Their arguments are developed by elites in the South who will prosper off of the dispossession caused by climate taxes

These existing critiques sometimes give the impression, however, that the North has been dictating climate change policy to a ‘helpless’ South. As recent climate change negotiations have shown, however, nothing could be further from the truth. What we see, instead, are Southern elites – particularly those in the BRICS countries – pushing for the extension of carbon markets. Given Marini’s insights into the pressures driving sub-imperialism within the periphery of the world-economy, it is not at all surprising that the development of the CDM, as well as VOM projects, is dominated by the BRICS countries today (Ganguly & Bandyopadhyay, 2011). More than 70% of all those CDM projects that have been registered so far, for example, are located in Brazil, China and India (UNFCCC, 2012). As contributions to Böhm and Dabhi (2009) show, many of these CDM and VOM projects (all put forward as climate change mitigation projects) involve the development of big industrial plants; these plants have significant negative effects on local communities and ecosystems in the South that are situated in close proximity to them. And of course, these plants are owned by Southern elites, who are benefiting financially by selling carbon credits to polluters in the most developed industrial countries. As Lohmann puts it, ‘heavy polluters and local corporate “bad citizens,” such as India’s Tata Group, ITC, Birla, and Jindal, Korea’s Hu-Chems Fine Chemical, Brazil’s Votorantim and South Africa’s Mondi and Sasol, become stars of heroic green narratives,’ while villagers and local communities continue to see their local livelihoods and environments destroyed by these heavy-weight industrial companies (Lohmann, 2008a, p. 364). This ‘green’ façade is supported by national governmental agencies in these countries, such as the DNAs. While these agencies are meant to monitor CDM projects and ensure that local sustainable development goals are achieved, the DNAs are instead run like pro-business agencies that see the CDM projects as welcome economic development and as opportunities to enhance the profits of domestic firms (Gilbertson, 2009; Cabello, 2009). Elite social groups in the BRICS countries have an inherent interest in expanding carbon markets, because they profit directly from them, without having to feel any of the pain of climate change mitigation themselves. Newell and Paterson (2010) welcome this aspect of the broadening global support for carbon markets. In their view, these kinds of financial incentives – which attract powerful economic and political groups to the cause of climate change mitigation – will help capitalism to decarbonize itself and hence avoid the climate change abyss. We are, however, less convinced that much is to be celebrated in the way that capitalism has embraced carbon markets. We see these tools as essentially providing new profit opportunities for elite actors, by financializing a new commodity (essentially air) in the form of ‘carbon allowances’ and ‘carbon credits.’ These commodification processes are, in turn, facilitating processes of dispossession, uneven development and sub-imperialism in the South, while simultaneously exacerbating ecological degradation and unsustainable, crisis-prone development paths in many of the localities in which the new ‘clean development’ projects are based.