The Great Impostors: In the Name of Saving Natural World, Governments Are Privatizing It

[Matilda]

Already the government is developing the market for trading wildlife, by experimenting with what it calls biodiversity offsets. If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else. The government warns that these offsets should be used only to compensate for "genuinely unavoidable damage" and "must not become a licence to destroy". But once the principle is established and the market is functioning, for how long do you reckon that line will hold? Nature, under this system, will become as fungible as everything else.

Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight; we'll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated and, doubtless, that it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.

All those messy, subjective matters, the motivating forces of democracy, will be resolved in a column of figures. Governments won't need to regulate; the market will make the decisions that politicians have ducked. But trade is a fickle master, and unresponsive to anyone except those with the money. The costing and sale of nature represents another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/07

Note that this exercise was begun by the Blair Government, so we can't even say "typical of conservatives". I don't doubt that this kind of political thinking isn't limited to the U.K. - I'm sure it's rapidly becoming universal.

It's enough to make a grown person weep.

[NYC_SKP]

1. We do that here to a certain degree, and are trying to do more with Carbon Credits

Cap and Trade is similar, turning environmentally unfriendly practices into a commodity with negative value.

If you pollute you have to offset.

I'm not certain it's a bad thing.

[Matilda]

2. I also thought of carbon taxes,

which we are now implementing in Australia as well. To an extent, it's a good thing that something good can come out of something bad, but how much better is it just not to do the things that have a negative impact on the environment?

I worry that one day there won't be any place left to create a "new" wilderness, or park, or whatever.

Then what do we do?

[NYC_SKP]

3. Done poorly, as it may well be, it's not very good.

Cap and trade makes sense where carbon emissions are practically unavoidable, energy and transportation, as a way to discourage bad practices while rewarding good practices.

However your article also reminds me of coal mining mitigation, where they do a mountaintop removal to extract the coal and then "restore" the landscape.

It's a bandaid, it's a joke.

So I guess it's all in the execution of the deal, in the details, and in whether or not there's oversight.