The statement below was read by Private First Class Bradley E. Manning at the providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification under Article 92 with a substituted time frame for the offense, and nine specifications for lesser included offenses under Article 134. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. [...]]]> Source

The statement below was read by Private First Class Bradley E. Manning at the providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification under Article 92 with a substituted time frame for the offense, and nine specifications for lesser included offenses under Article 134. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O’Brien at the Article 39(a) session of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning on February 28, 2013 at Fort Meade, MD, USA.

Judge Lind: Pfc. Manning you may read your statement.

Pfc. Bradley Manning: Yes, your Honor. I wrote this statement in the confinement facility. The following facts are provided in support of the providence inquiry for my court martial, United States v. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.

Personal Facts.

I am a twenty-five year old Private First Class in the United States Army currently assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, HHC, US Army Garrison (USAG), Joint Base Myer, Henderson Hall, Fort Meyer, Virginia.

My [exodus?] assignment I was assigned to HHC, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY. My primary military occupational specialty or MOS is 35 Foxtrot intelligence analyst. I entered active duty status on 2 October 2007. I enlisted with the hope of obtaining both real world experience and earning benefits under the GI Bill for college opportunities.

Facts regarding my position as an intelligence analyst.
In order to enlist in the Army I took the Standard Armed Services Aptitude Battery or [ASVAB?]. My score on this battery was high enough for me to qualify for any enlisted MOS position. My recruiter informed me that I should select an MOS that complimented my interests outside the military. In response, I told him that I was interested in geopolitical matters and information technology. He suggested that I consider becoming an intelligence analyst.

After researching the intelligence analyst position, I agreed that this would be a good fit for me. In particular, I enjoyed the fact that an analyst could use information derived from a variety of sources to create work products that informed the command of its available choices for determining the best course of action or COA’s. Although the MOS required working knowledge of computers, it primarily required me to consider how raw information can be combined with other available intelligence sources in order to create products that assisted the command in its situational awareness or SA.

• I accessed that my natural interest in geopolitical affairs and my computer skills would make me an excellent intelligence analyst. After enlisting I reported to the Fort Meade military entrance processing station on 1 October 2007. I then traveled to and reported at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri on 2 October 2007 to begin basic combat training or BCT.

Once at Fort Leonard Wood I quickly realized that I was neither physically nor mentally prepared for the requirements of basic training. My BCT experience lasted six months instead of the normal ten weeks. Due to medical issues, I was placed on a hold status. A physical examination indicated that I sustained injuries to my right soldier and left foot.

Due to those injuries I was unable to continue ‘basic’. During medical hold, I was informed that I may be out processed from the Army, however, I resisted being chaptered out because I felt that I could overcome my medical issues and continue to serve. On 2[8 or 20?] January 2008, I returned to basic combat training. This time I was better prepared and I completed training on 2 April 2008.
I then reported for the MOS specific Advanced Individual Training or AIT on 7 April 2008. AIT was an enjoyable experience for me. Unlike basic training where I felt different from the other soldiers, I fit in and did well. I preferred the mental challenges of reviewing a large amount of information from various sources and trying to create useful or actionable products. I especially enjoyed the practice of analysis through the use of computer applications and methods that I was familiar with.

I graduated from AIT on 16 August 2008 and reported to my first duty station, Fort Drum, NY on 28 August 2008. As an analyst, Significant Activities or SigActs were a frequent source of information for me to use in creating work products. I started working extensively with SigActs early after my arrival at Fort Drum. My computer background allowed me to use the tools of organic to the Distributed Common Ground System-Army or D6-A computers to create polished work products for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team chain of command.

The non-commissioned officer in charge, or NCOIC, of the S2 section, then Master Sergeant David P. Adkins recognized my skills and potential and tasked me to work on a tool abandoned by a previously assigned analyst, the incident tracker. The incident tracker was viewed as a back up to the Combined Information Data Network Exchange or CIDNE and as a unit, historical reference to work with.

In the months preceding my upcoming deployment, I worked on creating a new version of the incident tracker and used SigActs to populate it. The SigActs I used were from Afghanistan, because at the time our unit was scheduled to deploy to the Logar and Wardak Provinces of Afghanistan. Later my unit was reassigned to deploy to Eastern Baghdad, Iraq. At that point, I removed the Afghanistan SigActs and switched to Iraq SigActs.

As and analyst I viewed the SigActs as historical data. I believed this view is shared by other all-source analysts as well. SigActs give a first look impression of a specific or isolated event. This event can be an improvised explosive device attack or IED, small arms fire engagement or SAF, engagement with a hostile force, or any other event a specific unit documented and recorded in real time.
In my perspective the information contained within a single SigAct or group of SigActs is not very sensitive. The events encapsulated within most SigActs involve either enemy engagements or causalities. Most of this information is publicly reported by the public affairs office or PAO, embedded media pools, or host nation (HN) media.

As I started working with SigActs I felt they were similar to a daily journal or log that a person may keep. They capture what happens on a particular day in time. They are created immediately after the event, and are potentially updated over a period of hours until final version is published on the Combined Information Data Network Exchange. Each unit has its own Standard Operating Procedure or SOP for reporting and recording SigActs. The SOP may differ between reporting in a particular deployment and reporting in garrison.

In garrison, a SigAct normally involves personnel issues such as driving under the influence or DUI incidents or an automobile accident involving the death or serious injury of a soldier. The reports starts at the company level and goes up to the battalion, brigade, and even up to the division level.
In deployed environment a unit may observe or participate in an event and a platoon leader or platoon sergeant may report the event as a SigAct to the company headquarters and through the radio transmission operator or RTO. The commander or RTO will then forward the report to the battalion battle captain or battle non-commissioned officer or NCO. Once the battalion battle captain or battle NCO receives the report they will either (1) notify the battalion operations officer or S3; (2) conduct an action, such as launching a quick reaction force; or (3) record the event and report– and further report it up the chain of command to the brigade.

The reporting of each event is done by radio or over the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network or SIPRNet, normally by an assigned soldier, usually junior enlisted E-4 and below. Once the SigAct is recorded, the SigAct is further sent up the chain of command. At each level, additional information can either be added or corrected as needed. Normally within 24 to 48 hours, the updating and reporting or a particular SigAct is complete. Eventually all reports and SigActs go through the chain of command from brigade to division and division to corps. At corps level the SigAct is finalized and [missed word].
The CIDNE system contains a database that is used by thousands of Department of Defense– DoD personnel– including soldiers, civilians, and contractors support. It was the United States Central Command or CENTCOM reporting tool for operational reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two separate but similar databases were maintained for each theater– CIDNE-I for Iraq and CIDNE-A for Afghanistan. Each database encompasses over a hundred types of reports and other historical information for access. They contain millions of vetted and finalized directories including operational intelligence reporting.

CIDNE was created to collect and analyze battle-space data to provide daily operational and Intelligence Community (IC) reporting relevant to a commander’s daily decision making process. The CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases contain reporting and analysis fields for multiple disciplines including Human Intelligence or HUMINT reports, Psychological Operations or PSYOP reports, Engagement reports, Counter Improvised Explosive Device or CIED reports, SigAct reports, Targeting reports, Social and Cultural reports, Civil Affairs reports, and Human Terrain reporting.

As an intelligence analyst, I had unlimited access to the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases and the information contained within them. Although each table within the database is important, I primarily dealt with HUMINT reports, SigAct reports, and Counter IED reports, because these reports were used to create a work product I was required to published as an analyst.

In working on an assignment I looked anywhere and everywhere for information. As an all-source analyst, this was something that was expected. The D6-A systems had databases built in, and I utilized them on a daily basis. This simply was– the search tools available on the D6-A systems on SIPRNet such as Query Tree and the DoD and Intellink search engines.

Primarily, I utilized the CIDNE database using the historical and HUMINT reporting to conduct my analysis and provide a back up for my work product. I did statistical analysis on historical data including SigActs to back up analysis that were based on HUMINT reporting and produce charts, graphs, and tables. I also created maps and charts to conduct predictive analysis based on statistical trends. The SigAct reporting provided a reference point for what occurred and provided myself and other analysts with the information to conclude possible outcome.

Although SigAct reporting is sensitive at the time of their creation, their sensitivity normally dissipates within 48 to 72 hours as the information is either publicly released or the unit involved is no longer in the area and not in danger.

It is my understanding that the SigAct reports remain classified only because they are maintained within CIDNE– because it is only accessible on SIPRnet. Everything on CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A to include SigAct reporting was treated as classified information.

Facts regarding the storage of SigAct Reports.
As part of my training at Fort Drum, I was instructed to ensure that I create back ups of my work product. The need to create back ups was particularly acute given the relative instability and reliability of the computer systems we used in the field during deployment. These computer systems included both organic and theater provided equipment (TPE) D6-A machines.

The organic D6-A machines we brought with us into the field on our deployment were Dell [missed word] laptops and the TPE D6-A machines were Alienware brand laptops. The [M90?] D6-A laptops were the preferred machine to use as they were slightly faster and had fewer problems with dust and temperature than the theater provided Alienware laptops. I used several D6-A machines during the
deployment due to various technical problems with the laptops.

With these issues several analysts lost information, but I never lost information due to the multiple backups I created. I attempted to backup as much relevant information as possible. I would save the information so that I or another analyst could quickly access it whenever a machine crashed, SIPRnet connectivity was down, or I forgot where the data was stored.

When backing up information I would do one or all of the following things based on my training:

[(1)] Physical back up. I tried to keep physical back up copies of information on paper so that the information could be grabbed quickly. Also, it was easier to brief from hard copies of research and HUMINT reports.

(2) Local drive back up. I tried to sort out information I deemed relevant and keep complete copies of the information on each of the computers I used in the Temporary Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or T-SCIF, including my primary and secondary D6-A machines. This was stored under my user profile on the desktop.

[(3)] Shared drive backup. Each analyst had access to a ‘T’ drive– what we called ‘T’ drive shared across the SIPRnet. It allowed others to access information that was stored on it. S6 operated the ‘T’ drive.

[(4)] Compact disk rewritable or CD-RW back up. For larger datasets I saved the information onto a re-writable disk, labeled the disks, and stored them in the conference room of the T-SCIF. This redundancy permitted us the ability to not worry about information loss. If the system crashed, I could easily pull the information from a my secondary computer, the ‘T’ drive, or one of the CD-RWs.

If another analyst wanted to access my data, but I was unavailable she could find my published products directory on the ‘T’ drive or on the CD-RWs. I sorted all of my products or research by date, time, and group; and updated the information on each of the storage methods to ensure that the latest information was available to them.

During the deployment I had several of the D6-A machines crash on me. Whenever one of the a computer crashed, I usually lost information but the redundancy method ensured my ability to quickly restore old backup data and add my current information to the machine when it was repaired or replaced.

I stored the backup CD-RW with larger datasets in the conference room of the T-SCIF or next to my workstation. I marked the CD-RWs based on the classification level and its content. Unclassified CD-RWs were only labeled with the content type and not marked with classification markings. Early on in the deployment, I only saved and stored the SigActs that were within or near our operational environment.

Later I thought it would be easier to just to save all of the SigActs onto a CD-RW. The process would not take very long to complete and so I downloaded the SigActs from CIDNE-I onto a CD-RW. After finishing with CIDNE-I, I did the same with CIDNE-A. By retrieving the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs I was able to retrieve the information whenever I needed it, and not rely upon the unreliable and slow SIPRnet connectivity needed to pull. Instead, I could just find the CD-RW and open up a pre-loaded spreadsheet.

This process began in late December 2009 and continued through early January 2010. I could quickly export one month of the SigAct data at a time and download in the background as I did other tasks.
The process took approximately a week for each table. After downloading the SigAct tables, I periodically updated them, by pulling only the most recent SigActs and simply copying them and pasting them into the database saved on the CD-RW. I never hid the fact that I had downloaded copies of both the SigAct tables from CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A. They were stored on appropriately labeled and marked CD-RWs, stored in the open.

I viewed the saved copies of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables as being for both for my use and the use of anyone within the S2 section during the SIPRnet connectivity issues.

In addition to the SigAct tables, I had a large repository of HUMINT reports and Counter IED reports downloaded from CIDNE-I. These contained reports that were relevant to the area in and around our operational environment in Eastern Baghdad and the Diyala Province of Iraq.

In order to compress the data to fit onto a CD-RW, I used a compression algorithm called ‘bzip2′. The program used to compress the data is called ‘WinRAR’. WinRAR is an application that is free, and can be easily downloaded from the internet via the Non-Secure Internet Relay Protocol Network or NIPRnet. I downloaded WinRAR on NIPRnet and transferred it to the D6-A machine user profile desktop using a CD-RW. I did not try to hide the fact that I was downloading WinRAR onto my SIPRnet D6-A machine or computer.

With the assistance of the bzip2 compression algorithm using the WinRAR program, I was able to fit all of the SigActs onto a single CD-RW and relevant HUMINT and Counter IED reports onto a separate CD-RW.

Facts regarding my knowledge of the WikiLeaks Organization or WLO.
I first became vaguely aware of the WLO during my AIT at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, although I did not fully pay attention until the WLO released purported Short Messaging System or SMS messages from 11 September 2001 on 25 November 2009. At that time references to the release and the WLO website showed up in my daily Google news open source search for information related to US foreign policy.

The stories were about how WLO published about approximately 500,000 messages. I then reviewed the messages myself and realized that the posted messages were very likely real given the sheer volume and detail of the content.

After this, I began conducting research on WLO. I conducted searches on both NIPRnet and SIPRnet on WLO beginning in late November 2009 and early December 2009. At this time I also began to routinely monitor the WLO website. In response to one of my searches in December 2009, I found the United States Army Counter Intelligence Center or USACIC report on the WikiLeaks organization. After reviewing the report, I believed that this report was possibly the one that my AIT referenced in early 2008.

I may or may not have saved the report on my D6-A workstation. I know I reviewed the document on other occasions throughout early 2010, and saved it on both my primary and secondary laptops. After reviewing the report, I continued doing research on WLO. However, based upon my open-source collection, I discovered information that contradicted the 2008 USACIC report including information that indicated that similar to other press agencies, WLO seemed to be dedicated to exposing illegal activities and corruption.

WLO received numerous award and recognition for its reporting activities. Also, in reviewing the WLO website, I found information regarding US military SOPs for Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and information on the then outdated rules of engagement for ROE in Iraq for cross-border pursuits of former members of Saddam Hussein [missed word] government.

After seeing the information available on the WLO website, I continued following it and collecting open source information from it. During this time period, I followed several organizations and groups including wire press agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters and private intelligence agencies including Strategic Forecasting or Stratfor. This practice was something I was trained to do during AIT, and was something that good analysts were expected to do.

During the searches of WLO, I found several pieces of information that I found useful in my work product– in my work as an analyst, specifically I recall WLO publishing documents related to weapons trafficking between two nations that affected my OP. I integrated this information into one or more of my work products.

In addition to visiting the WLO website, I began following WLO using Instant Relay Chat or IRC Client called ‘XChat’ sometime in early January 2010.

IRC is a protocol for real time internet communications by messaging and conferencing, colloquially referred to as chat rooms or chats. The IRC chat rooms are designed for group communication discussion forums. Each IRC chat room is called a channel– similar to a television where you can tune in or follow a channel– so long as it is open and does not require an invite.

Once you joining a specific IRC conversation, other users in the conversation can see that you have joined the room. On the Internet there are millions of different IRC channels across several services. Channel topics span a range of topics covering all kinds of interests and hobbies. The primary reason for following WLO on IRC was curiosity– particularly in regards to how and why they obtained the SMS messages referenced above. I believed that collecting information on the WLO would assist me in this goal.

Initially I simply observed the IRC conversations. I wanted to know how the organization was structured, and how they obtained their data. The conversations I viewed were usually technical in nature but sometimes switched to a lively debate on issues the particular individual may have felt strongly about.

Over a period of time I became more involved in these discussions especially when conversations turned to geopolitical events and information technology topics, such as networking and encryption methods. Based on these observations, I would describe the WL organization as almost academic in nature. In addition to the WLO conversations, I participated in numerous other IRC channels across at least three different networks. The other IRC channels I participated in normally dealt with technical topics including with Linux and Berkley Secure Distribution BSD operating systems or OS’s, networking, encryption algorithms and techniques, and other more political topics, such as politics and [missed word].

I normally engaged in multiple IRC conversations simultaneously– mostly publicly, but often privately. The XChat client enabled me to manage these multiple conversations across different channels and servers. The screen for XChat was often busy, but its screens enabled me to see when something was interesting. I would then select the conversation and either observe or participate.

I really enjoyed the IRC conversations pertaining to and involving the WLO, however, at some point in late February or early March of 2010, the WLO IRC channel was no longer accessible. Instead, regular participants of this channel switched to using the Jabber server. Jabber is another internet communication [missed word] similar but more sophisticated than IRC.

