PULP, PAPER, POWER AND KYOTO
Larry Lohmann
Vitoria, August 2001

Summary:

1. What are the pulp and paper industry's leading political and technical characteristics?

• Extremely large scale.
  • Machinery.
  • Parcels of land supplying raw materials.
• Extreme centralization, both physical and political (=hostility to local diversity and local needs).
• A drive to simplify.
  • Landscapes.
  • Ecosystems.
  • Biological/genetic diversity.
  • Political systems.
• Extreme capital intensity (=few opportunities for employment).
• Heavy reliance on public subsidies.
• Heavy dependence on wood rather than other fibres and the associated chlorine-intensive processes.
• Cyclicity (boom and bust pattern).
• A need to create indefinitely expanding demand, thus luxury demand.

2. Where do these characteristics come from? How did they evolve over the past 200 years?

3. Whose interests do these characteristics serve? What alliances enforce them and how?

• Pulp and paper firms.
• Consultancies.
• Technology suppliers.
• Industry associations.
• Bilateral agencies.
• State investment and export credit agencies.
• Multilateral agencies.
• National states.
• Research institutes and NGOs.
• Promoters of packaging-intensive trade.
  • Agencies of economic globalization.
  • Supermarket systems, etc.
• Elite consumers.

4. How does the Kyoto Protocol fit in?

• Background to current climate politics.
  • The North overuses atmospheric greenhouse-gas "dumps" (US alone uses the entire "dump" which is available if CO2 concentrations are to be stabilized at twice pre-Industrial Revolution levels), leading to climate crisis.
  • Northerners use far more of these "dumps" than Southerners (India emits 0.2 tonnes of carbon per capita per year, US 5.2).
• Northern industry and society therefore under world pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically.
• North (especially US, Japan, Australia, Canada) reluctant to do so.
• North therefore seeks to delay cuts through, e.g., planting trees cheaply in the South, expanding its neocolonialist ecological footprint even further. Inequalities in use of the atmosphere to be augmented by new land takeovers. Poorer pollution-affected communities in the North also on course to suffer from this initiative.
• Southern opposition moderated through money, threats, and the building of alliances with possible beneficiaries. Agreement reached in July 2001 in Bonn by which Northern countries can try to compensate for up to 1% of their total emissions through projects in the South, with corporations, consultants, brokers and development agencies making profits.
• Accordingly, new subsidies for plantation interests (see 1. and 3. above) are on the way.
• But the carbon sink market won't work.
  • It's based on scientific fraud.
    • The biophysics is too uncertain.
    • Who receives the credit can't be resolved.
    • Sink projects involve social processes whose carbon impacts are unquantifiable.
    • The difference between with-project and without-project scenarios cannot be quantified.
    • Trying to use plantations as carbon sinks has its own additional problems.
  • Floods of fraudulent credits will cause the market to disintegrate, harming those who have entered it.
  • While it lasts, the carbon sink market will actually make the climate worse.
• Possible consequences.

5. How can more democratic paths be supported?

• Need to look at the issues as political and interlinked.
• Need to acknowledge insufficiency of "technical" solutions. which confine themselves to single characteristics of the industry in isolation: e.g., "reduce demand", "certify plantations", "recycle", "eliminate chlorine", "integrate conservation areas", "use nonwood materials", "consult environmentalists", "improve scientific understanding of dangerous impacts".
• Support for local initiatives.
• Cooperative research into industry restructuring.
• Need to discuss rights to the atmosphere as well as rights to land.