Upsetting the Offset The Political Economy of Carbon Markets Steffen Böhm & Siddhartha Dabhi (eds) may f l y Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds) Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon mar- kets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, show- ing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures. ‘This book is a very constructive and rigorous critique of CDM offset approaches to deal with carbon footprints. I recommend this book to any student, policy maker or administrator of climate change complexities in developed or developing countries.’ Professor Anil Gupta, Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad, India ‘If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom! But this book is far from re- signed to that fate. After examining the case against carbon trading… the book turns to alternatives, to hope, to sanity, and to the future.’ Professor Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London, UK ‘The politics of carbon trading is a subject far too important to be left to politicians, industrialists and technocrats. This is an issue that is affecting everyone on the planet. In this important book, a series of well known commentators explain the perverse economics that lies behind the impossible idea of trading our future for profit.’ Professor Martin Parker, University of Leicester, UK ‘Anyone concerned about the future of the planet (is anyone not?) should read this book. The contributors give powerful evidence and argument to show that the car- bon trading regimes favoured by the world’s elites will not work – and are, indeed, set to make things worse. But the message is not negative. There are alternatives, both effective and desirable.’ Professor Ted Benton, University of Essex, UK Steffen Böhm is Reader in Management at Essex Business School, University of Es- sex, UK. Siddhartha Dabhi is a researcher at Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK. may f l y www.mayflybooks.org Today, at one and the same time, scholarly publishing is drawn in two directions. On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of scholarly publication, creating a situation in which the means of distribution of books grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the present are increasingly restricted. In this context, MayFlyBooks has been established as an independent publishing house, publishing political, theoretical and aesthetic works on the question of organization. MayFlyBooks publications are published under Creative Commons license free online and in paperback. MayFlyBooks is a not-for-profit operation that publishes books that matter, not because they reinforce or reassure any existing market. 1. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory 2. Dag Aasland, Ethics and Economy: After Levinas 3. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique 4. Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets UPSETTING THE OFFSET Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds) First published by MayFlyBooks in paperback in London and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2009. Printed by the MPG Books Group in the UK CC: The editors & authors 2009 Except Chapter 2, © Zed Books 2010, and Chapter 30, © Sally Andrew 2007/2009 ISBN (Print) 978-1-906948-06-1 ISBN (PDF) 978-1-906948-07-8 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Contents Contributors xi Acknowledgments xix FOREWORDS The Business of Carbon is Different 1 Sunita Narain Offsets Under Kyoto: A Dirty Deal for the South 2 Kevin Smith Carbon Markets: A Fatal Illusion 5 Walden Bello INTRODUCTION 1 Upsetting the Offset: An Introduction 9 Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi 2 Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading 25 Larry Lohmann CASES 3 Double Jeopardy: Pursuing the Path of Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses 41 Melissa Checker 4 How Sustainable are Small-Scale Biomass Factories? A Case Study from Thailand 57 Tamra Gilbertson 5 Politics of Methane Abatement and CDM Projects based on Industrial Swine Production in Chile 72 Cristián Alarcón 6 Paying the Polluter? The Relegation of Local Community Concerns in ‘Carbon Credit’ Proposals of Oil Corporations in Nigeria 86 Isaac ‘Asume’ Osuoka 7 Carbon Sink Plantation in Uganda: Evicting People for Making Space for Trees 98 Ricardo Carrere vii 8 Tree Plantations, Climate Change and Women 102 Raquel Nuñez and GenderCC 9 Shall We Still Keep Our Eyes Cerrados? 