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Georgetown University Center for Democracy and Civil Society,
Event: Patrick Bond: Kyoto's Civil Society Critics
Date: Friday, February 22, 2008 Time: 10:00am to 12:00pm
Venue: Mortara Building 101, Mortara Center, 3600 N Street NW, Washington, DC
Details: Patrick Bond is a political economist, expert on eco-social
policy and director of the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Bond has an extensive background in
academia and NGO work, both overseas and in the United States.
Join him for 'Kyoto's Civil Society Critics: The Debate over Market Solutuons to Climate Change' on Friday, February 22 from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm at the Mortara Center, 3600 N Street NW, Washington, DC. Sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown.
RSVP to cdacs@georgetown.edu
Greenpeace Academy, Washington DC, 22 Febuary, 2:30-4:30
State Univ of New York (Geneseo)
7 pm in the MacVittie College Union Ballroom, 27 February
University of Ottawa, Ottawa
Topic: Global Governance and Climate Change: What Scale, What Solutions?
Speaker: Patrick Bond: Professor at the School of Development Studies
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Date: Monday, March 3, 2008
Time: 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Venue: Desmarais Building, room 3120
55 Laurier Avenue East
Patrick Bond, a political economist, is research professor at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies where he
directs the Centre for Civil Society. His training was in economic
geography at Johns Hopkins, finance at the University of Pennsylvania
and economics at Swarthmore College. Patrick’s recent authored and
edited books include Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society
(UKZN Press and Rozenberg Publishers, 2008); Looting Africa: The
Economics of Exploitation (Zed Books and UKZN Press, 2006), Elite
Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (UKZN Press,
2005); Fanon’s Warning: A Civil Society Reader on the New Partnership
for Africa’s Development (Africa World Press, 2005); and Against Global
Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International
Finance (Zed Books and University of Cape Town Press, 2003). He was born
in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1961.
This lecture is presented by:
The International Development and Globalization program
The African Studies Research Laboratory
The Institute of Population Health present
The Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
For further information on this upcoming session, please contact
api@uOttawa.ca
Queens University, Hamilton, 3 March
University of Toronto, 4 March
Duke University "Marxism and Society Seminar", 5 March
University of North Carolina, 6 - 7 March
Lecture: "Climate, Energy and Water Crisis: South Africa and the World"
Venue:Global Education Center, Room 1005
Date: 6 March
Time:6:30-9 p.m.
On March 6, in conjunction with African Studies Center, the UNC faculty
working group on Gender and Globalization will be sponsoring "Climate,
Energy and Water Crisis: South Africa and the World."
This event is sponsored by the Odum Institute and the African Studies Center.
Professor Patrick Bond is a political economist and research professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies where he directs the Centre for Civil Society. His training was in economic geography at Johns Hopkins, finance at the University of Pennsylvania and economics at Swarthmore College.
Patrick's recent authored and edited books, including Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society (2008), The Accumulation of Capital in Southern Africa (2007), and Looting Africa: The Economics of Explotiation.
Also, on March 7 members of the working group will be holding a half-day
workshop on the themes of our conference in the fall. In addition to
being a resource person for this workshop, Professor Bond will present
his work on the gender implications of globalization, water
privatization, and the environment justice movement in Southern Africa
at the workshop. For more information, contact Eunice Sahle at
eunice@email.unc.edu.
Michigan State University, 12-13 March
SA in Global Context: A Special MSU Three Lecture Series
By Patrick Bond
Africa as Victim of Climate Change and Carbon Trading
Date: Wednesday, March 12
Time: 3-5 pm
Venue: 303 International Center
This builds on Prof. Bond's new book Climate Change, Carbon
Trading and Civil Society (2008)The lecture will be followed by refreshments.
Is Africa still being looted?"
Date: Thursday, March 13
Time: 12-1 pm
Venue:Noon African Studies Center Brownbag Lecture -201 International
Center
This lecture builds on Prof. Bond's book, Looting Africa: The
Economics of Exploitation (2006)
Understanding the Political Economy of the New South Africa
Date:Thursday, March 13
Time:3:00-4:40 pm
Venue: Holden Hall, GR 008 Lecture Room.(Holden Hall is next to Cherry Lane Apartments on Trowbridge Rd extension.)
This lecture for ISS 330a "Africa: Social Science Perspectives" is
open to the public.
Sponsored by the African Studies Center at MSU.
Left Forum, NYC, 14-16 March
From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change
By Patrick Bond
Amidst her welcome critique of the biofuel mania, Vandana Shiva's ZNet
commentary last month (December 13, 2007) also made this point: "The
Kyoto Protocol totally avoided the material challenge of stopping
activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of
regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance
with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Instead, Kyoto put
in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the
polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in
these rights to pollute."
