The emperor's green clothes

Over recent years, and especially since the financial crisis of 2008, the term Green Economy has become a hub around which the hegemonic discourse is reorganizing. The spread of the "Green Economy" as a slogan, has been very effective – politically and ideologically – to help forge a powerful unifying narrative, and at the same time to catalyze the sense of involvement necessary in the post-crisis financial period since 2008. The green economy has gained increasing visibility and has entered the mainstream political discourse, from the words of heads of state, to G20 finance ministers, in the press, and the so-called UN Environment Program for a Global Green New Deal.

However, there is no definition of the term to clarify whether it is something entirely different from the current economy. Even so, UN agencies, multilateral organizations, the World Bank, regional development banks, the European Parliament, international consultants, business coalitions and other actors have made proposals, listed priority sectors and industry agendas have been defined. They have established goals and targets, and recommended new financial instruments and investments for change towards a "greener" future.

The greening of the economy today set a process that is already heavily influencing the development of public policies in many countries. This includes legal reforms and ongoing regulatory adjustments to pave the way for a "green transition", justified in the name of strengthening the institutional capacity of countries to trigger a new economic cycle, in which growth and development take account concerns of sustainability (climate, biodiversity, energy, social inclusion and poverty eradication, etc.). In fact, the establishment of a green economy is a process that is only possible with the active participation of states and governments, as its implementation depends on the centrality of a legal system that ensures the creation of new laws, reform or adjustments of existing policy parameters, and the consequent security and legal validity of contracts and investments.

In the repertoire of the green economy public policies are supposedly used to combat climate change through trade in carbon emissions and mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and financing for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+); in the same way, biodiversity policy, increasingly incorporated into the national schemes such as payments for environmental services, biodiversity offsets, water (including water bonds), habitat banking of threatened species (species banking), and a wide range of new "environmental assets", including the creation of new international markets, such as carbon.

DECARBONIZATION OR DEPOLITICIZATION?

A structural criticism that we are presented with is: a "strategy" of low carbon, for whom? Low carbon metrics reduces reality to a single narrative and makes invisible conflicts of interests, power plays, ideologies and provides contradictions of reality, and further subjects individuals and collectives to structural violence and injustice.

The depoliticization of this debate operates under the assumption that "managing" carbon and its technological components has to do with the way in which Larry Lohmann (2008) points out as, "all social and political problems stemming from climate change (which can privatize and possess the atmosphere, such as the carbon market, for example) have been overshadowed by the neoclassical economic language." To this is added the fetish in the belief of the supposedly "scientific", immune to the "ideological" which favors the presentation of "objective" data that generates visual and graphic impacts; a feature of the current political culture, to the detriment of the political and critical argument.

In addition, policy-making processes, laws, studies and strategies of low carbon become a "business plan" with banks and consulting firms that advise governments as if they were businesses.

Given that more or less "carbon" is, in plain language, the quantification and control of energy content and the relationship with that resource after the energy is generated (fossil or "renewable"), from a wide-angled perspective, the green economy gives us clues of what type of transition the oil civilization – and capitalism – have planned to ensure their reproduction.

A KEY DISCURSIVE SHIFT: FROM THE "NEGATIVE" CLIMATE POLICY TO THE "POSITIVE" GREEN ECONOMY

Over recent years, the subject of climate change and the fight against global warming and “climate justice” has managed to take a central role in the international agenda and incorporated into the agendas, discourses and mobilizations global civil society. This process peaked at the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009 (COP 15 of the UNFCCC), where expectations of achieving a legally binding agreement to curb climate change failed. Since Copenhagen, the negotiations have not advanced substantially towards a new agreement. The latest development is a plan for a new global agreement by 2015, to come into force in 2020.

The type of change is symptomatic of this process. The term, until then widely used and disseminated, which related to the transition process towards a low carbon economy, development of low carbon and even growth of low carbon, becomes permanently replaced, in the same contexts and by the same actors, with the term “green economy”. A shift aparently discursive, but determined by a consolidated hegemony. Faced with the demobilization of public opinion, the moment surpassed the international momentum in the fight to save the climate, and before the inescapable reality of the economic crisis, the scenarios of low carbon consumption and imperative challenge to decarbonise economies evoked the reduce, reuse, avoid, ideas unappitizing in times fighting against the stagnation of economic growth.

