by Patrick Bond

in S. Böhm and S. Dabhi (Eds), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets, London, MayFlyBooks, September 2009

The ‘ecological debt’ that the Global North owes the Global South for excessive use of the environmental space plus damages done to Third World ecology became a global concern in 2009 as it entered the Copenhagen Conference of Parties (COP) negotiations. The willingness of African rulers to raise this in preliminary meetings – and the European Union’s acknowledgement of compensation payments but at grossly inadequate levels – reflected how much damage was already done. It also suggested that a configuration similar to the Seattle World Trade Organisation summit might emerge (if not at Copenhagen then in subsequent negotiations), with discontented elites inside and angry protesters outside. Other faith-based and advocacy groups in civil society took up the demand as well, suggesting the potential for a global movement which would generate the resources thus far missing from Africa’s plans to finance development aspirations – and also to change those aspirations into strategies that can transcend the Western model of capitliast industrialism and mass consumption.

Introduction

Carbon trading is under attack, but is there an alternative strategy to transfer resources to the Global South to support a different model of development? Is it reasonable to make calls for ‘ecological debt’ or ‘climate compensation’ in the form of a fund that would justifiably exceed $100 billion/year within a decade, without tendentious reliance upon emissions trading brokers, offset salesmen, futures and options, ‘additionality’ requirements, corruption, and the ‘commodification of the air’ associated with the Kyoto Protocol and its likely successor regime?

There is a fairly simple financial choice facing those advocating global climate governance: the Global North would pay hard-hit Global South sites to deal with climate crisis either through ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM) projects and declining overseas development aid – both entailing plenty of damaging side effects – or instead, pay through other mechanisms that must provide financing quickly, transparently and decisively, to achieve genuine income compensation plus renewable energy to the masses. The Kyoto Protocol – and its potential Copenhagen COP successor – is all about the former choice, because the power bloc in Europe and the US put carbon trading at the core of their emissions reduction strategy, while the two largest emitters of carbon in the Third World, China and India, are the main beneficiaries of CDM financing. What that means is that problems caused when Al Gore’s US delegation brought pro-corporate compromises to Kyoto in 1997 – deceitfully promising US sign-on to Kyoto in exchange for carbon trading – will now amplify and haunt this debate for a long time to come. For what we have witnessed since Kyoto came into effect in February 2005 is a climate-reduction stalemate by a coalition of selfish, fossil-fuel addicted powers. Terribly weak targets may get a mention (or even no mention, as at the Bali 2007 Conference of Parties), but market mechanisms will be invoked as the ‘solution’ so as to appease polluting capital and associated governments, especially Washington. Some of the less principled environmental NGOs and opportunistic Third World elites will sign up, as has become a habit in such global governance gambits.

Market mechanisms – especially carbon trading and offsets – allow corporations and governments generating greenhouse gases to seemingly reduce their net emissions. They can do this, thanks to the Kyoto Protocol, by trading for others’ ‘certified emissions reductions’ (e.g. CDM projects in the Third World) or emissions rights (e.g. Eastern Europe’s ‘hot air’ that followed the 1990s economic collapse). The pro-trading rationale is that once property rights are granted to polluters for these emissions, even if given not auctioned (hence granting a generous giveaway), a ‘cap’ can be put on a country’s or the world’s total emissions. It will then be progressively lowered, if there is political will. So as to minimize adverse economic impact, corporations can stay within the cap even by emitting way above it, by buying others’ rights to pollute.

But critics[1] argue that the carbon market isn’t working, for several reasons:

• the idea of inventing a property right to pollute is effectively the ‘privatization of the air’;
• greenhouse gases are complex and their rising production creates a non-linear impact which cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange relationship (a tonne of CO2 produced in one place accommodated by reducing a tonne in another, as is the premise of the emissions trade);
• the corporations most guilty of pollution and the World Bank – which is most responsible for fossil fuel financing – are the driving forcesbehind the market, and can be expected to engage in systemic corruption to attract money into the market even if this prevents genuine emissions reductions;
• many of the offsetting projects – such as monocultural timber plantations, forest ‘protection’ and landfill methane-electricity projects – have devastating impacts on local communities and ecologies, and have been hotly contested;
• the price of carbon determined in these markets is haywire, having crashed by half in a short period in April 2006 and by two-thirds in 2008, thus making mockery of the idea that there will be a sufficient market mechanism to turn the society towards renewable energy;
• there is a serious potential for carbon markets to become an out-of-control, multi-trillion dollar speculative bubble, similar to exotic financial instruments associated with Enron’s 2002 collapse (indeed, many Enron employees populate the carbon markets);
• as a ‘false solution’ to climate change, carbon trading encourages merely small, incremental shifts, and thus distracts us from a wide range of radical changes we need to make in materials extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal; and
• the idea of market solutions to market failure (‘externalities’) is an ideology that rarely makes sense, and especially not following the world’s worst-ever financial market failure, and especially not when the very idea of derivatives – a financial asset whose underlying value is several degrees removed and also subject to extreme variability – was thrown into question..

