cuts!” “Kyoto! Carbon trading!”

Both of these US-centred approaches (Kyoto and anti-Kyoto) are actively interfering with more constructive approaches . . .

• Subsidy shifting• Public investment in structural change• Taxation• Legal action• Less emphasis on numerical targets and more

attention to historical processes• Recognition that there are no political short cuts• Promotion of public discussion in plain language

rather than the jargon inevitable with carbon trading

• Support for existing initiatives

c. 400 BC – State environmental management, China.c. 1300s – 2005: Community and inter-community irrigation management systems, upland SE Asia.c. 1850s – 2005: First national “environmental regulation” in the UK.

10,000 BC – 1970s: No pollution trading systems.

1960s: Academic economists in US & Canada come up with the idea.

1970s: US lead trading programmes begin.1990s: Acid Rain (SO2) Programme, Los

Angeles trading schemes.1997: Kyoto Protocol trading schemes

begin.2005: EU ETS comes into force.