OUTSOURCING POLLUTION AND ENERGY-INTENSIVE PRODUCTION

VANDANA SHIVA

This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012). The Energy Reader is copyright © 2012 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute.

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Photo: Reuters. Rampant air pollution is one of the high costs of China’s rapid economic growth.

about the author

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000) and Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (2008). She is the founder of Navdanya, a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds, and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award. She holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of science and a PhD in particle physics.

“Outsourcing Pollution and Energy Intensive Production” by Vandana Shiva includes material that has appeared elsewhere; used by permission of the author.

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Globalization, Equity, and Climate Change

Climate change today is global in cause and global in effect. The globalization of economies has

outsourced energy-intensive production to countries like China, whose cheap products flood the shelves of supermarkets in the rich North and for the rich in the South. The corporations of the North and the consum-ers of the North thus have their share of contributions to increased emissions in the countries of the South.

In a globalized economy that runs on fossil fuels, addressing pollution by setting emissions levels for each country is inappropriate for two reasons. First, not all the citizens of a country contribute to the pol-lution. As a result of becoming the world’s factory, China has seen its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rise from 13.8 percent of the world’s total in 2005 to 22 percent in 2006; this outstrips the emissions of the United States and puts China in first place worldwide. But while China produced 6.2 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2006 compared with 5.75 billion metric tons for the United States, its per capita emissions of CO2 were only 4.7 metric tons, compared with 22 metric tons for the United States.

Further, much of China’s 6.2 billion metric tons of CO2

emissions could just as easily be considered U.S. emis-sions because U.S. companies have outsourced to China

the manufacture of goods that are eventually consumed in the United States. Most of what U.S. superstores sell is produced in China. As Charles Fishman reports,

Wal-Mart, which in the early 1990s trumpeted its claim to ‘Buy America’, doubled its imports from China between 1997 and 2002 to $12 billion. In the next two years, Wal-Mart increased Chinese imports again by 50 percent, so that in 2004 the company and its suppliers landed Chinese-made goods in the United States with a wholesale value of $18 billion.1

Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the U.S. economy—and Walmart dominates retail. During the period between 1997 and 2004, while jobs in U.S. manufacturing fell by 20 percent, Walmart’s imports from China increased by 200 percent.2 Americans are shopping themselves out of jobs while Walmart’s every-day lowest price does not include the costs of climate change or the costs of the destruction of China’s land, water, and air. As Qin Gang, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said in June 2007, “China is now the fac-tory of the world. Developed countries have transferred a lot of manufacturing to China. What many western consumers wear, live in, even eat, is made in China.”3 Outsourcing of manufacturing is also the outsourcing of pollution. As the outsourcing of manufacturing does not mean that companies outsource profits, the car-bon footprint should be counted in the accounts of the

Globalization has largely been seen in the context of the outsourcing of information technologies. But the larger

outsourcing that globalization is leading to is the outsourcing of pollution and the energy-intensive production of goods.

The corporations and consumers of the rich global North thus bear some responsibility for increased

greenhouse gas emissions in the poorer global South.

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company that is profiting, not the country that is bear-ing the burden of pollution.

This inequity is not limited to U.S. companies. As a recent report by Christian Aid states, “While only 2.13 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions emanate from the U.K.’s domestic economy, through the pro-cess of globalization CO2 is emitted around the world on the U.K.’s behalf in China, India, Africa and else-where.”4 While the exact global footprint of U.K. companies is not known, our estimate suggests that emissions associated with the worldwide consump-tion of the top 100 U.K. company products amounts to 12 to 15 percent of the global total.

In fact, the rural poor in China and India are los-ing their lands and livelihood for an energy-intensive industrialization. To count them as polluters would be doubly criminal. Moreover, when global corporations outsource to China or India, they need to be responsible for the pollution they carry overseas. Corporations are the more appropriate unit for regulating atmospheric pollution in a globalized economy.