Most scientists insist that at least an 80% drop in emissions will be necessary within four decades, with the major cuts before 2020. To achieve this, carbon markets won’t work, as the leading US climate scientist, James Hansen, concluded in leading the intellectual opposition to Barack Obama’s cap and trade scheme. Obama’s legislation – the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the US House of Representatives in June 2009 (with similar Senate legislation bogged down at the time of writing in September 2009) – was so profoundly flawed that the more ambitious wing of environmental civil society argued it should be scrapped, especially because of the legislation’s destruction of Environmental Protection Agency powers to regulate carbon pollution. [2]

Even the financial speculator George Soros criticizes cap and trade:

The cap and trade system of emissions trading is very difficult to control and its effects are diluted. It is pretty much breaking down because there is no penalty for developing countries not to add to their pollution. You count the saving but you don’t count the added pollution going on. As a world, I don’t think we are getting our act together on climate change at the moment… [CDMs] are not effective: you buy credits in third world countries that don’t have a cap on emissions and you can get carbon credits whether you can sell them or not… It is precisely because I am a market practitioner that I know the flaws in the system. [3]

To be sure, one wing of civil society – e.g., campaigners Avaaz, the World Wildlife Federation and the Climate Action Network – endorsed a Copenhagen deal no matter such flaws, which can be partially explained by the fact that some in the latter group have substantial conflicts of interest as carbon-traders themselves. According to Michael Dorsey, professor of political ecology at the US’s Dartmouth College, these include CAN board member Jennifer Morgan of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, who took leave for two years to direct work on Climate and Energy Security at carbon trading firm E3G, Kate Hampton, formerly of Friends of the Earth, who joined Climate Change Capital as head of policy while simultaneously advising the EU on energy and the environment, working for the California Environmental Protection Agency, and acting as president of International Carbon Investors and Services, and several others.

Dorsey concludes: ‘After more than a decade of failed politicking, many NGO types… are only partially jumping off the sinking ship – so as to work for industries driving the problem. Unfortunately, many continue to influence NGO policy from their current positions, while failing to admit to or even understand obvious conflicts of interest’. [4]

Critics condemn carbon trading for these and many other reasons, and term the emissions trade a ‘false solution’. In contrast, central to a genuine solution to climate crisis is the task of raising the world’s standards of living in a manner not characterized by the fossil fuel addiction of industrial society. Climate-related finance will be required, and this might logically begin with the North’s payment of ecological debt to the South for excess use of environmental space and for the damage done to many ecosystems already, and in future when vast damages are anticipated especially in Africa.

Ecological debt defined

According to the Quito group Accion Ecologica: ‘ecological debt is the debt accumulated by Northern, industrial countries toward Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases, from the industrial countries.’ [5] The term came into professional use in 1992 at the Earth Summit of the United Nations in Rio de Janeiro of 1992, with NGOs promoting the concept through an ‘Alternative Treaty’. An initial voice was the Institute of Political Ecology in Santiago, Chile, and contributed to world consciousness about ChloroFluoroCarbon damage to the ozone layer. A Colombian lawyer, José María Borrero, wrote a 1994 book on the topic, and further research and advocacy was provided by the Foundation for Research on the Protection of the Environment. By 1999 Friends of the Earth International and Christian Aid agreed to campaign against Ecological Debt, especially in relation to climate damage.

The leading scientist in the field, Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Joan Martinez-Alier, calculates ecological debt in many forms: ‘nutrients in exports including virtual water, the oil and minerals no longer available, the biodiversity destroyed, sulphur dioxide emitted by copper smelters, the mine tailings, the harms to health from flower exports, the pollution of water by mining, the commercial use of information and knowledge on genetic resources, when they have been appropriated gratis (‘biopiracy’), and agricultural genetic resources.’ As for the North’s ‘lack of payment for environmental services or for the disproportionate use of Environmental Space,’ Martinez-Alier criticizes ‘imports of solid or liquid toxic waste, and free disposal of gas residues (carbon dioxide, CFCs, etc).’ According to Martinez-Alier:

The notion of an Ecological Debt is not particularly radical. Think of the environmental liabilities incurred by firms (under the United States Superfund legislation), or of the engineering field called ‘restoration ecology’, or the proposals by the Swedish government in the early 1990s to calculate the country’s environmental debt. [6]

The sums involved are potentially vast. As Martinez-Alier puts it, ‘tropical rainforests used for wood exports have an extraordinary past we will never know and ongoing biodiversity whose destruction we cannot begin to value.’ However, ‘although it is not possible to make an exact accounting, it is necessary to establish the principal categories and certain orders of magnitude in order to stimulate discussion… If we take the present human-made emissions of carbon, [this represents] a total annual subsidy of $75 billion is forthcoming from South to North.’ [7]

Leading ecofeminist Vandana Shiva^[8] and former South Centre director Yash Tandon^[9] estimate that wild seed varieties alone account for $66 billion in annual biopiracy benefits to the US. Examples of biopiracy in Africa, according to a 2005 study commissioned by Edmonds Institute, African Centre for Biosafety, include:

