I would say that there is nothing wrong with
giving credit for carbon sinks. But, they should
not be given for existing carbon sinks but rather
for newly created ones. So, if the US, or anybody
else, plants new forests, then give them credit.
Of course, all this has broken down in a
complete mess. Presuming Dubya pulls it out,
I'm afraid we are seriously up you know where
without a you know what on this whole issue.
Ack!!!
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Burford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Saturday, November 25, 2000 3:28 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:4952] The exchange value of forests
>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
>
>