The IRC and Jabber conversations, allowed me to feel connected to others even when alone. They helped me pass the time and keep motivated throughout the deployment.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the SigActs.
As indicated above I created copies of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables as part of the process of backing up information. At the time I did so, I did not intend to use this information for any purpose other than for back up. However, I later decided to release this information publicly. At that time, I believe and still believe that these tables are two of the most significant documents of our time.

On 8 January 2010, I collected the CD-RW I stored in the conference room of the T-SCIF and placed it into the cargo pocket of my ACU or Army Combat Uniform. At the end of my shift, I took the CD-RW out of the T-SCIF and brought it to my Containerized Housing Unit of CHU. I copied the data onto my personal laptop. Later at the beginning of my shift, I returned the CD-RW back to the conference room of the T-SCIF. At the time I saved the SigActs to my laptop, I planned to take them with me on mid-tour leave and decide what to do with them.

At some point prior to my mid-tour leave, I transferred the information from my computer to a Secure Digital memory card from for my digital camera. The SD card for the camera also worked on my computer and allowed me to store the SigAct tables in a secure manner for transport.

I began mid-tour leave on 23 January 2010, flying from Atlanta, Georgia to Reagan National Airport in Virginia. I arrived at the home of my aunt, Debra M. Van Alstyne, in Potomac, Maryland and quickly got into contact with my then boyfriend, Tyler R. Watkins. Tyler, then a student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and I made plans for me to visit him [the] Boston, Massachusetts area.

I was excited to see Tyler and planned on talking to Tyler about where our relationship was going and about my time in Iraq. However, when I arrived in the Boston area Tyler and I seemed to become distant. He did not seem very excited about my return from Iraq. I tried talking to him about our relationship but he refused to make any plans.

I also tried to raising the topic of releasing the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables to the public. I asked Tyler hypothetical questions about what he would do if he had documents that he thought the public needed access to. Tyler really didn’t really have a specific answer for me. He tried to answer the questions and be supportive, but seemed confused by the question in this and its context.
I then tried to be more specific, but he asked too many questions. Rather than try to explain my dilemma, I decided to just to drop the conversation. After a few days in Waltham, I began to feel really bad feeling that I was over staying my welcome, and I returned to Maryland. I spent the remainder of my time on leave in the Washington, DC area.

During this time a blizzard bombarded the mid-atlantic, and I spent a significant period of time essentially stuck in my aunt’s house in Maryland. I began to think about what I knew and the information I still had in my possession. For me, the SigActs represented the on the ground reality of both the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I felt that we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and anger on both sides. I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year. The SigActs documented this in great detail and provide a context of what we were seeing on the ground.

In attempting to conduct counter-terrorism or CT and counter-insurgency COIN operations we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and not being suspicious of and avoiding cooperation with our Host Nation partners, and ignoring the second and third order effects of accomplishing short-term goals and missions. I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday.

At my aunt’s house I debated what I should do with the SigActs– in particular whether I should hold on to them– or expose them through a press agency. At this point I decided that it made sense to try to expose the SigAct tables to an American newspaper. I first called my local newspaper, The Washington Post, and spoke with a woman saying that she was a reporter. I asked her if The Washington Post would be interested in receiving information that would have enormous value to the American public.

Although we spoke for about five minutes concerning the general nature of what I possessed, I do not believe she took me seriously. She informed me that The Washington Post would possibly be interested, but that such decisions were made only after seeing the information I was referring to and after consideration by the senior editors.

I then decided to contact the largest and most popular newspaper, The New York Times. I called the public editor number on The New York Times website. The phone rang and was answered by a machine. I went through the menu to the section for news tips. I was routed to an answering machine. I left a message stating I had access to information about Iraq and Afghanistan that I believed was very important. However, despite leaving my Skype phone number and personal email address, I never received a reply from The New York Times.

I also briefly considered dropping into the office for the Political Commentary blog, Politico, however the weather conditions during my leave hampered my efforts to travel. After these failed efforts I had ultimately decided to submit the materials to the WLO. I was not sure if the WLO would actually publish these the SigAct tables [missed a few words]. I was also concerned that they might not be noticed by the American media. However, based upon what I read about the WLO through my research described above, this seemed to be the best medium for publishing this information to the world within my reach.

At my aunt’s house I joined in on an IRC conversation and stated I had information that needed to be shared with the world. I wrote that the information would help document the true cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the individuals in the IRC asked me to describe the information. However, before I could describe the information another individual pointed me to the link for the WLO website’s online submission system. After ending my IRC connection, I considered my options one more time. Ultimately, I felt that the right thing to do was to release the SigActs.

On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by a special link. TOR is a system intended to provide anonymity online. The software routes internet traffic through a network of servers and other TOR clients in order to conceal the user’s location and identity.

I was familiar with TOR and had it previously installed on a computer to anonymously monitor the social media websites of militia groups operating within central Iraq. I followed the prompts and attached the compressed data files of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs. I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to The Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.’

After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly published by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of 10 Reykjavik 13.

I first became aware of the diplomatic cables during my training period in AIT. I later learned about the Department of State or DoS Net-centric Diplomacy NCD portal from the 2/10 Brigade Combat Team S2, Captain Steven Lim. Captain Lim sent a section wide email to the other analysts and officers in late December 2009 containing the SIPRnet link to the portal along with the instructions to look at the cables contained within them and to incorporate them into our work product.

Shortly after this I also noticed the diplomatic cables were being reported to in products from the corps level US Forces Iraq or USF-I. Based upon Captain Lim’s direction to become familiar with its contents, I read virtually every published cable concerning Iraq.

I also began scanning the database and reading other random cables that piqued my curiosity. It was around this time– in early to mid-January of 2010, that I began searching the database for information on Iceland. I became interested in Iceland due to the IRC conversations I viewed in the WLO channel discussing an issue called Icesave. At this time I was not very familiar with the topic, but it seemed to be a big issue for those participating in the conversation. This is when I decided to investigate and conduct a few searches on Iceland and find out more.

At the time, I did not find anything discussing the Icesave issue either directly or indirectly. I then conducted an open source search for Icesave. I then learned that Iceland was involved in a dispute with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands concerning the financial collapse of one or more of Iceland’s banks. According to open source reporting much of the public controversy involved the United Kingdom’s use of anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland in order to freeze Icelandic access assets for payment of the guarantees for UK depositors that lost money.

Shortly after returning from mid-tour leave, I returned to the Net Centric Diplomacy portal to search for information on Iceland and Icesave as the topic had not abated on the WLO IRC channel. To my surprise, on 14 February 2010, I found the cable 10 Reykjavik 13, which referenced the Icesave issue directly.

The cable published on 13 January 2010 was just over two pages in length. I read the cable and quickly concluded that Iceland was essentially being bullied diplomatically by two larger European powers. It appeared to me that Iceland was out viable options and was coming to the US for assistance. Despite the quiet request for assistance, it did not appear that we were going to do anything.

From my perspective it appeared that we were not getting involved due to the lack of long term geopolitical benefit to do so. After digesting the contents of 10 Reykjavik 13 I debated on whether this was something I should send to the WLO. At this point the WLO had not published or acknowledged receipt of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables. Despite not knowing that if the SigActs were a priority for the WLO, I decided the cable was something that would be important and I felt that I would I might be able to right a wrong by having them publish this document. I burned the information onto a CD-RW on 15 February 2010, took it to my CHU, and saved it onto my personal laptop.

I navigated to the WLO website via a TOR connection like before and uploaded the document via the secure form. Amazingly, when WLO published 10 Reykjavik 13 within hours, proving that the form worked and that they must have received the SigAct tables.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video.

During the mid-February 2010 time frame the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division targeting analyst , then Specialist Jihrleah W. Showman and others discussed a video that Ms. Showman had found on the ‘T’ drive.

The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me.

As Showman and a few other analysts and officers in the T-SCIF commented on the video and debated whether the crew violated the rules of engagement or ROE in the second engagement, I shied away from this debate, instead conducting some research on the event. I wanted to learn what happened and whether there was any background to the events of the day that the event occurred, 12 July 2007.

Using Google I searched for the event by its date by its and general location. I found several news accounts involving two Reuters employees who were killed during the aerial weapon team engagement. Another story explained that Reuters had requested for a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. Reuters wanted to view the video in order to be able to understand what had happened and to improve their safety practices in combat zones. A spokesperson for Reuters was quoted saying that the video might help avoid the reoccurrence of the tragedy and believed there was a compelling need for the immediate release of the video.

Despite the submission of the FOIA request, the news account explained that CENTCOM replied to Reuters stating that they could not give a time frame for considering a FOIA request and that the video might no longer exist. Another story I found written a year later said that even though Reuters was still pursuing their request, they still did not receive a formal response or written determination in accordance with FOIA.

The fact neither CENTCOM or Multi National Forces Iraq or MNF-I would not voluntarily release the video troubled me further. It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely ‘good samaritans’. The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.

They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote “dead bastards” unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.

While saddened by the aerial weapons team crew’s lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew– as soon as the individuals are a threat, they repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck and once granted they engage the vehicle at least six times.

Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van and despite the injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, saying quote “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kid’s into a battle” unquote.

The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team crew verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body– or one of the bodies. As I continued my research, I found an article discussing the book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.

In Mr. Finkel book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As, I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel’s account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.

It is clear to me that Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenure as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel’s portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as ‘payback’ for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account of the engagement by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes that the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together, a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture extending his middle finger.

The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter. Reading this, I can only think of how this person was simply trying to help others, and then he quickly finds he needs help as well. To make matter worse, in the last moments of his life, he continues to express his friendly gesture– his friendly intent– only to find himself receiving this well known gesture of unfriendliness. For me it’s all a big mess, and I am left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together , and it burdens me emotionally.

I saved a copy of the video on my workstation. I searched for and found the rules of engagement, the rules of engagement annexes, and a flow chart from the 2007 time period– as well as an unclassified Rules of Engagement smart card from 2006. On 15 February 2010 I burned these documents onto a CD-RW, the same time I burned the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable onto a CD-RW. At the time, I placed the video and rules for of engagement information onto my personal laptop in my CHU. I planned to keep this information there until I redeployed in Summer of 2010. I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.

However, after the WLO published 10 Reykjavik 13 I altered my plans. I decided to provide the video and the rules of engagement to them so that Reuters would have this information before I re-deployed from Iraq. On about 21 February 2010, I as described above, I used the WLO submission form and uploaded the documents. The WLO released the video on 5 April 2010. After the release, I was concern about the impact of the video and how it would be received by the general public.

I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public, who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled– if not more troubled that me by what they saw.

At this time, I began seeing reports claiming that the Department of Defense and CENTCOM could not confirm the authenticity of the video. Additionally, one of my supervisors, Captain Casey Fulton, stated her belief that the video was not authentic. In her response, I decided to ensure that the authenticity of the video would not be questioned in the future. On 25 February 2010, I emailed Captain Fulton a link to the video that was on our ‘T’ drive, and a copy of the video published by WLO that was collected by the Open Source Center, so she could compare them herself.

Around this time frame, I burned a second CD-RW containing the aerial weapons team video. In order to made it appear authentic, I placed a classification sticker and wrote Reuters FOIA REQ on its face. I placed the CD-RW in one of my personal CD cases containing a set of ‘Starting Out in Arabic’ CD’s. I planned on mailing out the CD-RW to Reuters after our I re-deployed , so they could have a copy that was unquestionably authentic.

Almost immediately after submitting the aerial weapons team video and the rules of engagement documents I notified the individuals in the WLO IRC to expect an important submission. I received a response from an individual going by the handle of ‘ox’ ‘office’– at first our conversations were general in nature, but over time as our conversations progressed, I accessed assessed this individual to be an important part of the WLO.

Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the WLO, we never exchanged identifying information. However, I believe the individual was likely Mr. Julian Assange [he pronounced it with three syllables], Mr. Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt.

As the communications transferred from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave ‘ox’ ‘office’ and later ‘pressassociation’ the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009.

After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.

The anonymity that was provided by TOR and the Jabber client and the WLO’s policy allowed me to feel I could just be myself, free of the concerns of social labeling and perceptions that are often placed upon me in real life. In real life, I lacked a closed friendship with the people I worked with in my section, the S2 section.

In my section, the S2 section and supported battalions and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team as a whole. For instance, I lacked close ties with my roommate to his discomfort regarding my perceived sexual orientation. Over the next few months, I stayed in frequent contact with Nathaniel. We conversed on nearly a daily basis and I felt that we were developing a friendship.

Conversations covered many topics and I enjoyed the ability to talk about pretty much everything anything, and not just the publications that the WLO was working on. In retrospect I realize that that these dynamics were artificial and were valued more by myself than Nathaniel. For me these conversations represented an opportunity to escape from the immense pressures and anxiety that I experienced and built up through out the deployment. It seems that as I tried harder to fit in at work, the more I seemed to alienate my peers and lose the respect, trust, and support I needed.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of documents related to the detainments by the Iraqi Federal Police or FP, and the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and the USACIC United States Army Counter Intelligence Center report.
On 27 February 2010, a report was received from a subordinate battalion. The report described an event in which the Federal Police or FP detained 15 individuals for printing anti-Iraqi literature. On 2 March 2010, I received instructions from an S3 section officer in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division Tactical Operation Center or TOC to investigate the matter, and figure out who these quote ‘bad guys’ unquote were and how significant this event was for the Federal Police.

Over the course of my research I found that none of the individuals had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist militia groups. A few hours later, I received several photos from the scene– from the subordinate battalion. They were accidentally sent to an officer on a different team on than the S2 section and she forwarded them to me.

These photos included picture of the individuals, pallets of unprinted paper and seized copies of the final printed material or the printed document; and a high resolution photo of the printed material itself. I printed up one [missed word] copy of a high resolution photo– I laminated it for ease of use and transfer. I then walked to the TOC and delivered the laminated copy to our category two interpreter.

She reviewed the information and about a half an hour later delivered a rough written transcript in English to the S2 section. I read the transcript and followed up with her, asking her for her take on the content. She said it was easy for her to transcribe verbatim, since I blew up the photograph and laminated it. She said the general nature of the document was benign. The documentation, as I had sensed as well, was merely a scholarly critique of the then current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

It detailed corruption within the cabinet of al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people. After discovering this discrepancy between the Federal Police’s report and the interpreter’s transcript, I forwarded this discovery to the top OIC and the battle NCOIC. The top OIC and the overhearing battle captain informed me that they didn’t need or want to know this information anymore. They told me to quote “drop it” unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out, where more of these print shops creating quote “anti-Iraqi literature” unquote.
I couldn’t believe what I heard and I returned to the T-SCIF and complained to the other analysts and my section NCOIC about what happened. Some were sympathetic, but no one wanted to do anything about it.

I am the type of person who likes to know how things work. And, as an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth. Unlike other analysts in my section or other sections within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was not satisfied with just scratching the surface and producing canned or cookie cutter assessments. I wanted to know why something was the way it was, and what we could to correct or mitigate a situation.

I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time– if ever.
Instead of assisting the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police, I decided to take the information and expose it to the WLO, in the hope that before the upcoming 7 March 2010 election, they could generate some immediate press on the issue and prevent this unit of the Federal Police from continuing to crack down on political opponents of al-Maliki.

On 4 March 2010, I burned the report, the photos, the high resolution copy of the pamphlet, and the interpreter’s hand written transcript onto a CD-RW. I took the CD-RW to my CHU and copied the data onto my personal computer. Unlike the times before, instead of uploading the information through the WLO website’s submission form. I made a Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP connection to a file drop box operated by the WLO.

The drop box contained a folder that allowed me to upload directly into it. Saving files into this directory, allowed anyone with log in access to the server to view and download them. After uploading these files to the WLO, on 5 March 2010, I notified Nathaniel over Jabber. Although sympathetic, he said that the WLO needed more information to confirm the event in order for it to be published or to gain interest in the international media.

I attempted to provide the specifics, but to my disappointment, the WLO website chose not to publish this information. At the same time, I began sifting through information from the US Southern Command or SOUTHCOM and Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Cuba or JTF-GTMO. The thought occurred to me– although unlikely, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the individuals detainees detained by the Federal Police might be turned over back into US custody– and ending up in the custody of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

As I digested through the information on Joint Task Force Guantanamo, I quickly found the Detainee Assessment Briefs or DABs. I previously came across the documents before in 2009 but did not think much about them. However, this time I was more curious in during this search and I found them again.
The DABs were written in standard DoD memorandum format and addressed the commander US SOUTHCOM. Each memorandum gave basic and background information about a specific detainee held at some point by Joint Task Force Guantanamo. I have always been interested on the issue of the moral efficacy of our actions surrounding Joint Task Force Guantanamo. On the one hand, I have always understood the need to detain and interrogate individuals who might wish to harm the United States and our allies, however, I felt that’s what we were trying to do at Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

However, the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would be released if they were still held in theater.