• three dozen cases of African resources – worth $billions – captured by firms for resale without adequate ‘Access and Benefit Sharing’ agreements between producers and the people who first used the natural products;
• diabetes drug produced by a Kenyan microbe and Libyan/Ethiopian treatment;
• antibiotics from Gambian termite hill and giant West African land snails;
• antifungal from Namibian giraffe and nematocidal fungi from Burkina Faso;
• infection-fighting amoeba from Mauritius;
• Congo (Brazzaville) treatment for impotence;
• vaccines from Egyptian microbes;
• South African and Namibian indigenous appetite suppressant Hoodia;
• drug addiction treatments, multipurpose kombo butter from Central, W.Africa;
• beauty, healing treatment from Okoumé resin in Central Africa;
• skin and hair care from the argan tree in Morocco, Egyptian ‘Pharaoh’s Wheat’, bambara groundnut and ‘resurrection plant’;
• endophytes and improved fescues from Algeria and Morocco;
• groundnuts from Malawi, Senegal, Mozambique, Sudan and Nigeria;
• Tanzanian impatiens; and
• molluscicides from the Horn of Africa.[10]

A partial ecological debt accounting was published by environmental scientists in early 2008, and counted $1.8 trillion in concrete damages over several decades.[11] According to co-author Richard Norgaard, ecological economist at the University of California, Berkeley, generated a crucial finding: ‘At least to some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor, and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor. That, perhaps, is one reason that they are poor. You don’t see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here’.[12] The study included factors such as greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, and the conversion of mangrove swamps into shrimp farms, but did not (so far) succeed in calculating other damages, e.g. excessive freshwater withdrawals, destruction of coral reefs, bio-diversity loss, invasive species, and war.

Another route into the intellectual challenge of calculating ecological debt was taken by the World Bank (2006) in its estimates of tangible wealth (in the book Where is the Wealth of Nations?). In addition to resource depletion and rent outflows, there are also other subsoil assets, timber resources, nontimber forest resources, protected areas, cropland and pastureland to account for. The ‘produced capital’ normally captured in GDP accounting is added to the tangible wealth. In the case of Ghana, to consider one example, that amounted to $2,022 per person in 2000. The same year, the Gross National Saving of Ghana was $40 and education spending was $7. These figures require downward adjustment to account for the consumption of fixed capital ($19), as well as the depletion of wealth in the form of stored energy ($0), minerals ($4) and net forest assets ($8). In Ghana, the adjusted net saving was $16 per person in 2000. But given population growth of 1.7%, the country’s wealth actually shrunk by $18 per person in 2000. Notwithstanding the World Bank’s conservative counting bias,[13] Africa shows evidence of net per capita wealth reduction, largely traceable to the extraction of nonrenewable resources that is not counterbalanced by capital investment from those firms doing the extraction (Table 1).

Table 1: African countries’ adjusted national wealth, 2000[14]

	Income per capita before adjustment ($)	Change in wealth per capita after adjustment ($)
Benin	360	-42
Botswana	2925	814
Burkina Faso	230	-36
Burundi	97	-37
Cameroon	548	-152
CapeVerde	1195	-81
Chad	174	-74
Comoros	367	-73
Rep of Congo	660	-727
Côte d’Ivoire	625	-100
Ethiopia	101	-27
Gabon	3370	-2241
The Gambia	305	-45
Ghana	255	-18
Kenya	343	-11
Madagascar	245	-56
Malawi	162	-29
Mali	221	-47
Mauritania	382	-147
Mauritius	3697	514
Mozambique	195	-20
Namibia	1820	140
Niger	166	-83
Nigeria	297	-210
Rwanda	233	-60
Senegal	449	-27
Seychelles	7089	904
South Africa	2837	-2
Swaziland	1375	8
Togo	285	-88
Zambia	312	-63
Zimbabwe	550	-4

African leaders united?

How is Africa reacting? Generally the leadership of African countries has cooperated with those doing the resource extraction and utilizing Africa’s ecological space, with only complaints by exploited communities, by workers subject to safety/health violations and exploitation, and by environmentalists. However, finally in mid-2009, the African Union’s leadership on climate issues became a force to be reckoned with, thanks to Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, who also chaired the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and thus was invited to G20 gatherings along with the South African government. Sometimes seen merely as a US proxy power in the Horn of Africa – thanks to the disastrous, Washington-sponsored 2007 invasion of neighboring Somalia – Zenawi is rather more complex. He was once a self-described Marxist but became a tyrant whose troops killed scores of students and other democrats. It is ironic, thus, for Zenawi to lead the ecological debt charge, reportedly demanding a minimum of $67 billion – and up to $200 billion – annually from the North by 2020.[15]

