BRICS cook the climate (Part Two)

Patrick Bond, Guest Blogger

A secondary objective of the Copenhagen deal – aside from avoiding emissions cuts the world so desperately requires – was to maintain a modicum of confidence in carbon markets. Especially after the 2008 financial meltdown and rapid decline of European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, BASIC leaders felt renewed desperation to prop up the ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM), the Third World’s version of carbon trading. Questioning the West’s banker-centric climate strategy – which critics term ‘the privatisation of the air’ – was not an option for BRICS elites, given their likeminded neoliberal orientation.

By the end of 2012, the BRICS no longer qualified to receive direct CDM funds, so efforts shifted towards subsidies for new internal carbon markets, especially in Brazil and China. In February 2013, South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan also announced that as part of a carbon tax, Pretoria would also allow corporations to offset 40 percent of their emissions cuts via carbon markets.

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Cyprus: Rescuing a Tax Haven

Alejandro Nadal

It must hurt when you show your hand without anybody calling your final bet. After all, why do you have to give free information to your opponents? This is what the infamous troika must feel right now after revealing its “rescue” plan for Cyprus. The parliament in Nicosia has flatly rejected the strategy, but the troika’s game plan has been unveiled at great political (and possibly financial) costs.

The little island in the eastern Mediterranean is responsible for only 0.2 per cent of the European Union’s GDP. But the architecture of the rescue plan has resuscitated primal fears about the future of the euro. Why is this so?

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BRICS cook the climate (part one)

Patrick Bond, Guest Blogger

As they meet in Durban on March 26-27, leaders of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – must own up: they have been emitting prolific levels of greenhouse gases, far higher than the US or the EU in absolute terms and as a ratio of GDP (though less per person). How they address this crisis could make the difference between life and death for hundreds of millions of people this century.

South Africa’s example is not encouraging. First, the Pretoria national government and its Eskom parastatal electricity generator have recently increased South Africa’s already extremely high emissions levels, on behalf of the country’s ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’. This problem is well known in part because of the failed civil society campaigns against the world’s third and fourth largest coal-fired power plants (Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile), whose financing in 2010 included the largest-ever World Bank project loan and whose subcontractor includes the ruling party’s investment arm in a blatant multi-billion rand conflict of interest.

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Missing Women: The G20, Gender Equality and Global Economic Governance

James Heintz, Guest Blogger

The Group of 20 (G20) has declared itself the “premier global economic forum” and was created to tackle the most pressing challenges confronting the world economy today, including reducing instability and preventing future financial crises. The G20 has committed itself to a goal of shared and inclusive growth. Given this commitment, it is striking how little attention has been paid to issues of gender equality in its policy frameworks, summits, and declarations.

This report examines the G20’s strategies and their effects on gender equality. It finds that the G20 has not seriously considered the consequences for women and men when formulating policies and setting its agenda. There are indications that this situation has changed somewhat, with a commitment to gender equality made at the 2012 Los Cabos Summit in Mexico. Nevertheless, questions remain over whether gender equality will be taken seriously. Representation within the G20 is unbalanced – only 25 percent of the heads of state of the G20 member countries are currently women. The figure for the official government representatives, the “sherpas,” is lower – just 15 percent are women.

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Marx and President Correa’s Extraction

Joan Martínez Alier, Guest Blogger

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador asks when and where Marx criticizes mega-mining. In various interviews, Correa, the mouthpiece of mega-mining and the expansion of oil exploitation, has asked, “Let’s see, señores marxistas, where was Marx opposed to the exploitation of non-renewable resources?” The response is easy. Marx and Engels criticized predatory capitalism, even if (in my opinion) their proto-ecologist critique was not a fundamental pillar of their work, which was more focused in an analysis of the exploitation of salaried workers and its consequences for the dynamics of capitalism.

But what would Marx have said of mega-mining and the ideas of President Correa? I don’t know enough German to guess, but I imagine it would be something like Pfui Teufel! In this respect, the pertinent concepts of Marxism that Correa doesn’t know or has forgotten are at least two: 1) Primitive or Original Accumulation of Capital (a concept revised by David Harvey in 2003 under the name Accumulation by Dispossession, very appropriate to the realities of President Correa’s oil and mineral extractive projects in Ecuador’s Amazon and other regions); 2) The interpretation of economics as Social Metabolism (for which Marx was inspired by Moleschott and Liebig).
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Marx and President Correa's Extraction

Joan Martínez Alier, Guest Blogger

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador asks when and where Marx criticizes mega-mining. In various interviews, Correa, the mouthpiece of mega-mining and the expansion of oil exploitation, has asked, “Let’s see, señores marxistas, where was Marx opposed to the exploitation of non-renewable resources?” The response is easy. Marx and Engels criticized predatory capitalism, even if (in my opinion) their proto-ecologist critique was not a fundamental pillar of their work, which was more focused in an analysis of the exploitation of salaried workers and its consequences for the dynamics of capitalism.