I also recall that in early 2009 the, then newly elected president, Barack Obama, stated that he would close Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and that the facility compromised our standing over all, and diminished our quote ‘moral authority’ unquote.

After familiarizing myself with the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I agree. Reading through the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I noticed that they were not analytical products, instead they contained summaries of tear line versions of interim intelligence reports that were old or unclassified. None of the DABs contained the names of sources or quotes from tactical interrogation reports or TIR’s. Since the DABs were being sent to the US SOUTHCOM commander, I assessed that they were intended to provide a very general background information on each of the detainees and not a detailed assessment.

In addition to the manner in which the DAB’s were written, I recognized that they were at least several years old, and discussed detainees that were already released from Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Based on this, I determined that the DABs were not very important from either an intelligence or a national security standpoint. On 7 March 2010, during my Jabber conversation with Nathaniel, I asked him if he thought the DABs were of any use to anyone.

Nathaniel indicated, although he did not believe that they were of political significance, he did believe that they could be used to merge into the general historical account of what occurred at Joint Task Force Guantanamo. He also thought that the DAB’s might be helpful to the legal counsel of those currently and previously held at JTF-GTMO.

After this discussion, I decided to download the data DABs. I used an application called Wget to download the DABs. I downloaded Wget off of the NIPRnet laptop in the T-SCIF, like other programs. I saved that onto a CD-RW, and placed the executable in my ‘My Documents’ directory on of my user profile, on the D6-A SIPRnet workstation.

On 7 March 2010, I took the list of links for the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and Wget downloaded them sequentially. I burned the data onto a CD-RW, and took it into my CHU, and copied them to my personal computer. On 8 March 2010, I combined the Detainee Assessment Briefs with the United States Army Counterintelligence Center report on the WLO, into a compressed [missed word] IP or zip file. Zip files contain multiple files which are compressed to reduce their size.

After creating the zip file, I uploaded the file onto their cloud drop box via Secure File Transfer Protocol. Once these were uploaded, I notified Nathaniel that the information was in the ‘x’ directory, which had been designated for my own use. Earlier that day, I downloaded the USACIC report on WLO.

As discussed about above, I previously reviewed the report on numerous occasions and although I saved the document onto the work station before, I could not locate it. After I found the document again, I downloaded it to my work station, and saved it onto the same CD-RW as the Detainee Assessment Briefs described above.

Although my access included a great deal of information, I decided I had nothing else to send to WLO after sending the Detainee Assessment Briefs and the USACIC report. Up to this point I had sent them the following: the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs tables; the Reykjavik 13 Department of State Cable; the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team video and the 2006-2007 rules of engagement documents; the SigAct report and supporting documents concerning the 15 individuals detained by the Baghdad Federal Police; the USSOUTHCOM and Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment Briefs; a USACIC report on the WikiLeaks organization website.

Over the next few weeks I did not send any additional information to the WLO. I continued to converse with Nathaniel over the Jabber client and in the WLO IRC channel. Although I stopped sending documents to WLO, no one associated with the WLO pressured me into giving more information. The decisions that I made to send documents and information to the WLO and the website were my own decisions, and I take full responsibility for my actions.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of other Government documents.

One 22 March 2010, I downloaded two documents. I found these documents over the course of my normal duties as an analyst. Based on my training and the guidance of my superiors, I look at as much information as possible.

Doing so provided me with the ability to make connections that others might miss. On several occasions during the month of March, I accessed information from a government entity. I read several documents from a section within this government entity. The content of two of these documents upset me greatly. I had difficulty believing what this section was doing.

On 22 March 2010, I downloaded the two documents that I found troubling. I compressed them into a zip file named blah.zip and burned them onto a CD-RW. I took the CD-RW to my CHU and saved the file to my personal computer.

I uploaded the information to the WLO website using the designated prompts.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the Net Centric Diplomacy Department of State cables.

In late March of 2010, I received a warning over Jabber from Nathaniel, that the WLO website would be publishing the aerial weapons team video. He indicated that the WLO would be very busy and the frequency and intensity of our Jabber conversations decrease significantly. During this time, I had nothing but work to distract me.

I read more of the diplomatic cables published on the Department of State Net Centric Diplomacy server. With my insatiable curiosity and interest in geopolitics I became fascinated with them. I read not only the cables on Iraq, but also about countries and events that I found interesting.
The more I read, the more I was fascinated with by the way that we dealt with other nations and organizations. I also began to think that the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn’t seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.

Up to this point, during the deployment, I had issues I struggled with and difficulty at work. Of the documents release, the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn’t harm the United States. I conducted research on the cables published on the Net Centric Diplomacy, as well as how Department of State cables worked in general.
In particular, I wanted to know how each cable was published on SIRPnet via the Net Centric Diplomacy. As part of my open source research, I found a document published by the Department of State on its official website.

The document provided guidance on caption markings for individual cables and handling instructions for their distribution. I quickly learned the caption markings clearly detailed the sensitivity level of the Department of State cables. For example, NODIS or No Distribution was used for messages at the highest sensitivity and were only distributed to the authorized recipients.

The SIPDIS or SIPRnet distribution caption was applied only to recording of other information messages that were deemed appropriate for a release for a wide number of individuals. According to the Department of State guidance for a cable to have the SIPDIS [missed word] caption, it could not include other captions that were intended to limit distribution.

The SIPDIS caption was only for information that could only be shared with anyone with access to SIPRnet. I was aware that thousands of military personnel, DoD, Department of State, and other civilian agencies had easy access to the tables. The fact that the SIPDIS caption was only for wide distribution made sense to me, given that the vast majority of the Net Centric Diplomacy Cables were not classified.

The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that– that this type of information should become public. I once read a and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other.

I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy. Given all of the Department of State cables information that I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified, and that all the cables have a SIPDIS caption, I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States; however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.

In many ways these cables are a catalogue of cliques and gossip. I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy. On 22 March 2010, I began downloading a copy of the SIPDIS cables using the program Wget, described above.

I used instances of the Wget application to download the Net Centric Diplomacy cables in the background. As I worked on my daily tasks, the Net Centric Diplomacy cables were downloaded from 28 March 2010 to 9 April 2010. After downloading the cables, I saved them onto a CD-RW.

These cables went from the earliest dates in Net Centric Diplomacy to 28 February 2010. I took the CD-RW to my CHU on 10 April 2010. I sorted the cables on my personal computer, compressed them using the bzip2 compression algorithm described above, and uploaded them to the WLO via designated drop box described above.

On 3 May 2010, I used Wget to download and update of the cables for the months of March 2010 and April 2010 and saved the information onto a zip file and burned it to a CD-RW. I then took the CD-RW to my CHU and saved those to my computer. I later found that the file was corrupted during the transfer. Although I intended to re-save another copy of these cables, I was removed from the T-SCIF on 8 May 2010 after an altercation.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of Garani, Farah Province Afghanistan 15-6 Investigation and Videos.

[NB Pfc. Manning plead 'not guilty' to the Specification 11, Charge II for the Garani Video as charged by the government, which alleged as November charge date. Read more here.]

In late March 2010, I discovered a US CENTCOM directly on a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan. I was searching CENTCOM for information I could use as an analyst. As described above, this was something that myself and other analysts and officers did on a frequent basis. As I reviewed the documents I recalled the incident and what happened. The airstrike occurred in the Garani village in the Farah Province, Northwestern Afghanistan. It received worldwide press coverage during the time as it was reported that up to 100 to 150 Afghan civilians– mostly women and children– were accidentally killed during the airstrike.

After going through the report and the [missed word] annexes, I began to review the incident as being similar to the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team engagements in Iraq. However, this event was noticeably different in that it involved a significantly higher number of individuals, larger aircraft and much heavier munitions. Also, the conclusions of the report are even more disturbing than those of the July 2007 incident.
I did not see anything in the 15-6 report or its annexes that gave away sensitive information. Rather, the investigation and its conclusions helped explain how this incident occurred, and were– what those involved should have done, and how to avoid an event like this from occurring again.

After investigating the report and its annexes, I downloaded the 15-6 investigation, PowerPoint presentations, and several other supporting documents to my D6-A workstation. I also downloaded three zip files containing the videos of the incident. I burned this information onto a CD-RW and transferred it to the personal computer in my CHU. I did later that day or the next day– I uploaded the information to the WLO website this time using a new version of the WLO website submission form.

Unlike other times using the submission form above, I did not activate the TOR anonymizer. Your Honor, this concludes my statement and facts for this providence inquiry.

(Parte I de II)

Nuevo libro para bajar del Internet en PDF

Chess freaks have a word for it. In the insulting, machista idiom of the traditional chess world, it’s called “being a patzer”.

Patzer: an amateurish blunderer, probably from the German patzen, to bungle.

One mark of the patzer is to [...]]]> Beyond Patzers and Clients Strategic Reflections on Climate Change and the ‘Green Economy’

Larry Lohmannhttp://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Patzers%20and%20Clients%2019.pdf

Chess freaks have a word for it. In the insulting, machista idiom of the traditional chess world, it’s called “being a patzer”.

Patzer: an amateurish blunderer, probably from the German patzen, to bungle.

One mark of the patzer is to fall into avoidable traps: to walk into fool’s mate, grab the poisoned pawn, neglect strategic development in favor of quick gains.

In the position at right, White (the master) surprises Black (the patzer) by giving away a piece. The white bishop takes the black pawn at the upper right of the board, giving check but leaving itself open to capture by the black king.

Black thinks for a moment, then decides to take the offered bishop. What’s not to like about the deal? Black gets the equivalent of two pawns for free. It may not be a won game yet, Black knows, but the capture is surely a step in the right direction: a material foundation for an eventual victory. A bishop is a bishop: how can you turn it down? Then, with a barely-concealed, evil grin, White brings down the chopper, moving her knight to the fifth square from the bottom in the next-to-rightmost column. Black may not know it yet, but the game is over. No matter what Black does, White will now triumph in six or seven moves. The temporary advantage in material that Black has gained doesn’t mean anything because Black has lost.

Climate Politics In the United Nations and other international forums, environmental politics has long been a chess game full of masters preying on patzers, setting up situations in which they seem to be giving something away when they are actually maneuvering their way into a long-term positional advantage.

Turn the clock back to 1997, for example. When United Nations delegations assembled in Kyoto for their annual meeting on climate change, it seemed international politics might be entering an interesting new phase. Alarmed at global warming, Southern countries had been insisting that the industrialized North take responsibility for a global crisis of which it had been the main cause. The United States, preoccupied with maintaining what geographer Mazen Labben calls a global ‘militarized market’ dependent on fossil fuels and the massive, climate-changing carbon emissions they produce, found itself particularly on the defensive.

But an instinctively astute strategic move worthy of any chess master succeeded in turning the tables. In Kyoto, the US dangled the offer of signing up to emissions cuts in return for an international commitment to carbon trading. Exhausted by the marathon negotiations, Southern countries accepted the gambit, facilitating, largely unwittingly, a technopolitical process that led to the multiple defeats that are the subject of this note.

Of course, nobody had been under the illusion that getting the US or any other country to sign up to Kyoto’s relatively trivial emissions cuts was much of a prize, any more than your average patzer believes that a two-pawn advantage guarantees victory in chess.

But like all good patzers, the UN negotiators on the receiving end of the US strategem – as well as the politicians who stood behind them and the journalists and NGOs who accompanied them – tended to be linear thinkers. They told each other that this was maybe at least a ‘small first step’, ‘a step in the right direction’, ‘better than nothing’, a ‘foundation for something bigger’. Surely, they insisted, having the US, the world’s worst polluter, on board even an inadequate agreement was better than not having them participate at all. The condition for US participation – carbon trading – might be morally or aesthetically distasteful, they reasoned, but should not be a deal-breaker.

Let’s not be ‘fundamentalist’, they urged. Let’s not allow the best to be the enemy of the good. Politics is the art of the possible. Step by step.

In the process, the long-term significance of the carbon trading quid pro quo was missed – to say nothing of the need to look beyond mere emissions cuts toward the imperative of keeping remaining fossil fuels in the ground permanently. Asked why the Philippines went along, for example, Tony La Viña – a negotiator who, ironically, prided himself on his ‘realism’ – confessed that at that point, all he cared about was that the US took on ‘binding targets’, no matter how that goal was achieved.1 Like countless others, La Viña – perhaps conditioned by an earlier stint at Washington’s World Resources Institute, a bastion of neoliberal thinking about the environment – had fallen for the idea that the real political stakes were CO2 targets and carbon trading was a mere technical tool – an efficient ‘instrument’ for achieving them.

“Carbon trading is just a wave,” as one North American climate activist later explained. “Targets are the water.”2 Indeed, even many of the US’s own climate policymakers may well at first have underestimated the importance of the trading aspect of the Kyoto deal. The most farsighted undoubtedly understood that a carbon trading proposal would, if approved, help protect fossil fuel use as well as provide speculative new business opportunities – while, even if rejected, would still help to put the Clinton regime on record as having made some effort on global warming. Yet others held a different view. The faction of US climate thinking represented by ExxonMobil and George W. Bush, for example, was famously unresponsive to the pleas of speculators such as ENRON that the Kyoto’s carbon market be ratified, believing that the constraints represented by emissions targets would outweigh the benefits of trading to the fossil fuel economy; it was only much later that some industrial interests realized how effective the carbon markets could be in entrenching coal, oil and gas. On the other side of the narrow US political spectrum, some green policy advocates may also have genuinely thought that Kyoto’s emissions targets represented an environmental advance unaffected by the trading component of the deal, which was perhaps viewed as a mere sop tossed to business and a hostile and largely climate-denialist US Senate. In any case, like a chess player pretending to be overcome with nervous second thoughts after sacrificing her bishop, the US was able to put on a convincing performance – feigned or not – of attaching greater importance to Kyoto’s nominal emissions cuts than to the carbon market that was the other component of the deal.

Small wonder that the players on the other side of the chessboard could hardly keep their eyes off the bishop either. If so many in the US corporate world were worried about being assigned ‘legally-binding targets’ – so went the patzer logic – surely setting targets and caps must be the key to everything. And surely if targets could be set, then means would be found to meet them, and then new, stricter targets could be imposed, in an inevitable ratcheting process,3 until the ultimate goal – 350 parts per million, 2 degrees centigrade of warming, or whatever – would be reached.

Only years afterwards did the deeper game loom into view. With the sinking feeling of marks who come to realize they’ve fallen for a ‘long con’, many of the patzers eventually saw that while they had been preoccupied with getting the US and other industrialized nations to sign up to so-called ‘legally-binding emissions cuts’, on the other side of the chessboard their opponents had used carbon trading to arrange their pieces in a position that made it increasingly difficult to address climate change at all.

Like the chess master’s offer of the ‘poisoned bishop’, the US’s offer to accept emissions targets can be seen in retrospect as having been a sacrifice performed in order to open up the position for bigger operations.

What the effects of these operations were emerged only gradually. First, Kyoto’s minimal cuts did not turn out, as the number-fetishizing patzers had presumed, to be a prelude to sharper reductions, which were never agreed, but at most to lead to national-level legislative processes of inducing the nominal scarcity required for a pollution market. Nor were even the preliminary ‘binding cuts’ of Kyoto actually binding when it counted – first the US, then Canada, then Japan and other countries made it clear that they were free at any time to withdraw from any agreement that actually threatened fossil fuel use.4 The ‘binding cuts’ were further undermined through the widespread use of the offsets that carbon trading made possible, as well as the growing ‘offshoring’ of emissions.5 Still later the US spearheaded an agitation to abolish the idea of targets altogether. By 2012, with not just fossil fuel use, but the rate of fossil fuel use, increasing, the struggle was on to keep any industrialized country on course to make any reductions at all. The ‘ratchet’ that the patzers had envisaged turned out to be a greased cylinder devoid of teeth.

Yet all the while, most patzers kept thinking like patzers, continuing quasi-autistically to count molecules and formulate targets, while waiting and hoping for more free bishops. With which they were amply supplied from early on in the game. Employing a classic maneuver, growing carbon trading establishments in the EU, international development institutions, Washington NGO circuits, and assorted research and lobbying bodies were soon doing everything they could to entice patzers into thinking that they could exercise progressive ‘policy influence’ by pouring effort into carbon market design and carbon market reform. “We know carbon trading has problems,” market proponents put on a great show of conceding. “Help us make it better!” On the whole, the patzers were only too happy to take up the poisoned offer. Some dutifully produced a stream of ineffectual ‘standards’, ‘safeguards’ and ‘principles’, or demanded that more attention be paid to ‘governance’ and ‘participation’, telling themselves that in doing so they were providing ‘damage control’. Others expended their energies, with paltry or nonexistent results, on urging that stricter caps be set, that allowances be auctioned instead of being given away free, that the role of offsets be reduced, or that ‘carbon cowboys’ be curbed.6 Still others allowed themselves to be seduced into thinking that carbon trading could be ‘leveraged’ or ‘subverted’ to secure land rights, human rights, technical support or hard cash for worthy grassroots initiatives. (“No rights, no REDD!” went one slogan, referring to programmes to generate carbon pollution rights by Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.) The result was that for 15 years, patzers tended to neglect the real task of climate action: making common cause with the social movements that actually had practical, concrete stakes in countering the interests of fossil-fuelled productivism. In many cases, the patzers wound up unwittingly conspiring against the interests of grassroots networks to which some imagined they were still loyal and accountable.

