An internal bank manual for the Carbon Pricing Club

An internal bank manual for the Carbon Pricing Club (Whitehorse Star Comment March 30, 2016)

The club image as a signal for special finance interests looks cynical, but the honesty of it is a refreshing contrast to the World Bank’s generally false advertising of fighting poverty with free trade and the climate crisis with carbon pricing.

The Institute For Climate Economics, I4CE, in Paris, posted an unusual and very tight 10-page set of sales instructions and recruiting strategies that comes in big fat letters.

It is authored by Dr. Venkata Putti, the program manager of the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit, http://goo.gl/6b8LvA .

The front page poses the question and thread: Towards a Carbon Pricing Club on the Road to and through COP21? 

The document headline reads: WBG Carbon Pricing Initiatives: Building and Linking the Next Generation of Carbon Markets.

Graphically, a winding labyrinth is laid out for processing financial derivative, carbon tax leveraged products and related expansion of sales and PR networks (renewable energy is unmentioned). Here is the abbreviated list of seven main stations:

1. CPLC, Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition;

2. PMR, Partnership for Market Readiness;

3. CADF, Carbon Asset Development Fund;

4. PAF, Pilot Auction Facility;

5. NCM, Networked Carbon Markets;

6. CPF, Carbon Partnership Facility;

7. T-CAF, Transformative Carbon Asset Fund

“Carbon markets in the Paris agreement – an early holiday gift” says a Dec. 17, 2015 blog posting by Vikram Widge, head of Climate and Carbon Finance at the World Bank Group.

As somebody who remembers the 2008/09 financial heist, I cannot help to notice the sinister flavour of this obfuscation gobbledigook has investor fraud written all over it.

The concern is legitimate that the lack of transparency in financial product design is helping those who would embezzle people out of their retirement savings and seek a carbon money laundry for criminal gains.

What is in a name or in a name change?

The World Bank still exists, but a lot of its business is carried out as WBG, World Bank Group, which is the World Bank plus three add-ons, including the anti-democratic free trade enforcer ICISD. 

The International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes participates in overruling parliaments in Quebec and Ontario against environmental and renewable energy legislations, under NAFTA Chapter 11 Investment. 

WBG’s ICISD is engaging in direct intervention to increase greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

Elsewhere, the World Bank’s trail of action since the days of the Marshall Plan has become a questionable one as well.

Following the post-Second World War era, the World Bank has changed its economics focus to a political one.

So-called structural adjustment programs, SAPs, play a role as tools of World Bank and IMF that throughout the Global South are understood to be neo-colonial and anti-development in their orientation.

Around 50 of the poorest countries spend more than their entire foreign reserves on oil imports alone.

The World Bank co-ordinates carbon pricing mechanisms with SAPs towards restricting renewable development to cosmetic insignificance. 

The results are devastating for environment, energy/food security and economy.

Generally, SAP enforcement by World Bank and IMF, aligned with free trade deals, oppose democratic institutions such as parliaments, medicare, education and unions.

Economically, the WBG restricts value adding, wealth building, exporting industries in favour of poverty, debt and pushing raw resource exploitation. 

Looking at the hypocrisy of internal and public World Bank communication, one particular aspect of false language contaminates or suppresses discourse these days.

It is the idea, sometimes explicit, sometimes subliminal, that CO2 is the only problem of burning fossil resources as energy source. 

This is comforting to super-polluters in carbon and uranium extraction that carbon price language hides seven-fold prohibitive impacts (and disproportionally blames little guys who make no infrastructure decisions).

Fossil/nuclear cartels generate harm against climate, clean water/air/land, democracy, peace, industrial resource preservation, energy/food security, market economy and energy affordability.

Dimming down awareness is one more carbon pricing strategy that favours deceptive climate solutions like gas fracking in B.C. and Yukon or subsidizing Royal Dutch Shell’s failed leaky carbon sequestration tinkering in Alberta and Saskatchewan. 

What jumps out from the Carbon Pricing Club document is a cancerous ambition to fill all policy and manoeuvring space with inflated circular thinking. It is to get everybody to chase their carbon price tails, to suck the oxygen right out of even seeing anything that can make sense. 

As in the broader and substantial World Bank PR on carbon pricing, the club is about ignoring clean energy source legislation, sustainable economies or allocating fuel/alcohol taxes towards renewable infrastructure initiative.

High-profile environmentalists David Suzuki, Bill McKibben or, locally, John Streicker and the Yukon Conservation Society, invoke the impression that carbon pricing is science-based or even recommended by the IPCC. Distortions are reminiscent of World Bank language.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expressed no such thing. From the beginning in 1988, it had set down evidence-based principles which continue in the up-to-date 2013/14 Fifth Assessment Report, AR5. 

The IPCC assessment reports on the climate crisis come out of three working groups:

• Working Group I reviewed climate science; 

• Working Group II reviewed climate adaptation; and

• Working Group III reviewed climate mitigation.

The adaptation and mitigation working groups refer to carbon pricing and its hypothetical input assumptions critically and separate to climate science.

It is discussed as theory that has no evidence nor shred of empirical proof to support what never worked. 

Proven climate solutions, of renewable legislative frameworks and of cutting fossil subsidies, to fight greenhouse gas emissions are substantively recognized and ranked highly by the IPCC. 

Given the academic light weight of the carbon price which to date has not survived a single examination by economists that I am aware of, the amount of PR traction involved is nothing short of astonishing.

We need to remember the carbon price title was not randomly chosen by marketing brains 30 some years ago.

The hollow abstraction of it that matches nothing and everything is what oil and finance profiteers require to design their needs into it. 

On March 11, 2016, Keith Halliday, the Yukon News columnist, prolific carbon price and frack proponent, flip-flopped on carbon tax and trade.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, Yukon Premier Darrell Pasloski and Takhini-Kopper King MLA Kate White, on behalf of the Yukon NDP caucus, have made similar public statements.

While in the new consensus a carbon tax is supposedly a more or less positive instrument, it is currently not affordable nor needed. On that basis, everybody can get (back) into it tomorrow morning if they feel nobody is watching. 

The NDP further has the carbon trading agenda of the club on its books and has not let go of it. In no way is that coming clean on the stuff that is unethical and deceptive all around.

Does that make Halliday, Wall, Pasloski and White fence-sitting politicians, fifth column or sleeper cell for the Carbon Price Country Club (CPCC)?