The immorals of capitalism and climate change

GAONTEBALE MOKGOSI
Correspondent | Wednesday January 27, 2010 00:00

The Presidents of 'Third World' countries came back upset due to the manner in which issues of global warming were discussed, especially by the leaders of Industrialised Nations.

As they went to attend the Conference the leadership of Third World Countries had hoped to be assisted by western nations as they were promised finances so as to put in place environment - friendly  technology for the development of their countries. This arrangement has been dictated by the western nations; that the developing countries must avoid employing health hazard instruments in their developmental initiatives. The expectations of Third World Countries were crushed as the countries responsible for global warming did not commit themselves to assist them.

Like everyone who is concerned with global warming, I asked myself why the Industrialised Countries play the Third World Countries gimmicks. Why do they still take Africa as a land of perpetual childhood passed over by history? This has caused me to take a glimpse at the system that rules today`s World; Capitalism. The World is being controlled by a handful of men who for over 500 years have been robbing, raping and molesting other nations resources. These are the same people who went out to invade and conquer other peoples countries.   

Over the last four hundred years the external relations of the West with Africa have not been those of equality but of dominance and domination at the economic, political and cultural levels. The slave trade and slavery brought about mass relocation of peoples; colonialism brought about immense economic, political, cultural and psychological violence on colonised communities. This presented conditions of Africas disbelief in itself and its political leadership claimed that imitation of the western model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time; they caused third world peoples to internalise this belief in their intellectual conception of the universe. That is why African leaders are much more prepared to obey the rules dictated by western nations as regards global warming when in actual fact it is the worlds major states and corporations which are pumping out ever - increasing amounts with little sign of any meaningful cuts.

Global warming is caused by the growing concentration in the atmosphere of a series of gases which act as a blanket, trapping the suns heat. The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas in power stations and in internal combustion engines has increased an unprecedented emission rate of carbon dioxide. The result is a major increase in storms, heat-waves, droughts, floods and hurricanes across the globe. Global warming has the ultimate potential to plunge the world into huge and sudden climatic shifts which no society could withstand. The Copenhagen international conference involving world governments ended with no agreement on doing anything to tackle rising emissions precisely because many industrialised nations share business sentiments that nothing should be allowed to touch the profits of multi-national corporations. Instead business and many governments have come up with fake populist arguments which African leaders have accepted. They have proposed a series of fancy -sounding schemes such as 'emissions trading', Clean Development Mechanism and the Joint Implementation Mechanism. These schemes provide a market where companies and countries buy and sell the right to pump out quotas of carbon dioxide.

So a transnational company could sponsor a plantation in a poor country, and claim that if this had not been done more carbon dioxide would have gone into the atmosphere, on the grounds that trees lock up carbon but ignoring the fact that when trees die they release carbon dioxide. Another example could be a corporation investing in some electricity generation project involving hydroelectric power and dams, and claiming that otherwise fossil fuels would have been burned and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Emissions -trading is not only a false proposed mechanism for tackling climate change, it is also the rhetoric to pepper and confuse the discussions. The schemes in effect privatise the problem of air-pollution. Government and communities lose control over environmental protections, placing it in the hands of the polluters. This is another effort to promote neo-liberalism as the atmosphere is taken as a commodity. It is neither carbon nor pollution that is being traded, but peoples lives. Pollution trading must be rejected as false solutions to climate change.  The whole scheme is open to abuse over who decides what would otherwise have happened, and who does the resulting calculation.

Whatever the views of those at the top, and however genuine their concern over climate change, they are prisoners of the remorseless logic of profit by which corporations live or die. On average all the oil companies still depend on fossil fuels for 95 percent of their revenues and profit. It is the same story with the car firms. Ford for example, makes lots of green noises about climate change. But it is utterly committed to selling more and more cars, expanding into newer markets like India and China, and so contributing even more to global warming. Capitalism has an immense sluggishness at its heart. Once patterns of production become established and with them great concentrations of wealth and power established, they are hugely resistant to change.

The people who head the giant corporations such as Shell and BP, will resist with all their power anything which fundamentally threatens their current basis of profit and power - the fossil fuel based economy. The record of human history is that those who control societies have often been prepared to see the whole of society plunge into disastrous chaos and collapse rather than accept change which undermined their power.