So far, emissions trading schemes have rewarded the polluters by giving them quotas for pollution. And these quotas have allowed them to increase their emissions rather than decrease them. What is needed is a carbon tax on corporations—both for their production systems, no matter where their facilities are located, as well as for transport. The global economy as currently organized is destroying local production and promoting long-distance supply on the smallest items of everyday use. Long-distance transport is subsidized while local, low carbon emissions production and distribution is penal-ized. And the high emissions of long-distance transport have been totally excluded in the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, while the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have led to a huge increase in carbon dioxide emissions due to global transportation, this increase is not even accounted for in emission reduction targets.

We need not concern ourselves with the inevitable cor-porate cry that regulations destroy markets. After all, even the “market instrument” of carbon trading requires

government involvement. The Clean Development Mechanism requires the involvement of the United Nations. Instead of regulating through trade in pollu-tion, governments could regulate through a tax on the use of fossil fuel and through incentives for the use of renewable energy. We can either destroy the conditions for human life on the planet while clinging to “free market” fundamentalism or we can secure our future and create climate justice by requiring that commerce works within the laws of ecological sustainability and within the laws of social justice.

Hunger for Energy: The Diversion of Food to Biofuel

Of course, the manufacturing of consumer goods is not the only industrial process that has been aggressively offshored to the detriment of the global poor and the benefit of the global rich.

Biomass has always been used for energy by the global poor, who themselves have largely not participated in the modern fossil fuel economy. With rising oil prices and growing concern about the contribution of fossil fuel use to climate change, there is now a scramble for transform-ing biomass into liquid fuel for the cars of the global rich. Liquid biofuels are very different from biomass energy for the poor, however. One of the most significant differ-ences is that industrial biofuels divert land and food from the poor to the rich, thus aggravating the hunger crisis.

“First generation” biofuels use soybean and palm oil for biodiesel and corn and sugarcane for ethanol. U.S. and E.U. subsidies and energy policies have encouraged the production of these biofuels, essentially diverting food to fuel, thus contributing to hunger. While indus-trial biofuels are offered as a renewable energy solution which can address both climate change and peak oil, they require roughly the same amount of energy to pro-duce as they provide. Biofuel production is essentially a net-negative energy system.

In Europe, the E.U. biofuel industry was supported by financial incentives to the tune of 4.4 billion Euros ($6.1 billion). If the target of 10 percent blending of

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gasoline and diesel with ethanol and biodiesel, respec-tively, by 2020 has to be met, the industry would be subsidized with 13.7 billion Euros ($18.9 billion) per year. This subsidy pulls food away from the hungry. At least 30 percent of the global food price rise in 2008 was due to biofuels; by 2020 food prices could rise by an additional 76 percent because of such diversion.5 According to FAO in 2008–2009, 125 million met-ric tons of cereals were diverted to produce biofuels. Around 40 percent of the corn produced in the United States is being converted into ethanol.6

Former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz said in 2006 that biofuels present “an opportunity to add to the world’s supply of energy to meet [an] enormous, growing demand and hopefully to mitigate some of the price effects. It’s an opportunity to do so in an environ-mentally friendly way, in a way that is carbon neutral.”7 In contrast, in 2008 then World Bank president Robert Zoellick stated, “While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it’s getting more and more difficult every day.”

Even when food is not used to produce biofuel—or when non-food crops such as jatropha are used—food-growing land is diverted to biofuel production. Our study “Food vs. Fuel”8 shows how pastures and com-mon lands in Rajasthan, and rice-growing land in the tribal areas of Chhattisgarh, have been appropriated for jatropha cultivation for biodiesel.

There is now discussion about “second generation” biofuels, which use cellulosic biomass rather than food for biofuel. Second generation biofuels use forestry and agricultural by-products, such as wheat straw and corn straw, or crops, such as switchgrass, that can be grown where food crops cannot. However, these biofuels are not expected to fully reach the market before 2018. The challenge is to separate the cellulose from the lignin, and then reduce it to simpler sugars by applying intense heat or strong chemicals.