That constituted an obvious triumph for many US, EU and other fossil-dependent elites, whose overall power advantage over the global majority in climate politics tended to grow every year. Yet to understand the subtler (and no doubt partly inadvertent) genius of the original US gambit, it will be useful to go a bit deeper, by sketching three key processes of positional consolidation that it made possible: the institutionalized defossilization of the global warming problem; the institutionalized deresponsibilization of industrialized countries; and the financialization of climate change action.

How It Was Done, Part I: Entrenching Goal Change in Institutions

Suppose US or other industrialized-country leaders had stated publicly that, in their view, fossil fuels remained so central to the productive exploitation of labor and other aspects of ‘nature’ that there was no choice but to extract and burn the last drop of oil and the last lump of coal no matter what the global warming cost. They would thereby have put themselves in a weak debating position. No one comes out and says such things at the UN or anywhere else, even if many think it. But by inducing the international community to accept carbon markets instead, they were able to promote a ‘fossil forever’ agenda while avoiding the mistake of openly advocating it.

Carbon trading made this feat possible because it changed the goal of climate action from keeping remaining fossil fuels in the ground to meeting targets for the emission of CO2-equivalent molecules. This change was made all the smoother in that, for the technocratic sensibility widespread at the UN and in the world of middle-class climate activism, it did not appear to be a change at all. Technopolitically-unsophisticated patzers tended to accept at face value the neoliberal commonsense that assigning a price to CO2 molecules would automatically incentivize the phaseout of fossil fuels.

Under cover of this ideology, carbon trading was then able to make its contribution toward accomplishing the opposite, protecting, perpetuating and promoting fossil fuel use for a decade and a half, during which time greenhouse gas emissions continued to increase. For example, under cover of ‘efficiency’ claims, a variety of institutions were set up that made it possible for polluters to meet their emissions targets by substituting cuts in other gases for CO2 cuts, substituting photosynthesis for fossil emissions cuts, or substituting hypothetical cuts for actual cuts.7 Competition to find the cheapest substitutes contributed to a decline in pollution permit prices to a level far below what would be environmentally meaningful8 – a trend amply reinforced by the way carbon markets were designed as the “only commodity market in the world where demand varies in real time but supply is fixed years in advance”, to quote Mark Lewis at Deutsche Bank.9 Carbon trading, like other pollution trading schemes in the past, also selected for lowcost substitutes for green innovation, disincentivizing research and development investment in clean technologies10 and militating against the long-term investment planning needed to address structural transition under conditions of uncertainty.11 As Jerome Whitington notes, “carbon markets, while promising to tie climate objectives to risk-taking entrepreneurialism, are perhaps more closely aligned with moving around and forestalling investment and innovation.”12 The delays in transition for which carbon markets select, in turn, multiply the ultimate costs of moving to a nonfossil society, further obstructing climate solutions; the International Energy Agency estimates climate investment postponed beyond 2020 will cost 4.3 times investment now.13 Because carbon markets were artificial constructs created by the state, they also introduced unlimited opportunities for rent-seeking and gaming, resulting in market gluts and, again, low prices, as well as windfall profits for heavy greenhousegas polluters14 – profits that were then often plowed into additional fossil-fuel development. At the same time, carbon markets interfered with more effective tools for cutting emissions and tackling fossil fuel dependence.15 What the patzers had been persuaded to believe was a ‘neutral instrument’ for global warming mitigation, in other words, was actually a game-changer furthering fossil fuel interests. The misidentification of nominal molecule trading with global warming action meanwhile made it easy for trading proponents to gauge environmental success, falsely, by the size of the carbon market.

How It Was Done, Part II: Deresponsibilization through Institution-Building

Over the years, the US has repeatedly insisted that it will never take any special responsibility for climate change. In 2010, for example, US negotiator Todd Stern declared that while the US recognizes its “historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere,” it “categorically rejects … culpability or reparations”, echoing the first George Bush’s insistence in 1992 that “the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation”.

Other counties, particularly in the global South, have always expressed outrage at the US stance, which flies in the face not only of its own legal torts tradition16 but also of the principle of ‘differentiated responsibilities’ for climate change that the US signed up to in 1992. Yet in their day-to-day practice and policy, almost all nations, South and North, now in practice support the US disavowal of responsibility. As Herbert Docena and others show, the US accomplished this feat not by making abstract speeches at UN plenary sessions but by quietly helping to embed a far-reaching regime of concrete, specific deresponsibilizing practices in the climate change mitigation institutions in which all signatories to the Kyoto Protocol participate.17 Again, this was almost entirely the achievement of the carbon trading gambit.

For example, as part of its market architecture, the Kyoto Protocol bestowed tradeable rights in the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity exclusively on Northern countries, proportional to how much of it they were already using; later, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) also unilaterally granted to European countries rights in this global good. The result was a system based on the principle of ‘the polluter earns’ or ‘the polluter is bribed’ rather than that of ‘the polluter pays’ (which, of course, would have had its own problems).18 At the same time, instead of being fined for failing to meet Kyoto’s targets (which, as Docena points out, “implied the commission of an offense”), industrialized countries were encouraged to buy extra pollution permits to compensate for their failure (which, again in the words of Docena, “connoted the acquisition of an entitlement”).19 In Nigeria, the Philippines, South Africa, Guyana and many other Southern countries, meanwhile, governments were incentivized by carbon markets not to promulgate or enforce environmental laws
(which attribute responsibility for harm to their subjects) but instead to allow their societies to remain dirty in order to collect fees for cleaning up later; or to encourage deforestation so that they could later claim that they had ‘reduced’ it.20 Such forms of gaming further undermined juridical approaches to the environment.

The increasing institutionalization of opportunity-cost estimates in the design of biotic offset schemes, similarly, favored the relatively wealthy – those with the means to destroy forests wholesale rather than poorer, communities who followed a more environmentally benign approach – and thereby further reduced the space for practices that worked to recognize and gauge responsibility for either destruction or preservation.21 Carbon markets worked best by taking advantage of pre-existing inequalities, which entailed giving short shrift to the rich’s responsibility to right them.

Throughout the new carbon market system, participants were forced to track, manage and price the movements of commodity molecules of greenhouse gases without regard for their status as ‘survival’ or ‘luxury’ emissions.22 This constituted a further blow against a ‘commons’ view of environmental activism,23 according to which the right to subsistence takes precedence over the price system and private property, and capital accumulation is not allowed to dominate survival considerations. It also tended to undermine the juridical view according to which the rights and interests of private corporations must be balanced against those of the public. Tens of thousands of experts, traders, bankers, lawyers, accountants, consultants and bureaucrats went to work setting fuel emission proxy factors, commenting on carbon project design documents, formulating schedules and criteria for payments for forest conservation certificates, making submissions to the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board, hedging investments, buying land, tallying molecules, balancing accounts, establishing ownership and discovering prices, each day producing a bit more deresponsibilization in each of the offices and other arenas they worked in.24 The bulk of the work of building a moral and political economy of carbon trading was carried out by institutions that positioned themselves as ‘apolitical’ or ‘not taking a stance’. Behind their ‘technical’ facade, however, organizations such as the World Bank, UNCTAD and UNEP acted as de facto legislators, normalizing the carbon market’s moral theory by rolling out various kinds of trading infrastructure before obtaining any UNFCCC mandate to do so (programmes to prepare REDD projects for the carbon market before the UNFCCC has approved REDD credits are one example).

The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has played a similar game. Given that 100 researchers associated with CIFOR have been working on REDD in Indonesia alone, to infer that the organization has had no stake in seeing REDD and carbon trading normalized globally would be naïve in the extreme. Yet according to its outgoing director, Frances Seymour, CIFOR “doesn’t take positions on anything,” merely suggesting means for addressing goals which remain hypothetical until given official approval.25 Such disavowals are familiar features of the would-be ‘antipolitics machine’ that James Ferguson described in his 1990 book of the same name.26 In the carbon markets as elsewhere, their function has been to help promote a false dichotomy between political ‘ends’ and technical ‘means’ that, by reducing politics to the intermittent presentation of abstract ‘position statements’, allows the extensive political, neoliberally-biased work of agencies such as CIFOR and the World Bank to be shunted safely into the ‘nonpolitical’ bin.

A beautiful literary example of such ‘non-political’ deresponsibilization – and the incremental bamboozlement of widening circles of patzers – is a 44-page booklet called “Nuestra Casa en el Universo”, produced under a cooperative programme linking Yale and McGill Universities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Coordinadora Nacional de Pueblos Indigenas de Panama, with finance from the Blue Moon Fund.27 Said to be designed as an “educational tool on climate change and the REDD+ proposal for indigenous communities in the Latin American tropics”,28the booklet announces on its first page that it is “neither for nor against REDD+”.29 This abstract disclaimer conceals the concrete pro-REDD+ gambits which are then deployed throughout the rest of the text – and which, once readers are induced to accept them, give them less and less space to think clearly about the central contradictions of both REDD+ and carbon trading.

The introductory gambit, played by the friendly talking turtle who narrates the text and appears in many of the comic-book-style panels (delightfully drawn by Panamanian indigenous artist Ologwagdi), is to insist that the first thing we need to know about global warming is that it is caused by the accumulation of “carbon” in the atmosphere (p. 16). This carbon, the turtle continues, comes from the burning both of trees (pp. 7-9) and of coal, oil and gas (p. 12). The analytical framework setting the stage for the acceptance of REDD+ as a mechanism that can ‘substitute’, in part, for reductions in fossil emissions is thus already in place in the form of a posited ‘climatic equivalence’ between biotic carbon and fossil carbon.30 This ‘equivalence’ is then reinforced subtly on p. 27, when the turtle admits disarmingly that most additions of carbon to the atmosphere do come from the burning of fossil fuels (actually, the text says “petroleo”) but quantifies the contribution (four-fifths) in a way that assumes the two are commensurable (illustration above).31 A further equivalence is then introduced: “avoiding forest burning”, the turtle implies, can combat climate change just as effectively as cutting industrial emissions (p. 29), meaning that, molecule for molecule, the one can be substituted for the other.32 Keeping readers’ minds firmly on the climatic role of counterfactual forest burning, the turtle enjoins us to “imagine how much carbon would go into the air if this tree burned” and to “imagine what would happen if a whole forest burned!” On p. 34 comes the admission that many people have questions about the effects of REDD+ on indigenous rights: “Will REDD+ be a form of reinforcing our rights over our territories, or completely the contrary?” the turtle asks. The answer depends, he suggests, on formulating principles such as those discussed by “indigenous brothers and sisters in Panama” (p. 35), such as asking REDD+ managers to “respect our territories (p. 36), allow for “free prior informed consent” (p. 37), respect “indigenous styles of life and spiritual values” (p. 38), ensure “real participation of the communities” (p. 39) and “respect our right to produce food” (p. 40). By the time this reassuring wish-list has been compiled, it is easy to forget that the decisive (and unaddressed) step in the violation of indigenous rights was in fact taken long before, endorsed by the turtle himself, in the form of the equation stating that biotic-origin CO2 = fossil-origin CO2. In erasing the history of anthropogenic climate change, this equation implies that, per molecule emitted, forest dwellers and industrial users of fossil fuels are equally responsible for climate change, and that indigenous peoples, in addition to dealing with all the other pressures incumbent upon them and their lands, must now take on the task of providing carbon savings to the industrialized world.

On p. 42, a small indigenous figure at the bottom of the page briefly tries to call us back to reality, noting despite all this talk of addressing climate change through forest conservation, “developed countries which have had a greater impact on climate change logically have more responsibility” and therefore “it is they who must change their way of life and pay for the damages caused”. Another indigenous figure then intervenes briefly in an idiom more familiar to Latin American radicalism and altogether opposed to that used in the rest of the booklet: “if the world continues to be treated as an endless source of resources and as a commodity to make money, that is, the way the capitalist system treats it every day, how will we be able to solve climate change?” None of this belated political analysis has any effect on the turtle, however, who, instead of taking up the theme of how indigenous people might organize to help bring about the necessary changes among those who, unlike them, are responsible for global warming, hastily bids farewell to his indigenous readers on the final page, asking them to take the booklet’s ideas about REDD+ back to their communities (p. 44).

It must be emphasized that there is no reason to suppose that the particular experts who wrote “Nuestra Casa en el Universo” are any less patzerish (from the point of view of climate strategy) than the ‘ideal readers’ it envisages, or any less caught in the hinges of the intricate mechanisms of deresponsibilization and racial blame that necessarily accompany the technical structuring of a system of calibrating and exchanging fossil and biotic carbon. Indeed, the institutional momentum at the stage of the game at which the booklet was written makes attributions of individual intention, good or bad, almost irrelevant. The document’s moves are merely a further playing out of a position whose relevant features were determined long ago by the acceptance of carbon trading’s larger gambits.

As the inappropriateness, irrelevance or marginality of attributing responsibility for global warming gradually became established in international behaviour in this way, Southern delegates to the UN and other climate forums, as well as many climate activists, found themselves situated in the old game of neocolonialist development, sometimes without quite knowing what had been done to them. De facto, rich nations were now cast as ‘climate leaders’ rather than ‘climate offenders’, climate benefactors rather than climate debtors. The old colonialist ideology, temporarily challenged by the global debate over climate change, had been rehegemonized less through the relatively inefficient and superficial means of propaganda, moral reasoning, bad science, or outright threats and bribes than through the repetition and accretion of thousands of quotidian technical practices surrounding market construction and operation.33 Southern outrage survived only in an attenuated, conflicted, rhetorical form.

At the climate negotiations in Bangkok in 2009, for instance, two Caribbean nation delegates were overheard convening informally in the corridors to express repugnance at, and discuss tactics for challenging, the continued reluctance of Northern countries to acknowledge the extent of their responsibility to undertake meaningful emissions reductions. The conversation quickly shifted, however, to ways of gaining revenue through sale of CDM carbon credits to those same countries. The senior delegate enthusiastically enjoined his colleague to explore jatropha-planting agrofuel projects in his country. “But,” the junior colleague demurred, “what about land conflicts?” Not a problem, his elder counselled. “You can easily hire experts to give economic legitimacy to biofuel conversions.” Between the senior delegate’s firebrand rhetorical denunciations of excessive Northern emissions and his eager participation in the Northern exploitation of Southern carbon resources in order to continue or increase those emissions, there could be little question which would have the greater long-term practical effect.34 How It Was Done, Part III: Financialization Accepting the US’s carbon-trading gambit had a third long-term consequence of which many patzers, with a mental architecture built partly from neoliberal nostrums and memories of the short-lived ‘golden age’ of capitalist development between the end of the second world war and the 1970s, also failed to take full account. By taking various poisoned bishops, the patzers had also, often unwittingly, thrown in their lot with an ongoing movement toward increased financialization and ‘supercommodification’ of nature which was inherently and structurally damaging to their own climate action cause.

Beginning in the 1970s, business has been confronted with a deep profitability crisis and a deterioriation of the US-centred cycle of accumulation that has been dominant for about the last 100 years.35 In search of better returns and greater security, mobility and liquidity, capital has turned increasingly from ordinary production, services and trade to finance, which today accounts for the bulk of private sector profits in the US and other rich countries. As the financial sector and its demands and criteria have become more and more influential (unchecked by the 2008 financial crash), a strategy of ‘take, don’t make’ has increasingly taken precedence over the protection and development of common goods, as well as investment in creativity and technology.

The result has been intensified asset-stripping, stealing from labor and rural communities, and the cannibalization of the substance of society generally, combined with a quixotic attempt to control contingency by mathematizing and commodifying the radical uncertainty which previously had been critical for entrepreneurial activity.36 In its quest to regain profitability, business has simultaneously been forced into a dogged hunt for new commodities – commodities which, not surprisingly, must also satisfy the imperatives laid down by the newly-dominant financial sector.

It was precisely during this period that pollution trading came to prominence, nursed by such figures as Richard Sandor, a Chicago trader and economist who had earlier pioneered the interest rate derivatives that played a significant part in the financial boom. Since then, a continually revamped and expanded banking and ‘shadow banking’ sector has been ‘reprocessing’ climatic stability as well as other ‘ecosystem services’ as credits or information capable of flowing smoothly through global financial circuits. Indeed, Wall Street, the City of London and other nodes of finance today form partnerships with various specialist institutions in restructuring the very science by which environmentalist patzers are accustomed to swear.37 The result has been even more positional advantage for the chess masters in their struggle to keep fossil fuels flowing out of the ground.