Ironic or tragic, nevertheless this voice must be heard, considering how much Africa will be devastated by the climate crisis. The most shocking probable outcome of climate change is, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change director R.K. Pachauri, ‘that there could be a possible reduction in yields in agriculture of: 50% by 2020 in some African countries… In Africa, crop net revenues could fall by as much as 90% by 2100, with small-scale farmers being the most affected.’ [16] The Climate Change Vulnerability Index, calculated in 2009 ‘from dozens of variables measuring the capacity of a country to cope with the consequences of global warming’, listed 22 African countries out of 28 across the world at ‘extreme risk’, whereas the United States is near the bottom of the world rankings of countries at risk even though it is the leading per capita contributor to climate change. [17]

There is no question that those most responsible should pay reparations, now that there is near-universal awareness of the damage being done by rising greenhouse gas emissions, and by the ongoing stubborn refusal by the rich to cut back. The amounts can be debated, for of course $67 billion/year for Africa is way too low, given how many incalculably valuable species will be lost, how much devastation to individuals and communities is already underway, how many economies will falter, how much ecology is threatened.

The question is not mainly a technical one, but related to power. Behind African elites’ considerations are the threat to repeat their performance in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003, when denial of consent in World Trade Organisation negotiations were the proximate cause of the summits’ collapse on both occasions. On September 3, 2009, Zenawi issued a strong threat from Addis Ababa about the upcoming Copenhagen conference: ‘If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threatens to be another rape of our continent.’ [18]

To gather that power, Zenawi established the Conference of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change: chairpersons of the AU and the AU Commission, representatives of Ethiopia, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, Chairpersons of the African Ministerial Conference on Environment and Technical Negotiators on climate change from all member states. They met at the AU Summit in Sirte, Libya in July 2009, agreeing that Africa would have a sole delegation to Copenhagen with a united front and demands for compensation. According to AU official Abebe Hailegabriel, ‘Trillions of dollars might not be enough in compensation. Thus there must be an assessment of the impact before the figure.’ Added AU head Jean Ping, ‘Africa’s development aspirations are at stake unless urgent steps are taken to address the problems of climate change. Climate change will fundamentally affect productivity, increase the prevalence of disease and poverty… and trigger conflict and war’. [19]

The most important African negotiator – and largest CO2 emitter (responsible for more than 40% of the continent’s CO2) – is South Africa. [20] Long seen as a vehicle for Western interests in Africa, Pretoria’s negotiators have two conflicting agendas: increasing Northern payments to Africa (a longstanding objective of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which requested $64 billion per annum in aid and investment concessions during the early 2000s); and increasing CO2 outputs through around 2050, when the Long-Term Mitigation Scenario – South Africa’s official climate cap – would come into effect and emissions declines are offered as a scenario. In the meantime, Pretoria has earmarked more than $100 billion for emissions-intensive coal and nuclear fired electricity generation plants due to be constructed during 2010-15, which would amplify Africa’s climate crisis, requiring more resources from the North for adaptation. South Africa does not, officially, see itself as an ecological creditor; As the environment minister, Buyelwa Sonjica put it in September 2009: ‘We expect money. We need money to be made available… we need money as of yesterday for adaptation and mitigation.’[21]

South African negotiators also lead the G77, and are on record from August 2009 demanding that ‘at least 1% of global GDP should be set aside by rich nations’ so as, according to one report,

help developing countries conduct research, improve flood control, protect their coastlines, create seed banks and take other steps to cope with the severe storms and droughts linked to climate change. The money also could help poor countries obtain technology to reduce their carbon emissions. Alf Wills, a top South African environmental official, summed up the position going into Copenhagen: ‘No money, no deal.’ [22]

There are other allies, especially Bolivia, whose submission to the UNFCCC in 2009 made the ecological debt demand explicitly:

The climate debt of developed countries must be repaid, and this payment must begin with the outcomes to be agreed in Copenhagen. Developing countries are not seeking economic handouts to solve a problem we did not cause. What we call for is full payment of the debt owed to us by developed countries for threatening the integrity of the Earth’s climate system, for over-consuming a shared resource that belongs fairly and equally to all people, and for maintaining lifestyles that continue to threaten the lives and livelihoods of the poor majority of the planet’s population. This debt must be repaid by freeing up environmental space for developing countries and particular the poorest communities. There is no viable solution to climate change that is effective without being equitable. Deep emission reductions by developed countries are a necessary condition for stabilising the Earth’s climate. So too are profoundly larger transfers of technologies and financial resources than so far considered, if emissions are to be curbed in developing countries and they are also to realise their right to development and achieve their overriding priorities of poverty eradication and economic and social development. Any solution that does not ensure an equitable distribution of the Earth’s limited capacity to absorb greenhouse gases, as well as the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change, is destined to fail. [23]

Bolivia’s government is generally driven by left-leaning popular forces in the rural and urban social movements. Other countries that have expressed similar sentiments include Venezuela, Paraguay, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. In Africa, where most countries do not have such strong movements, what is the state of play around civil society’s ecological debt demands?

