Who
will verify the verifiers?
In
his book on the dangers of global warming, Heat, George
Monbiot endorses a scheme, thought-up by Mayer Hillman and called
"contract and convergence". The basic idea is that a target
should be fixed for reducing average world CO2
emissions per person to a level much lower than at present. Countries
above this average should commit themselves to reducing their
emissions while countries below it should be allowed to increase
theirs up to the average. The countries above this average will of
course be the developed capitalist countries while those below will
be developing capitalist countries such as China and India.
So,
it's a proposal that the developed capitalist countries should
voluntarily shackle themselves in the competitive struggle with their
developing rivals to produce and make a profit from selling goods on
the world market. Which is why it will never be adopted. There is
simply no way that the capitalist corporations of the West and the
states that protect their interests are going to agree to this. Given
capitalism – as Monbiot and Hillman assume – each capitalist
state will defend its own in the battle to realise profits on the
world market. No capitalist state is going to undermine the
competitiveness of its capitalist firms by imposing more expensive
energy on them while its competitors in the developing world are not
subject to this. It's just not going to happen.
A
front-page article in the Guardian (2 June) gave another
reason why it wouldn't work even in the unlikely event of its being
adopted. Headed "Abuse and incompetence in fight against global
warming" and subtitled "Up to 20% of carbon savings in
doubt as monitoring firms criticised by UN body", the article
concerned the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the 1997
Kyoto treaty.
The
CDM is a "carbon trading" scheme, which supporters of
capitalism are lauding as the way to solve the problem within the
profit system. Under this particular scheme, projects are started in
the developing countries which are certified as reducing CO2 emissions; the firms carrying
out these projects can then
sell these "carbon credits" to firms in the developed
countries for them to emit (a lesser amount of) CO2
instead.
But
it hasn't worked as planned:
"Within
the world of carbon trading there are numerous cases of projects
which are widely regarded as breaking CDM rules. Some existed long
before the CDM project was launched: if they do happen to be
producing fewer greenhouse gases that is the natural state and not a
reduction which can be claimed and sold. Yet, such schemes have been
validated by specialist companies and accepted by the CDM board; and
the companies running them have been allowed to earn large amounts of
money by selling unjustified Certified Emissions Reductions".
These
specialist companies are hired by firms who stand to earn big profits
if their project is accepted. The Guardian quoted one carbon
analyst: “The verifiers are being paid by the people they are
verifying. If it turns out the verified is a bad guy, he is paying
the policeman to sign him off as a good guy".
Monbiot's
scheme would demand a far wider verification of carbon saving since
accurate statistics would have to be collected and verified for every
country (and every individual in every country). So, the problem
uncovered by the Guardian would be multiplied many times, with
every country trying to cook the books by understating the amount of
its emissions.
Compared
to "contract and convergence", it would be much simpler to
introduce socialism, the common ownership of the world's resources
with production to satisfy people's needs not for profit, where
vested capitalist interests and market forces would no longer
conspire to prevent what needs to be done being done.
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