Indeed in 1997 at Kyoto, Al Gore bamboozled negotiators into adopting
carbon trading as a central climate strategy in exchange for
Washington's support -- which never materialized.
Likewise last month's Kyoto Conference of Parties in Bali allowed the
"everyone v. the USA" debate to obscure much more durable problems.
Even many environmentalists and well-meaning citizens think that
building on Kyoto is the correct strategy for post-Bali negotiations.
These include the Climate Action Network of NGOs and corporate-funded
environmental groups including the IUCN, Sierra Club, the World Wildlife
Federation, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Senators Sanders, Kerry,
Lieberman, McCain, Leahy, Feinstein, Bingaman, Snow, Specter, Alexander,
and Carper proposed laws in 2007 featuring emissions trading.
"Fixing a market problem (pollution) with a market solution" is still a
mantra to some light-greens, notwithstanding a year's worth of
scandalous reports from practitioners and the press.
A year ago, Citigroup's Peter Atherton confessed in a PowerPoint that
the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS) had "done nothing to
curb emissions" and acted as "a highly regressive tax falling mostly on
poor people." On whether policy goals were achieved, he admitted:
"Prices up, emissions up, profits up . . . so, not really. Who wins and
loses? All generation-based utilities -- winners. Coal and
nuclear-based generators -- biggest winners. Hedge funds and energy
traders -- even bigger winners. Losers . . . ahem . . . Consumers!"
The Wall Street Journal confirmed last March that emissions trading
"would make money for some very large corporations, but don't believe
for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming." The
paper termed the carbon trade "old-fashioned rent-seeking . . . making
money by gaming the regulatory process."
Speaking to Channel Four news last March, the European Commissioner for
Energy offered this verdict on the ETS: "A failure." Yvo de Boer, the
sanguine head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
warned of "the possibility that the market could collapse altogether."
In April 2006, the price of carbon in Europe's market fell by half
overnight due to authorities' mismanagement of the ETS.
But not just in Europe. According to Newsweek magazine's investigation
of Third World carbon trading (through the Clean Development Mechanism)
last March, "It isn't working . . . [and represents] a grossly
inefficient way of cutting emissions in the developing world." The
magazine called the trade "a shell game" which has transferred "$3
billion to some of the worst carbon polluters in the developing world."
After an exhaustive series on problems associated with carbon trading
and offsets, the Financial Times concluded they were merely a "carbon
'smokescreen.'"
In June, the Guardian newspaper headlined its investigation with equal
scorn: "Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved. . . .
Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming. . . . The
inconvenient truth about the carbon offset industry."
Meanwhile the Big Green groups' professionalism and reasonableness -- or
simple cronyism (since key personnel from CAN now work in the industry)
-- have made them utterly useless as watchdogs on the carbon trade.
So then who do we turn to?
The Bali conference featured an alternative movement-building component
outside: a Climate Justice Now! made up of Carbon Trade Watch (the
Transnational Institute); the Center for Environmental Concerns; Focus
on the Global South; the Freedom from Debt Coalition, Philippines;
Friends of the Earth International; Women for Climate Justice; the
Global Forest Coalition; the Global Justice Ecology Project; the
International Forum on Globalization; the Kalikasan-Peoples Network for
the Environment; La Vía Campesina; the Durban Group for Climate Justice;
Oilwatch; Pacific Indigenous Peoples Environment Coalition; Sustainable
Energy and Economy Network (Institute for Policy Studies); the
Indigenous Environmental Network; Third World Network; Indonesia Civil
Society Organizations Forum on Climate Justice; and the World Rainforest
Movement.
The coalition criticized carbon trading and called for genuine
solutions: "reduced consumption; huge financial transfers from North to
South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for
adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military
budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation; leaving fossil fuels in
the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe,
clean and community-led renewable energy; rights-based resource
conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples'
sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and sustainable family
farming and peoples' food sovereignty."
In October 2004, the Durban Group was founded to tackle the problems in
the carbon trade, warning of all the dangers above, especially Shiva's
point that the transfer of the right to pollute is a multitrillion
dollar giveaway to the people who caused the bulk of the climate problems.
But establishment figures will continue confusing matters. At the Bali
meeting, a key Third World leader was South African environment minister
Marthinus van Schalkwyk -- successor to FW de Klerk as leader of the
National Party after serving the apartheid police as a spy against
fellow students (he later folded the NP into the ruling African National
Congress and was rewarded with a do-little ministry). His strategy for
bringing the US into the fold came at the price of evacuating any
emissions target and accountability mechanism in the official
declaration and reinforcing the carbon trade.
