Trust in Kapital

June 8th, 2007

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It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for looking back at some of the entrepreneurial solutions that have emerged from the rush to exploit the concept of climate change as a generator of speculative surplus value. The one that hit the ground hardest, or at least made the biggest noise when it did, was the idea of carbon trading, revealed last week to have made a negligible impact on carbon emissions, but to have generated fantastic profits for the companies who so far have taken part in it. The problem was the incentive scheme, which, like most incentive schemes, has been successfully milked by ‘innovators’ whose creativity extends no further than how to cook the books.

Perhaps the stage has already been passed when ‘climate change’ becomes a free-floating signifier whose signified is a problem that can be hygienically isolated and then magic-bulleted at will by the perpetual motion machine of capitalist innovation - a process that removes it neatly from the broader discussions about the interdependence of human society and its supporting ecosystems, turning it into just one more business opportunity. Certainly, this blank-eyed piece of boosterism is a symptom that warns we’re on our way.

Hope never seemed more theological in nature than when people started talking about ‘market signals’ being the best way to transform society towards ’sustainability’. For an illustration, consider another, much smaller-scale spectacle of the insanity of trying to fight growth-related externalities with more growth fuelled by berzerk economic speculation.

Towards the end of May, a ‘geo-engineering’ company called Planktos (motto: “Planktos Restores Ecosystems and Slows Climate Change”) planned to dump a load of iron into the Pacific. This was part of a bid to attract investment to the sort of snake-oil notion that George Bush is pinning his environmental hopes on.

Russ George is a California businessman with a big idea: you give him some money and he will seed the ocean with iron, causing phytoplankton to grow. The process is called iron fertilization, and is designed to take carbon out of the atmosphere to help you mitigate your contribution to global warming. It is one of a number of business ideas that have grown out of the global demand for carbon trading schemes, and it’s becoming a big business. Russ George and his foundation Planktos is creating quite a stir: Nature, the BBC, and a host of major newspapers have reported on his business venture.

If you’re looking for the published, peer-reviewed research to back up this idea, don’t bother - there isn’t any.

“It’s really more of a business experiment than a scientific experiment”, he said.

In other words, it’s a crude attempt to huckster cash out of speculators looking for the next big thing. What’s even cruder is its application of a ridiculously mechanistic model to a deliberate intervention within a hugely complex system, an objection which should perhaps be written into the dictionary definition of geo-engineering. With these levels of complexity, traditional conceptions of risk analysis can’t even get a foothold - which naturally some think is a kind of flip justification for ignoring the concept of risk entirely. Except, of course, in a sexy financial sense.

In addition to which, as nanotech activists the ETC Group point out,

Planktos boasts on their website that the iron they dump will be in nanoparticle form because nanoparticles float longer than normal particles. (although Planktos have given contrary information in person). If this is true, then the Planktos experiment may be the largest intentional release of engineered nanoparticles ever undertaken. The last four years have seen a growing scientific consensus that the altered properties exhibited by nanoparticles could have negative toxicity effects on the environment and for human health. In 2004 the UK’s Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering issued a recommendation that environmental applications of nanoparticles should be prohibited, a call echoed by many environmental groups. Planktos claims they will be dumping their particles in international waters and so are not bound by international treaties or permit requirements.

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