While countries like Britain are studiously avoiding making offensive
remarks about the US approach to the Climate conference, a key point of
conflict is whether the USA can reasonably bargain its large forests to
offset its high CO2 pollution.
This is negotiation in a new frame of economic reference, conceptualised as
pollution credits, notionally with all countries having a limited "right"
to pollute the environment.
This extends the bourgeois concept of right to ownership of a commodity,
including land, to a right to have a social and environmental effect. It
stretches the capitalist concepts of bourgeois right to the edge of
breakdown, since the individual essence of bourgeois right in this context
is explicitly focussed on the social implications.
Certainly at face value, ownership of land with forests on it, brings the
right to enjoy the use value of those forests, including to benefit from
their contribution to the new global task of absorbing CO2. In this
respect the application of bourgeois right to forests is just another
feature of "enclosing the commons", which is also occuring with the rights
to fish the seas.
However there is another twist to this. The protagonists are meeting at the
world climate conference as representatives of modern states, bargaining
economic power like finance capitalists. Forests have an economic value in
this negotiation as CO2 sinks. The US representative "naturally" wants to
bring to bear the full economic power of the US ito the debate as
effectively as possible. The USA is negotiating as USA Incorporated. Others
denounce this as fiddling with numbers to let US capitalism off the hook
and to continue to produce 25% of the worlds CO2 despite being only a few
percent of the worlds population.
Certainly pollution rights are one way that capitalist states may have to
address the question of climate change. But it is not the only approach. We
should question the legal and economic implications of regarding the air
and the seas as commodities capable in some sense of being privately owned,
even if it is by a concentration of capital within a state of around 200
million people.
Comments appreciated, especially if they can relate the critique to marxist
categories of analysis of commodities, use, and exchange value.
Chris Burford
London
