UKZN Press

Patrick Bond, one of the editors of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, has issued a strong statement against carbon trading – also known as the “cap-and-trade” system of regulating C02 emissions – as the Copenhagen Climate Conference enters its final days.

Writing on the Counterpunch website, Bond takes up the cudgels on behalf of filmmaker Annie Leonard’s Story of Cap and Trade, which outlines a near-apocalyptic disaster scenario should cap-and-trade measures become policy after Copenhagen.

Bond looks at the positions of both anti-green free marketeers and “Big Green” pro-cap-and-trade activists in his warning against allowing this so-called “solution” to take hold:

For example, Africa’s greatest political economist, Samir Amin, has just penned a damning attack on environmental markets, as has University of Oregon professor John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet. Either can assist Roberts to plug the gaping holes in his pro-market consciousness.

Roberts doesn’t seem to understand the severe dangers associated with an anticipated $3 trillion in carbon trades by 2020, which will become the basis for further trade in financial derivatives, for he derides the film’s warning about Wall Street speculation: ‘Leonard et al. seem instead to have decided that “market Goldman Sachs derivatives bugga bugga!” suffices.’

But Roberts, de Place and NRDC policy director David Doniger dare not trash the film’s proposed solutions, such as stronger EPA regulatory enforcement and citizen activism (e.g. West Virginia mountaintop defense). There is greater potential to push the EPA into action – in spite of misgivings by NewEnergyNews’ Herman Trabish – than to win legislation regulating carbon within ill-functioning, untransparent financial markets, in which ‘too big to fail’ deregulatory freedom was amplified by Bush-Obama’s 2008-09 bailouts.

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Book details

• Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society edited by Patrick Bond, Rehana Dada, Graham Erion
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  EAN: 9781869141417
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