Democracy or Carbocracy?
Intellectual Corruption and the Future of the Climate Debate

"Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University, On Bullshit¹

When diplomats emerged from their conference rooms in Bonn on the morning of 23 July this year to announce that they had reached agreement on how to tackle climate change, many environmentalists cheered. After being disappointed by the collapse of the climate negotiations last November in The Hague, and by US President George W. Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in March, they were ready to celebrate.

The jubilation seemed justified. Global warming is a matter of overwhelming importance. Keeping worldwide negotiations going seems critical. If nothing else, the Bonn agreement signaled that most of the world's governments recognize that climate change is a problem and are eager to be seen to be doing something about it.

Yet a soberer look may be needed. A decade ago, international climate talks could still be said to be, in part, an environmentalist initiative. But how much of that agenda remains in today's negotiations? Many observers complain that the talks leading up to Bonn were antidemocratic and scientifically bankrupt. The truth is even worse. They were also, in many ways, counterproductive.

Contrary to popular impression, most climate negotiators no longer bother discussing how to make deep cuts in fossil fuel emissions. Nor do they talk seriously about how to share the world's limited carbon-cycling capacity. Nor do they scrutinize the underlying causes of global warming. Nor do they support the most important existing efforts to adapt to it.

Instead, they squabble over calculations they should know are unscientific -- such as how much fossil fuel emissions they might claim that trees are "neutralizing" through photosynthesis. They argue over who is to receive the spoils of "climate mitigation" activities whose fraudulence is well-established -- such as subsidies for tree plantations or coal-fired power plants. They lay plans for a carbon market which has no viable accounting system and which would redistribute air and land from poor to rich. Such cynical games have usurped years of negotiations. The same effort could have been more prudently devoted to practical means of addressing global warming and its effects.

Building on the agreement reached in Bonn is crucial. So is mobilizing against Bush's anti-environmentalism. But doing either means more than just cheering on any and all attempts to keep the diplomats talking. It also means studying the subtle social processes through which the climate talks have themselves become a contributing cause of the climate crisis. And it means organizing in support of the many more constructive approaches to global warming that exist elsewhere.

The Paradox of the Protocol

In 1997 the world's governments, under heavy public pressure, came to an agreement on climate action known as the Kyoto Protocol. When ratified,² the Protocol is to bind 38 industrialized nations to reducing their emissions by an average of five per cent by 2008-2012. Countries unable to achieve these modest targets are allowed to "compensate" by buying credits from countries that have exceeded their targets, by putting money into forestry or soil conservation, or by investing in "cleaner" energy technology abroad (see Box 1: "Flexible Mechanisms and Other Loopholes").

The Kyoto pact is technocratic. It tends to see global warming's causes mainly in physical terms: the production of excessive amounts of greenhouse gases.³ On the whole, it declines to address institutions and power imbalances which have resulted in both the overuse and the unequal use of the atmosphere. Avoiding historical analysis, it averts its gaze from the politics of industry, the explosion in trade-related transport, subsidies for fossil fuel exploitation, the creation of consumer demand, and so on.

It views global warming's effects in a similar way, often assuming that "knowing the physical attributes of a climatic variation or change" is "adequate for understanding or predicting its consequences for human society".⁴ It pays little attention to the fact that, in the words of geographer Michael Watts, "climate risk is not naturally given",⁵ but is partly a function of a society's cultural resources and ingenuity, together with the political forces which support or threaten them.

This technocratic slant is no accident. In addition to having bureaucratic, technical or market backgrounds, many of the Protocol's architects took their cues from an earlier treaty: the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.⁶

The Montreal agreement was a technocrat's dream. Spearheaded by Northern scientific bureaucracies and governments, it managed to restrict the use of ozone-depleting substances internationally without having to scrutinise the industrial system which produced them.⁷ Although aimed at phasing out the use of substances many corporations had come to rely on (mainly chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs), the Montreal Protocol was also fundamentally business-friendly. The Chemical Manufacturers Association was a part of the Northern-dominated scientific network which eventually confirmed the link between CFCs and ozone depletion, and Du Pont and other manufacturers joined many governments in announcing their support for an ozone protocol long before it was agreed.⁸

Unsurprisingly, the agreements that resulted presented the ozone problem as rooted in "flights of inanimate particles from activities deemed benign in themselves, and not the lifestyles of the rich and famous", to quote the wry assessment of Sheila Jasanoff, Professor of Science and Public Policy at Harvard.⁹ Luckily, the economic and political stakes weren't very high. Unlike global warming, the ozone problem didn't require restructuring energy sectors central to industrialized economies.¹⁰ Substitutes were found for some ozone-depleting substances, and with the help of a few transition-aiding payments to Southern nations, nearly all nations wound up complying with the treaty.

The deliberations leading up to the Kyoto Protocol were biased in similar ways. They saw the way forward in "rational analysis, goal-setting, and policy implementation by technocratic elites".¹¹ They were even guided by some of the same scientist-bureaucrats. Modest, fixed, quantitative targets and timetables for reducing emissions were set without many questions being asked about power, property and political obstacles. It was as if elites and their advisers were imagined already to have their hands on "non-political" dials which, when twisted, would ratchet greenhouse-gas emissions down to a reasonable level.

That kind of unsophisticated approach may have worked in Montreal. But it ran into problems in Kyoto. Even on its own technocratic terms, the Kyoto treaty was seen by most observers as inadequate in itself. Supposing its many loopholes could be plugged,implementing the agreement could check the projected several-degree temperature rise over the next century by only a fraction of one degree.¹⁸ Many scientists hold that 60 per cent global emissions cuts are needed just to level off CO2 proportions in the atmosphere at twice pre-industrial revolution levels, and even cuts this big carry no guarantees.

That provoked some obvious questions. Why devote years or decades of negotiations to trying to find ways to achieve such a paltry objective? Doesn't doing so even risk a backlash when a globally-warmed, flood-plagued, storm-buffeted public finds out how little has been done?¹⁹ Two answers were usually given.

The first was that the goal set in Kyoto is easy for intellectuals to understand. It's numerical. You know -- it would seem -- whether you've reached it or not. Complicated institutional change is left out of the picture. So is the issue of how different societies might best adapt to the climate change already occuring.

Second, so what if the cuts contemplated were small and applied only to 38 countries? Surely some cuts by some nations were better than none at all. Only by building on hard-won, trust-building agreements by which industrialized countries make little reductions first, the argument went, will it become possible for the whole world to join in bigger collective efforts later. Whatever its drawbacks, the Kyoto Protocol was the "best expression we have of collective will to solve the problem".²⁰ Hence even some of the severest non-government organization (NGO) critics of the talks lavished time and resources on official meetings, creating a generation of activists whose professional lives have in many cases become bound up with legitimizing the treaty process.

These answers are now invalid. The current incarnation of the Kyoto Protocol will fail to curb greenhouse gas releases even by the tiny amounts advertised. Worse: the measures the Protocol proposes for "compensating" for the emission increases which it sanctions open up new ways of subsidizing climate change. As a result, the treaty is arguably on course to discredit the whole idea of climate negotiations.

Promoting Unequal Rights to the Air

"To say that we should 'leave things to the market' is to say no more nor less than that we should leave things to history as it has come to us."

Arthur MacEwen, University of Massachusetts, Neoliberalism or Democracy?²¹

North America, Europe, Japan and Australia and other industrialized regions use far more than their fair share of the atmosphere as a greenhouse-gas dump. And they throw far more greenhouse gases into the air than the earth's biophysical systems can recycle back out.

