<http://truth-out.org/video/item/13762-neoliberalizing-nature-and-privatizing-the-air>
Neoliberalizing Nature and Privatizing the Air
Monday, 07 January 2013 15:59
By Paul Jay, The Real News Network | Video
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm
Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to what is going to become a
series of reports on environmental and climate change issues with
Patrick Bond, who now joins us from South Africa.
Patrick is the director of the Centre for Civil Society and a
professor at the university of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He's
written many books. One of his latest is The Politics of Climate
Justice and Durban's Climate Gamble.
Thanks for joining us, Patrick.
PATRICK BOND, GLOBAL ECON. PROJECT DIRECTOR, INST. FOR POLICY
STUDIES: Great to be with you again, Paul.
JAY: So, looking forward to 2013, what do you think are going to be
the big issues in terms of environmental and climate change questions?
BOND: A lot of ground was broken in 2012 at the Rio Earth Summit-that
was Rio+20-in June. And the phrases that your listeners, your
audience would have heard are "green economy", "payment for ecosystem
services", "natural capital". And these were theorized, well, for
many years.
And the idea is that if you value the environment, you should put a
price tag on it so that its destruction is not just a [free]
activity-so say the proponents. But critics say this is equivalent to
neoliberalizing nature or privatizing the air in the case of climate
and carbon trading.
And what became even trickier was in Doha the idea called loss and
damage, which is another way of saying that the North owes the South
a climate debt for the huge destructive force. I mean, Barack Obama
just asked for some $60 billion from Congress to clean up after
Sandy. And so this is the sort of huge scale of loss and damage, and
even more so in the Third World, the main victims of climate change
here in Africa, maybe 200 million deaths anticipated this century.
And the big question we'll all be asking in the coming months: can
you put a price on it? And if you do so, in order for the North to
pay up, does that mean that you endorse markets for the environment?
And that's a tricky situation for many environmentalists not wanting
to go too far towards neoliberal nature, but on the other hand,
demanding a climate and an ecological debt be paid.
JAY: Well, you've got to-I guess if you need something paid, you've
got to put a price on it. But that is a separate question, then,
isn't it, from whether it's going to be a privatized solution or not.
They're two separate issues, aren't they?
BOND: That's right. And one of the finest theorists, Larry Lohmann at
Corner House group, explained it to me in Rio very simply, and I
think we all should learn from Larry Lohmann. He said the difference
between a fine on a big corporation, for example, Texaco-Texaco, now
Chevron, polluted about $8 billion worth in the Ecuadoran Amazon, and
a court found them guilty. Of course, they're refusing to pay.
They're a big U.S. corporation. And the idea is they should be fined
and then banned from doing that again. And that is an acceptable
strategy for progressive environmentalists.
The problem is if you allow that activity to be mandated through a
fee, a fee for an ecosystem service. And it's in that very nuanced
distinction between putting a price on something because you value it
and making someone who destroys it pay for the damage on the one
hand, which I think is reasonable-on the other hand, the danger would
be if you try to create markets. And this is what's really running
rampant.
Here in southern Africa, natural capital will soon be actually
calculated as a way to correct gross domestic product, something
that's way overdue, because GDP, what economists like to do to
measure growth, ignores environmental destruction, not to mention
women's unpaid labor or community activism or crime or family
breakdown. All of these important things are not measured. And the
attempt to correct it, natural capital, if it's used properly, would
give us a whole new dimension on whether we should be extracting at
the rate, for example, here in our platinum mines we do which led to
the Marikana Massacre in August.
And that's the sort of question that I think environmentalists and
community activists and labor movements, women's groups, will be
asking more and more. Is it really worth it? And should we not be
calculating into a cost-benefit analysis the destructive capacity of
capital when it meets nature, and then trying to prevent that process
from becoming something like a carbon market or offsets for
biodiversity? And a green economy strategy of the World Bank of many
big agencies leans towards markets. And this is going to be the
struggle of 2013, I predict.
JAY: Well, the argument I guess you would hear from Wall Street or
others that support what I'm about to say, which is that without the
financialization of these issues, you can't attract the kind of
capital that's required to either have mitigation programs or various
things to reduce carbon emission, and that you need to harness the
power of international finance, and the only way to do that is make
it attractive for them-.
BOND: Well, [indeed, that] for 15 years was the underlying assumption
behind emissions trading. And to tell you how well that works, simply
go to Chicago, where in 2010 they had to close the market. That was
the one that former vice president Al Gore was involved in. And the
European Union's emissions trading scheme, which is the largest-over
$100 billion a year worth of trading-it's really crashing and hasn't
done well since here in Durban about a year ago we had the COP17, the
climate summit. And as it was said by Bank of America, that summit,
like the Doha, gave a little bit of confidence for traders that their
system would still be in place. They said it was like a Viagra
shot-but that doesn't last very long, as many men know.
I think the point is the carbon markets have demonstratively shown
they cannot finance renewable energy. You really need about a $50 per
ton price on carbon dioxide, and these markets are running at around
$7 or $8, and so they just are unable to deliver the goods. And
therefore there are NGOs out there who are calling for the European
Union's emissions trading scheme to be shut down, and instead, a
replacement system, a regulatory system, a cap system that would then
ban, eventually, the fossil fuels that threaten to destroy our planet.
And I think that's the way to go. Since markets have failed, we
really have to turn to a regulatory approach. And the problem is, of
course, there are still a lot of people, even in environmental
groups, who still believe that the bankers can solve a problem this
big, even after all the evidence of the last five years of
destruction by bankers. I don't understand them, but they still
believe that.
JAY: Alright. Thanks very much for joining us, Patrick. And we're
going to dig more into these issues with-I think we're going to do
this every week or every other week with Patrick. So thanks again,
Patrick.
BOND: Great to be with you, Paul. Thanks.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
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