The Climate Change Problem

The climate change problem

The Climate Change Problem
The climate change crisis is an example of a familiar social problem - the overflowing waste dump: Too much fossil carbon is released from underground fossil fuel deposits into a much more active and rapidly circulating carbon pool, or “dump” above ground. But the capacity of the above-ground “dump” to absorb fossil carbon is limited. For example, it would be biologically impossible for the earth's trees, grass and other vegetation to absorb even a small fraction of the carbon in remaining fossil fuel deposits. The result of this limited capacity of the earth's above-ground carbon “dump” is that some of the fossil carbon continually being added to the above-ground active pool of carbon is building up in the atmosphere - causing changes in the global climate. This overflow cannot go on indefinitely.

Were the global North's use of aboveground carbon “dump” space to be held constant, no space would be left for others to use. In brief, rich and poor are heading toward a conflict over who gets to use a limited “dump” space which is already dangerously overflowing.

The realistic solution to this problem of the overflowing dumps is to slow or halt the production of the substance that pile up in the dump. Reducing the dangers of nuclear waste, DDT, or polyvinyl chloride leaking out of overflowing or irremediably faulty disposal grounds ultimately requires a halt to production. Similarly, the only realistic approach to the dangers of climate change is to stop burning of coal, oil and gas as soon as possible, leaving the great bulk of fossil fuels safely underground.

Many private corporations are reluctant to take up new technologies or product lines which would shift their current core markets away from fossil fuels. Instead of facing the need to reduce the flow of carbon from below- to above-ground, they hope either to find new dumps to stow excess carbon in, or to be able to exclude others from using existing dumps, or both.

The result is that instead of restricting and equalizing the use of the above-ground carbon dump, a relatively small group of actors, particularly in the North, and particularly in the United States, have been working, since the 1990s, to turn the atmosphere into a privately-owned asset. Bit by bit, starting with voluntary carbon markets and the Kyoto Protocol (together with its offshoots such as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme), international climate agreements have become a charter for the commodification and trading of the carbon-absorbing capacity of the world's air, oceans, soil and vegetation in a way that benefits neither the climate nor the great majority of the world's population.