Toward a new Agenda for Climate Justice.

• Author: Tokar, Brian

With all the fanfare that usually accompanies such gatherings, delegates to the December 2007 UN climate talks on the Indonesian island of Bali returned to their home countries declaring victory. Despite the continued obstructionism of the US delegation, the negotiators reached a mild consensus for continued negotiations on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and at the very last moment were able to cajole and pressure the US to sign on.

But in the end, the so-called "Bali roadmap" added little besides a vague timetable to the plans for renewed global climate talks that came out of a similar meeting two years ago in Montreal. (1) With support from Canada, Japan and Russia, and the acquiescence of the new Australian government, the US delegation deleted all references (except in a nonbinding footnote) marketing the to the overwhelming consensus that reductions of 25- 40% in annual greenhouse gas emissions are necessary by 2020 to forestall catastrophic and irreversible alterations in the earth's climate.

In Kyoto in 1997, Vice President Al Gore was credited with breaking the first such deadlock in climate negotiations: he promised the assembled delegates that the US would support mandatory emissions reductions if the targeted cuts were reduced by more than half, and if their implementation were based on a scheme of market-based trading of emissions. The concept of "marketable rights to pollute" had been in wide circulation in the US for nearly a decade, but this was the first time a so-called "cap-and-trade" scheme was to be implemented on a global scale. The result, a decade later, is the development of what British columnist George Monbiot has aptly termed "an exuberant market in fake emissions cuts." Of course, the US never signed the Kyoto Protocol, and the rest of the world has had to bear the consequences of managing an increasingly cumbersome and ineffectual carbon trading system.

Given the increasingly narrow focus on carbon trading and offsets as the primary official response to global climate disruptions, it is no surprise that Bali resembled, in the words of one participant, "a giant shopping extravaganza, marketing the earth, the sky and the rights of the poor." All manner of carbon brokers, technology developers and national governments were out displaying their wares to the thousands of assembled delegates and NGO representatives. Numerous international organizations used the occasion of Bali to release their latest research on various aspects of global warming, including an important new report from the Global Forest Coalition and Global Justice Ecology Project highlighting the consequences for the world's forests of the current global push to develop so-called "biofuels" from agricultural crops, grasses and trees (revised edition available at global justice ecology. org).

Substantive developments from Bali were few and far between. Those that did emerge serve to highlight the ways that nominal progress on global warming is often linked to counterproductive measures that only benefit the world's elites. First, the World Bank announced the creation of a new "Forest Carbon partnership Facility," releasing Bank funds for governments seeking to preserve forests. But this effort is based on perpetuating the fatuous notion that wealthy nations (and individuals) can "offset" their excessive carbon dioxide emissions by paying for nominally carbon-saving projects in poorer countries. Throughout the global South, carbon offsets have already spurred the replacement of vast native forests with timber plantations, more readily assessed for their carbon sequestration potential, and able to be harvested for "energy crops" such as palm oil and highly speculative cellulose-derived ethanol.

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NGOs assembled in Bali warned that the Bank's forest initiative "could trigger further displacement, conflict and violence; as forests themselves increase in value they are declared 'off limits' to communities that live in them or depend on them for their livelihoods." Traditional forest dwelling communities, deemed incapable of managing their own forests, will continue to be displaced by international experts affiliated with the Bank, national governments, and compliant environmental organizations such as Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund. Ultimately, timber companies and plantation managers, in league with the World Bank, will be demanding, in the words of Simone Lovera of the Global Forest Coalition, "compensation for every tree they don't cut down."

Second, the Bali meetings led to the creation of a new UN fund to help poor countries adapt to climate changes. This fund will be managed by the Global Environment Facility, a semi-independent partnership of the UN's environment and development programs and the World Bank, and funded through a 2% levy on carbon offset transactions under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDMs carbon offset schemes, however, have been widely criticized for manipulations, abuses and the funding of highly questionable projects...