By falling for the carbon trading gambit, in other words, the patzers were not only endorsing a mechanism that had been developed in the shadow of a surging financial sector, but also ensuring that climate policy – indeed, the very definition of the climate problem – would henceforth be heavily influenced by its institutional needs.

Pressures from traders and speculators consistently favoured liquidity and fungibility of carbon instruments, securitization, exchangeability and interlinkages with other commodities, as well as the expectations of high short-term return on investment that financialization has promoted,38 all of which further distanced climate action from the imperative for structural change away from fossil fuels, as well as the need for an approach that addressed the North’s historical responsibility for global warming.

Proposals for ‘green bonds’ based on carbon offset and other ‘ecological’ collateral meanwhile foreshadowed a new chapter in the de facto shift of climate and other ecological indebtedness from North to South.

Further Dimensions of Strategy

The three key processes of positional consolidation sketched above – the institutionalized defossilization of the global warming problem; the institutionalized deresponsibilization of industrialized countries; and the financialization of climate change action – are also, to vary the metaphor, movements toward containing a severe challenge to capital as well as toward assimilating a new opportunity for its expansion. In this process of enclosure and reframing, ‘inconvenient’ aspects of the climate problem – for example, its roots in inequality and the exploitation of fossil fuels – are separated out and expelled across newly-drawn boundaries.

While the circumstances and the problem are historically unique, this is a classic dynamic visible in virtually any effort by business to tame, commodify, and turn into a source of profit things which have not hitherto been bought and sold. More broadly, it resembles the processes through which (say) commodified labour power is created through the violent separation of commoners from their land, or ‘feudal’ status conflicts are transformed into battles to consume conspicuously, or ‘accumulation by dispossession’39 is used to provide fuel for new cycles of profit. Parallels also exist with various historical strategies of response to accumulation crisis. One example is the 17th-18th century Dutch effort to internalize the increasingly expensive costs of exercising force that an expanding commercial system required by creating an efficient warmaking machine whose maintenance expense was lower and more predictable than the tribute extracted from caravans and ships by local powers. A more recent instance is the 20th-century US-centred business system’s strategy of managed demand and vertical integration, which created the system’s own calculable forms of consumption and internalized within single enterprises, and made more predictable, the costs associated with the transfer of intermediate inputs through production-consumption chains. Like such strategies, carbon trading and other manifestations of the ‘green economy’ strive to bring what come to be seen as troublesome ‘external’ factors – in this case environmental – within what historian and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi calls the ‘economizing logic of capitalist enterprise’. A related dynamic of internalization and reprocessing, of course, was also characteristic of colonialism and subsequently recapitulated, in nearly every economic and cultural particular, in the phenomenon of ‘Third World development’.

As with all such strategies, conventional analytic divides between ‘state’ and ‘market’ are seldom of much explanatory use. Just as the Dutch East India Company exercised quasi-governmental powers and 20th-century Fordism and Keynesianism required farreaching coordination between state and business, so too carbon and other environmental-service markets are hybrid public/private entities whose commodities are usually creatures of government regulation. Nor is it possible, as a rule, to characterize any move in such games of enclosure or internalization as merely ‘technical’, ‘economic’, ‘political’ or ‘cultural’: indeed, the making of such distinctions is often itself a move in the game. The orthodox mathematical economics which justifies and explains ecosystem service markets, for example, has always been at bottom a largely literary and moral genre, continually producing new versions of anticommons narratives that simplify the historically-specific logic of accumulation for accumulation’s sake into a tragic, eternal battle between a Nature reified into a passive, rightless, limited reservoir of raw materials and an active Society whose needs will always be in principle infinite.40 Similarly, the financial system which today so strongly shapes those markets has long been sustained, as David Graeber points out, by a dramatic script that casts those who depend on the commons as idle, non-industrious and non-deserving:41 “capitalist crises,” George Caffentzis suggests, “stem from refusal of work.”42 On the chessboard of the green economy, every gambit and pawn advance needs to be analyzed in multiple, overlapping ways. For example, biologists, UNFCCC delegations, carbon accountants and bankers working in carbon markets act also as de facto legislators and moral reformers insofar as they help put together an elaborate infrastructure allowing pollution fines to be replaced with fees and legal judgements against environmental offenders with prices. Wealthy offset project sponsors like Cargill or Chubu Electric become agents creating ecological value (it is they who allow emissions that otherwise were ‘inevitable’ to be ‘avoided’), while nonprofessional actors in already low-emitting contexts or social movements actively working to reduce use of fossil fuels are cast as passive objects of deterministic calculation, or even global warming culprits. Technicians calculating how much greenhouse gas emission a hydroelectric dam ‘avoids’ act as global legislators deciding how large European entitlements to the earth’s carbon dumps are to be, as well as political prophets adjudicating ‘whether another world is possible’.

Scientists who ‘monitor, report and verify’ emissions become political agents assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas production to bordered ‘geobodies’43 like ‘China’ or ‘Mexico’ instead of to the countries that consume the wage goods such countries produce. And just as environmental responsibility becomes a ‘product component’ of Starbucks coffee or monoculture plantation timber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, obscuring underlying processes of enclosure, ecosystem services markets are in part a political move to contain and preempt the ‘environmentalism of the poor’44 that poses such an enduring threat to business.

Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in the way the leftist agitation of the Brazilian rubber-tapper union leader Chico Mendes, who led a movement for communitystrengthening ‘extractive reserves’ in the 1980s, has been digested and translated into support for new forms of capital accumulation. For his pains, Mendes was assasssinated in 1988, but by 2012, his famous statement – “In the beginning I thought I was fighting to save the rubber trees. Afterwards I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize that I am fighting for humanity” – was festooning a brochure promoting a North American-influenced plan to convert Acre, Mendes’s home state, into an international exporter of pollution and biodiversity-destruction rights as well as many other ‘green’ products.45 “Poor Chico,” one Acre activist commented 24 years after his murder. “They never stop killing him.” Analysis of ‘green economy’ strategies may thus benefit from viewing them as shaped, in part, by imperialism. But it is important to make connections with patriarchy and racism as well. Thus the strategy of enclosure embodied in carbon trading can be seen as a masculinist movement ‘outwards’ toward an exotic, challenging Other (the global warming problem), whose ‘useful’ characteristics, novelties and uncertainties are broken down, transferred ‘inward’ and made commensurable and tradable with other items in the commodity matrix for the purpose of profit, while efforts are made to discard its stubbornly problematic parts. As many cultural critics have pointed out, homologous strategies of imperialist reformulation and assimilation/expulsion proliferate throughout Western culture, entwining enclosure with even some of the most subtle, extravagantly beautiful works of art. There is, for example, a long tradition of ‘internalization’ of the carnivalesque into the established order in the figures of clowns and fools, as in Shakespeare. On a more extreme note, the musicologist Susan McClary observes how the codgypsy music sung by Carmen in Bizet’s opera – chromatic and sinuous – is a symbolic reworking, taming and recycling of something even more radically Other: a reworking which nevertheless turns out to be insufficient to prevent a murderous patriarchal resolution to the challenge to masculine order posed by the jouissance Carmen represents.46 As with capital accumulation, the more difficult, necessary and enticing the job of cannibalization of the Other is, the more ‘productive’ the result can be; but only up to a point: “if the Carmen figure were not so compelling, then the contradictions upon which the opera plays would not be so forcefully engaged. She could be domesticated, rather than seeming to demand murder.”47 This reflects a darker aspect of the deresponsibilizing strategy both of carbon trading and of the rest of the ‘green economy’ heralded at Rio + 20. Integral to Rio + 20′s economic project of commodification, ‘internalization’ and amelioration of capitalist crisis – as well as to its imperialist project of ‘land and nature grabs’ prefiguring continued environmental destruction – is a cultural project of re-representation of resistance to that destruction, promoting patriarchal domestication and ‘management’ of, or violence against, a wide variety of living and nonliving things that are both threats to and temptations for the logic of capital. REDD, for example, is infused with the myth that Northern industrialized societies are being victimized through Southern ‘slash and burn’, bureaucratic corruption, and lack of proper discipline and ‘governance’. The motif, while decorated with ‘technical’ talk of all kinds,48 is familiar from popular culture: the most characteristic cultural expressions of contemporary racism present racists as victims of immigrants, the dark-skinned, etc.; the more extreme versions of misogyny present men as victims of women. REDD is willing to depict indigenous forest peoples as noble savages to be rewarded for their stewardship of nature – but, as with historical others so depicted, only as long as they do not resist containment within REDD’s incipient provisions for property reform, monitoring, labor discipline, ‘participation’, ‘consultation’ and ‘free prior informed consent’. If they do resist, they risk being redefined as obstructionist and environmentally destructive.

This is why it is unlikely to be possible to act effectively against the destructive outcomes of the green economy merely as an isolated ‘scientist’, ‘technician’, ‘policy adviser’, moral commentator, or ‘consultant on human rights’. Viewed in a strategic light, a relevant recent observation by the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek is nothing other than advice on how not to be a patzer: “It is only the reference to those Excluded, to those who dwell in the blanks of the State space, that enables true universality … without [the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded], all others lose their subversive edge: ecology turns into a problem of ‘sustainable development’, intellectual property into a ‘complex legal challenge’, biogenetics into an ‘ethical issue’.”49 Following the onset of the current financial crisis, popular media have not hesitated to connect financial crisis to the patriarchy of Wall Street, excoriating the brash City trader figure and his hypermasculine swagger and juvenile excess. A more serious effort to come to strategic grips with the cultures of masculinism and racism, however, would also target comparatively genteel, diplomatic advocates of the ‘green economy’ such as Sir Nicholas Stern, Jos Delbeke and Christiana Figueres.

Consequences If politics is the art of the possible, in short, the multiple mechanisms of the new green economy are having the effect of constricting political space by making effective environmental action – and even sober analysis of environmental problems – less possible. As this paper has argued, carbon trading – to take the leading example of ecosystem services markets – is a culturally complex strategy favouring those types of climate action that first, do not impact on fossil fuel use; second, preempt juridical approaches to mitigation; and third, are subject to the imperatives of a dominant financial sector. Believing that by accepting the quid pro quo of carbon trading, they were helping keep open paths for future change that ‘fundamentalists’ with tiresomely ‘moral’ or ‘ideological’ obsessions were endangering, patzers unwittingly helped close them off, as the depoliticization and deresponsibilization that resulted from carbon trading consolidated the overall ‘board position’ of their opponents. Both inside and outside the UN, carbon markets helped crowd out intelligent political debate,50 putting the patzers in what chess players call zugzwang, in which the only moves you can make will weaken your position further. (In the instance of zugzwang below, from a famous game played in Copenhagen in 1923, it is White’s move. Ahead in material, White nevertheless finds that all of the moves available lose the game for him.) Particularly with the launch of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) in 2005, the diversity of political resources available for constructive change dwindled.

The patzers never even got the passing satisfaction of having induced the US into a few nominal emissions cuts. In a supremely contemptuous gesture of cynical mastery, the US withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol three years after it had succeeded in inserting carbon trading into it, and long before the associated institutional processes had fully played out. More than a decade later, the results of those processes were on view at COP-17 in Durban. After having launched the multitude of carbon trading practices that eroded the principles of historical and ‘differentiated’ responsibilities, the US set the seal on its victory when the principle of ‘legal equivalence’ or ‘legal symmetry’ of obligations between North and South was allowed to enter discussions over the constitution of a new protocol. By the time of the Durban talks, similarly, the socalled ‘binding targets’ of yesteryear were being openly derided in favor of ‘pledge and review’ measures. While ‘new market mechanisms’ of even greater benefit to fossil-fuelled industry than the CDM were being mooted, the future appeared to be one of a “proliferation of low-value, nontransparent carbon markets without any binding global cap on emissions.”51 Many patzers squawked, some even resorting to the desperate expedient of trying to rejuvenate yesterday’s US agenda (Kyoto) as an alternative to today’s. But the damage had already been done. By the time the position that had been achieved in
1997 was played out (with great help from the EU, which had become the leading force behind carbon trading between 1998 and 2003), the rout of 2011 was little more than a formality. Almost from the moment the US had seen its winning gambit of 1997 accepted, the smirks had been clearly visible in Washington, the derisive, mocking chuckles almost audible. For those with ears to hear, the same sotto voce laughter was now rippling through Durban.

Conspiracy or Pattern Recognition?

For many, to see the introduction of carbon markets into the Kyoto Protocol as a prescient strategy in defense of fossil-fuelled productivism may look like an overestimation of the foresight and coordination of US elites, even to indulge in ‘conspiracy theory’. Consider, first of all, where the idea of carbon markets came from. The theory of pollution markets was not the invention of scheming industrialists, but was developed over many years by serious economists such as Ronald Coase, John Dales, Thomas Crocker, Gabriela Chichilnisky, Robert Stavins and Michael Grubb before being promoted in the global warming arena by serious bureaucrats such as Peter Vis, Jos Delbeke, Timothy Wirth and Peter Zapfel, serious politicians such as Al Gore, and serious environmental organizations such as Washington’s Environmental Defense Fund and National Resources Defense Council.

Surely, common sense suggests, some of these individuals and organizations genuinely believed, at least at first, that carbon markets could support effective climate policy (a few of them have now expressed opposition).52 Second, who could have foreseen all the ways that carbon markets would benefit fossil-fuel interests, banks and scammers while setting back the cause of a just transition to a low-carbon society? Third, who could have foreseen in 1997 that the EU, which was at first skeptical, would take up the baton of carbon trading after US politicians dropped it, saving it from obscurity and coming to account for more than 90 per cent of global demand? And fourth, why would anyone assume there was anything close to unanimity about carbon markets among US leaders at the time of Kyoto? Surely, the objection might be made, there was no hidden, flawlessly-executed master plan, merely the usual mistakes, muddle, compromise, improvisation, and unintended consequences that afflict everybody. The triumph for coal, oil and gas achieved by carbon trading was something that few intended and no one could have predicted.

Basically, the objection goes, the US elites most concerned with preserving the rule of fossil fuels just lucked out.

The difficulty with this objection is that it is directed against a claim that has not been made. It confuses the mastery that the US displayed in Kyoto – and which a small group of US-influenced European bureaucrats and consultants were later able to transfuse into the EU leadership53 – with master planning. It confuses a proper respect for the well-developed if imperfectly-coordinated pattern-recognition skills of experienced strategists with conspiracy theory. It confuses the undoubted sincerity of many of the original theorists of carbon trading with the opportunism of the policymakers, businesspeople and financiers whose interests came to lie in developing the idea in ways that would reinforce fossil fuel use. To point to the strategic wisdom of the US gambit at Kyoto is not to suggest the behind-the-scenes working of malignant masterminds who achieved exactly what they wanted. Nor is it to suggest that the ranks of carbon trading’s inventors and developers – or even the US delegation to Kyoto – did not contain their own patzers. Nor is it to minimize the role played by the EU’s extraordinary late-1990s policy reversal. It is merely to acknowledge the underlying logic of the 1997 agreement in light of the particular conjuncture of forces, histories, institutions and interests at play. To vary the metaphor, insofar as a ‘long con’ was executed by a US elite (with the fortuitous later collaboration of a small EU clique) it was not one out of a Hollywood heist movie, replete with bleeping gadgets, synchronized watches and rubber masks, but one whose complex particulars were largely improvised as the play proceeded and which did indeed benefit from some lucky breaks.

Even chess masters, after all, seldom have everything worked out to the last move.

Some things just happen: in chess, as in the rest of life, intricately-calculated plots have only a limited role. (According to Zermelo’s theorem, a hypothetically determinable optimal strategy does exist for chess, but no one is going to find it in the foreseeable future.) Formidable calculating powers (say, nine or ten moves ahead) may be a prerequisite for master playing, but among humans the game is not and cannot be won by calculation alone. What is decisive is informed intuition.54 By this is meant nothing mystical, merely a power of pattern recognition born of long practical experience, a deeply-ingrained sense of what pathways will be advantageous and what not. Without EU participation, the carbon market strategy could easily have foundered; but without the inspiration of its presiding Washington geniuses, it would never have been launched at all.

‘If You Can’t Beat ‘Em …’: From Patzer to Client One part of the institutionalization process that has consolidated the position of the US and European masters of commodified climate politics has been the assimilation of many of their erstwhile patzer opponents into their client base – an experience that provides a further cautionary strategic lesson for the conduct of campaigns about the ‘green economy’.

For at least some patzers, the process in question was without question drawn-out and difficult. You know you’ve been snookered when a deal you yourself helped make turns out to undermine your deepest goals and allegiances at every turn. Nobody likes the feeling; but what do you do about it? If you can’t turn the clock back or start the game over, or suddenly acquire so much mastery that you can turn the game around, or turn over the board and upset the pieces, one option is to modify those goals and allegiances. If, like most of us, you are afflicted by intellectual laziness, linear thinking and isolation from the grassroots, the temptation to try to put yourself on the other side of the chessboard can become almost irresistible.