To stabilize levels of greenhouse gases at a level twice those at the time of the industrial revolution, global emissions would have to be reduced from the current one tonne of carbon per person per year to an average of 0.4 tonnes. The US emits 13 times this amount per head, or 5.2 tonnes, and Japan and Western European nations five to twelve times this amount per head, or two to five tonnes. More than 50 Southern countries including India, by contrast, emit less than half the maximum level, or 0.2 tonnes per person.²² Assuming that each person has an equal right to the atmosphere, US emissions will ultimately have to come down to less than 10 per cent of current levels, while India's can double. There's also an accumulated "carbon debt" which the North owes the South due to its disproportionate emissions over the past century and a half.²⁹

Rather than addressing these issues, the Kyoto Protocol stipulates that Europe will be allowed to continue emitting a full 92 per cent of its 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions until 2012. Canada and Japan are permitted 94 per cent of their 1990 levels, and Australia 108 per cent. Because it "rewards historically high emitters and penalizes low emitters"³⁰ in this way, the treaty appears to give the North atmospheric "dumping rights" which are both unsustainable and unfair.

The Protocol's defenders argue that this appearance is deceptive. The Protocol, they say, isn't talking about property rights at all, but merely sets temporary emissions targets as a stepping-stone on the way to more radical cuts. This, they say, in no way precludes a future discussion on who really owns the atmosphere.

This defence is invalid. The Kyoto Protocol, together with initiatives outside the official negotiations, creates a "sky market", where money can buy rights to use the air as a greenhouse gas dump. This market, like any other, needs these rights to belong to somebody. You can't trade what you don't have power over. This "somebody" turns out to be the people who are using the atmosphere the most already.³¹

Under the Kyoto Protocol, if Japan (say) finds that cutting its emissions by the required six per cent between 1990 and 2008 to 2012 is too difficult or expensive, it'll be able to buy cheap emissions permits from elsewhere to help fill the gap. But it won't need to buy permits for the remaining 94 per cent of its 1990 emissions. In effect, it'll be regarded as already holding these -- if only until 2008.

By the same token, if Russia, Ukraine, Germany or the UK overshoot their Kyoto targets, they'll have, in effect, permits to use atmospheric dumps which they don't need. These will be available for sale to Japan or other countries. Again, this implies that these countries hold more provisional air disposal rights than nations that have historically made do with a smaller per capita use of global carbon-cycling capacity. The latter countries won't have so many permits to sell even if they make emissions cuts which are proportionally just as great.

In practice, such permits cannot help but be treated as what David Victor of the US Council on Foreign Relations calls "semipermanent property rights". Once distributed, they will tend to become "assets that, like other property rights, owners will fight to protect". Their immense value will only add to the pressures to treat them as durable property. Victor calculates that at US$14 per tonne of carbon dioxide (which is somewhere in the middle range of the prices economists expect CO2 to fetch if global climate trading schemes go into effect), the new carbon commodities created by Kyoto would add up to $2.345 trillion, the "largest invention of monetary assets by voluntary international treaty in history".³⁹

Awarding most of these assets free to the North is hardly a sustainable settlement. And it's one that has already been sharply contested. The British organization Christian Aid argues, for example, that the distribution of rights should be just the opposite of that proposed by Kyoto. The G-7 group of industrialized countries, Christian Aid calculates, is "running up carbon debts in economic efficiency terms of around US$13 trillion each year" while the "group of highly indebted poor countries are running up credits of between $141-$612 billion because of their under-use of fossil fuel resources and the climate."⁴⁰

Making Inequalities Worse

Current carbon trading schemes not only entrench inequalities in access to global resources. They make them worse. The Kyoto Protocol, and the many corporate initiatives being developed in parallel, help make it possible for the well-off to buy the right to operate air conditioners, sports utility vehicles or jet fleets while telling ordinary people to stop using firewood or farming rice in methane-emitting paddies. They encourage companies who already use more than their share of the world's carbon sinks and stocks to buy still more of them -- using cash which has itself been accumulated partly through a history of overexploiting those sinks and stocks.

Under the arrangement, the North gets the right to emit extra greenhouse gases in exchange not only for maintaining trees or soil in its own rural areas but also for planting trees in the South. This expands its already-extensive ecological and social footprint. If Japan uses 24 times more per capita of the atmosphere for carbon-dioxide dumping than India, then it will also need 24 times more tree plantation land, 24 times more trees, and 24 times more "carbon workers" per capita in order to "compensate". Economic realism dictates that the land will be taken disproportionately from poorer people in the South and elsewhere.

The Norwegian firms Tree Farms AS and Norwegian Afforestation Group, for example, have already leased land from Uganda at bargain prices to use to soak up Norwegian carbon dioxide. This takeover threatens the livelihoods of 8,000 people, mainly farmers and fisherfolk, many of whom consider themselves the owners of the land in question. Carbon revenues will far exceed the rent paid to the Ugandan government.⁴¹ TransAlta, the largest energy utility in Alberta, Canada, is meanwhile financing a project to feed Ugandan cows supplements to reduce the volume of their farts, which contain the greenhouse gas methane, in order for TransAlta to buy itself time to upgrade three coal-fired electricity generating stations.⁴²

In neighbouring Tanzania, Tree Farms anticipates selling carbon credits from pine and eucalyptus plantations worth US$27 million to Industrikraft Midt-Norge on a land rent payment to the government of a mere $565,000. Starting in 1996-7, local people were hired as casual plantation workers between December and March at a rate less than the government's minimum wage (US$1.05 per day), and many workers were not paid at all. "When we asked about the salaries," commented the residents of Uchindile village:

"the company told us that the money came from a place far away and that there was nothing that could be done about it."

As environmentalist Jorn Stave notes, the agreement requires not only that local people give up rights to future use of the land. It also demands that Tanzania "relinquish the option of using the plantation areas in its own CO2 budgets when, as is likely, the Kyoto Protocol is expanded" to include restrictions on Southern emissions.⁴³

Such projects don't only damage local livelihoods. They're also used to sanction fossil fuel-related pollution elsewhere, both at mining and oil drilling sites and around energy generating plants. The impacts once again fall mainly on the poor. As always, using technical fixes to try to remedy what are essentially political problems tends merely to pile inequality on inequality.

All this is bound to stir growing opposition over time. Governments of some poorer nations may sell permits while their industrial output is in decline,⁴⁴ but then defect from the agreement when their country looks set to put out carbon dioxide in excess of its allocation. Still others may be angered when they can't build a power plant because the North has already acquired ownership of the needed emissions rights. Frustrated by land grabs, finally, local people may take matters into their own hands and render "carbon-saving" forest or land projects projects valueless.⁴⁵

Call to Account

Climate negotiatiors' commitment to untenable notions of property and resource distribution isn't the only reason why their plans for an atmosphere market are headed for trouble. In addition to clear property rights, markets need workable accounting systems. Venturing into a market without knowing how or what to count is as dangerous as doing so without knowing who owns what.