Civil society reactions

The threat of a walkout at Copenhagen was contemplated with interest by civil society groups, both in Africa and across the world. The former became increasingly active in August 2008 when Africa chapters of Jubilee South converged in Nairobi to debunk limited ‘debt relief’ by Northern powers and to plan the next stage of financial campaigning. Nairobi-based Africa Jubilee South co-coordinator Njoki Njehu concluded, ‘Africa and the rest of the Global South are owed a huge historical and ecological debt for slavery, colonialism, and centuries of exploitation.’ Njehu says Jubilee’s challenge as it rebuilds is to link issues as diverse as food sovereignty, climate change, trade and EU Economic Partnership Agreements and continuing debt bondage. ‘From the initial 13 countries that participated in the Jubilee South founding conference in Johannesburg in 1999, the Africa Jubilee South network has grown to organizations and movements from 29 countries.’ [24]

A year later in Nairobi, the Africa Peoples Movement on Climate Change, pronounced:

• We reject the principle and application of Carbon Trading, which is a false solution based on inventing a perverse property right to pollute, a property right to air;
• We demand that human rights and values be placed at the centre of all global, national and regional solutions to the problem of climate change;
• We call on colleagues in the social and economic justice movement globally to rigorously campaign against the undemocratic corporate led agendas which will dominate the deliberations and processes at COP 15;
• We emphasize that ecological, small holder, agro-biodiversity based food production can ensure food and seed sovereignty and address climate change in Africa;
• We support the call by African leaders for reparations on Climate Change and support the initiative of the upcoming AU ministers of environment meeting and call for African governments to embrace more people centered alternatives for the African peoples;
• We urge African governments to engage civil society groups positively and collaborate with them to build common national and international responses on the problems of climate change. [25]

Another node of ecological debt organizing is the World Council of Churches (WCC), whose Central Committee adopted a formal statement in September 2009 on the North’s ‘deep moral obligation to promote ecological justice by addressing our debts to peoples most affected by ecological destruction and to the earth itself.’ It is useful to consider the WCC’s analysis because it does not stop at the debt, but attacks the mode of production itself:

We call for the recognition, repayment and restitution of ecological debt in various ways, including non-market ways of compensation and reparation, that go beyond the market’s limited ability to measure and distribute… This warrants a re-ordering of economic paradigms from consumerist, exploitive models to models that are respectful of localized economies, indigenous cultures and spiritualities, the earth’s reproductive limits, as well as the right of other life forms to blossom. And this begins with the recognition of ecological debt. [26]

The WCC Central Committee made several requests, including:

• Urges Northern governments, institutions and corporations to take initiatives to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within and beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which stipulates the principles of historical responsibility and ‘common, but differentiated responsibilities’ (CDR), according to the fixed timelines set out by the UNFCCC report of 2007.
• Urges WCC member churches to call their governments to adopt a fair and binding deal, in order to bring the CO2 levels down to less than 350 parts per million (ppm), at the Conference of Parties (COP 15) of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen in December 2009, based on climate justice principles, which include effective support to vulnerable communities to adapt to the consequences of climate change through adaptation funds and technology transfer.
• Calls upon the international community to ensure the transfer of financial resources to countries of the South to keep petroleum in the ground in fragile environments and preserve other natural resources as well as to pay for the costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation based on tools such as the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) Framework.
• Demands the cancellation of the illegitimate financial debts of Southern countries, most urgently for the poorest nations, as part of social and ecological compensations, not as official development assistance. [27]

It is evident at this writing (September 2009) that the COP15 – or its immediate successors – will not make the urgent progress required on cutting emissions to the levels at which climate disaster can be averted; or on providing restitution and reparations to Third World peoples, or even canceling their illegitimate debts. To be sure, in September 2009, a desire by the European Union to begin paying its ecological debt was recorded, but only up to $22 billion annually to fund adaptation, roughly 1/7^th of what EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas observed would be required by 2020 ($145 bn). Some of that would be subtracted from existing aid. The EU damage estimates were considered far too conservative, as China’s mitigation and adaptation costs alone would be $438 bn annually by 2030, according to Beijing. According to one report, the EU view is that emissions trading should be the basis of ‘much of the shortfall’: ‘The international carbon market, if designed properly, will create an increasing financial flow to developing countries and could potentially deliver as much as €38bn per year in 2020.’ [28] As noted above, however, this strategy is replete with fatal flaws.

Because of the influence of big capital and pro-market ideology on Northern governments in the Kyoto process to date, not only will emissions continue rising and the ecological debt not be properly paid, carbon trading will not be dropped as a central EU and US strategy. As a result, critical narratives will become more common, and in turn will force serious advocates of environmental justice to raise very important strategic issues about how to get the North to repay the ecological debt.

Conclusion: Repaying the debt?

