Nature's final frontiers fall to the corporations

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

Forests under threat in carbon offsets scandal

Campaigners fear a new surge of forest destruction as a result of both the reactionary Copenhagen Accord and a new European Union bio-fuels directive.

It seems that EU member states will be forced to accept palm oil grown in plantations planted on cleared forest – whether they like it or not.

The EU is committed to a target of 10% of all road transport fuel being based on renewable energy by 2020, and a new directive claims that palm oil plantations can be classified as forest, and meet so-called “sustainable standards”.

According to Rainforest Rescue, razing rainforest to plant oil palm would not count as a change in land use under the new directive, which also says that “member states may not set additional criteria of their own. They may not exclude biofuels/bioliquids on sustainability grounds where these meet the sustainability criteria laid down in the Directive”.

This is entirely in line with the Copenhagen Accord, the wrecking agreement forced through by powerful nations at last year’s climate conference.

Without a successor to Kyoto the controls on carbon off-setting (weak as they were) will become non-existent. It will lead to large-scale destruction of eco-systems and unprecedented land grabs, as spurious projects are classified as carbon offsets. There will even be carbon credits for tree and crop monocultures and GM soya, planted on cleared rainforest.

Stella Semino from Grupo de Reflexion Rural (Argentina) states: “If these new proposals are agreed upon we will see a massive boost for crop and tree plantations alike which, in the name of ‘climate change mitigation’, will speed up the destruction of forests and other vital ecosystems, the spread of industrial agriculture, and land grabbing against small-farmers, indigenous peoples and forest communities. Industrial monocultures are already a major cause of climate change and their expansion will make it worse.”

The problem is even bigger than palm oil – the whole concept of bio-fuels replacing oil is flawed because of the nature of the capitalist system and the system of private land ownership. An example is the development of new oil plants that will grow on so-called “marginal land”.

The Jatropha plant is being grown by Kijani Energy of Canada in Mozambique on land classified as marginal. This very experimental process, with an incredibly toxic plant which can harm farmers as they harvest and crush it, is already being claimed as a biol-fuel breakthrough.

It is reported that Kijani has now purchased 200,000 acres of land in the Thar province of Pakistan for Jatropha cultivation. Local people say that far from being unused land, this area belongs to them, and their centuries old livestock grazing rights are being violated.

In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions we reject the idea of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, within the existing capitalist economic structures. It is damaging the poorest and most powerless in society, not protecting them from the effects of climate change – and it is doing it without making any significant reductions in emissions. An alternative system of energy production and land ownership is urgently needed.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Emissions of hypocrisy on the increase

Sonorous Presbyterian tones rumble through the room: “We have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe.” Gordon Brown is preaching to the Major Economies Forum. Yet Brown and his government stand accused of being amongst the world’s greatest climate change hypocrites.

Hypocrisy no. 1
The Treasury has gone to court to defend the right of the state-owned RBS bank to finance companies involved in enterprises that pollute the planet, add to emissions and seize land from indigenous people.

Campaigners from Platform, the World Development Movement and People & Planet vowed to appeal after failing to convince a High Court judge to order a judicial review of the Treasury’s position on RBS investments. In particular they highlight Vedanta, which is mining bauxite on sacred land in Orissa in India. A scathing report from the government’s own business department accuses Vedanta of disrespecting the rights of indigenous people.

The Treasury hired a high-price QC to defend its position that it would be wrong to consider climate change and human rights when it evaluates the "commercial" interests of state-owned bank.

Hypocrisy no. 2
The government has been exaggerating its claims of reductions in CO2 emissions, according to the UK Statistics Authority. Sir Michael Scholar, the authority’s chair, has accused the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) of producing “unsatisfactory data”.

Scholar wrote to Tim Yeo, chairman of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, saying that a statistical bulletin released by the DECC in February “fell short” of the code of practice for government statistics.

The government claims CO2 emissions have fallen by 12.8% compared to 1990 levels. But almost a third of that is made up of carbon credits purchased by polluters in the EU trading scheme and do not represent actual cuts. The real reduction is more like 8.5%.

Scholar told the Commons committee: "In this case, the figures mentioned are, in our view, likely to be used by non-expert observers to judge progress in reducing CO2 emissions within the UK. We regard the quoted figures, and particularly the percentage change, as unsatisfactory in the context of that use."

Hypocrisy no. 3
The government own Climate Change Committee suggests that only the recession, resulting in less energy use by industry, can save New Labour from failing to meet targets. From 2003 to 2007 greenhouse gas emissions were falling at less than 1% each year, well below the target.

The Committee also said that much of the reduction in recent years has been in non-CO2 gases. CO2 emissions in the period 2003-07 averaged a 0.6% annual reduction. Where CO2 emissions have fallen, the extent to which this has been through implementation of measures to improve energy or carbon efficiency is very limited. Broadly speaking, it has been as a result of carbon offsetting.

Of course when it comes to hypocrisy, Brown is not alone in advance of the Copenhagen climate change summit in December. His EU colleagues talk big numbers but in reality, Germany, Italy and Poland have no intention of acting because they put achieving a return to capitalist economic growth before everything else.

And you could argue that the world’s number one hypocrite is China. If it was truly “the People’s Republic”, they would be acting now to prevent the impact of climate change on the Chinese people. As it is, Beijing is playing diplomatic games with the major economies over carbon emissions. Meanwhile, China is engaged in the large-scale buying up of resources in Africa and the Middle East with absolutely no concern for the environment.

Penny Cole
Environment editor