An accounting system for a market with billions and perhaps trillions of dollars of emission permits circulating throughout the global economy on the basis of gas fluxes, needs to be, as US commentator David Victor notes drily, "reasonably robust". It needs to be able to quantify in a single number the direct and indirect atmospheric effects of any credited actions taken on climate. That would require:

1. The biophysical knowledge necessary to assemble a sufficiently certain and complete quantitative picture of carbon flows between the atmosphere and biosphere. The margin of uncertainty in quantifying carbon stocks and flows must be small enough for credits gained from planting or maintaining trees, or maintaining or improving soil, to be climatically meaningful.
2. Sustainable consensus on what social agency is responsible, and in what proportion, for any quantified change in carbon flows. For credits to be assigned, it is insufficient simply to quantify and verify that some atmospheric change has been brought about by some set of trees or flight of particles. The trees' presence or the particle flights must be traced to some nation, corporation, group or individual. Somebody must be responsible for, or be the owner of, or be entitled to, the trees. Somebody must have caused the particles to fly. Accounting presupposes accountability. Who is to be credited and debited?
3. The ability to quantify the effects of social actions and institutions which mediate those carbon flows. Sociological as well as biophysical knowledge is necessary for tracing, assessing, predicting or controlling carbon flows resulting from efforts to mitigate climate change. For example, physical action (planting trees, building power plants fueled by so-called "clean coal"⁴⁶) may cause social effects (outrage among local farmers, diminished interest among investors in renewable energy, loss of local knowledge). These social effects may in turn bring about further physical effects (migration to cities, increased use of fossil fuels) which exacerbate climatic instability. Assessing, predicting or controlling carbon flows into or out of the biosphere resulting from a carbon plantation requires understanding and monitoring the "carbon behaviour" of any people affected by the plantation project, whether they are dispossessed peasants who move to Los Angeles or Wall Street bankers whose advice to utility investors is affected by the plantation's anticipated impact on carbon prices.
4. The ability to specify a story line constituting what "would have happened" without a particular climate action. This is crucial especially when actions are being credited which result in the transfer of carbon from fossil fuel deposits to the air, but in amounts "less than would otherwise have been the case". To make the accounting system work, the story line describing "what would have happened otherwise" must be singular. If more than one possible alternative future emissions scenario is specified, then quantitative comparisons with the carbon effects of each story line will have to be made, the number of credits will be indeterminate and the accounting system will break down.

The failure of any one of these conditions would be enough to make Kyoto's accounting system impossible, and explode the foundations of the trading system it envisages. Yet not only one but all four of the conditions fail spectacularly.

First, if the biosphere is to be part of the accounts, "the current state of knowledge regarding carbon sources and sinks cannot determine the levels and flows of carbon with sufficient accuracy to form the basis for the Protocol and any viable trading scheme".⁴⁷ Second, there is unlikely to be consensus on who is entitled to which carbon credits. Third, quantifying the effects on carbon stocks and flows of policies and other social actions is admitted by all sides to be impossible. Finally, the future is a matter for decision, not just prediction. The story line describing "what would have happened otherwise" can never be singular. (For elaboration, discussion and references, see Appendix below: "Why Kyoto-Style Accounting Systems Fail".)

Because the carbon accounting system envisaged by Kyoto is quadruply impossible, the pretence that it works -- enshrined in the Bonn agreement -- is bound to end in tears. Bad or unverifiable carbon credits are likely to jam the trading system. Cheating will be both encouraged and uncontrollable. Ultimately, the market is unlikely to survive. Far from being checked, climate change will be subsidized and exacerbated.

Undermining Existing Initiatives and Resources

One of the biggest ironies in the current climate talks is that they often distract from an impressive range of existing positive practices and initiatives. In sharp contrast with the wishful technical fixes mooted by the corporate sector and the Kyoto Protocol, many of these go straight to the political and social root causes of global warming. To take a few examples:

• Communities in Burma, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Colombia, Nigeria, Chad, Thailand, Bolivia and Ecuador have stepped to the forefront of constructive action against global warming by protesting oil drilling and winning the revocation of fossil fuel concessions in their territories. In doing so, they argue, they're helping to keep some 3.655 billion tonnes of carbon in the ground. Such groups are also building alliances with other communities who have lost out in the hydrocarbon economy through having their health or livelihoods threatened by oil-burning installations. In support of these movements, which provide powerful incentives for managing demand and development of renewable energy, the non-governmental organization Oilwatch is calling for a plan for a moratorium on the exploration for further oil, gas and coal and on loans and subsidies for extraction and generation projects.⁴⁸
• At a time when North American emissions are rocketing upwards, China reportedly reduced its own by 17 per cent in only two years, between 1997 and 1999 -- during a time when its economy expanded by 15 per cent. The reductions, achieved in part through mundane technical improvements in boiler technology, equal the 400 million tonnes of carbon that the US transportation sector emitted in 2000.⁴⁹
• In Sweden, communities supported by non-government organizations are independently undertaking efficiency and renewable energy programmes to cut their emissions by up to six times their per capita share of the country's Kyoto targets. The city of Vaxjo is working toward abandoning the municipal use of fossil fuels altogether.⁵⁰
• A continent away, citizens in Haat Yai, Thailand, are mobilizing at community level to analyze the huge floods which struck the area in 2000. They're also assessing locally-appropriate ways of coping in the future with such events and monitoring the effectiveness of state interventions.
• The Caribbean nation of St. Lucia is meanwhile quickly and unilaterally moving toward a fossil fuel-free energy future with a practical renewable energy technology investment plan.⁵¹
• Movements protecting community forests and low-input swidden agricultural systems worldwide continue to be a powerful force preventing climatically-destabilizing land clearance, commercial logging and high-input intensive agriculture.
• Movements battling the deleterious effects of global trade liberalisation are also helping slow down the mining and burning of fossil fuels. One example is the international campaign spearheaded by groups such as the New Economics Foundation to cut state subsidies for transport of internationally-traded goods -- projected to increase 70 per cent between 1992 and 2004.⁵²

The first question for any global agreement on climate to ask itself is whether it nurtures -- or whether it undermines -- such already-existing actions. On the whole, the answer so far isn't encouraging.

For example, the Bonn agreement does call on parties to the climate convention (especially, oddly, Southern ones) to "remov[e] subsidies associated with the use of environmentally unsound and unsafe technologies". But few diplomats or their technical advisers have proposed lending a hand to community groups resisting coal and oil exploitation (and thus helping in the economic transition to a post-hydrocarbon economy) by applying pressure on export credit agencies or the World Bank to stop providing handouts to Northern fossil fuel companies from public funds.⁵⁸ No clear measures are being considered, either, to induce governments to reduce the subsidies they provide for coal-and oil-fired power (estimated at US$200 billion annually⁵⁹), the automobile economy, long-distance food transport and new fossil fuel exploration. Yet such actions are crucial in helping build local alternatives and ingenuity and develop climate-friendly ways of using and conserving energy.

Worse, the technocracies shaping the official climate change agenda show few signs of even comprehending some of the materials for climate care which already exist at the local level. By supporting (for example) plantation projects, they often threaten their very existence instead.⁶⁰ By continuing to define the climate crisis as a problem to be solved through indefinite capital accumulation, state subsidies for large corporations and consultants, transnational capital flows, neoclassical economics and national "development", the climate establishment makes it almost impossible for itself to connect its top-down emissions targets with support for independent actions at the local level -- actions that will necessarily be variegated and difficult to administer from above through development channels whose failures are widely acknowledged (see Box 5: "The Limits of Centralized Carbon Projects").

The approach currently followed by the UN and corporate sector also tends to menace existing reserves of flexibility many communities will need to adapt to the degree of climate change which is already inevitable. One problem lies in the de-skilling and disempowerment of ordinary people in the South which tends to accompany state-centred developmentalist approaches. As researcher R.W. Kates puts it:

"If the global poor are to adapt to global change, it will be critical to focus on poor people and not on poor countries as does the prevailing North-South dialogue. The interests of the poor are not always the same as the interests of poor countries, since in the interests of 'development', the poor may grow poorer."⁶¹

Ordinary people in the North are disempowered, too, when the dominant market approach to climate change diverts their concern into individual self-blame and green consumerism. For example, Europeans and Australians are often invited by carbon-"offset" companies, governments or environmentalists to calculate their individual carbon emissions using simple questionnaires. Inevitably, most of those answering are revealed to be "individually responsible" for large releases of CO2 from, for example, home heating or national transport systems which the questionnaires provide no clues on how to change.

