Activity title | Different world views, different policies |
Overview | Participants analyse by which strategies different climate policies are inspired. |
Objectives |
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Materials | Handout ‘Strategies to make economies ‘future fit’’ (1 per person) Printouts of Case A and B (1 per group) |
Time | 30 – 45 minutes |
Group size | Works for all group sizes |
Instructions for trainers |
Case A) There are different approaches to lower greenhouse gas emissions in the field of industry. Discuss with your group which understanding of sustainability and which strategy for sustainable economics underpin those approaches:
Within emissions trading systems a cap on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted is set. Companies receive or buy emissions allowances, which permit them to emit certain amounts of greenhouse gases. If a company reduces emissions it can sell allowances which it no longer needs.
Individual governments or the European Union can tax carbon intensive activities. Instead of trading emissions, they could increase the tax on greenhouse gas emissions from industry every year in order to steadily increase the cost of emitting greenhouse gases.
Individual governments or the European Union can also set absolute emission reduction targets for the different industries and thereby make lowering emissions mandatory. Case B) In order to protect climate and biodiversity in general, different approaches are put forward. Discuss with your group which understanding of sustainability and which strategy for sustainable economics underpin those approaches:
The United Nations REDD+ program on ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’ in developing countries creates a financial value for the carbon stored in forests by selling emission reduction units. Those units stand for one ton of CO2 emissions which is avoided by not cutting down the forest.
Around the world, 11.9% of all terrestrial land is protected area, half of which is explicitly dedicated to biodiversity protection. The definition for a protected area is: ‘A clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values’. |
Debriefing and evaluation | Feedback: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the field of industry Emissions trading is rooted in the core assumption of weak sustainability that natural capital is comparable to other forms of capital and can be substituted by money. Companies which do not reduce emissions can buy themselves out by acquiring emission allowances. Hereby, for example in the EU emissions trading system (EU ETS), it is also possible to buy international credits from emission-saving projects, whereby the global north can hand over its climate protection duties to the global south. The EU ETS was the world’s first major carbon market. Emission markets do not ‘naturally exist’; they get created by regulation. Establishing markets where emissions are tradable means making a stable climate a tradable commodity. Market-liberals, especially neoclassical economists, support the creation of emission markets, as they see them as a means to correcting wrong price signals by including the previously externalised cost that emissions have for society into the final price. Also some pragmatic proponents of a socio-ecological transformation support emission trading schemes, arguing that they can make emission-intense production more expensive and thereby support less polluting alternatives. Radical proponents of a socio-ecological transformation are against commodifying emissions. They criticize that a stable climate should not be determined by how prices on markets evolve. In contrast to taxing emissions, where the governments earn the tax money and can reinvest it to make a transformation socially just, within emission trading systems, corporations earn by reselling permits which they mainly got allocated for free based on historical emissions and lobbying efforts. Taxing greenhouse gas emissions can be part of all three strategies. While libertarians like Hayek would not suggest setting up such taxes, for neoclassical economists these taxes can be a means leading to ‘right prices’. Proponents of both strategies of socio-ecological transformation would argue that next to making emission-intensive activities more expensive, the tax money can be used to boost green innovations (primarily in the pragmatic view) and to solve inequality issues by redistribution (primarily in the radical view). Instead of making it more expensive to pollute the environment, environmental degradation can also simply be prohibited. An example was the prohibition of CFC in refrigerators, which until then harmed the ozone layer. Prohibiting unsustainably high greenhouse gas emissions is not seen as an option by market-liberals, as this would interfere with the free market. Proponents of a socio-ecological transformation, on the other hand, regard regulatory interventions as necessary to sustain a stable climate and thereby protect the environment and society in which the economy is embedded. While the concept of weak sustainability favours market instruments and correcting prices, the concept of strong sustainability in many cases calls for strict regulatory intervention in order to protect irreplaceable ecosystems, reflecting the principle of incommensurability. Feedback climate and biodiversity: REDD+ builds on the concept of weak sustainability, since it explicitly assumes that nature can be attributed an objective and quantifiable value. Through the price mechanism in the REDD+ scheme, healthy and intact forests compete with other, destructive land uses. This implies that for the mechanism to effectively protect forests, these forests must be valued with a higher price than the potentially different utilizations. As the assessment is subject to larger macroeconomic influences and trends on capital markets, the valuation mechanism might fail when economic conditions change. Proponents of strong sustainability criticize that the average time horizon of REDD+ projects are 20 years, whereas carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels stay in the atmosphere for several thousand years. What’s more, within REDD+ programs primary forests can be cut down and substituted by industrial tree plantations. In the concept of weak sustainability, this isn´t a problem as long as the value (in this case for storing carbon) stays the same. In the concept of strong sustainability, complex ecosystems should not be replaced by industrial tree plantations: even though the carbon storing capacity might stay the same, biodiversity and the ecosystem itself would be lost. Market-liberals welcome programs like REDD+ as they regard market solutions to be the most efficient. As do many pragmatic proponents of a socio-ecological transformation, as cheap options to ‘reduce’ emissions. However, radical proponents of a socio-ecological transformation criticize REDD+ programs, as they allow countries in the global north and ‘their’ companies to pay for the ‘right to pollute’ and thereby maintain their current level of production and pollution, instead of actually meeting emission reduction targets. Commodifying the storage of emissions allows them to consume more energy from fossil fuels without actually increasing the carbon sequestration, as forests are not even replanted, but only not cut down. Furthermore, they criticize REDD+ as a colonial mechanism that encloses land and forces Indigenous Peoples and forest-dwellers to give up control over their land, resources and traditions. Strong sustainability calls for protecting areas. In the understanding of strong sustainability certain ecosystems are irreplaceable and therefore have to be maintained, e.g. through prohibiting that forest can be logged. This can be understood as applying the precautionary principle of avoiding the risk of irreversible, dangerous damage. Market-liberals would be against prohibiting economic activities like logging in general, as they see it as more efficient to let price signals dictate what should happen. The only regulatory interventions they suggest creating and securing are a property regime and markets. Both pragmatic and radical proponents of a socio-ecological transformation would support establishing protected areas in which certain economic activities are prohibited. |
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