http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4815

Players and Plays at Bali Walden Bello | December 13, 2007 Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
With less than 48 hours to go before the Bali climate conference comes to a close, it is now universally expected that the 13th session of the Conference of Parties (COP 13) will produce a watered-down “Bali Roadmap.” Once again, countries will be bending over backwards to seduce the United States into joining a post-Kyoto multilateral process to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. Bali will probably be remembered as the conference where big business came to climate change in big way. A significant number of the side events have focused on market solutions to the GHG problem such as emissions trading arrangements. Under such schemes, GHG intensive countries can “offset” their emissions by paying non-GHG intensive countries to forgo pollution-intensive activities, with the market serving as the mediator. Shell and other big-time polluters have been making the rounds touting the market as the prime solution to the climate crisis, a position that meshes well with the U.S. opposition to mandatory emission cuts set by government. UN officials justify the greater private sector presence by saying that 84% of the $50 billion needed to combat climate change in the next few years will need to come from the private sector and the latter needs to be “incentivized.” Climate change activists have been appalled and stunned by the business takeover of the climate change discourse. “I can’t believe it,” one Indian activist muttered as he walked out of a session entitled Linking Emissions Trading Markets. “These guys have their own specialized jargon. I did not understand one word of what they were saying.” According to Kevin Smith of the Durban Network on Climate Justice, “The carbon market was originally a very minor part of the architecture of climate architecture, one that climate activists agreed to in order to get the United States on board the Kyoto express. Well, the United States did not get on board, and we are now stuck with carbon markets driving the process since the corporations have found that there is money to be made from climate change.” Smith and others claim that the carbon market is a panacea that will merely allow polluters in the North to keep on polluting while allowing private interests in the South to displace smallholders so they can set up unmonitored and unregulated tree plantations that are supposed to absorb carbon dioxide.