One indirect effect of this procedure is to leave respondents vulnerable to the challenge that they "have no right to talk about climate change until they stop using their cars". Another is to draw them into attempts to "compensate" for their outsize "individual" emissions by investing in tree-planting. The following "carbon equations", for instance, which represent the current market approach in microcosm, are cited in recent promotional material by the British tree-planting firm Future Forests:

• 7 trees = 5 London-New York single air tickets
• 5 trees = 1 year's driving of an ordinary car
• 2 trees = 4 pots of tea a day for 6 years
• 40 trees = 1 average home's CO2 emissions over 5 years

These calculations are part of Future Forests' invitation to individuals and corporations to become "carbon-neutral®". It doesn't matter how much fossil fuel you use, or what you use it for. Simply write out a cheque and the carbon professionals will punch numbers into their computers representing your carbon-dioxide emissions, plant the requisite number of trees, and watch over them for you.⁶²

In addition to slighting or ignoring many existing climate-friendly local practices, negotiators' technical advisers have also been slow to acknowledge an important and growing international climate movement. This movement demands both that the discussion of rights in the atmosphere be brought out of the shadows and that a scientifically meaningful programme of aggregate emissions cuts be undertaken. It calls for all countries to agree, in line with evolving wisdom on climate, how rapidly world greenhouse gas emissions should contract each year. It proposes then allocating permits to emit to all countries in proportion to the number of their citizens. Countries unable to keep their emissions in line with their per capita allocations could buy extra ones from those whose emissions were under the limit.

This equitable, flexible "contraction and convergence" framework has been endorsed by many Southern countries including China, India and the nations of the Africa Group; European government ministers including Michael Meacher of the UK, Jacques Chirac of France and Svend Auken of Denmark; insurance industry associations; and organizations ranging from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution to India's Centre on Science and Environment and Climate Network Africa. Unlike any other proposal on offer, the framework would enable the US's bluff to be called on all three of its objections to the Bonn climate agreement: that it doesn't commit the South to emissions limitations; that it's "unfair"; and that it doesn't address sources of future emissions.⁶³ It would thus advance the discussion in a way which could result in a better future agreement.

From One Technical Fix to Another

"Why is there so much bullshit? ... The production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more extensive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled -- whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others -- to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant ... The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world."

Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit"⁶⁴

How has an international discussion that advertises itself as well-intentioned, and which has benefited from the involvement of so many environmental activists, veered so far into nihilism and irrelevance? "Lack of political will" is one stock answer given by columnists, pundits, diplomats and non-government organizations. But this response is both glib and unenlightening. It'd perhaps be more exact to cite a "surfeit of political will" on the part of the private corporations and technocratic institutions that have influenced the negotiations so deeply.

The search for a better-grounded answer might begin with the fact that many industrialized countries long ago abandoned the goal of meeting their Kyoto Protocol targets by reducing emissions. Instead of lowering its greenhouse gas emissions by seven per cent by 2012, as specified in the Protocol, for instance, the US is likely to increase them by 25-30 per cent.⁶⁵ Instead of cutting its emissions by six per cent, Canada will probably increase them by 44 per cent.⁶⁶ Since 1990, Australia's CO2 emissions have risen by 17 and Japan's by over 14.⁶⁷

To many Northern politicians and thinkers, these trends are destiny. Oil and energy corporations' plans must be accommodated. The current generation of energy-generating equipment must be allowed to run for the rest of its lifetime. Protests over fuel costs must be avoided. Improving efficiency is not worth the effort. Underlying these imperatives is the belief that cutting carbon emissions is more expensive than continued burning of fossil fuels -- a notion which underpins the entire market approach to climate.

This notion is either false or oversimplified (see Box 6: "Which is Cheaper, Action or No Action?"). But it has prevailed with economic modelers, policymakers, technocrats -- and climate negotiators.⁷⁰ As a result, the problem for Northern politicians and their advisers has become how to reconcile rising emissions with climate action.

The answer is inevitable: instead of delinking from carbon-intensive technologies, find ways to make technologies which transfer underground stores of fossil-fuel carbon into the air seem just as "climate-neutral" as technologies which keep the carbon in the ground.

Few expected such measures to solve the climate change problem. Few even believed that they would be able to keep industrialized countries within their Kyoto limits for long, given expanding fossil fuel use. But they were supposed to give the North, especially the US, a "money-saving" reprieve from having to meet its Kyoto targets by emissions cuts. Getting carbon credit for changes in forest and land management within Northern countries alone, it was asserted, could reduce the costs of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol by a third.⁷¹ Credits from the South were expected to be even cheaper.

As time passed, Southern elites were seduced into the deal as well, with the help of development agencies and energy, development and forestry companies. Before long, negotiators were talking about little else. After one technical fix -- legislating mere numerical limits on 38 countries' emissions -- had proved politically unworkable, diplomats had simply added another: market-based mechanisms and trees. An infrastructure began to be built up which would "lock in" societal dependence on carbon sequestration and trading techniques just as, during the previous century, carbon-intensive technologies had been politically and culturally "locked in" to industrial economies.

But the political nature of ecological crises isn't so easily evaded. The repressed always returns. The techno-fix diplomats hoped would remedy the "inflexibility" of the Kyoto targets now faces breakdown due to its own ill-concealed neocolonialism and scientific fraudulence.

Corporate Influence, Diplomatic Paralysis

"How we got to this convoluted state, God only knows."

Andrew Kerr, World Wide Fund for Nature, November 2000

A fuller explanation for the deepening quagmire in official climate politics would look in detail at how large private corporations have come to dominate official international forums on global warming -- and why they have taken the trouble to do so.

Many corporate lobby groups treat serious efforts to tackle climate change as threats to corporate capitalization, culture, market share and stability. Research by the non-governmental Corporate Europe Observatory and others suggests that, viewed in the aggregate, such groups, though diverse in their individual interests, have followed a two-pronged, "fail-safe" strategy.⁷² On the one hand, they've tried to prevent the Kyoto Protocol from being ratified. On the other, they've subverted and weakened the Protocol from the inside.

The second is the dominant approach followed by corporate representatives outside the US, including US negotiators outside their own borders. Widening the loopholes the US built into the Protocol in 1997, they've helped divert the climate talks into politically regressive and scientifically spurious discussions about avoiding emissions reductions while reinforcing the inertia of fossil fuel-intensive industries.

The tactics for achieving these ends are many. One is to swamp official meetings with lobbyists and consultants. At UN climate conferences, private sector representatives easily outnumber both delegates and environmentalists. Far more important, however, is patient corporate work behind the scenes, particularly with other companies, with technical experts, and with national governments.⁷³

One example is a mission mounted by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) shortly before the 1998 climate talks in Buenos Aires. Together with Shell, Texaco, Mobil and Chevron, the ICC sent a 30-person team to Senegal to round up support for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) (see Box 1) from the energy and environment ministers of more than 20 African countries. In return, the companies offered technology transfer and foreign investment. Similar efforts with forest-rich Latin American nations have helped recruit nearly all their governments to the cause of carbon forestry. A fossil-fuel industry coalition called the Climate Council works closely with prominent members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in countering various climate proposals, while the World Business Council on Sustainable Development has put its head together with the UN Development Programme to facilitate carbon trading and get companies involved in CDM projects.⁷⁴ Other alliances such as the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue and the Emissions Marketing Association are in touch with national governments daily to promote market approaches to global warming. At the July 2001 talks in Bonn, five representatives of the Indonesian Association of Logging Companies sat on their country's delegation, pushing for schemes which would create climate credits for logging and plantations.