That doesn’t necessarily mean adopting outright the goals of the masters who outwitted you. But it may well mean devoting a bit of time and effort to the new interactions and new obligations entailed in finding a subordinate niche for yourself and some of your needs in the strategies or ‘anti-politics machines’ used to achieve those goals, and securing compensation for following an etiquette of abjuring any visible opposition to them.

In the language of political science, this is known as patron-clientage. Patronclientage is a kind of exchange premised on the maintenance of inequality.

Classically, powerful patrons provide protection or other benefits to lower-status clients, who reciprocate by publicly endorsing the patrons’ claims to leadership and offering support, assistance, compliance, votes and the like. The underlying asymmetry in power and status is clear but accepted as legitimate, and both sides rub along together symbiotically with the aid of a panoply of rituals and symbols of deference, mutual obligation and amity.

In climate politics, what patrons such as US and EU governments and corporations provide their client governments, client NGOs and client technical institutions often includes financial resources and political connections. But perhaps an even more important gift is respectability and a certain measure of dignity – an escape from being seen as patzers. In return, clients provide loyalty and deference. The tacit understanding is that they will abandon their former climate goals, instead providing technical and moral support for their patrons’ own climate policies and projects, and refrain from threatening their patrons’ power by, say, attempting alliances with popular opposition movements.

For example, client NGOs can suggest technical refinements to the CDM (turning their backs on the CDM’s grassroots opponents) in exchange for a public declaration on the part of governments or corporations that they ‘take seriously’ a ‘Gold Standard’ for CDM, say. Or they can supply support for (or ‘neutrality’ about) REDD in return for (infeasible) promises to respect the principle of ‘free prior informed consent’ of affected communities. In addition, client NGOs can help expand the entourages of their patrons by seeking fresh clients among grassroots groups, and discrediting movements that refuse such associations. Together with client academics, client NGOs can also pitch in to help displace the blame for carbon trading’s failures onto an ever-expanding universe of culpable ‘external’ institutions. By making more and more far-fetched proposals for reform of that universe, they can help keep carbon trading itself innocent and free of responsibility for the ongoing failures of climate policy.

Thus carbon trading’s lack of results is often attributed to governments’ unwillingness to “accept the advice of climate scientists on global caps” or the ‘irrational’ reluctance of Southern countries to agree to emissions limits.55 Its reliance on preexisting inequalities is presumed to be ‘not its department’ and its vulnerability to financial shenanigans as an ‘external’ question that can be cleared up by the simple expedient of replacing “private with public finance” or subjecting “private finance to competent regulation”.56 By the same token, REDD becomes in principle benign as soon as it is realized that “all forest people have to do is avoid expulsion by global ‘sharpies’.”57 Instead of questioning REDD on the ground that it poses a threat to indigenous territories, “climate justice activists and advocates for the rights and well-being of indigenous people” should simply “concentrate their efforts on helping forest dwellers keep their lands”.58 It is at such points that client academics and NGOs most reveal their patzer roots, and patzer fantasy fully achieves its destiny as a structural component of clientelism.

Saying that “All forest people have to do is avoid expulsion by global ‘sharpies’” is like saying that all chessplayers have to do to win chess games is unilaterally to rearrange both sides’ pieces so that they can inflict a checkmate on their opponents in one move. “I could have won the game if only the knight had been on a different square … if only I had seen the rook behind the queen … if only my opponent had fallen for my clever trick … if only she had not been a master …” This is the stuff of patzer post-mortems, not careful positional re-analyses aimed at learning where you went wrong in the first place. While such lazy reasoning may, in a pinch, serve as balm to the bruised egos of beaten adolescent chess novices, when used to defend carbon trading and REDD it is an emblem of acquiescence in lost land, ruined livelihoods and unchecked expansion of fossil fuel use. With its fatuous endorsement of the project of reshaping the entire political world to preserve the idealized image of a carbon market that ‘could work’, patzer logic is the ultimate gift of NGO clients and armchair economists to their respected patrons.

The beauty of such aspects of the patron-client system of contemporary climate politics is how well they accommodate and assimilate the edgy relationship that traditionally obtains between states or corporations on the one hand and NGOs and critical academics on the other. In the case of climate politics, part of the ‘respect’ that patrons provide clients consists precisely in putting on a public show of being ‘challenged’ by what are in fact tame recommendations or proposals that shift the onus for the failures of official policy onto ‘external’ entities. Clients are thereby allowed to ‘make a difference’. In the classic traditions of patronage, as mentioned above, dollars and jobs as well as the respectability of being associated with a ‘winning’ project may well be on offer.59 However, especially for those whose experience of having been patzers is still fresh in memory, it is the ‘respect’ part of the exchange that is likely to be more mesmerizing.

For patrons, too, much of the value of the exchange lies not in mathematicallycalculable gains, but in the execution of rituals symbolizing and certifying power relations. Patrons particularly treasure the ‘loyalty’ part of the ‘loyal opposition’ that their clients provide. This is why they lay such emphasis on demands such as that expressed in the sentence “we will not take your criticisms of X seriously if you insist on undermining the very foundation of X”. Logically, this claim is almost unintelligible. In reality, elites tend to take most seriously precisely those critiques that are offered by open opponents of the overall approach in question, because they are usually the ones that are the most threatening. But if we rephrase the claim in terms of the rituals of patron-client exchange, then the statement makes perfect sense: “We will not offer you respect unless you offer us loyalty.” This is also why client NGOs, despite appearances, are being rational when they buy into the fiction that they can have an influence on policy only by accepting their patrons’ choice of terrain, and that they can fight on that terrain and exercise ‘damage control’ only if they make ritual obeisance to the policy in question. In many official processes, NGO participation is far better interpreted in patron-client terms than as a way of attempting to achieve environmental or social goals.

We NGOs are naturals for clientelism not only insofar as we tend to depend on philanthropy, but in other senses as well. First, it is chronically unclear what status and leverage NGOs have with respect to official or corporate power – advisory? oppositional? revolutionary? nonexistent? Our links with the public or with grassroots or popular movements tend to be equally unclear or shifting. It is thus perpetually uncertain how secure our existence is, and how much we can depend on anybody for that security. Second, by general consensus NGOs are only as good as the more or less visible, immediate results they achieve; longer-term, intangible outcomes do not usually come in a form that fits into project evaluation reports. Yet even immediate results can be elusive. Where are NGOs going to get them? In the face of this uncertainty, NGOs can be as vulnerable to the temptations of clientelism as any small farmer deprived of the support of customary kin relationships or feudal ties by colonial policy or postcolonial privatization.60 Particularly susceptible are patzer NGOs who – whether through bias, inexperience, ignorance or lack of political imagination – have already limited their other options by cutting themselves off from grassroots movements or by assuming that official or corporate patrons have an oligopoly on the provision of security. Characteristic expressions of the type of patron-clientage that grows out of such circumstances include ‘we have no choice but to become consultants on carbon trading because the train has already left the station’; ‘we are where we are, and the task now is to take what has been placed in legislation and try to improve its efficiency’;61 ‘so many millions of dollars will be available that we ought to be able to use at least some of it for our own purposes’. While there have, of course, been brief moments in the development of climate politics during the last 20 years when inexperienced or overconfident activists or experts – almost exclusively in the North – believed or hoped that they had found, in ‘science’, a source of power independent of private corporations, the state sector or mass movements, the idea that such a deus ex machina might offer politically-weak or unimaginative NGOs a ‘non-political’ refuge from clientelism was always illusory.

Anyone who doubts the dominance of clientelism over environmental concerns among official UN delegations needs only to consider the observations of Trevor Sikorski, a Barclays Capital carbon trader, at the Durban climate talks of 2011. In his blog, Sikorski reports with a certain bemused awe how difficult it was to find UN delegates who knew the first thing about carbon prices: “I decided to see if the random COP delegate (let’s call them COPpers, for short) had any idea of the chaos reigning supreme in the carbon market. I did this by approaching unknown, to me anyway, COPpers and asking them if they could tell me roughly the current market price of CERs.

I was fairly happy to be generous on the answers, so anything between €4 and €6 would get a tick and a hearty well done from me. Like I said, I was being generous. After a punishing 15 minutes of doing this, I realised that the carbon market and global climate change discussions are fairly remote cousins, only vaguely acquainted with each other, hardly speaking to each other really.”62 The “chaos” and acknowledged ineffectiveness of carbon trading, similarly, has never diminished the zeal of client Washington NGOs such as Environmental Defense Fund and WWF to lobby for new carbon markets in Mexico, China, Thailand and elsewhere,63 nor checked the determination of other client networks to expand existing carbon markets in Africa,64 nor put a lid on the extravagance of the promises of billions of dollars of money for forest conservation that REDD enthusiasts make to governments and community groups. It is not that the NGOs and consultants involved are idiots or have donned ideological blinders that prevent them from seeing the reality of carbon markets. It is rather that, in the eyes of such clients, the long-term environmental and economic performance of the markets is simply irrelevant to the patronage networks and other institutional arrangements that sustain them or provide their lives with meaning in the short term.65 While even the most callow of patzers may keep tabs on prices in the wistful hope that the bishop they once captured will someday turn out to have been worth it, Sikorski’s observation suggests that UN delegations and client NGOs and consultants, entwined as they are in clientelistic frameworks in which such details have little meaning, don’t even bother.

From the point of view of environmental effectiveness, the line between patzerdom and clientelism may seem difficult to make out. The opportunities to achieve ‘respect’ that patrons offer their clients – the chance to formulate ‘standards’ and ‘safeguards’, to ‘curb the cowboys’, to ‘improve governance and participation’, to ‘use our system for your own goals (land rights, etc.)’, to engage in ‘damage control’ – may look to those who are concerned with long-term results like nothing more than a few extra poisoned bishops. The point, however, is that patzers become clients precisely by leaving the goal of environmental effectiveness behind. Environmentally speaking, both patzers and clients are failures – but which would you rather be? It is not only bankers and hedge and private equity fund CEOs who smile when Washington NGOs announce a campaign to institute new ‘principles’ and ‘safeguards’ at the World Bank so that it can ‘lead the financial world in the right direction’. The NGOs get a nice flow of cash too. It is not only government ministers and corporate bigwigs who smile when executives of Big Green NGOs accept their invitations to lunch. The Big Green executives get a slap-up meal too – and a fetishistic sense that they are finally getting somewhere.66 Who are the Ultimate Patzers? Many of us early critics of carbon trading flatter ourselves that we are neither as short-sighted as the patzers nor as blind to the power of potential grassroots alliances as the clients. Preening ourselves on our ability to see through the claim that carbon trading is an ‘instrument for reducing the cost of achieving climate goals’, we criticize people who describe their work within the trading establishment as ‘damage control’ as having fallen into a lazy clientelism.

Smugly, we note that all the evidence about the effects of carbon trading (and carbon trading reform) is on our side. European Union carbon prices have been so low for so long, for example, that they have become an embarrassment to EU officials, who, forced to admit that the market is providing no incentives for a green transition, are putting on a belated, desperate, contradictory and doomed show of trying to overhaul it.67 With the Clean Development Mechanism in disrepute, ideas such as that (say) a Gold Standard for carbon credits might help redeem it now look as quaint as the idea that the current US regime might commit itself to deep emissions cuts. The notion that REDD could be used to squeeze authoritarian governments into agreeing to the principle of ‘free prior informed consent’ is clearly on course toward the same destiny.

The moment for ‘we told you so’ triumphalism seems to be fast approaching.

But before gloating too much, perhaps we should take a closer look at ourselves. We find fault with the patzers and the clients for being distracted from the task of grassroots organizing by the carbon market gambit. But haven’t we made the same mistake, year after year mounting all sorts of intellectually-devastating assaults on what is in many ways a mere decoy when we should have been targeting the fossil fuel interests behind it? In learning to ridicule molecule targets, have we not drained a lot of energy that could have been devoted to organizing to keep oil in the soil, coal in the hole, tar sand in the land, gas under the grass? Have we not spent too much time confronting patzers and clients with logic and evidence when we could have instead been building better alliances with the popular movements who have never given much weight to their opinions anyway? By lavishing critical attention on the patzers’ premise that carbon trading is structured to foster (efficient) climate action – when everybody should know that it isn’t – have we not ourselves walked into a trap and wound up reinforcing the delaying and temporizing functions of market environmentalism? Perhaps before too long carbon trading will indeed collapse, and the traders who remain will be released into the streets to seek new, equally lucrative professions. But so what? Carbon markets have had a nice 20-year run, which is perhaps more than anyone had a right to expect. And during that time all the controversy over them – including a lot of the criticism – has succeeded beautifully in distracting public and official attention from the underying issues.

Perhaps it is true that we carbon trading critics have been able to avoid the extreme political naivete of the patzers, as well as the political unimaginativeness or sauve qui peut cynicism of the clients. But again, so what? From the point of view of larger social transformation, how different are we from the market proponents and reformers? We like to tell ourselves we are more ‘masterly’ than the patzers, but, given that we ourselves have spent so much time on non-issues, it has to be asked who the real masters of the game are, if not, again, the US government, the EU, dirty industries in North and South, financial firms, and so on.

Strategy and Patriarchy

Our soul-searching might extend even further. Assuming that we too have been patzers, might not our most patzer-like action, paradoxically, be the very use of concepts like ‘patzer’ and ‘strategy’? No one who uses the word ‘strategy’ can afford to be unaware of the reeking baggage it carries of warfare, exclusion, containment and top-down planning. Traditionally, such words are most at home in a masculinist environment, or at the very least in a simplified, ludic, zero-sum world of winners and losers.68 In assuming everybody must strive for a superior ‘strategy’, are we not precluding the possibility of rejecting such a simplified world, or putting it in its proper place? In heaping insults on patzers, are we not implicitly conjuring up a competitive, machista vision of ourselves as their masters rather than as co-inhabitants of the same world? Are we not buying into the same myths promoting patriarchal containment that we criticize? Shouldn’t we rather try to avoid or transcend those games that encourage a drive to evolve ‘strategies’ to beat patzers? To put it another way, to what extent should we be interested in spending our lives trying (and inevitably failing) to be Garry Kasparov? Most activists are likely to feel that they have better things to do than go around pretending that some day they, too, can learn to be chess masters – miniature Machiavellis like Todd Stern, Andrew Steer, Christiana Figueres, Al Gore or Barack Obama. For those who concentrate on survival rather than triumph, on multiple rather than single identities, on coexistence rather than purging and containment, terms like ‘strategy’ – along with chess and warfare metaphors generally – might appear to be a symptom of something that needs to be resisted.

The point of highlighting the significance of strategy in climate politics, however, is not to propose that popular movements and their supporters necessarily can or should ‘master’ the same game that, during the past 15 years, patzer NGOs and diplomats have consistently lost. Quite the contrary: it is to suggest that they might better honour their nature and achieve their goals by not staking everything on political plays involving complex attempts at commodification in which big business, a few powerful states, and an elite corps of technical and legal consultants are the undisputed pros. By the same token, the point of criticizing clientelism among NGOs is not to say that the challenge of promoting climate justice that they face could be addressed if they somehow found a way of becoming patrons instead of clients, but rather to warn that activists genuinely seeking to achieve climate results need to be wary of the whole system of patron-client relations has grown up around the carbon market as around so many other international policies. For movements that may be relatively weak politically at the outset, the objective of talking about strategy is not necessarily merely to follow the constricted, linear path of proposing expert methodologies for ‘winning’ what are in fact unwinnable zero-sum games, but rather to insist on a broader vision that includes the ‘metagame’ or ‘intergame’ where more political space can be found. Over the past century, many intellectuals of a liberatory bent have furthered this vision by opening up new senses of ‘strategy’ that float away from the word’s militaristic connotations. For example, Karl Polanyi speaks of a ‘double movement’,69 Michel Foucault of ‘discursive strategies’, Ashis Nandy of ways that colonized peoples turn the colonizer into a ‘digestible bolus’,70 James C. Scott of oppressed groups’ development of ‘hidden transcripts’ on ‘protected sites’,71 J. K.

Gibson-Graham of strategies that build alternative economies,72 cultural critics of ‘artistic strategies’, gender theorists of strategies of presentation, and nearly everybody of ‘strategies for survival’ used by the poor. In the case of global warming, one way of moving away from the dominant (militaristic, calculative, repressive) strategy of ‘controlling emissions’ (which inevitably rebounds on those who ‘emit least’ as well as failing to address climate change itself) toward a richer approach would be to help set in motion a more collective questioning of fossil fuel civilization, thus working to connect movements concerned with extraction, pollution, globalization, exploitation of labour and much else besides.