Existing North-South redistributive processes are not effective. Northern foreign aid to the South goes only a small way towards ecological debt repayment. It is a far lower sum (and falling) than military spending (which is rising), and in any case 60% is ‘phantom aid’, according to the Johannesburg-based agency Action Aid. [29] Aid is also a tool of imperialism. Other North-South payments to Africa are yet more dubious, including the debt relief promised in 2005. In spite of enormous hype at the Gleneagles G8 meeting, the International Monetary Fund calculates that notwithstanding a lower debt stock, the actual debt repayments of the lowest-income African countries stayed stable from 2006-08 and then increased 50% in 2009 as a percentage of export earnings.[30] So although there was debt cancellation, it was on unrepayable debt, with debilitating debt servicing charges for low-income African countries still preventing local accumulation and provision of social services, much less financing preparations for climate change adaptation.

There are important debates about who should pay what share. But in general, it is important to note that ecological debt results from the unsustainable production and consumption systems adopted by elites in the Northern countries, which are to some extent generalized across the Northern populations. Hence even poor and working-class people in the North, often through no fault of their own, are tied into systems of auto-centric transport or conspicuous consumption, which mean that they consume far more of the Earth’s resources than do working-class people of the South.

Hence, recalling the WCC position in favour of a ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ framework, it is worth considering that a per capita ‘right to pollute’ – and to trade pollution rights – will have some of the same dubious outcomes. The bigger questions which GDRs pose are whether environmental justice can be measured merely in terms of formal ‘equality’; whether environmental justice is instead historical, political-economic, and grounded in social struggles of those adversely affected; and in turn, whether environmental justice should not aim higher, for a broader, deeper eco-social transformation? The WCC hints at such a perspective, but the GDR approach may foreclose it by reducing the challenge to incremental reformism. When it comes specifically to GDRs as a methodology for calculating debt liabilities and beneficiaries, Larry Lohmann of The Cornerhouse (a British development institute) critiques the model’s

tacit endorsement of a long-discredited concept of ‘development’ that condescendingly sees ‘resilience’ as ‘far beyond the grasp of the billions of people that are still mired in poverty’, and that singles out for special climate blame ‘subsistence farming, fuel wood harvesting, grazing, and timber extraction’ by ‘poor communities’ awaiting Northern tutelage in capital flows, social networking, carbon trading and methods for holding policymakers accountable. [31]

Is a rights-based approach to environmental services preferable, as a strategy for demanding and properly redistributing ecological debt payments from North to South? South Africa’s ‘Free Basic Services’ provide insights into the possibilities and limitations of rights discourses for redistributing wealth from North to South. In 2000 (just after Nelson Mandela left the presidency), the ruling party’s municipal campaign platform highlighted this promise: ‘African National Congress-led local government will provide all residents with a free basic amount of water, electricity and other municipal services, so as to help the poor. Those who use more than the basic amounts will pay for the extra they use.’ But as can be shown in excruciating detail, it was the failure to move beyond individualized nuclear-family household units and tokenistic amounts of free basic water (6 kl/household/month) and electricity (50kWh/household/month) that led to many ‘service delivery protests’ during subsequent years, contributing to South Africa’s standing as the country with the most per capita social unrest. Attempts to gain justice in these cases through the court system – even the Constitutional Court in September 2009 – proved extremely frustrating.[32]

Juridical approaches to ecological debt may not be optimal, although interesting precedents have emerged. In November 2008 a San Francisco court began considering an ecological debt and reparations lawsuit – under the Alien Tort Claims Act – filed by Larry Bowoto and the Ilaje people of the Niger Delta against Chevron for involvement in 1998 murders reminiscent of those that took the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders on November 10, 1995. The first judgments went against Bowoto et al but appeals are in process. In June 2009, Shell Oil agreed in a similar lawsuit to an out-of-court settlement with reparations payments of $15.5 million. Although representing just four hours’ worth of Shell profits, it was considered a crucial step in establishing liability and disincentivising corporate exploitation of people and nature. In late 2009, further reparations lawsuits were expected in the New York Second District Court by victims of apartheid who initially requested $400 billion in damages from US corporations which profited from South African operations during the same period. Supreme Court justices had so many investments in these companies that in 2008 they bounced the case back to a lower New York court to decide, effectively throwing out an earlier judgment against the plaintiffs: the Jubilee anti-debt movement, the Khulumani Support Group for apartheid victims, and 17 000 other black South Africans. When Judge Clara Scheindlin replaced the late John Sprizzo, the case suddenly was taken seriously and in March 2009 moved a step closer to trial when she rejected the corporations’ attempt to have it dismissed. [33]

Beyond these kinds of tort actions, will courts start declaring climate-related ecological debt a valid concept? Environmental rights to protection from climate change were explored in a court case filed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the cities of Boulder, Colorado, Arcata, Santa Monica and Oakland in California, against the US Export- Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which had invested, loaned or insured $32 billion in fossil fuel projects from 1990–2003 without regard to the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). At present, only US cities have formal standing to sue for damages from climate change under NEPA, in the wake of a 2005 federal ruling. The out-of-court-settlement in February 2009 meant that the defendants will in future incorporate CO2 emissions into planning, but there are prospects for further suits that extend into identification and payment of damages.[34]

There are quite obvious limits to prospects for court relief under the Alien Tort Claims Act or NEPA, the two most advanced areas. Hence it would be consistent to also proceed with more immediate strategies, as well as direct action tactics. As Al Gore expressed it in 2007, ‘I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants’.[35] Arguing that ‘Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions,’ the US National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, ‘The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.’[36] Hansen himself moved to direct action in 2009, demonstrating at coal-fired power plants in Coventry, England and West Virginia (where at the latter site he was arrested).