Europe's corporations have meanwhile worked to erode from within European opposition to demands from the US and its allies for no limits on "flexible mechanisms". The European Roundtable of Industrialists, a club of 48 of the largest European transnationals, has been an influential proponent of the view that business should be offered "flexibility to develop alternative approaches" to regulation.⁸⁴ UNICE, the European confederation of employers, and the European Chemical Industry Federation are active on the same front, and other European firms hope to cash in on exports of supposedly "zero-carbon" nuclear energy. Other busy European groups include the Dutch FACE Foundation, which has been a pioneer in carbon forestry both in The Netherlands and abroad, and aid bodies such as Switzerland's Intercooperation, which is putting taxpayers' money into research on carbon forestry.⁸⁵

Good Cop, Bad Cop

While corporate actors acting internationally have helped retool the Kyoto Protocol from within, those inside the US have triumphed with a more primitive siege approach, attacking the Protocol itself.

This approach -- although obsolete elsewhere -- still works in the US partly because of the disproportionate cultural influence enjoyed there by multinational fossil-fuel-related corporations. Such companies shape a great deal of the information to which ordinary US citizens have access. Corporate or corporate-backed groups such as the Business Roundtable, the Global Climate Information Project, the Coalition for Vehicle Choice, the National Center for Public Policy Research, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition and the Information Council for the Environment have spent millions of dollars on experts, conferences, books and advertisements associating climate action with economic harm to the US, including higher petrol prices.⁸⁶ For a decade, the Global Climate Coalition, another corporate group, aimed a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign at US audiences attacking the whole idea that the climate was changing, including a US$13 million pre-Kyoto advertising blitz in 1997 alone.⁸⁷ Corporate-linked non-government organizations such as the Pew Center for Climate Change⁸⁸ and establishment think-tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations also help carry the message to the media that Kyoto targets are "unrealistic", aided enormously by the faculties of North American and British economics departments.

Through campaign finance, corporations also exercise tight control over US politicians. Nearly the entire US Senate endorses the line that the Kyoto Protocol is "damaging" to the US economy and "unfair" because it requires Northern countries to reduce emissions first.⁸⁹ Since the Senate would have to ratify any climate agreement signed by the US, the effects reverberate throughout the government and bureaucracy. Under the Bill Clinton regime, for example, US negotiators constantly had to assure Senators that they were willing to disregard both scientific and public opinion on atmospheric change.

A Senate hearing to which US chief climate negotiator Frank Loy was summoned two months before the meeting in The Hague offers a case in point. The Senators to whom Loy had to report included businessman Chuck Hagel, chair of the Senate Observer Group to the climate negotiations. In 1997-8 alone, Hagel had received more than a million dollars in campaign contributions from, among others, BP Amoco, Chevron, Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Marathon, Occidental and Tenneco; the three largest US automakers; and electric utilities in nine states other than the one (Nebraska) which Hagel ostensibly represents. Revealingly, these contributions flowed into Hagel's coffers just after he was first elected, not before. Most went directly -- and legally -- into his personal bank account.⁹⁰ Hagel lectured Loy that other countries were just going to have to "get over" the idea that the US bears heavy responsibility for the climate crisis:

"the developing countries that are not held to any standard in Kyoto are obviously the biggest polluters when it comes to the black soot and some of these other emissions. Carbon dioxide, the United States has made good progress on that, as has [sic] most developing countries, imperfect yes. But we are not the problem."⁹¹

In fact, as Hagel should have been notified by his platoon of researchers, the US, with five per cent of the world's population, releases nearly a quarter of its greenhouse gases and a third of its carbon dioxide. He should also have been informed that nearly half of the total growth in global CO2 emissions since 1990 has come from the US, more than the combined increase of China, India, Africa and Latin America.⁹²

Senator Frank Murkowski -- a banker and one of the Senate's top five recipients of campaign funding from air-polluting industries including auto, fossil fuel mining, electric utility and trucking firms⁹³ -- then added this observation:

"We have spent an astronomical amount on renewables. We have not achieved the percentage of the market share we would like, but it is not because we have not expended the money."⁹⁴

In fact, US government investment in renewable energy research and development has been poor compared with subsidies for nuclear and fossil energy, and has fallen steeply since 1980.⁹⁵ In 1995, renewables got less than five per cent of total government expenditure on energy research and development, or $393 million, having fallen from a high of only 15 per cent, or nearly $1.2 billion, in 1980. (In April 2001, President Bush announced that support for renewables would be cut again in 2002 from $373 to $237 million.⁹⁶)

Loy acquiesced without comment in the Senators' inaccurate claims. Significantly, however, he wasn't prevented from setting out certain virtues of a pro-Kyoto position. Whatever the facts of global warming might be, he assured the Senators, staying in the talks could make it possible for the US simply to compute its way out of its Kyoto commitments. Even better, it could help make some extra money for some of its wealthier citizens on the side. For instance, the US could arrange things so that it could take credit for having a lot of trees within its borders. It could also try to find other so-called "climate mitigation" measures from which large US landowners could financially benefit.

The cordial understanding eventually arrived at between Loy and the Senators reflects an important strategic truth. Corporate attacks on the Kyoto Protocol don't necessarily contradict corporate attempts to use it. Like the proverbial "bad cop", industry activists within the US go straight for the throat of the Protocol.⁹⁷ Like the proverbial "good cop", their colleagues, largely outside the US, "defend" it, hoping to cajole and squeeze it into giving them what they want. The broader goal is the same: entrenchment of corporate power over atmospheric CO2 dumps.

Sometimes good and bad cop are even the same person. The American Petroleum Institute, for instance, lobbies both for and against the Kyoto formula, depending on whom it's talking to. It tells US political elites that it would be unfair to restrict US emissions without also limiting the South's.⁹⁸ It then tells Southern elites not to submit to such restrictions on pain of losing growth and foreign investment. Similarly, the International Chamber of Commerce's attempt to bend the Kyoto framework in favour of big business meshes beautifully with the more aggressive anti-Kyoto line⁹⁹ of its US branch.¹⁰⁰

By the same token, President Bush's ditching of the Kyoto Protocol in favour of "voluntary" corporate approaches to climate change doesn't contradict corporate efforts to take advantage of the Protocol from within. It's very much of a piece with them. Bush's "no Kyoto" position has made it even easier for those seeking to subvert the Protocol to argue that huge concessions must be made to the US's climate allies Japan, Canada and Australia to secure any sort of treaty at all. In fact, Bush's own diplomats were present at the Bonn conference in July 2001 in large numbers to haggle over the details of a treaty their President had already rejected. The deal which resulted is congenial to many sectors of the US business community, who may well eventually succeed in pushing Bush into backing Kyoto -- no doubt to much public acclaim.

In sum, to criticize Bush's withdrawal from the treaty without criticizing corporate pressure inside the climate talks is to risk falling victim to the elite strategy that underlies both. In truth, Bush's position merely formalizes the destructive role the US and its carbon-intensive industries have played in the climate negotiations from the start.

Here as elsewhere, lack of democracy within the US -- the isolation of US negotiators and leaders from their own environmentally-concerned public, to say nothing of the billions of people outside the country -- constitutes a global problem. It magnifies corporate influence on international discussions of all kinds.¹⁰⁷ What climate specialist Michael Grubb calls the "dominance of US power, and the continuing weakness of foreign policy ... elsewhere"¹⁰⁸ has ensured that the negotiations following the Kyoto Protocol -- as well as the Protocol itself -- have been "very much as sought by the US administration".¹⁰⁹

This US dominance, like the corporate dominance to which it's linked, is partly based on force of numbers. The story is often told, for example, of how, in The Hague, the US fielded 150 well-equipped delegates, housing them in the luxury Bel Air Hotel and sending well-rested representatives to every working group meeting, while Mozambique had to put up its three harried delegates in a noisy youth hostel occupied largely by Chinese tourists.¹¹⁸ The US also organizes other trading and sink enthusiasts such as Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway and applies political pressure on less enthusiastic negotiating partners. Not least, it lavishes resources on ensuring dominance in technical forums. As IPCC member Wolfgang Sachs observes, the US is the most "politically-minded" participant in IPCC deliberations:

"Many governments don't even bother to comment on ... drafts, but the Americans do, with a staff of many people. [That's how] influence and power works, even in a relatively marginal thing like the IPCC".¹¹⁹

A New Dialect

"[A number of] important questions cannot be addressed by policymakers engaged in the climate change discourse as it is currently framed."

