Corporate Sponsored Environmentalism-Cap and Trade and the Green Police

President Obama is likely to make cap and trade a reality. The impacts will be felt not just in corporate boardrooms, it is not just a regulation system designed to hold corporations accountable for greenhouse emissions. It will also commodify carbon sinks, the earth’s natural resources containing carbon. Carbon in forests, or bogs and other greenhouse gases, like methane from cows, become “carbon credits” to be traded by industry to offset their emissions. In the debate so far not much has been said about what will be traded as carbon credits or why only the US is considering a cap and trade system to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The appeal of cap and trade is the government gives the right to emit certain levels of CO2 and corporations can choose to reduce emissions or to purchase “credits”, the right to trade the carbon in forests, etc to offset their emissions that are above the cap. This aspect of the carbon cap and trade system sets it apart from other cap and trade systems in the US like the Acid Rain Program run by the EPA to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. In that system corporations have no option to buy sulfur dioxide sinks to offset emissions, they don’t exist, only from several methods to actually reduce emissions or use a larger portion of energy from renewable sources. Carbon is an exception as it is the building block of life as well as the CO2 in the atmosphere.
What this cap and trade system will do is create value in natural resources as carbon sinks, currently around $10 a ton. If cap and trade becomes reality you could sell the right to trade that $10 in carbon in the trees in your backyard just for letting them sit there. The real value comes not from the monetary value of the carbon sinks, but their inclusion on supranational conglomerates’ balance sheets in order to continue business as usual.

In anticipation of the arrival of cap and trade, companies like Chevron have bought up huge areas of Brazilian rainforest as “banks” of carbon credits. Actually the Nature Conservancy, America’s largest conservancy group, brokered the deal and had the SVPS, a Brazilian conservation group purchase and manage the land on their behalf. The only thing Chevron owns is the right to trade the carbon.
In the process the SVPS has created the Forca Verde, the Green Police, to patrol and protect the areas under its control. Rare species are returning and encroaching ranches and farms are being kept at bay. US corporations are funding an armed police force in the Brazilian countryside to protect a Brazilian rainforest from the poorest Brazilians so that Americans can gradually reduce the burning of coal to power our giant energystar refrigerators full of over processed food of which 30% will end up in the trash anyway. Not that it had much nutritional value to begin with.

If there is going to be a Green Police it should be here in America. Maybe it’s our destiny; maybe America’s future economic prosperity lies in becoming China or Brazil’s "carbon credits" with Chinese or Brazilian funded Green Police to help facilitate our efficiency.

Unless the global warming apocalypse comes first. Even in the face of global warming, freedom and environmental conservation need to be balanced, like freedom and security, or you end up with neither.

Our collective actions are equally as important environmentally as the means of production of supranational conglomerates, which we have no say in. Much of the impact of our collective actions could be mitigated if a Green Police rigorously monitored the latter. Information should be enough to alter the people’s behavior. An issue with urgency like global warming will be used by many people for gain and the the actual urgency of the problem should be considered carefully in proportion to the solutions proposed.