But the most effective examples of direct action come from the Global South, especially the Niger Delta. In January 2007, at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, many other groups became aware of this movement thanks to eloquent activists from the Delta, including the Port Harcourt NGO Environmental Rights Action (ERA). In separate disruptions of production (including armed interventions), the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta prevented roughly 80% of the country’s oil from being extracted, although a cease-fire was called in mid-2009.[37] The strategy is consistent with the grassroots, coalface and fenceline demands of civil society activists in the Oilwatch network (headquartered at ERA) to leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sand in the land. Activists from Accion Ecologica popularized this approach in their struggle to halt exploitation of the oil beneath the Yasuni park in the Ecuadoran Amazon. The German state development agency GTZ conceded to a $50 mn/year grant, although Yasuni may become a pilot carbon trading case unless Ecuadoran environmental and indigenous rights activists can resist.[38]

The legacy of keeping oil in the soil includes Alaskan and Californian environmentalists who halted drilling and even exploration. In Norway, the global justice group, ATTAC, took up the same concerns in an October 2007 conference and began the hard work of persuading wealthy Norwegian Oil Fund managers that they should use the vast proceeds of their North Sea inheritance to repay Ecuadorans some of the ecological debt owed via a Yasuni grant. In Australia, regular blockades of Newcastle coal transport (by rail and sea) by the activist group, Rising Tide, correspond to Gore’s injunction.

Canada is another Northern site where activists are hard at work to leave the oil in the soil. In a November 2007 conference in Edmonton, the University of Alberta Parkland Institute addressed the need to halt development of tar sand deposits (which require a liter of oil to be burned for every three extracted and devastate local water, fisheries, and air quality). Institute director Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for strict limits on the use of water and greenhouse gas emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic land reclamation plans (including a financial deposit large enough to cover full-cost reclamation up-front); no further subsidies for the production of dirty energy; provisions for energy security for Canadians (since so much of the tar sand extract is exported to the U.S.); and much higher economic rents on dirty energy to fund a clean energy industry (currently Alberta has a very low royalty rate). These kinds of provisions would strictly limit the extraction of fossil fuels and permit oil to leave the soil only under conditions in which much greater socio-ecological and economic benefit is retained by the broader society.[39]

There are many other examples where courageous communities and environmentalists have lobbied successfully to keep nonrenewable resources (not just fossil fuels) in the ground for the sake of the environment, community stability, disincentivizing political corruption, and workforce health and safety. For many victims, the extraction of these resources is incredibly costly in terms of local land use, water extraction, energy consumption, and political corruption, and requires constant surveillance and community solidarity. The adverse balance of forces noted at the outset should be restated: the climate negotiators and corporations of the Global North will consistently fail to make sustained emissions cuts; to depart from the ineffectual, dangerous carbon trading modus operandi; and to offer adequate reparations for the ecological debt. This will, in turn, require national states to take stronger actions, such as Zenawi has threatened, or as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa did in defaulting on odious foreign debt in early 2009. But most of all, it will require people of conscience across the world to become involved, and to offer solidarity and activism aimed at leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

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[1]. The analysis generated by Larry Lohmann is probably the most sophisticated, e.g., Lohmann, L. (2006), Carbon Trading, special issue of Development Dialogue, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD2006_48_carbon_trading/carbon_trading_web_HQ.pdf and more recently, Lohmann, L. (2010), ‘Uncertainty markets and carbon markets: Variations on Polanyian themes’, New Political Economy; Lohmann, L. (2009a), ‘Climate as investment’, Development and Change; Lohann, L. (2009b), ‘Neoliberalism and the calculable world: The rise of carbon trading’, in K. Birch, V.Mykhnenko and K.Trebeck (Eds.), The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order?, London, Zed Books; Lohmann, L. (2009c), ‘Regulatory challenges for financial and carbon markets,’ Carbon & Climate Law Review, 3, 2; and Lohmann, L. (2009d), ‘Toward a different debate in environmental accounting: The cases of carbon and cost-benefit’, Accounting, Organisations and Society, 34, 3-4.

[2]. See, e.g, the groups Biological Diversity, Climate SOS and the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, at http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/action/toolbox/ACESA/sign-on_letter.html, http://www.climatesos.org and http://www.seen.org .

[3]. Wheelan, H. (2007), ‘Soros slams emissions trading systems: Market solution is “ineffective” in fighting climate change’, Responsible Investor, 18 October, http://www.responsible-investor.com/home/article/soros_slams_emissions_cap_and_trading_systems/

[4]. Bond, P. (2009a), ‘A timely death?’, New Internationalist, January, http://www.newint.org/features/2009/01/01/climate-justice-false-solutions/

[5]. Accion Ecologica (2000), ‘Trade, climate change and the ecological debt,’ Unpublished paper, Quito.

