The Rio +20 final document
is so shocking and the risks it poses so great that it bears revisiting. "Ecosystem
services", and other so-called “green economics” initiatives set out at Rio represent capitalism's final assault on wilderness,
untamed habitat and the plants and animals (including humans) who live inter-connectedly
in these spaces.
If, as the UK 's
Stern
Report explained, climate change is the biggest-ever market failure, then
how can bringing the planet's remaining wild spaces into this failed framework
protect them? These areas of forest, ice-cap and permafrost are our last protection
against runaway climate change and this fresh attack on them could prove
disastrous for humanity.
Two examples of why it cannot work are carbon credits and
the REDD treaty on deforestation.
First carbon credits, a new form of currency that came into
being with the Kyoto Protocol. Google the phrase and you'll get myriad
financial advice sites explaining how to profit from them. It's a market, which
has run along the same rails as all capitalist markets – sometimes profitable, sometimes less so.
But it has brought absolutely no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
REDD is the new international treaty on deforestation. It
rewards countries that achieve cuts in deforestation with credits from big
polluting countries. This creates the perverse incentive to start cutting down
forest that has been untouched up until now so you can claim credits for
stopping. It's putting a gun to the head of the forest, and saying "pay up
or we shoot".
Pablo Solon, Bolivia ’s
former UN ambassador and now head of Focus on the Global South, has written
that it is the transnational corporations that are promoting green economy:
"According to them, the mistake of capitalism that led
us to this current multiple crises is that the free market had not gone far
enough. And so with the ‘green economy’, capitalism is going to fully
incorporate nature as part of its capital. They are identifying the specific
functions of ecosystems and biodiversity that can be priced and then brought
into a global market as ‘Natural Capital’."
Natural capital is defined as the “five pillars of life” –
water, oceans, land and ecosystems, energy and raw materials. Think
privatisation of electricity, gas, railways and health and the fraudulent
claims made for that process, and you get an idea of what they are planning.
Capitalism is a system that renews itself continuously by
developing new markets and new commodities. Current commodity production is in
crisis, with a contraction of up to 90% of productive capacity needed, and
already well underway.
With Rio +20 we are seeing
capitalism's last great grab from the planet - the commodification of every
part of nature that will run alongside the current shift of capital into the
market in land.
The GM and chemical food speculators such as Monsanto and
Cargill will move in for rapacious copyrighting of plants and natural
processes. And alongside these fat new profits, indeed fuelled by it, the
destruction of eco-systems will continue.
The lesson of the Barclay's rate-fixing scandal is that
there is no free market, and this new commodity market too will be subject to
corruption, lies and profit-grabbing speculators. Why not, after all? If you
can profit from it, you must profit from it – that's the essence of capitalism.
In theory every species and every zone can be forced into
the framework of profit monomania, but there is a huge price to be paid.
Millions are already paying it, most of them are in the global south. But
nowhere – not the United States
and Europe nor the BRIC “developing economies”
- has immunity.
As Solon concludes: "The capitalist system has gone
beyond control. Like a virus its going to kill the body that feeds it… it’s
going to damage the Earth System in a way that makes it impossible for human
life as we know it. We need to overthrow capitalism and develop a system that
is based on the Community of the Earth."
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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