Elizabeth L. Malone and Steve Rayner¹²³

Climate diplomacy may have been brought low partly by bullying, dirty tricks and undue private-sector influence. But even more important is the corporate-friendly idiom that now sets the terms of the discussion. The function of this idiom is to reconcile the actual current topic of the climate talks -- how to expand and consolidate corporate access rights to the atmosphere -- with its apparent topic -- how to take scientifically-based action to mitigate global warming.¹²⁴

A decade or two ago no such vocabulary existed. Today it is ubiquitous. A mass of disembodied, interlinked terms such as "leakage", "additionality", "baselines" and "supplementarity" has been conjured up which fuse biophysics, neoclassical economics, neocolonialist politics, and international law into a seductive and authoritative ideological fudge which gives business demands moral (read: scientific and technical) content while obscuring their political thrust.

The new idiom isn't just a handful of individual words dressing up a central set of false equations. Nor is it just a pseudo-scientific smokescreen concealing a grab for resources. Nor is it merely a jerry-rigged code large companies and industrialized countries use to communicate threats, offer inducements and conceal their meaning from a skeptical public -- like adults spelling out the naughty words they don't want their children to overhear.

On the contrary, it's a full-blown dialect with its own independent heft, texture and shadings. It's a conceptual home in which a growing number of professionals forge solidarity and find collective confidence and self-respect. Inducing a state of sustained, dreamlike suspension of disbelief, the new idiom enables diplomats to discuss "flexible mechanisms" for weeks on end without needing to ask whether they can either verifiably address climate change or be implemented in the real world (see Box 9: "Transforming Impossibilities into 'Difficulties'"). At the same time, it helps transform field research into carbon sequestration into, to borrow the words of anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, a "ritual furnace" in which the corporate ideology of carbon trading is "forged into subjective truths in the lives of the scientists" involved.¹²⁹ It's a dialect capable of luring intelligent, technically-minded inquirers into an ambience of seriousness, civility and collegiality even in the course of mediating what are, clinically speaking, stupid discussions.

Scholar Joyeeta Gupta has written perceptively that many accepted UN negotiating techniques tend to be friendlier to the North than the South. "Avoiding polarization", "incrementally building on agreement", pretending to be guided by international legal norms -- all handicap activist Southern diplomats by automatically relegating talk of structural change to the category of the "merely rhetorical" or "irrelevant". The resulting series of "decision-less decisions" wind up buttressing an exploitative status quo.¹³⁰

The emerging "technical" discourse on mitigating climate change works in much the same way. Within it, it becomes impossible to change the subject to serious science or responsible politics. Yet to refuse to speak the idiom is to risk "political incorrectness" and marginalisation in the UN corridors and meeting rooms in which climate change is discussed. For example, as IPCC member Wolfgang Sachs notes, orthodox economics and public policy methodology prevents the question even being raised of what type of changes would be necessary to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to a safer level or allocate atmospheric property equitably; and this methodology, largely due to the influence of US climate intellectuals who are forced to adhere to it within their country, continues to dominate IPCC discussions.¹³¹

The climate idiom which results is the cultural substrate on which the so-called "political will" of the US and Big Oil fattens, while that of the less privileged languishes. Talking about how corporate and US power operates in climate politics without discussing how the new idiom works is like talking about how Beethoven achieved his effects without talking about the musical language within which he laboured.

Origins of the Idiom

"All institutions -- academic disciplines, markets, nations, families -- ... match their problems and their solutions to their institutional imperatives."

M. Thompson, M. Warburton and T. Hatley, Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale¹³²

Like any language, the new vocabulary hasn't been spirited up suddenly by a conspiracy of a few individuals. It has a material basis in the varied and shifting details of the patient livelihoods of hundreds of highly-educated communities who speak, maintain and develop it. Nurturing its evolution have been corporations, governments, universities, think-tanks and non-governmental organizations, as well as the UN itself.¹³³ But what has emerged could have been only partly foreseen or intended.

The Northern-dominated¹³⁴ intellectual network responsible for this language produces two things. One consists of authoritative, sobering, ever-evolving narratives of future climate change. These story lines have to be standardized and clear-cut enough to meet international needs for "the" scientific view on global warming. Accordingly, they sometimes homogenize contrasting views and downplay controversy. Under pressure from policymakers, scientists presenting the narratives have also occasionally reformulated indeterminacies in their climate system modelling as "uncertainties". This reinforces existing lay understandings of scientific authority, makes risks seem more calculable and manageable by state institutions, and suggests that generous further funding for technical research will some day issue in determinate answers making policy choices clearer.¹³⁵ Some of these "uncertainties", in addition, provide policymakers with welcome room to make compromises, and corporations with an excuse for doubting that humans are changing the climate at all. However, there's little sign that these establishment narratives of future climate change significantly misrepresent the seriousness of global warming.

The second product is more damaging. It consists of pseudo-scientific justifications for the climate market which the UN and other institutions have agreed on as a result of political horse-trading.¹³⁶ This product functions to make standard climate narratives acceptable to the US government, its allies in Japan, Canada and Australia, trans-national corporations, and a handful of other elites. It also describes global warming's effects in ways that help legitimize agendas and institutions fundamentally unrelated to climate change. Shortly before the climate negotiating round in Bonn in July 2001, for instance, the World Bank issued a press release liberally quoting its environment chief Robert T. Watson (who also happens to be chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Its message was that the World Bank now had an important new role in "helping developing countries protect themselves as much as possible from climate change".¹³⁷

The misnamed "uncertainties" in this second product -- stemming from the four impossibilities of carbon accounting described earlier and in the Appendix (below) -- again guarantee a growing stream of funding for research. Based on false premises, this research is guaranteed to produce yet more failures and "problems", which in turn provide still more jobs for economists, foresters, development consultants and NGOs. In this way, a carbon technocracy, or carbocracy, grows which is capable of manipulating to its own advantage both fears of climate catastrophe and corporate and governmental predilections for self-serving technical "solutions".

Background to Breakdown

How the assembly line for the fabrication of this second product came to be set up is a complex story with an interesting cast of characters. It begins perhaps with the late 1980s efforts of both the US and funding-hungry research bodies to shift the centre of gravity of engaged scientific inquiry into climate change from independent academics and the United Nations Environmental Programme to technocracies more closely tied to governments. These included the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in 1988.¹⁶¹

In 1990, it was the "natural science community" alone which was able to present to governments a "fully planned and coordinated research agenda" on climate.¹⁶² This revolved largely around general circulation models (GCMs) of the atmosphere and the oceans run on powerful computers.

Of course, the social aspects of climate change could hardly be ignored. But they were studied only in a narrow way. Climate modellers canvassed socioeconomic data. Technocrats forecasted energy use and collected the social data needed for management "solutions". Legal experts studied and proposed laws. On the whole, the tendency was to try to fuse "formal mechanistic models across the various distinct natural and social science disciplines."¹⁶³ There was little incentive to study the history and politics of the interaction between various societies and climate change, investigate the limitations of official programmes of climate relief, research existing social resources for atmospheric care, or arrange conferences on rights and accountability. Prediction -- not interpretation, discussion or democratic decision-making -- was the order of the day.