But what would Marx have said of mega-mining and the ideas of President Correa? I don’t know enough German to guess, but I imagine it would be something like Pfui Teufel! In this respect, the pertinent concepts of Marxism that Correa doesn’t know or has forgotten are at least two: 1) Primitive or Original Accumulation of Capital (a concept revised by David Harvey in 2003 under the name Accumulation by Dispossession, very appropriate to the realities of President Correa’s oil and mineral extractive projects in Ecuador’s Amazon and other regions); 2) The interpretation of economics as Social Metabolism (for which Marx was inspired by Moleschott and Liebig).
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We Need a Shadow CBO

Jeff Madrick

I have written before on this blog and in my Harper’s Magazine column about the distorted long-term budget projections produced by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO’s figures are a primary source of the current alarm about the need to cut government spending even with the economy weak.

To earn its “non-partisan” label, the CBO makes unrealistic assumptions that for the most part merely project past trends into the future, and sometimes don’t even do that — underscoring the need, in my view, for a “shadow CBO” that exposes the office’s outlandish assumptions and offers us a set of alternative projections based on realistic ones. The office forecasts, for instance, that U.S. debt as a proportion of GDP will be 150 percent by the early 2030s and nearly 200 percent by 2037. Michael Linden, a highly competent economist at the Center for American Progress, has made a good start at exposing the assumptions that underlie such predictions by taking a close look at the office’s June 2012 long-term forecast:

Since CBO released its long-term outlook in June 2012, we’ve already made significant progress toward bringing down our deficits. First, contrary to CBO’s assumption, we did not extend all of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012. Instead, the American Taxpayer Relief Act allowed approximately $600 billion of the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled, thereby raising future revenue projections. Second, the most recent CBO budget outlook, published in early February 2013, shows substantially less spending over the next 10 years than was projected in June’s long-term outlook. Finally, given the scheduled drawdown in Afghanistan, it seems unlikely that we will continue spending more than $100 billion a year—as is currently projected—on foreign wars. Incorporating these changes brings the 2037 debt projection down from 199 percent of GDP to 169 percent.

Linden goes on to point out that the CBO is projecting no rise in tax revenues as a proportion of GDP, even though these revenues usually go up with the rise in personal and corporate income that accompanies economic expansion. The office is also expecting a sudden increase in non-entitlement spending in 2022 — the very spending that Congress is now working to cut. Thus, the CBO is building into its projections deficit increases that likely won’t occur. Moreover, if these programs receive additional funding in the future — and let’s hope they do — they may be accompanied by tax increases to finance them.

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Why Chavez’s legacy will live on

Martin Khor

Hugo Chavez, who died last week, mourned by millions of Venezuelan citizens and people around the South American region, was a figure that was larger than life.

During his 14 years as President of Venezuela, he managed to institute profound changes with effects on his country and the developing world long after his death.

Some leaders and media outlets in the West have been giving misleading or trivialised commentaries, just as they tried to demonise him during his lifetime.

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Why Chavez's legacy will live on

Martin Khor

Hugo Chavez, who died last week, mourned by millions of Venezuelan citizens and people around the South American region, was a figure that was larger than life.

During his 14 years as President of Venezuela, he managed to institute profound changes with effects on his country and the developing world long after his death.

Some leaders and media outlets in the West have been giving misleading or trivialised commentaries, just as they tried to demonise him during his lifetime.

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Wake Up and Smell the Air

Sunita Narain

Our health is not on anybody’s agenda. Or, we just don’t seem to make the connections between the growing burden of disease and the deteriorating condition of our environment. We don’t really believe the science, which tells us each passing day how toxins affect our bodies, leading to high rates of both morbidity and mortality. It is true that it is difficult to establish cause and effect, but we know more than enough to say that air pollution is today a leading cause of both disease and death in India and other parts of South Asia.

The Global Burden of Disease is an initiative involving WHO that tracks the causes of disability-adjusted life years lost—the number of productive years lost to diseases—and human death. In other words, it assesses a large number of risk factors responsible for the global burden of disease. Why are we ill? The initiative’s decadal 2010 assessment should make us angry.

In South Asia the top cause of disease and death is particulate pollution—inside homes because of the poor quality cook stoves and biomass fuel burnt by poor households, and outside homes because of growing numbers of vehicles and use of dirty diesel fuel. What is more worrying is that ambient and household-level air pollution has a correlation with ischemic heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and lower respiratory infections. According to this assessment, some 627,000 deaths in 2010 are attributable to ambient air pollution alone in India, of which heart disease caused almost 50 per cent deaths and stroke and hypertension another 25 per cent. In all, over 1.6 million deaths happened in India because of indoor and outdoor air pollution in 2010, finds the global assessment. It is not mocking numbers.

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