It\’s Getting Hot In Here

There is ample reason for disappointment over the current climate bill’s public investment priorities which in Rep. Markey’s own words has “huge subsidies for clean coal—huge—much more than we have in for renewables.” However, the amount of investment and the sectors of the economy into which it goes are only part of the bigger problems regarding popular democratic control over investment  decisions and their outcomes. When the goal of technology development is economic monopoly power and profit maximization rather than maximum social benefit, certain results tend to follow be it in the field of medicine or energy.

In a recent article Mark Weisbrot spotlights some of the increasingly obvious contradictions of accumulation and imperialism surrounding investment in the private sector for the development  technologies aimed at mediating climate change:

“According to Inside U.S. Trade, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is gearing up for a fight to limit the access of developing countries to Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs).  They fear that international climate change negotiations, taking place under the auspices of the United Nations, will erode the position of corporations holding patents on existing and future technologies.  Developing countries such as Brazil, India, and China have indicated that if — as expected in the next few years — they are going to have to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, they should be able to license some of the most efficient available technologies for doing so.

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It took years of struggle by non-governmental organizations to loosen the big pharmaceutical companies’ stranglehold on the WTO, to the point where the organization’s 2001 “Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health” reaffirmed the rights of member countries to produce generic versions of patented drugs in order to promote public health.  But this was just a first step, and seven years later these rights have been applied almost exclusively to anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of AIDS, in just a handful of developing countries.  The power of the pharmaceutical companies, with their governments in the United States and Europe as advocates, still keeps life-saving medicines priced out of reach for hundreds of millions of the world’s poor.

The legal procedure that has been used — although very infrequently — to allow for the production of generic drugs for the treatment of AIDS is called a compulsory license.  This means that a government can legally authorize the production of a generic version of a drug that is currently under patent, provided that this is done for public health purposes.  A royalty is paid to the patent holder, but this is generally not very expensive.

Developing countries such as Brazil, India, and China want to make sure that such possibilities are open for new Environmentally Sound Technologies, e.g. in the areas of renewable energy, that might enable them to meet future targets for reducing carbon emissions.  A Brazilian official noted that his country had only issued one compulsory license, for the anti-AIDS drug Efavirenz, produced by Merck.

But big business doesn’t want to take any chances.  On May 20, they are scheduled to launch a new coalition called Innovation, Development and Employment Alliance (IDEA).  (You’ve got to love the Orwellian touch of those marketing consultants).  Members include General Electric, Microsoft, and Sunrise Solar; they will reportedly also be concerned with intellectual property claims in the areas of health care and renewable energy.

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Rhetoric surrounding investment in truly renewable energy or even boondoggles like Carbon Capture and Sequestration often simultaneously appeals to contradicting goals of restoring the threatened United States imperial dominance in the world and  generously(?) distributing green(er) energy technologies to help the project of capitalist development in poorer nations of the world. Clearly, the coercive transfer of these technologies only in return for concessions of political sovereignty and with as high a profit margin as the patent holders can squeeze out is the goal of the business elite and an obstacle to addressing climate change.

In such a pathological economy, as a first step, any public investment must be accompanied by public ownership if we wish to put people and the planet first. Otherwise, we may reasonably expect IDEA’s membership in the future to be willing to use their property rights to watch the world burn rather than concede to an unacceptable rate of return.