Van Schalkwyk's leadership is a travesty, for he has said nothing about
South Africa's own $20 billion in new investments -- partly privatized
through the US multinational AES -- in cheap coal-fired electricity
generation for the sake mainly of large corporations; he endorses
nuclear energy expansion. SA already has an emissions output per person
per unit of GDP twenty times worse than the US, and van Schalkwyk's
official carbon trading policy argues that it is primarily a "commercial
opportunity."
This is true only if there is no resistance; in Durban, Sajida Khan
fought carbon trading before her death by cancer caused by an
apartheid-era landfill next door -- SA's Clean Development Mechanism
pilot for methane-extraction.
In contrast to carbon trading, what is reverberating within grassroots,
coalface, and fenceline struggles in many parts of the world is a very
different strategy and demand by civil society activists: leave the oil
in the soil, the resources in the ground.
This call was first made as a climate strategy in 1997 in Kyoto by the
group OilWatch when it was based in Quito, Ecuador. Heroic activists
from Accion Ecologia took on the struggle to halt exploitation of oil in
part of the Yasuni National Park. This led President Rafael Correa to
declare in mid-2007 that the North should pay Ecuador roughly $5 billion
in compensation for its commitment to permanently forego exploitation of
Yasuni (albeit with concern amongst indigenous people about nearby oil
extraction especially by the voracious Brazilian firm Petrobas).
A year ago at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, many other groups
became aware of this movement thanks to eloquent activists from the
Niger Delta, including the Port Harcourt NGO Environmental Rights
Action. For example, women community activists regularly disrupted
production at oil extraction sites with sit-ins in which, showing
maximum disrespect for the petro multinationals, they removed their
clothing.
In my own neighborhood, which includes two of Africa's largest oil
refineries, the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance has
been mobilizing against corporate and municipal environmental crime,
including three major explosions and fires since September and a massive
fish kill at Christmas from toxic dumping in Durban's harbor, the
busiest in Africa.
But the legacy of resisting fossil fuel abuse goes back much further and
includes Alaskan and Californian environmentalists who halted drilling
and even exploration. In Norway, the global justice group ATTAC took up
the same concerns at a conference last October, and began the hard work
of persuading wealthy Norwegian Oil Fund managers that they should use
the vast proceeds of their North Sea inheritance to repay Ecuadorans
some of the ecological debt owed.
Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George
Monbiot, so it was revealing that last month, instead of going to Bali,
he stayed home in Britain and caused some trouble, reporting back in his
Guardian column:
Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might
seem, I have stumbled across the single technology which will save us
from runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it
to you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses.
Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and
storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is
efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called . . .
leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to
prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this policy
into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at
Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down
the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads
in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will be
used.
Canada is another Northern site where activists are working to leave the
oil in the soil. In an Edmonton conference last November, the
University of Alberta's Parkland Institute and its allies argued for no
further development of tar sand deposits (which require a liter of oil
to be burned for every three to be extracted and which devastate local
water, fisheries and air quality).
Institute director Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for
exceptionally strict limits on the use of water and greenhouse gas
emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic land reclamation plans and
financial deposits; no further subsidies for the production of dirty
energy; provisions for energy security for Canadians (since so much of
the tar sand extract is exported to the US); and much higher economic
rents on dirty energy to fund a clean energy industry (currently Alberta
has a very low royalty rate).
I have mentioned this demand in many sites over the past two years,
enthusiastically commenting on the moral, political, economic, and
ecological merits of leaving the oil in the soil. Unfortunately, in
addition to confessing profound humility about the excessive fossil fuel
burned by airplanes which have taken me on this quest, I must report on
the only site where the message dropped like a lead balloon: with dear
comrades in petro-socialist Venezuela.
Never mind, there are a great many examples where courageous communities and environmentalists have lobbied successfully to keep nonrenewable resources (not just fossil fuels) in the ground, for the sake of the environment, community stability, disincentivizing political corruption,
and workforce health and safety.
The highest-stake cases here in South Africa at present are the vast
Limpopo Province platinum fields and the titanium and other minerals in
the Wild Coast dunes (where, ironically, the film Blood Diamond was
shot). Tough communities are resisting multinational corporations, but
will need vigorous solidarity, because the extraction of these resources
is extremely costly in terms of local land use, peasant displacement,
water extraction, energy consumption, and political corruption, and
requires constant surveillance and community solidarity.
Still, the awareness that local activists are generating in these
campaigns makes us all more conscious of how damaging bogus strategies
like carbon trading can be, in contrast with a genuine project to change
the world.
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