Green Economy or Greed Economy

Anne Petermann recently reported on her attendance at Rio+20. What has happened to that great realization that the world must act collectively to stop the destruction of all life systems? One would hope we could be reviewing the great progress we've all made.

According to Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, who wrote about the Rio+20 summit’s preparatory meetings for the Guardian back in March 2011, “Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries…and suspicions are running high that the…‘green economy’ is more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old ‘greed’ economy.”

What would you expect an oil company to do, or an oil producing country for that matter, to the threat of their corporate destruction. Of course they've used every penny of their, by far largest financial resources in the world economy, to ensure that Rio+20 can look back at decades of sliding even further towards the abyss. Of course we let them because we drive their cars, eat their food, and use their oil as an integral part of everything we do. Their advertising actually helps us feel good about it. The ones we choose are doing their part, aren't they? Shell, BP, Exxon, GM, GE, Goldman. Their ads in National Geographic, on PBS, and where ever we look on television make us believe they are helping build a new great green economy. What does it really mean?

At the Rio+20 summit, industrialized countries and multinational corporations, accompanied by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, led the push for development of the green economy—that is, to use the very ecological devastation caused by global capitalism to create markets in so-called “environmental services” by turning them into tradable commodities. These new markets would help prop up the global economy in a greenwashed version of business as usual.

“Environmental services,” provided by intact natural ecosystems—which include such things as the storage of carbon, the purification of air and water, and the maintenance of biodiversity—would be given a monetary value in the market, enabling them to be purchased and supposedly protected. In reality, however, it would allow companies to destroy a biodiverse ecosystem in one area, by purchasing the protection of an equivalent ecosystem.

It is not in the interests of corporations nor the governments they bribe to actually stop climate change. They can make it seem as though it is through green washing and complex systems of creating markets with legal status for environmental services. These carbon trading schemes, offsets, environmental attributes, and others systems like them, give corporations and the governments they control, the legal framework and related legal language they can then use to deceive their consumers. What is really going on?

Source Article: Rio Earth Summit, Z Magazine