Dominating the discussion of the social dimensions of the climate crisis were neoclassical economists. Global economic modelling became the key tool of social scientists working on climate change, just as GCMs were the key tool on the natural-science side. In the early 1990s, under the prodding of the US and "well-organized social science research interests",¹⁶⁴ mainstream economists captured much of the agenda of the IPCC's Working Group III, which was charged with defining possible responses to global warming.¹⁶⁵ This trend had already been reinforced in 1990 by the UN General Assembly's decision to posit an imaginary dichotomy between climate policy-making (the province of diplomat-patrons) and climate research (the territory of natural-scientific adviser-clients).

In 1992 came the Framework Convention on Climate Change itself, which scholar Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen contends "was not negotiated primarily to reduce greenhouse gas emissions", but rather:

"as part of a wider bargain between rich and poor countries, competing energy interests and governments faced with growing economic problems making investments in the future increasingly more essential but also more difficult."¹⁶⁶

As the climate negotiations became increasingly dominated by a corporate agenda through the late 1990s and the early years of the new millenium, the UN climate apparatus became if anything even more indifferent to its ostensible agenda. Outside the UN, as well, a carbocracy grew which functioned -- sometimes despite the best intentions of the individuals involved -- to transform environmentalist concern about climate change into scientifically spurious technical and economistic fixes.¹⁶⁷

Currently playing a central role in nursing the development of the new carbocratic vocabulary are institutions in the US. Here, huge resources are being deployed to create jobs for technocrats to imagine and legitimize schemes for loading climate change mitigation onto the biosphere, building new fossil-fuel plants with climate change subsidies, and so forth. One US Energy Department laboratory alone envisages spending over $900 million on industry and academic carbon sequestration research and development by 2015.¹⁶⁸ Included are plans to dose soil with coal combustion byproducts to increase carbon uptake, inject carbon dioxide into deep ocean waters off the coast of Hawaii, and bury CO2 hydrates under Monterey Bay.¹⁶⁹ US scientists have long contemplated spraying the stratosphere with fine metallic particles to reflect sunlight, perhaps using the engines of commercial jets for the job.¹⁷⁰

Other US-inspired projects include seeding large areas of land with organisms genetically engineered to fix carbon "more efficiently"; establishing floating kelp farms thousands of square kilometres in size which, growing heavier as they consumed carbon dioxide, would eventually sink to the ocean floor; and using fleets of C-130 military transport planes to bomb Scotland and other countries with millions of metal cones containing pine saplings.¹⁷¹

Particularly notable is the extent to which the network of US national laboratories, including the old nuclear weapons technocracies, have moved into researching technical fixes for climate change.¹⁷² The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, for instance, recently proposed constructing a collection of calcium hydroxide ponds covering an area of 200,000 square kilometres to scrub fossil fuel-produced CO2 from the air.¹⁷³

Private firms are also helping construct the necessary technical discourse. For instance, the American Forest and Paper Association, an industry group, has tried to enlist fellow paper industry groups in Canada, Europe, Japan and New Zealand in a:

"new strategy to convince other nations of ... the proven concept that sustainable forest management offsets and mitigates carbon dioxide emissions".¹⁷⁴

Given enough funding, universities are happy to lend a hand. To take just one instance, BP and Ford recently contributed US$20 million to Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the largest corporate contribution in the university's history. Headed by professors from two departments -- mechanical and aerospace engineering, and ecology and evolutionary biology -- the scheme aims to find ways to collect CO2 at central processing sources, then store it deep underground. One ostensible objective is to help India and China "spend fossil fuels ... without doing what we've done to the atmosphere".¹⁷⁵ Economists from a wide range of universities have also helped out, producing a steady stream of new jargon which make Kyoto's "flexible mechanisms" seem common sense. In academia and policy circles alike, journals proliferate, research programmes ramify, projects and forums accrete, and new experts are lured in.

Climate mitigation money could be an unprecedented source of finance for forest conservation and other projects, and some conservative US environmental organizations have also got into the act. Both The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense, with the help of respected forest specialists, have woven extraordinarily sophisticated, deeply unsound technical justifications for trading trees for smoke. Other NGOs also sometimes unwittingly join the party. Climate Action Network US, for instance, has tried to contain the damage the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) (see Box 1) threatens by helping to draft regulations aimed at making it more "participatory". Others fret that Northern governments may use the CDM merely as a new label for existing foreign aid, and demand that it provide new funds.

Like other instances of carbocratic discourse, such actions not only tend to undermine effective action on climate. They also oppose many popular movements: the institutions being lobbied have a well-documented capacity to turn such advice to purposes that thwart partici-pation.¹⁷⁶ Moreover, the "local people" affected by CDM projects are to be found not only in the project area, but also around the faraway mines or factories or whose continued operation the CDM project helps to licence. The new climate idiom makes it easy to forget that a genuninely "participatory" CDM project in Colombia might well have to consult communities near oil wells in Nigeria, power generating plants in New Jersey, expressways in California, and coastlines in Bangladesh.

It's not only US institutions, of course, that are constructing the new climate idiom. Governments from Australia to Costa Rica, Colombia and Chile -- each with its own agenda -- have also joined the effort to find words and numbers to make sense of carbon trading mechanisms.

For example, New South Wales Labor Premier Bob Carr, who hopes to see his state become a "world leader in carbon trading credits", is seeking investment in carbon plantations from Italy, France, UK, Germany and The Netherlands. Carr is relying partly on technocrats in the Australian Greenhouse Office to forge the necessary discourse on "sinks, market trading instruments, carbon accounting and land management."¹⁷⁷ Private carbon brokerages¹⁷⁸ and economic research institutes the world over are lending a hand at the same tasks.

The Centre for European Policy Studies, inspired by US think-tanks, has meanwhile attempted to make European Union political discourse more corporate-friendly by pressing for market-based climate mitigation mechanisms and Southern commitments for CO2 reductions. Shell Oil, through a charity set up in June 2000, is now sponsoring Climate Strategies, a "network organization of of senior policy researchers" aimed at influencing policy.¹⁷⁹

International development institutions have also poured resources into building technical vocabularies to link their interests with the "flexible mechanisms" gravy train. Eager as always to please the US government, the World Bank set up a Prototype Carbon Fund in July 1999 to reduce the costs of emissions reductions for the North. The Fund quickly attracted investment from Mitsubishi, Shell and other companies hoping to get "carbon credits" from energy and other projects.¹⁸⁰ Part of its work revolves around the unachievable task of "verifying" that climate projects really are making a quantifiable improvement on "business as usual".

The United Nations Development Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, too, have attempted to get in on the ground floor of the carbon market by sponsoring research into "baselines" and sequestration.¹⁸¹ Klaus Topfer, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, meanwhile, infuriated many environmentalists in 2000 by trying to position his cash-strapped agency as a broker for CDM projects, including carbon "offset" forestry projects in Africa.¹⁸²

No Job for Amateurs

"Development, overseas aid ... the patronage of South by North; these are the modern weapons of appropriation. Euphemisms like 'modernization', 'basic needs' and 'LDCs' (Less Developed Countries) provide the camouflage for the latest and most serious bout of commodity fetishism. But the real traitors, as always, are the clerks -- the scientists."

M. Thompson, M. Warburton and T. Hatley, Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale¹⁸³

"Discussions under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol have totally excluded the indigenous peoples to the extent that neither recognizes the right of indigenous peoples to full and effective participation and to contribute to discussions and debates."

Third International Forum of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change, July 2001¹⁸⁴

Building up, day to day, the technical/political idiom needed for a market approach to climate is clearly no job for amateurs. It requires sustained efforts by financiers, economists, foresters, soil scientists, engineers, chemists, lawyers, climatologists, development experts, diplomats and non-government organizations. All work both within and outside the logic of their own disciplines. All help in their own ways to create scientific and pseudo-scientific talk about mitigating climate change which will link smoothly with neoliberal patterns of global investment, trade and development.