In fact, the principal metamorphosis occured when the term “low-carbon” was replaced by a more effective term with the slogan “green economy” which seems to capture the environmental sensitivities of society and consumers more effectively. It is much more plausible when, in addition, the term “green growth” sounds much better and more convincing than the “growth of low-carbon” (which remains the terms used in the more “technical” language).

GREEN ECONOMY OR HOW TO CORRECT MARKET FAILURE

In an attempt to circumscribe “in its most basic form” what would be the green economy, the formulation incorporates the central metrics or “carbon measurement” used in climate policy: the reference to equivalent metric tons of carbon dioxide (1 tCO2e = 1 unit of certified emission reduction, or = 1 “carbon credit”) with the “objective” to achieve (or not) the goal of lowering emissions in relation to the “brown” economy, and endorse the decarbonization as a structural dynamic of the “green” economy.

The environmental crisis from this perspective would be a matter of policy – inextricably dependent on the power relations that guarantee property regimes, access, use and management of resources and territorial authorities, but essentially a market failure; whereby a market failure must be corrected by a market solution including: incorporate and internalize the costs of the externalities, put a price on pollution, reverse perverse subsidies, investment leverage (and profit) to support private and public security policies, provide positive incentives (payments / tax exemptions), promotion of investments in appropriate technologies, etc.

The green economy is not presented as incompatible with its continuance or even accelerated growth based on current parameters. According to this “green” logic, the more the “brown” economy grows, the more funds there would be (hypothetically) available for more “greening”. This can also be argued in the opposite direction: the more environmental degradation and resource scarcity, the more valuable (and expensive on the market) the credits for forest offsets, biodiversity offsets, water permits, carbon credits, etc.

The concept of natural capital, which today is a central demand of finance capital and to a large extent the precondition for reproducing invisible assets in the traditional economy, such as environmental services (where carbon, biodiversity, water, etc.) are suitable, measured and assessed for trading in the markets. At a time when the global economy is absolutely dependent on and controlled by financial capital, and with the same financial capital crisis, the development and introduction of new assets in the financial market through the expansion of financing is the main strategy to leverage the green economy.

Naturalizing natural capital as an economic reality – but also social, cultural and political - entails a new moment of primitive accumulation, with the enclosure or isolation of these environmental assets by creating exclusion (separate indivisible components of biodiversity and ecosystems ) and to ensure that what was once a common good, can be transformed into private property.

That is already happening, for example, with the “carbon rights” which are expressed in new forms of control (such as methodologies to measure/quantify, report and verify carbon stocks) and regulated through access management contracts in the territories where these “assets” exist for example, a forest, under a contract of PES or REDD+.

IN CONCLUSION

This new hegemonic “green” narrative has achieved great efficiency, to encourage and legitimize the road to build a new acumulation strategy, which rests primarily on the concept of natural capital and the ambitious plan to quantify, assess and incorporate in the markets – through buying and selling environmental services, including the existing carbon markets, biodiversity and, increasingly, water – this is a whole portfolio of environmental goods and services (including the intangible, cultural, etc. ) as well as “natural infrastructure” (now referred to as rivers, soils, forests, etc.), which, until now, were “free” provisions from Nature.

The green economy does not present a contradiction to the continuity of the current extractive and energy intensive economy; the “green” mechanisms are designed to create value and to be complementary and interdependent on the current economy. Therefore, it functions as a form of an economic mirror: it is precisely based on the shortage of resources and pollution generated by today's economy, that which is generating value from environmental assets of the green economy. In the end, if water was abundant and clean, who would pay for it? If the air was clean and unpolluted, could one sell the services of forests as carbon producers?

Civil society has constructed a large body of critique and criticism over the last decade focused on confronting, resisting and creating alternatives to globalization, free trade, neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, however we face a huge setback today against the crystallization of a new consensus, a “green” consensus. Resistance to financialization and natural capital is an imperative, urgent challenge on the horizon for mobilization and alliance building, just as the construction of an ecological and energy transition, central and inescapable, is as a challenge to overcoming capitalism.

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