Africa does not share much responsibility for global warming. The continent only contributes 3 percent of global greenhouse emissions. But the extractive industries that operate in Africa are major emitters. Shell, for instance, emits more greenhouse gasses than many countries: Its carbon emissions of 102 million tons in 2005 exceeded the emissions of 150 countries.
Although Africa occupies a small carbon footprint, the continent’s autocratic regimes in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, and Gabon are located at the base of the commodity chain and depend primarily on the capital-intensive extractive industries that supply the world’s largest carbon-intensive engines with a significant share of fuel. But neither the corrupt regimes nor the corporations that financed and facilitated global warming made it to the Copenhagen agenda.
At Copenhagen
The discussions at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last year focused on “developed” and “developing” nations, and the new market for carbon offsets. Industrialized governments created these carbon permits from thin air and allocated them to the largest multinationals with the largest carbon footprints. The latter architects of the system, Goldman Sachs, with foreign subsidiaries criss-crossing the globe from the Bermuda to the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong to Jersey, Ireland, the British Virgin Islands and Africa’s own world-famed hub, Mauritius, not only designed the huge carbon market, but also hold a 10 percent share in Al Gore’s Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) — the pilot carbon trading program in the United States.
Gore’s CCX, whose board includes top VIPs such as the UN’s Kofi Annan and the World Bank’s James Wolfensohn, had advocated for the privatization of the atmosphere as far back at the Rio Earth Summit.
One well-publicized engine of the new carbon trade is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which enables polluters to circumvent caps by financing projects in the developing world that emit little or no carbon. Yet, according to studies by Stanford University’s Energy and Sustainable Development Program, “between a third and two-thirds” of CDM projects do not represent real reductions.
Meanwhile, G20 governments subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of $300 billion in 2009. So, as the G20 spends its time creating a carbon trade market that does little to reduce carbon emissions, multinationals continue to expand their extractive enterprises, dictators continue to siphon off capital, financial firms cash in on pollution credits, and this illicit capital continues to flow into offshore locations that are themselves threatened by the rising waters associated with global warming. (Posted by Bulatlat.com)
FPIF contributor Khadija Sharife is a journalist, and visiting scholar at the Center for Civil Society (CCS). She’s based in South Africa.