To broaden the meaning of ‘strategy’ in this way is not to suggest that there are no ways popular movements can also use or reclaim its more restrictive senses. Market logics, for example, are constantly used by all sides in nearly all struggles; few critics of market environmentalism can be accused of being ‘against markets’ or of being ‘ideological purists’, although their opponents typically love (for ‘strategic’ reasons) to try to put them in this box.73 74 Moreover, even those practices most narrowly associated with competition, warfare or profit – assuming that they are of interest as power matrices at all – can be seen as internally constituted by various edifying conversations or dances, not simply instrumental activities for control freaks.

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously chose chess as an example of what he calls a ‘practice’ or “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which goods internal to that type of activity” can be furthered and “human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”75 Thus chess analysts tend to focus not on winners, losers or prize money, but rather on what they rather poetically call ‘the truth of a position’. Instead of abandoning the metaphor of chess, it might be fruitful to look at it more deeply and, rather than assuming that the game must be seen as an instrumental ‘black box’ for external ends, identify the range of practices other than warfare with which it is cognate.

Conclusion

Maybe not so many of us can be chess masters. Maybe not so many of us want to be.

Nevertheless, there is something important to be learned from the shame of the patzers – which is all our shame – especially now that the pieces are being set up for new chess games called the ‘green economy’ and ‘climate finance’.

First, amateurs though we may always be at political strategy, the time may have come to devote more effort to understanding the rhythms of ‘long games’ – including the game involving carbon trading that began before Kyoto, or the ‘green economy’ game whose opening moves are being played today. The purpose is not necessarily to learn to outscheme the masters at their own chosen profession, nor to assign any particular prestige to it. But we need to understand their game and its context well enough to know whether and when to play it, always keeping in mind the centrality of painstaking movement-building. Only by acquiring a proper respect for its intricacies and dangers can we forestall a misplaced confidence that we can navigate its formalities as well as or better than they can. That need not entail becoming a calculating fiend, but it may well mean trying to learn to think at least two or three moves ahead rather than just one (always keeping in mind the old adage about being careful what you wish for); and working to acquire, through broad experience and historical study, at least some of the pattern-recognition skills required for better foresight. This may involve not just closer attention to struggles at the grassroots but also comparative study of the whole range of market environmentalisms and the contradictions involved in their construction, as well as historical investigation of accumulation cycles and the convulsions of finance over the past 500 years.76

This carefulness may help instill, second, a greater awareness that the structure of expertise and leadership that shapes official policy in all countries on matters involving fossil fuels will always be characterized by a bottomless indifference and cynicism. This is not a remark about personalities – indeed, to read it that way would be once again to slip into patzerdom – but about institutions and their interests and privileges and about capital and its logic. No one should waste time trying to ‘reprogramme’ the institutions in question with purely rational argument or make alliances where no alliances are possible. Climate change and other global crises are not ozone-type problems that can be solved by governments, corporations, banks or a UN protocol. The movement-building of tomorrow needs to be understood as clearly as the patzers’ failures of yesterday.

Third, Northern environmental activists in particular need to learn to trust more the political judgement that more oppressed groups have learned through hard experience, rather than the flashy, brainlessly self-confident, neoclassical culture of official Washington, London and Brussels meeting rooms or the lazy, superficial tactical theories prevalent among even some of the most well-intentioned professionalized NGOs and academics. As the carbon trading experience has shown, underestimation of the political intelligence of the radical grassroots, particularly in the South, both goes deep and bears a high cost. Programmes of mutual learning regarding new threats, new legal infrastructure, new technostructures of complex trickery and fraud, financialization’s weak points, and ways of breaking NGO patron-client chains are all essential, as is greater solidarity among the whole range of struggles for the commons.

As the future unfolds, it will be increasingly necessary, if never easy, to look beyond the enticing poisoned pawns and bishops to see where the real games lie, in the playing of which so many millions will live or die.77

1 Antonio La Vina, “Climate Change and Developing Countries: Negotiating a Global Regime”, Quezon City: Institute of International Legal Studies, University of the Philippines Law Center, 1997, cited in Herbert Docena, “Guilt, Blame, and Innocence in the International Climate Change Negotiations: The (Im)moral Origins of the Global Carbon Market,” unpublished paper, September 2011, p. 47.

2 One of the more extreme underestimations, by political idealists, of the structural potency of carbon trading in undermining climate goals can be found in Paul Baer, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict, The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework: The Right to Development in a Climate-Constrained World, second edition (Berlin: Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2008), which argues that in a fair world the US would have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 100 per cent by 2030, yet at the same time grudgingly supports carbon trading.

3 Donald MacKenzie, “The Political Economy of Carbon Trading,” London Review of Books 29 (7), 5 April 2007, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n07/donald-mackenzie/the-political-economy-of-carbon-trading.

4 For an expression of frustration from within the carbon trading establishment, see Charlotte Streck’s comment on Michael Grubb’s “Durban: The Darkest Hour” at http://climatestrategies.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/durban_the_darkest_hour/.

5 See, e.g., G. P. Peters, J. C. Minx, C. L. Weber and O. Edenhofer, ‘Growth in Emission Transfers via International Trade from 1990 to 2008′, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(21), 2011.

6 See, e.g., Ricardo Coelho, Green is the Color of Money: The EU ETS Failure as a Model for the “Green Economy”, Carbon Trade Watch: Barcelona, 2012, http://www.carbontradewatch.org/downloads/publications/EU-ETS_Reportweb.

pdf.

7 See, e.g., ICIS Heren, “UK Study Slams the Use of the Clean Development Mechanism by Fossil Fuel Companies”, 20 March 2012, http://www.icis.com/heren/articles/2012/03/19/9542981/emissions/edcm/uk-study-slams-the-use-of-thecarbon- clean-development-mechanism-by-fossil-fuel-companies.html; Michael Szabo, “Oil price far bigger drag on GDP than carbon cost: HSBC”, Point Carbon, 9 March 2012. RWE, for example, which is a highly coal-dependent utility, clearly plans “to wait out investment in non-fossil fuel energy sources” by relying on offsets. See Jerome Whitington, “The Prey of Uncertainty: Climate Change as Opportunity”, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 12 (1/2), pp. 113-137.

8 In 2011, UBS analysts noted that the EUETS “isn’t working” because “prices are already too low to have any environmental impact” (Jeff Coelho, “UBS analysts predict 70 pct collapse in EU CO2 prices”, Reuters, 18 November
2011), while the head of E.ON., Johannes Teyssen, pronounced the scheme “dead”. Prices have continued to decline since. See also, e.g., Ewa Krukowska, “Carbon `Like Titanic’ Sinking on EU Permit Glut: Energy Markets”, Bloomberg,
30 March 2012.

9 “Set-Aside Necessary but not Sufficient to Save EU ETS – Deutsche Bank”, Carbon Finance, 13 April 2012, http://www.carbon-financeonline.com/index.cfm?section=lead&action=view&id=14434&linkref=cnews.

10 Margaret R. Taylor, “Innovation under cap-and-trade programs”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
2012; M. R. Taylor, E. S. Rubin and D. A. Hounshell, “Regulation as the mother of innovation: The case of SO2 control”, Law & Policy 27 (2), 2005, pp. 348-378.

11 Carbon trading allocates industries generous short-term emissions budgets and then tries – through trading – to make it cheap and easy for them to continue business as usual within those budgets. The budgets are generous not only because of the rent-seeking and gaming the system encourages, but also because tough targets would mean very high prices, against which business and consumers would revolt if no technological and social alternatives were available that would keep them from having to pay that price. Emissions budgets are short-term because no government has the power to enforce a target to cut emissions drastically by 2050 – or even 2025 – without immediately starting, to redirect subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy, programs of public investment in rejiggered energy, transport and consumption systems, and so forth. It can’t do these things if it’s committed to the ideology that carbon prices will be the main mechanism for change. For some historical perspective on the limitations of price in managing structural change, the
1920s work of Otto Neurath is useful. See also Kapp, K.W., “Book Review of Einfehrung in die Theorie der Zentralverwalutungswirtschaft, by K. Paul Hensel”, The American Economic Review 45 (4), 1955, pp. 682-85.

12 Whitington, op. cit.

13 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2011, Paris: IEA.

14 See, e.g., Sandbag, ‘The Carbon Rich List: The Companies Profiting from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme’, London, February 2010.

15 See, for example, “Top Tories Admit: We Got it Wrong on Third Runway at Heathrow”, The Guardian; Reuters, “Polluters Winners from Carbon Scheme, Latest Rout”, 23 June 2011.

16 In US legal tradition, even if discharges were not known at the time to be hazardous, they are still subject to strict tort liability. See Jagdish Bhagwati, “A New Approach to Tackling Climate Change,” Financial Times, 22 February 2
17 Docena, op. cit.

18 “Polluter pays” systems, depending on how they are institutionalized, can involve polluters paying fees for use of pollution dumps rather than fines for illicit encroachment on them. The difference is important. The former not only legitimizes pollution; it also encourages the notion that experts have the ability and the power to calculate all costs of pollution to society, while at the same time reducing the power of society to decide reparations for contamination through legal means that depend only partly on economic calculation.

19 Ibid., p. 42.

20 See, for example, Lambert Schneider, “Perverse Incentives under the CDM: An Evaluation of HFC-23 Destruction Projects”, Climate Policy 11 (2), pp. 851-864; Chris Lang, “McKinsey’s Advice on REDD is ‘Fundamentally Flawed,’ Says Greenpeace”, REDDMonitor, 8 April 2011, http://www.redd-monitor.org/2011/04/08/mckinsey-advice-on-redd-isfundamentally- flawed-says-greenpeace/; Michael Szabo, ‘Kyoto May Push Factories to Pollute More: UN report’, Reuters, 2 July 2010; ‘EU Lawmakers Wade into HFC Debate’, Point Carbon, 15 July 2010; Herbert Docena, The Clean Development Mechanism in the Philippines: Costly, Dirty, Money-Making Schemes, Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, 2010, available at http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk. The World Bank, similarly, by lowering its efficiency standards for thermal power plant loans, has been able to ramp up production of carbon credits and thus boost revenues from the 13 per cent brokerage fee it charges for the offset transactions it mediates (Daphne Wysham, “Nothing More than Hot Air”, Earth Island Journal, Summer 2011).

21 Kathleen McAfee, “The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets”, Development and Change 43 (1),
2012: 105-131.

22 This distinction is due to Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain.

23 See, e.g., E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, Free Press: New York, 1990.

24 Pedro Moura Costa, one of the pioneers of the carbon market and a co-founder of the firm EcoSecurities, estimates
(perhaps with some exaggeration) that the carbon trading sector in the City of London alone involves 9,000 firms and
160,000 employees. See Fabrina Furtado, Ambientalismo de Espetaculo: Economia Verde e Mercado de Carbono no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: PACS and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2012), p. 92. The World Bank is said to employ 200 staff in carbon trading.

25 Chris Lang, “Interview with Frances Seymour”, REDD Monitor, www.redd-monitor.org.

26 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

27 “Nuestra Casa en el Universo”, edited by Dr. Catherine Potvin of McGill University’s Neotropical Ecology Lab and Jorge Ventocilla of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, is available at http://biology.mcgill.ca/faculty/potvin/NEL/Nuestra_Casa_en%20el%20Universo.pdf.

28 See http://biology.mcgill.ca/faculty/potvin/NEL/index.html. REDD+ is a method for “reducing emissions” [sic] that involves not just combating deforestation and forest degradation, but also conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

29 Potvin and Ventocilla, op. cit., p. 5.

30 On p. 10, an ‘equivalence’ between carbon dioxide and methane is also posited.

31 This is an obvious mistake, climatologically speaking, since biotic carbon belongs to an ‘active’, above-ground carbon pool in constant relationship with the atmosphere, whereas fossil carbon belongs to a vast below-ground pool cut off from the atmosphere for millions of years.

32 The equation of hypothetical ‘reductions’ with actual reductions is the (again, unscientific) premise underlying carbon offsets. See, e.g., Larry Lohmann, “The Endless Algebra of Climate Markets,” Capitalism Nature Socialism Vol. 22, No.

4 (2011) pp. 93-116.

33 It is not simply that payments for environmental services, say, can ‘crowd out’ normative or collective obligations to conserve (Arvild Vatn, “An institutional analysis of payments for environmental services”, Ecological Economics 69,
1245-1252) and thus can be counterproductive environmentally. The institutions required for such a market to work also embed a huge range of distinctive new calculating and moral practices in everyday work life: questions, surveys, forms, science, etc. These procedures create improvised new values that tend to confuse juridical or commons decision-making processes for deciding compensation, reparations, and the relevance of numbers thereto.

34 Noting the way conflicting moral or aesthetic languages interact in another context, musicologist Susan McClary writes that, although at one level no one wants to see Carmen die at the end of the eponymous opera, “Bizet’s musical strategies set up almost unbearable tensions that cause the listener not only to accept Carmen’s death as inevitable but actually to desire it” (Feminine Endings: Gender, Music and Sexuality, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 62).

35 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long 20th Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Time, London: Verso, 1994. See also the papers of Jason W. Moore.

36 Alexandra Ourousoff, Wall Street at War, London: Polity Press, 2010.

37 Larry Lohmann, “Endless Algebra”; Morgan M. Robertson, ‘The Neoliberalization of Ecosystem Services: Wetland Mitigation Banking and Problems in Environmental Governance’, Geoforum, 35(3), 2004; Melissa Leach, James Fairhead and James Fraser, ‘Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2012, 285-307. Merrill Lynch, for example, has partnered with Dorjee Sun, a forest carbon trading promoter, in endorsing the pseudo-climatology underpinning REDD, according to which preventing the release of biotic carbon into the atmosphere is climatically equivalent to halting the flow of underground fossil carbon into the above-ground system comprising atmosphere, oceans, biota and surface geology.

38 Members of the International Emissions Trading Association, for example, in lobbying for a more liquid carbon market with greater opportunities for intermediation and speculation, attempt to influence the characteristics of carbon commodities themselves. See, e.g., International Emissions Trading Association, “IETA response to the call for input on modalities and procedures for standardized baselines”, March 22, 2010, http://cdm.unfccc.int/about/standardized_baselines/sbase_ieta.pdf, which proposes means for streamlining the production of carbon credits through more ‘mechanized’ procedures of commodity construction that can quickly commensurate highly diverse modes of ‘carbon-saving’ behaviour. Cf. Matthew Paterson, “Who and what are carbon markets for? Politics and the development of climate policy, Climate Policy, 12:1 (2012), pp. 82-97.

39 This update of Marx’s concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ is due to geographer David Harvey.

40 See “Re-Imagining the Population Debate”, Corner House briefing paper, 2004, www.thecornerhouse.org.uk; The Corner House, Energy Security: For Whom? For What?, Sturminster Newton: The Corner House, 2012.

41 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, London: Melville House, 2011, pp. 389-90; Midnight Oil Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992, Jamaica Plain, MA: Midnight Notes, 1992.

42 Midnight Oil Collective, op. cit., p. 220.

43 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of The Geobody of a Nation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1994.

44 Joan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002.

45 Zeze Weiss, ‘Acre + 20: Uma Terra de Sonhos, Um Mundo de Oportunidades’, Rio Branco: 2012. Among the supporters of the plan are the World Bank, WWF and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Acre Law N. 2.308 – reportedly first drafted in English – was promulgated on 22 October 2010 to incentivize the ‘maintenance and expansion of supply’ of ‘ecosystem services and products’.

46 McClary, op. cit. “[T]he opera would not, in fact, work if it were not playing into some of the more agonizing contradictions of Western culture. Jose [the hero] … would not become embroiled in this mess if he were not experiencing considerable discontent with what ordered rational patriarchal culture offers him: control over others if (but only if) he repudiates his own body and feelings…” (p. 66). Eventually he has to retreat to the “black and white security of patriarchy as he manages to reach closure only in a key other than the one demanded by convention.”.

47 McClary. op. cit., p. 186.

48 See, for example, the consulting firm McKinsey’s ‘cost curves’ for REDD.

49 Slavoj Zizek, “Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses”, 2007, http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm and http://www.lacan.com/zizecology2.htm.

50 Larry Lohmann, “Carbon Trading, Climate Justice and the Production of Ignorance: Ten Examples”, Development, Vol.

51, No. 3 (2008) pp. 359-365.

51 Whitington, op. cit., p. 113.

52 John Hilsenrath, “Cap-and-Trade’s Unlikely Critics: Its Creators”, Wall Street Journal, 13 August 2009.

53 J. B. Skjærseth and J. Wettestad, EU Emissions Trading: Initiation, Decision-Making and Implementation, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008; Marcel Braun, “The Evolution of Emissions Trading in the European Union: The Role of Policy Networks, Knowledge and Policy Entrepreneurs”, Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (3-4), 2009.

54 The eccentric chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer, as Robert Osterbergh points out, sometimes said that he didn’t know exactly why he moved a certain piece to a certain position – he merely “felt that that the board was burning in that particular spot” and therefore he had to move there.

