The plan enables a colonial war on the global south.

It is no wonder that a Shell Oil executive was caught boasting about how they helped write the Paris Agreement, particularly the sections that allow for carbon trading.21 As Laura Terzani writes, “net zero emissions is not zero emissions.”22 In practice, net zero usually means wealthy countries passing the responsibility for their emissions on to poorer countries through creative accounting. When we pare down the ecological crisis to the demands of climate reductionism, talking about capitalism is dismissed as “off message.” Should it be any surprise, then, that climate policy has just become a new scam allowing the wealthy to make even more money?

It’s worse than mere profiteering, as a social war analysis would lead us to suspect. Carbon trading creates a market for major land grabs across the Global South, a final nail in the coffin of the world’s peasants, and a continuation of the colonial dynamics that export the costs of the ecological crisis to poorer countries. It is also a key part of “payment for ecosystem services,” a way of “quantifying and constructing the natural environment as a ‘service provider’ commensurable with financial markets,” which in turn constitutes a pillar of “property-based counterinsurgency,” the pernicious and often brutal repression of movements to defend the land.23

Placing our trust in Paris is an extremely precarious proposition. As democracy unravels, fewer and fewer governments are following a consistent course in policy. The worse the crisis gets, the better the electoral calculus of right-wing populism and economic nationalism that can lead to 180-degree shifts in policy. This is a major strategic liability for the mainstream climate movement, as seen in the US and Canada withdrawing from their climate commitments, Modi in India encouraging coal mining and canceling the ban on single-use plastics, or Bolsonaro in Brazil pillaging the Amazon for increased political and economic capital. The more power they have, the less governments need to listen to us.