112 Rafael Kruter Flores, Fabio Silva and Pedro Volkmann 10 Clean Conscience Mechanism: A Case from Uruguay 119 Steffen Böhm 11 India’s ‘Clean Development’ 129 Soumitra Ghosh and Hadida Yasmin 12 Where is Climate Justice in India’s First CDM Project? 138 Siddhartha Dabhi 13 The Jindal CDM Projects in Karnataka 148 Nishant Mate and Soumitra Ghosh 14 The MSPL Wind Power CDM Project 153 Nishant Mate and Soumitra Ghosh 15 The Deogad Hydroelectric CDM Project 159 Nishant Mate and Hadida Yasmin 16 Offsetting Lives and Livelihoods: Atmospheric Brown Cloud and the Targeting of Asia’s Rural Poor 163 Soumya Dutta CRITIQUES 17 Regulation as Corruption in the Carbon Offset Markets 175 Larry Lohmann 18 The Politics of the Clean Development Mechanism: Hiding Capitalism Under the Green Rug 192 Joanna Cabello 19 Rent Seeking and Corporate Lobbying in Climate Negotiations 203 Ricardo Coelho 20 Forests, Carbon Markets and Hot Air: Why the Carbon Stored in Forests Should not be Traded 214 Chris Lang 21 Hegemony and Climate Justice: A Critical Analysis 230 Vito De Lucia 22 Resistance Makes Carbon Markets 244 Matthew Paterson 23 Green Capitalism, and the Cultural Poverty of Constructing Nature as Service Provider 255 Sian Sullivan viii ALTERNATIVES 24 Repaying Africa for Climate Crisis: ‘Ecological Debt’ as a Development Finance Alternative to Emissions Trading 275 Patrick Bond 25 Rethinking the Legal Regime for Climate Change: The Human Rights and Equity Imperative 292 Philippe Cullet 26 Low Impact Development 307 Larch Maxey and Simon Dale 27 Planning for Permaculture? Land-Use Planning, Sustainable Development, and ‘Ecosystem People’ 317 Mike Hannis 28 Cycles of Sustainability: From Automobility to Bicycology 322 Chris Land 29 Towards the Sustainable School: Social Accounts and Local Solutions 334 John Fenwick, Jane Gibbon and Ann Marie Sidhu 30 Inspiring Examples: Sustainable Living 345 Sally Andrew AFTERWORDS On the Road to Copenhagen: Urgent Action is Required 357 Ida Auken Time to Breathe 360 Zoe Young ix Contributors Cristián Alarcón is a PhD candidate at the department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). My research project focuses on the structures of political economy, political ecology and environmental communication of forest sectors in Chile and Sweden. I also have a research position within the project GloPat – Global Patterns of Production and Consumption: Current Problems and Future Possibilities. I am affiliated to the CEFO Research Forum at the center for sustainable development at SLU and Uppsala University Sweden. Research interests: politics of forests and forest sectors; environmental communication; political economy; political ecology; salmon aquaculture and exploitation of marine resources; climate change and its relationships with power structures, politics and science; discourses on sustainable development. [email protected] Sally Andrew has worked as an activist, educator and writer in South Africa. She has a Masters in Adult Education (UCT) and a certificate in Environmental Education (Rhodes). She is the author of The Fire Dogs of Climate Change – An inspirational call to action (Findhorn Press, 2009). [email protected] Ida Auken is a member of the Danish Parliament, Spokesperson for Environmental Affairs. Member of the Standing Comittees on Environment and Planning, Climate and Energy and the Standing Committee on Culture. Cand.theol. and author of several publications on the relationship between religion and politics. Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines representing the political party Akbayan. Associated with the Climate Justice Now! Network, he is a senior analyst of Focus on the Global South and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. He is the author or co-author of numerous articles and 15 books on environmental, economic, and political issues. His latest book is Food Wars (New York: Verso, 2009). In 2007, he received the Right Livelihood Award – also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize – for his work on corporate-driven globalization. www.waldenbello.org Steffen Böhm is Reader in Management at the University of Essex. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Environment and Society based at Essex. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the critique of the political economy of organization and management. He is xi Contributors co-founder of the open-access journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization (www.ephemeraweb.org), and co-founder and co-editor of the new open publishing press MayFlyBooks (www.mayflybooks.org). He has also published Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave) and Against Automobility (Blackwell).