WAYS FORWARD
from Carbon Trading: a critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power, By Larry Lohmann, Development Dialogue no. 48 September 2006
Summarised from Chapter 5, Ways Forward by Ruth Rosenhek (www.climate.net.au)

A package of approaches that are backed and monitored by popular movements and evaluated against ambitious short- and long-term targets.

1) LARGE SCALE PUBLIC WORKS – reorganise Northern societies’ infrastructure away from fossil fuel dependency in a way that pollution trading and taxes are incapable of doing. Include such things as: revamp transport systems; decentralise electricity networks to make them more efficient, reliable, secure and receptive to solar, wind and micro-hydro power; and help overhaul inefficient heating systems

2) SUBSIDY SHIFTING

a) Phase out subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, extraction, refining, transport and use. These subsidies currently underwrite domestic and foreign pipeline development, superhighway construction, airport expansion, long-distance shipping, military operations, tax exemptions for aviation and bunker fuel users, low-cost credit and insurance for fossil fuel firms and consumer rebates for sports utility vehicles (USA). The Kyoto Protocol commits signatories to ‘progressive reduction or phasing out’ of damaging subsidies for fossil fuels. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that removing subsidies would alone reduce emissions by 18 per cent by 2050 while increasing world income by 0.7 per cent.

b) Shift subsidies towards coherent programme of renewable energy development; community-based planning for lower-carbon lifestyles; support for local movements protecting land, forests and smallholder agriculture; better insulation and heating; promotion of public debate and exchange on climate change; and just treatment for those who would otherwise suffer from the transition to less carbon-intensive industry, including fossil fuel workers and the poor.

c) Curb subsidies for deforestation provided by national governments, export credit agencies, the World Bank and other, including subsidies for pulp mills, industrial monoculture plantations, mining in forested areas and other enterprises that result in displacement, impoverishment and ecological degradation. Shift subsidies away from military budgets.

3) CONVENTIONAL REGULATION – Set efficiency and carbon use standards for buildings, vehicles, urban development and land-use planning. (Regulation is often capable of improving efficiency faster, at a lower cost, and in a less coercive way than market mechanisms such as trading or taxes.)

4) GREEN TAXES AND OTHER NON-TRADING MARKET MECHANISMS – as low-carbon choices become more plentiful (better public transport, more efficient machinery), carbon taxes and taxes on material intensity (unnecessary and throwaway use of metals, water, wood, plastics etc.) come to have a greater effect. Revenues from such taxes could then be used to reduce taxes on labour, fund low-carbon energy and increase efficiency, or offer rebates to buy greener, more efficient equipment.

5) LEGAL ACTION such as the use of public nuisance, product liability and human rights law against greenhouse polluters. Threat of civil liability may be a more powerful incentive to industry than the threat of regulation.

The Ways Forward are not decided by planners, but a matter of alliance building.

Need to strengthen and recognise, in the South as well as the North, movements that protect forests and other local commons, that fight against oil wars, gas and oil pipelines, fossil fuel extraction, power plant pollution, airport and highway expansion. Also movements that work to protect local subsistence regimes against trade liberalisation, privatisation, and commodification worldwide.

It is increasingly clear that small renewable energy sources over which local communities have power, whether off-grid or on-grid, are becoming a cheap alternative to fossil fuel-oriented centralised generating systems in many areas of the South

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

1) Public works and subsidy shifting to change societies’ energy-use patterns - Ancient irrigation systems of Asia, US’s undermining of rail travel and subsidisation of interstate highways and suburban sprawl following WWII. Conventional pollution and energy regulation has been around for at least 150 years and has many achievements to its credit.

2) Technological Change - During the Second World War, it took US car manufacturers only 6 months to convert to military production and the country took only 12 years to switch from steam to diesel/electric locomotives and from uncontrolled automotive emissions to catalytic conversers. Thanks in part to building and appliance efficiency standards, per capita electricity use in Californa has remained virtually flat since the mid-1970s , while it has risen by more than half in the rest of the US.