Such professionals are no more passive tools of their patrons than novelists are passive tools of their readers. Like all artists, they seek to please -- but, if they can, on their own terms. They deploy their own creativity. They quibble about details. They advise on finance. They come up with their own theories about politics in the course of choosing or creating slots in which they can insert scientific "input". They go out of their way to adapt or adulterate their own research in order to mate it with neoclassical economic assumptions or top-down development. As corporations and international agencies anxiously peer across old disciplinary fences in search of technical vocabularies that can further their own interests in a climate-obsessed world, thousands of technical experts and even NGOs are eagerly extending a hand toward them from the other side.

If the presenceof such intellectuals has been crucial to the evolution of the new climate discourse, so too has the absence of people with other relevant qualifications (see Box 7: "Roots of Spurious Science: A Case Study"). Missing from most negotiations and technical discussions have been Southern farmers, indigenous peoples, community organizers, social activists and other non-professionals, as well as historians, logicians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, property specialists and development critics.

This is why today's official climate idiom has virtually no words or procedures for analyzing the crippling scientific and practical fallacies associated with the "flexible mechanisms" -- or even giving them their proper names. People with the motivation, background or clout to help root out the relevant contradictions were simply not present at the idiom's creation, even to protest it. The vision of Southern countries competing with each other to produce carbon for the North just as they produce bananas or palm oil has become entrenched at the centre of current climate discourse not because anyone ever convincingly argued that the practice could be climatically effective, but because so few people mobilized behind the truth that it could not.¹⁸⁵ This exclusion is also ultimately responsible for the fact that many fruitful approaches to climate change -- such as reviewing subsidies for fossil-fuel development -- continue to occupy the margins of research.

Of course, there are limits to the ability of the carbocracy to make scientific sense of nonsense -- in particular, of entrenched US, UN and corporate views on why and how climate change should be mitigated. But without popular action, the warp in the official climate vocabulary will continue to be largely self-reinforcing. The higher the scaffolding built on false premises grows, the greater the institutional cost of questioning them becomes.

The 1990s did see one early direct triumph for democracy over carbocracy, when carbocratic attempts to formulate cost-benefit analyses of climate action collapsed. But this was due less to their own preposterousness than to political pressure applied by Southern countries outraged at the fact that the carbocrats' statistical valuation of human lives in the North was 15 times higher than their valuation in the North.¹⁹⁴ As Wolfgang Sachs observes, "the shape of the IPCC depends on the shape of the powers involved".¹⁹⁵

Science scholar David Bloor observed many years ago that we do not stop reasoning scientifically:

"in order to protect our institutions from collapse under the pressure of logical criticism. Rather, it is because we routinely accept [their] activities ... that we adjust our reasoning."¹⁹⁶

The activities "routinely accepted" by the carbocracy are those of carbon traders, with their needs for commensuration, quantification, prediction and centralization. Other activities -- those of farmers in forests, homeowners in Ohio, or flood victims in Orissa, with their needs for discussion, consensus, new policies, and attention to their own ground-level realities -- don't get a look-in.

As carbocrats continue to refine fraudulent techniques in the wake of the Bonn agreement, there's no particular point at which logic or "ordinary standards of scientific reasoning" can be expected suddenly to kick in. Where this dialectic ends depends not on how silly carbocratic thinking becomes, but on how soon Kyoto's carbon market collapses and -- more importantly -- how soon a public confronted with sophistry makes a political decision that enough is enough.

Democracy or Carbocracy?

"Hasta que no haya una presion social, los gobiernos no responderan y se antepondra la riqueza material a la conservacion del planeta" ("Without social pressure, governments will not do anything and material wealth will prevail over the planet's conservation.")

Jaume Matas, Minister of the Environment, Spain, November 2000

"Environmentalists need to pay greater attention to the character of knowledge-making institutions and may in future need to grant demands for the re-design of such institutions a prominent place in their list of campaign objectives."

Steven Yearley, Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization, 1996

"The age of disabling professions ... is now at an end, just as the age of energy splurges has ended. The illusions that made both ages possible are increasingly visible to common sense. But no public choice has yet been made."

Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions, 1977¹⁹⁷

Its size and composite, undirected, partly de-centred character gives the carbocracy a special strength. While the new idiom it has developed has been partly nurtured by US dollars, it's not reducible to the efforts of a North American elite to calculate its way out of a crisis, nor to those of business to seize the high ground. If it's not a source of "neutral", non-policy-prescriptive advice on which policy-makers can base a fair and scientifically-sound debate on action on climate change, neither is it a thin mask for US bullying. If the carbocracy orbits a US-dominated corporate world, it's also capable of perturbing it.

With so many actors with such a different range of stakes, the carbocracy enjoys multiple power bases. If it can't be straightforwardly manipulated by a single set of corporate powers, neither is there any single switch for turning off its intellectual production line. Were the carbocracy a conspiracy, it would be far less dangerous.

The carbocracy's composite nature, moreover, gives it an extraordinary ability to diversify, adapt itself to new circumstances, and drain resources from more locations. Michael Grubb has warned that the Clean Development Mechanism, for example, has the potential to become:

"not just a source of spurious emission credits, but a sink for the intellectual as well as some of the physical resources of the developing world, and a distraction from the fundamental goals of sustainable development".¹⁹⁸

If the unsoundness of the premises the carbocracy has to work with provides it with an endless chain of new technical "problems" to solve, its diverse character ensures that new experts and institutions can always be found to tackle them. Its repeated failures to address climate change breed only more baroque flourishes and an ever odder mixture of implausibility and extreme "technical" sophistication. What doesn't disrupt or democratize it is likely only to make it stronger.

The rise of the carbocracy since the late 1980s is a lesson in the extent to which antidemocracy can feed intellectual corruption. Just as the system of campaign finance is a permanent source of political corruption in the US, largely indifferent to the comings and goings of different individuals, governments and political parties, so the carbocracy is growing into a fount of scientific fraudulence largely unaffected by the day-to-day moves of individual diplomats, scientists, environmentalists and political leaders. Poised to become one of the routine Frankenstein monsters of the age, it's now a powerful force for dismantling any constructive agreements that might otherwise be reached.

In the struggle against the carbocracy's domination of the climate debate, individual experts' efforts at resistance will play one part. Folke Bohlin of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences stresses, for example, how important it is "for researchers to say no to ... research grants" for carbon sequestration projects.¹⁹⁹

The limitation of such an approach is that it asks intellectuals to be indifferent to the social conditions which shape their lives and livelihoods. "The courage that is required to limit violence," political psychologist Ervin Staub has written:

"is frequently not physical courage, the willingness to put one's life on the line, but the courage to oppose one's group and to endanger one's status in the group or one's career."²⁰⁰

Few people from any walk of life should be expected to be so brave. What is needed more is a collective movement to strengthen those institutions in which heroism isn't a prerequisite for reasonable behaviour, in which people without extraordinary courage can refrain from supporting the sort of institutionalized violence which the carbocracy's new language of climate engenders.

Coming up with effective strategies for doing so is important especially in that the carbocracy is locked in an intimate dance of opposition with any serious attempt to mobilize popular climate movements. On the one hand, only widespread grassroots resistance can undermine the expansion of the carbocracy and its ability to seduce the environmental movement, because only widespread grassroots resistance is capable of forcing public scrutiny of the carbocracy's material support. On the other hand, getting on with that resistance may benefit from trying to understand better both how the carbocracy's intellectual façade is being built and how a start might be made on disassembling it. That's been the aim of this briefing.