Second generation biofuels will also have an impact on food. If prices are high enough, there is no guarantee that

supposedly nonfood-competitive biofuel crops will not be grown on food-producing land. Moreover, if agricul-tural by-products like straw are diverted to biofuels, no organic matter will be returned to the soil, thus having a negative impact on soil fertility and food security.

The biofuel market is driven by both the limitless energy appetites of industrial society and the profits that biofuel companies can make. Biofuel markets accounted for $76 billion in sales in 2010, a figure which is expected to rise to $247 billion by 2020 and to $280 billion by 2022.9 Commodities flow to wherever more profits can be made. They do not respect rights or needs. All they respect is profits. That is why commodification of food has gone hand in hand with its diversion to fuel.

Thus, despite an increase in food production, there has been food scarcity and food riots in 40 countries. Increasing commodity production does not address hunger; rather, it can aggravate it. In 2007–2008, more cereals produced were used for cattle feed and biofu-els (1,107 million metric tons) than for feeding people (1,013 million metric tons). It is estimated that over the period from 2008 to 2018, biofuel will account for 52 percent of the increased demand for maize and wheat and 32 percent of that for oil seeds.11

Industrial biofuels solve neither the energy crisis nor the climate crisis, and they are deepening the food crisis by diverting food to fuel.

World Cereals Production and “End Use” (million metric tons)10

2007/ 2008

2008/ 2009

% change

Change 2007/08– 2008/09

Total production 2,132 2,287 +1.3% +155 mmt

Total utilization* 2,120 2,202 —— ——

To food 1,013 1,029 +1.5% +16 mmt

To animal feed 748 773 +3.3% +25 mmt

To other uses (incl. biofuel) 359 401 +11.7% +42 mmt

*Utilization is a combination of production and the use of stocks from the previous year; stocks of cereals went up from 2007/08 to 2008/09 by about 80 million metric tons.

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endnotes

1 Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect (New York: Penguin, 2006), 102–103.

2 Ibid., 103.

3 New Economics Foundation, Chinadependence: The Second UK Interdependence Report (London: 2007), http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/chinadependence.

4 Christian Aid, Coming Clean: Revealing the U.K.’s True Carbon Footprint (London: February, 2007), 6, http://www.christianaid.org.uk/Images/coming-clean-uk-carbon-footprint.pdf.

5 ActionAid, Meals per Gallon: The Impact of Industrial Biofuels on People and Global Hunger (London: January 2012), www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/meals_per_gallon_final.pdf.

6 Jayati Ghosh, “Frenzy in Food Markets,” January 20, 2011, http://triplecrisis.com/frenzy-in-food-markets/.

7 Paul Wolfowitz, “The Clean Energy Challenge,” (speech at Worldwatch Institute conference on Biofuels for Transportation, Washington, DC, June 7, 2006), http://go.worldbank.org/KOAHTX3L80.

8 Vandana Shiva, Food vs. Fuel (New Delhi: Navdanya, 2008).

9 Alex Salkever, “Global Biofuels Market to Hit $247 Billion by 2020,” Daily Finance, July 24, 2009.

10 ActionAid, Meals per Gallon.

11 Food and Agriculture Organization, “Crop Prospects and Food Situation,” 2009, http://www.fao.org/giews/english/cpfs/index.htm#top; Food and Agriculture Organization, “Food Outlook,” 2009, http://www.fao.org/giews/english/fo/index.htm; ActionAid, Meals per Gallon.

12 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/ Food and Agriculture Organization, “Agricultural Outlook,” 2010; Klaus Deininger and Derek Byerlee, Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2011), 15.

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The ENERGY Reader

ENERGYEdited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner

Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

Edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner

What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal mining, and natural gas “fracking” to wind power projects and solar power plants, every source of energy has costs. Featuring the essays found in ENERGY plus additional material, The ENERGY Reader takes an unflinching look at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more power along with their unintended side effects.

We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy... The essential problem is not just that we are tapping the wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered, and we are overpowering nature. — from the Introduction, by Richard Heinberg

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Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. 336 pages, 11.75” x 13.4”, 152 color photographs, 5 line illustrations.$50.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0970950086, Fall 2012.

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