[6]. Martinez-Alier, J. (2003), ‘Marxism, Social Metabolism and Ecologically Unequal Exchange’, Paper presented at Lund University Conference on World Systems Theory and the Environment, 19-22 September.

[7]. Ibid.

[8]. Shiva, V. (2005), ‘Beyond the WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong’, ZNet Commentary, 26 December.

[9]. http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/devthry/well-being/2000/tandon.htm

[10]. McGown, J. (2006), ‘Out of Africa: Mysteries of Access and Benefit Sharing’, Edmonds Washington, the Edmonds Institute and Johannesburg, the African Centre for Biosafety.

[11]. Srinivasan, U., S.Carey, E.Hallstein, P.Higgins, A.Ker, L.Koteen, A.Smith, R.Watson, J.Harte and R.Norgaard (2008), ‘The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, 5, http://www.pnas.org/content/105/5/1768.

[12]. Guardian (2008), ‘Rich countries owe poor a huge environmental debt’, 21 January, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jan/21/environmental.debt1.

[13]. The Bank’s estimates are conservative for at least three reasons: a minimalist definition based upon international pricing in 2000 (not potential future values when scarcity becomes a more crucial factor, especially in the oil industry); the partial calculation of damages to the local environment, to workers’ health/safety, and especially to women in communities around mines; and the Bank’s use of average – not marginal – cost resource rents also probably leads to underestimations of the depletion costs.

[14] . World Bank (2006), Where is the Wealth of Nations?, Washington, DC, p.66.

[15]. McLure, J. (2009), ‘Ethiopian leader chosen to represent Africa at climate summit,’ Addis Ababa, 1 September.

[16]. Pachauri, R.K. (2008), ‘Summary of testimony provided to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming,’ US Congress, Washington DC, globalwarming.house.gov/tools/assets/files/0342.pdf.

[17]. Agence France Press (2009), ‘Albania to Zimbabwe: the climate change risk list’, 2 September.

[18]. Ashine, A. (2009), ‘Africa threatens withdrawal from climate talks’, The Nation, 3 September.

[19]. Bond, P. (2009b), ‘Don’t play games with humanity’s future’, The Mercury, 2 September.

[20]. Bond, P., R.Dada and G.Erion (2009), Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

[21]. Sapa (2009a), ‘SA not “compromising anything” at climate change negotiations – Sonjica,” 15 September.

[22]. Sapa (2009b), ‘SA on climate change: “No money, no deal”‘, 5 August.

[23]. Republic of Bolivia (2009), ‘Submission to the Ad Hoc Working Group on

Long-term Cooperative Action under the UN Framework Convention on

Climate Change,’ La Paz, April.

[24]. Bond, P. and D.Brutus (2008), ‘Ecological debt and our centre’s survival’, ZCommentaries, 21 August, http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3594.

[25]. Africa Peoples Movement on Climate Change (2009), ‘Confronting the Climate Crisis: Preparing for Copenhagen and Beyond’, Nairobi, 30 August.

[26]. World Council of Churches Central Committee (2009), ‘Statement on eco-justice and ecological debt,’ Geneva, 2 September.

[27]. Ibid.

[28]. Chaffin, J. and E. Crooks (2009), ‘EU sets out €15bn climate aid plan’, Financial Times, 8 September.

[29]. Action Aid (2005), Real Aid: An Agenda for Making Aid Work, Johannesburg.

[30]. International Monetary Fund (2009), ‘The implications of global financial crisis for low-income countries’, Washington, DC.

[31]. Lohmann, L. (2009), personal correspondence.

[32]. Bond, P. (2010), ‘South Africa’s “rights culture” of water consumption: Breaking out of the liberal box and into the commons?’, in B.Johnston, L.Hiwasaki, I.Klaver, and V.Strang (Eds), Water, Cultural Diversity & Global Environmental Change: Emerging Trends, Sustainable Futures?, Paris, UNESCO.

[33]. Bond, P. and K.Sharife (2009), ‘Apartheid reparations and the contestation of corporate power in Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 119.

[34]. Friends of the Earth (2009), ‘Landmark global warming lawsuit settled’, Washington, DC, 6 February.

[35]. Kristoff, N. (2007), ‘The big melt’, New York Times, 16 August.

[36]. Adam, D. (2009), ‘Leading Climate Scientist: “Democratic Process Isn’t Working”‘, The Guardian, 18 March.

[37]. Mistilis, K. (2009), ‘Niger Delta standoff’, Pambazuka News, 442, 16 July, http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57769.

[38]. Gallagher, K. (2009), ‘Paying to keep oil in the ground’, The Guardian, 7 August.

[39]. Laxer, G. (2007), ‘Freezing in the dark?’, Presentation, Parkland Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 7 November.