55 Robin Hahnel, “Left Clouds Over Climate Change Policy”, Review of Radical Political Economics, forthcoming.

56 Ibid. See also Todd Henderson, “Good Derivatives”, an interview with Richard Sandor at the University of Chicago, 10 May 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgBVYF7Lp70.

57 Hahnel, op. cit.

58 Ibid.

59 For example, in Indonesia the indigenous network AMAN has received US$3 million for REDD from the World Bank and Japan (http://www.chinadaily.c om.cn/xinhua/2012-04-19/content_5723224.html ) , and Kemitran $4.7 million from Norway plus about $500,000 from CLUS and the Ford Foundation (http://bit.ly/JYYpyQ).

60 “As the communal land controlled by the village dwindled, as outsiders came increasingly to own land in the village, and as villagers increasingly worked for nonkin, the value of patron-client links increased for all concerned. In traditional Southeast Asia, as in feudal Europe … the inability of kindreds to provide adequate protection and security fostered the growth of patron-client structures. Both corporate kin groups and corporate village structures had depended on a certain level of economic autarchy for their vitality – an autarchy which colonial economic policy quickly eroded.

These corporate structures (where they existed) tended to lose their monopoly over resources and personnel in situations where land and labor became free commodities … As a mechanism for protection or for advancement, patron-client dyads will flourish when kinship bonds alone become inadequate for these purposes” (James C. Scott, ‘Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Mar., 1972), pp. 91-113). See also Peter Vandergeest, “Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-Help in Thailand”, Development and Change 22 (1991), pp. 421-443 for a superb discussion of why the gift relationship, which overlaps with patron-clientage, “is not necessarily a relation which is opposed to ‘capitalist relations’” (p. 439).

61 Dieter Helm, “EU Climate Change Policy – A Critique”, in Helm and Hepburn, The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 244.

62 Trevor Sikorski, Durban guest blog, 30 November: “Two cents’ worth”, 30 November, 2011 http://www.carbonfinanceonline.

com/index.cfmsection=cop&action=view&id=14109.

63 Valene Volcovici, “Mexico to Consider Domestic Carbon Market in Climate Bill”, Point Carbon, 2 February 2012.

64 International Institute for Sustainable Development, “A Summary Report of the Fourth Africa Carbon Forum”, Africa Carbon Forum Bulletin, Vol 17, No. 1 (23 April 2012), http://www.iisd.ca/africa/carbon/acf/acf4/.

65 The same is perhaps true with respect to average players in markets in complex derivatives, which swiftly reasserted their economic prominence following the financial crash, despite increased awareness of their dangers.

66 To put it in terms that Slavoj Zizek uses to describe certain kinds of fetish, the executives ‘know very well’ that they are not getting anywhere, ‘mais quand meme …’, they continue to ‘believe’.

67 Point Carbon, “EC Scraps Private CO2 Market Briefing after Angering Traders”, 26 April 2012; Ali Qassim, “Few Policy Options Available to Maintain Faith in EU Carbon Trading, Analysts Say”, Bloomberg Daily Report for Executives, 1 May 2012.

68 The poet George Oppen once noted that it always seems obvious at the time which political actions are valuable or not, although afterwards such judgements are impossible to prove; whereas with art it’s impossible to prove whether an art work is valuable at the time of its creation, yet afterwards it becomes perfectly clear whether it is or not.

69 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 (1944).

70 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1983.

71 James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

72 J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Post-Capitalist Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

73 “In a meeting in Dar es Salaam in 2004, a UNDP official asked me if I was ‘against markets’. We were discussing the prospects of the country’s new land law for safeguarding local land rights in the light of the current policy environment to promote private investment by setting up a national land bank for foreign investors. The request that I declare whether I was ‘for them’ or ‘against them’ seemed quite strange, given that we were talking about a variety of forces influencing the new law’s implications for rural livelihoods and development. This question was not only problematic for the false choice that it posed, but also for presenting a development narrative in which that choice was even imaginable. For many Africans, rejecting all markets is not plausible or desirable, no more than blindly embracing widespread and deepening market relations as a solution for poverty, insecurity and rights” (Benjamin Gardner, ‘Tourism and the politics of the global land grab in Tanzania: markets, appropriation and recognition’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2012, 377-402, pp. 397-98).

74 In a parallel from musical politics, McClary analyzes the way a Madonna song “sets up residence on the moments of the harmonic context that fluctuate” between a ‘masculine’ single resolution and a more ‘feminine’ region of desire and freedom: “[T]o the extent that identification with the feminine moment in the narrative spells death, the piece cannot embrace this reality without losing strategic control. Thus the singer risks resisting identification with ‘her own’ area, even if it means repeated encounters with that which would contain her … Rather than deciding for the sake of secure identity (a move that would lapse back into the narrative of masculine subjectivity), she inhabits both and thus refuses closure” (op. cit., p. 160).

75 MacIntyre, After Virtue, London: Duckworth, 1981.

76 See, e.g., Larry Lohmann, “Interpretive Openness and Climate Action in an Age of Market Environmentalism”, in Chris Methmann, Delf Rothe, Benjamin Stephan (eds.) , (De)Constructing the Greenhouse: Interpretive Approaches to Global Climate Governance, Routledge, forthcoming.

77 For help in thinking about and writing this article, I am grateful to Oscar Reyes, Antonio Tricarico, Robert Osterbergh, Niclas Hallstrom, Jutta Kill, Nick Hildyard, Witoon Permpongsacharoen, Hendro Sangkoyo, Terisa Turner, Ana Isla and Khadija Sharife.

Martin Creamer of Mining Weekly writes about the numbers that make the owners of the minimg sector (including energy of course) wet themsselves for future share prices. If this unsustainable model of “development” and consumption spreads across the planet we shall hundreds of thousands of new tower blocks of constructions and the slums [...]]]> Editorial comment:

Martin Creamer of Mining Weekly writes about the numbers that make the owners of the minimg sector (including energy of course) wet themsselves for future share prices. If this unsustainable model of “development” and consumption spreads across the planet we shall hundreds of thousands of new tower blocks of constructions and the slums that come with them to build and build then to fix, rebult, heat etc… etc… The proress is endless. Theis development model makes mining a very lucrative industry. Here are some of the numbers behind the theories of development and the profitability of Mining

JOHANNESBURG: SOUTH AFRICA  http://miningweekly.com/

Projections to 2025 point to cities around the world constructing the equivalent of the entire land area of Austria – 80 000 km² – in residential and commercial floor space, which would require $80-trillion worth of investment.

Moreover, Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll said at the presentation of the diversified major’s latest set of results, which saw operating profit fall 38% to $3.7-billion, that demand growth from now to 2025 for container traffic was expected to grow at a compound yearly growth rate of 7.2%.

The global car fleet, Carroll added, was projected to double to 1.7-billion by 2030, covering ten times the average distance between the earth and the moon, and cities would need an additional $10-trillion in yearly investments.

While tough short-term demand conditions confronted the industry, long-term demand and supply scenarios continued to point to the modern world being mining’s oyster.

The latest Economist magazine quotes BHP Billiton as projecting another 250-million Chinese to swop their villages for cities in the next 15 years, which would follow the 200-million that did so between 2000 and 2010, and diversified major Vale of Brazil tells a similar story of commodities-boosting urban growth on the way.

Carroll pointed out further that as development in emerging countries shifted over time from investment to consumption, the pattern of demand would change – but still keep mining in the money.

As that shift from investment to consumption took place, the rate of demand for steel – and consequently iron-ore, coking coal and manganese – would moderate, but then the expanding middle classes in many emerging countries should boost consumption of precious metals and minerals – in Anglo’s case, platinum and diamonds – as that transition occured.

One billion people were forecast to enter the consuming classes by 2025 and Carroll emphasised that Anglo’s diversified and time-balanced portfolio was positioning the company well to take advantage of the structural changes in the global economy.

What was happening on the supply front was, Carroll added, just as important to prices as the long-term demand picture.

Supply constraints – as well as difficulties producers faced to deliver that supply – would underpin prices.

Projects were facing significant delays as a result of increasingly complex planning and permitting regimes, exemplified by what Anglo itself was experiencing with its Minas-Rio iron-ore project in Brazil, a country where some 40 projects worth $225-billion were currently facing delays averaging 24 months.

Developing and developed countries alike were seeking a larger slice of the mining cake, whether it was through joint ventures with mining companies, windfall taxes, increased royalties and, in some cases, mining-asset expropriation.

Remaining resources were located in places difficult to access and which had underdeveloped or nonexistent infrastructure.

At the same time, mining itself was becoming more difficult, with existing operations facing grade declines and higher waste stripping.

In an industry that thought in decades rather than years, capital allocation and balance sheet management required discipline and sound judgement and Anglo was invested in the right commodities at the right high quality, right low cost and right time, Carroll reiterated.

Author: Sandra Cuffe Day of Action organizers speak out about repression, connections, solidarity

VANCOUVER CANADA —From Canada to Argentina, preparations are well underway for the Continental Day of Action Against Canadian Mega Resource Extraction on August 1.

Dozens of organizations have signed a call for the day of protest in solidarity with communities impacted [...]]]>  

Author: Sandra Cuffe
Day of Action organizers speak out about repression, connections, solidarity

VANCOUVER CANADA —From Canada to Argentina, preparations are well underway for the Continental Day of Action Against Canadian Mega Resource Extraction on August 1.

Dozens of organizations have signed a call for the day of protest in solidarity with communities impacted by Canadian extractive industries. The event is meant to highlight the dominance of the Canadian mining industry worldwide. Their demands range from divestment to putting people before profit.

But some activists in North America argue that the serious repression accompanying Canadian mining around the world requires going further than those initial demands. They say that acknowledgment, a sense of urgency and a deeper strategic analysis for concrete local action are also needed. Communities and organizers resisting extractive industry projects in Latin America continue to face displacement, harassment, threats, and death, often dismissed as part of unrelated violence and conflicts.

Decentralized actions will be taking place throughout the western hemisphere on Wednesday, including a national day of mobilization in regions of mining conflict in Colombia, a memorial in Vancouver to remember those who have lost their lives opposing mining projects and a rally outside the Canadian Embassy in San Salvador.

The National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining (Mesa Nacional Frente a la Mineria Metalica) in El Salvador, comprised of community-based groups affected by mining as well as environmental and other organizations across the country, will be actively participating in the day of action. Vidalina Morales spoke with The Dominion from her home in the department of Cabanas, El Salvador, where Vancouver-based Pacific Rim’s plans to develop a gold mine have been fraught with controversy.

“We’re going to rally in front of the Canadian Embassy here in El Salvador,” said Morales, adding that there will also be a press conference on-site. Over the course of the Roundtable’s actions and campaigns, many affiliated organizations have faced ongoing human rights violations, particularly in Cabanas.

The community-based resistance to the Pacific Rim mining project in Cabanas has suffered extreme repression, including murders of several active community organizers and activists from communities in the vicinity. Earlier this month, 19-year-old engineering student David Alexander Urias was murdered in the community of Palo Bonito, says Morales, only a few kilometres from Pacific Rim’s operations. His murder has been reported as being gang-related, but Morales says local community organizers suspect otherwise.

“Because we continue directly in the region where we’re in conflict and where the company has shown so much recent interest in mineral exploration, we’ve seen some things that seem surprising to us—when families that have been long-time supporters of our efforts are attacked. Here in this department where we live, a youth [David] who was only 19 years old was recently murdered—a young student who is the son of a woman who has been very involved in this struggle,” she said.

“Here, anything that happens, they always blame it on the gangs, because it’s the easiest way to deny links to other things,” said Morales.

In Colombia, murders, threats and other repression against individuals and communities facing large-scale mining activities around the country take place amid an ongoing armed conflict. Mario Valencia, a member of the Colombian Network Against Large-Scale Transnational Mining—RECLAME—spoke with The Dominion via telephone from Bogota, where preparations for the August 1 day of action are in full swing.

“In the middle of this conflict, the issue of mining can’t be seen as unconnected because many of these conflicts take place in zones that are rich in natural resources…It’s a struggle for territory. It has to do with taking possession of these areas—for example, displacing small-scale miners from territories where they have been mining for years, or even for centuries, and the conflict becomes a tool for that to happen,” said Valencia. “The National Confederation of Miners of Colombia, which unites small and medium-scale miners, is currently threatened and being persecuted by the government, to make way for transnational companies.”

In Colombia, a national day of mobilization “to stop the mining-energy locomotive” is being organized, coordinated by an alliance of unions, communities, and organizations, including the National Confederation of Miners and RECLAME. Rallies, marches, carnival-style parades and cultural festivals will be held in over a dozen different departments, all regions with mining conflicts. In Caldas, for example, actions will denounce the displacement of communities to make way for Canadian company Gran Colombia Gold’s Marmato mining project, says Valencia.

“Mining is one of the principal activities in the Colombian economy. The government’s idea is that Colombia should be a mining country, so the most important issue is territorial defense. We have proposed to take this on as the defense of life, the defense of water, the defense of territory, so that these transnational companies can’t find the conflict, the pretext to enter these regions,” he told The Dominion.

Valencia says that organizations in Colombia realized that they would not be able to confront the mining policy alone—a mining policy imposed on the country from outside but fiercely adopted by the Colombian government. Some of the sectors that have joined forces against transnational mining in Colombia may not seem like natural allies to some people, he says, given that they include communities resisting mining, mining and energy sector workers, small-scale miners and environmental organizations.

“Obviously not everything is all rosy and there are conflicts, but we are fundamentally united in RECLAME for one reason,” Valencia explained, adding that the unity is a product of years of discussion. “We came to the understanding that the main aspect of the contradiction on the issue of mining isn’t between workers and communities or between environmentalists and small-scale miners, but that the principal contradiction is with transnational large-scale mining companies.”

Root Force, a campaign based out of Tucson, Arizona, also connects environmental, social and other justice issues through a strategic anti-infrastructure approach to solidarity with communities in Latin America resisting extractive industry projects. Root Force has signed onto the call for the Continental Day of Action, although concrete actions are left to the discretion of the various autonomous collectives and affiliate groups scattered throughout the southwestern US, the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

“The sort of broader goal of Root Force is to help bring down this global economic system that is at the root of the various injustices that so many of the environmental and social justice groups are organizing against,” Ben Pachano, an organizer with Root Force, told The Dominion in a telephone interview. “The method that we’ve identified for doing that is by preventing the expansion of this resource extraction and transportation infrastructure that underlies the system.

“The actions that Root Force promotes and that, you know, our affiliate and allied groups take are aiming toward that ultimate goal, which is itself an act of solidarity, because the idea is that oppression of an Indigenous community resisting a mine, say in Guatemala, is coming in large part because of the demand for that metal in the first world,” said Pachano.

The organization provides resources to facilitate connections between like-minded groups, to raise awareness about struggles against extractive and infrastructure projects in Latin America and their connections to the US, and to promote effective strategic action at the local level.

“Because of that sort of interconnected nature of basically a globalized capitalist economy, that means that you don’t necessarily need to be in the place where the resources are being extracted to take actions affecting that extraction,” he said.

In Canada, which is home to companies that together own more than 3,000 mining projects around the world, actions are planned across the country. In Toronto, where many corporate headquarters and the Toronto Stock Exchange are located, people will mobilize at Queen’s Park. In Vancouver, another city with a huge number of mining company offices, the local Mining Justice Alliance is hosting a memorial action outside of Goldcorp’s head office.

Latin American communities spearheaded the Continental Day of Action, but the Vancouver action is also in solidarity with communities in Asia-Pacific, in Africa, locally and around the world, Mining Justice Alliance member Beth Dollaga told The Dominion. She is also a founding member of Canada-Philippines Solidarity for Human Rights and sees the same patterns of extraction and repression that occur in the Philippines happening elsewhere as well. Paramilitaries around the world are often trained not just to protect corporate infrastructure, she says, but also to harass communities resisting mining and people who speak out in support of community resistance.

“We know that the aggressive extraction—mining—it’s not just the environment plundered or killed, but also mostly Indigenous people, because this happens in the remotest areas of places, like in Latin America or anywhere in Asia-Pacific. So most of these places are actually the Indigenous ancestral domain. And people are killed,” she said.

“Part of this event is also to remember them. And to continue. It’s not just remembering those people, those martyred activists, but also to carry on and pick up from [where they left off], in solidarity, from wherever we are,” said Dollaga.

Dollaga is not the only one to recognize that solidarity organizing with resistance to Canadian extractive projects is often a matter of life or death for people from affected communities. Pachano also emphasizes that for many, it is a fight for survival.

“When you look at a lot of communities that are opposing mega-extraction projects, often the root of their opposition is that they believe that these projects will destroy their way of life and that at the end of the day it’s a battle for survival,” said Pachano. “Solidarity requires that we take that—that we sort of take to heart the urgency of the battles we’re in solidarity with.” “Ultimately, true solidarity requires looking at the systems that are producing these types of exploitations and actively trying to take them down.”

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.