The Carbon Scam
In metaphors in all cultures, false claims are often referred to as empty as air. No one could imagine that manufacturing companies and financial speculators could create a trade in pollution but the West has succeeded in doing just that with free-floating carbon dioxide.
Rocked by scandal, the recent Copenhagen summit on global warming ended in disarray, notwithstanding the corporate media’s portrayal of President Obama as saviour. Some scandals were minor or manageable such as the offer by the prostitutes of Denmark of free services to card-carrying delegates.
But the credibility of lead nations was shattered when The Guardian of London published a leaked secret ‘draft final agreement’ prepared by the US, UK, Australia and Denmark that sought to shove the UN leadership out of all future climate negotiations and hand over control to the World Bank. Furthermore, industrialised countries focused more on firming up carbon trade, giving short shrift to remedies and alternative non-polluting technologies. Outraged South countries walked out. Copenhagen’s so-called ‘Accord’ has no legal basis.
The Copenhagen summit was just the latest example of the West trying to create a trade in pollution. In 1991, Lawrence Summers, the then chief economist in the World Bank, in an internal memo, strongly recommended the dumping of toxic waste in Third World countries as the US and other industrialised countries were running out of places to throw it out.
“Just between you and me,” he wrote, “shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?…a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that… I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”
In 1992, his memo was leaked to The Economist of London, which commented about it under the caption, “Let Them Eat Pollution.” Although Summers claimed his tone was meant to be sarcastic, it outraged people around the world and was considered revealing of the World Bank’s callous and calculating nature. Brazil’s then secretary of environment late José Lutzenburger, also Brazil’s first internationally-known environmental activist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award (an alternate Nobel Prize) was greatly offended. He wrote to Summers: “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane…Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in…If the World Bank keeps you as vice-president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said…the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.”
The World Bank did not disappear despite its ruinous, non-transparent projects pushed through corrupt and undemocratic governments, but Mr Lutzenburger was forced to resign his post soon after, for standing up to the US and corporate interests.
And Larry Summers? He thrived. In 1999, he was appointed US treasury secretary. Later on in a lecture as president of Harvard University, he stated his ‘essential truth’: “all basic values, including literacy, was linked to market growth.” His ultimate neoliberal equation was: More money-value exchanges = more market growth = more basic values. Today, like a bad penny, Summers has reappeared at Obama’s side as director of the National Economic Council.
The UN finally passed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which called for a specific reduction of emissions by 2012. The principle was that the rich, industrialised countries responsible for most of the emissions, should take on the maximum reductions. Most developing nations do not contribute much to global warming yet. These countries, including Pakistan, which produces less than one per cent of greenhouse gases, therefore do not have to act immediately.
Continued on next page . . .
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