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Maybe this uncertainty about our climate comes at a convenient time, with the Copenhagen world climate conference coming up. Yes, Ricardo Martinelli is a conservative, but in Panama right-wing politics are not associated with hardcore opposition to science as they tend to be in the United States, and moreover the president comes from a farming and ranching family and ought to have some appreciation of what disruptions climatic effects can have. Given that our principal industry, the canal, depends on rainfall and will be affected by the thawing of Arctic maritime routes; given that the name of our country derives from an indigenous expression for "abundance of fish" and changes in sea levels, ocean chemistry and maritime currents would surely affect our fisheries; and seeing the floods we already get in our capital --- all of these things should give Panama's government reason to carefully consider our diplomatic positions in the face of Copenhagen's challenges.

It's also a set of domestic economic issues that are not readily apparent to most people.

For example, the Martinelli administration has opposed the notion, promoted by his predecessors in the PRD, of private rights of "environmental possession" of vast tracts of wilderness. So, if the government isn't doing a good job of protecting our rainforests, isn't it a good idea to let "responsible" environmental organizations do the job privately?

Well, consider many things, but look at the economics of it first.

Understand that the rabiblanco-dominated environmentalist groups, the best known of which is the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), have nowhere near the financial resources of the Panamanian government. They may have more motivation to protect our wildlife, but they don't have the resources.

Ah, but there is the current corporate-oriented approach to limiting the carbon emissions, which, notwithstanding all the denials coming from Republican politicians in the pay of special interests in keeping things the way they are, at least aggravate global warming and ocean acidification. (Yes, there are also natural climate cycles at work and there are so many variables that we very imperfectly understand the full balance of and interactions among the causes of what we are seeing.) So most of the world has recognized that carbon emissions are a problem, but instead of moving away from burning fossil fuels the corporate lobbyists and the politicians they buy have created carbon trading schemes. As in a coal-burning power plant in the United States can continue to do what it's doing, so long as it pays to mitigate the damage by financing the maintenance of a forest that breathes in carbon dioxide, the installation of an energy system that burns nothing, or some other project somewhere else. This financing scheme --- itself built upon some scientifically uncertain assumptions that a stand of teak in the Darien can make up for pollution spewed into the air in Denver --- is done through a complicated system of carbon emission bonds.

So if some rabiblanco foundation wraps itself in a green flag and tortures a right of posssession law designed to give destitute rural families a plot of land to farm into giving it the right to claim a vast track of our nation's public-owned forests, that foundation can get the income from the carbon emission bonds. Someone with the right family connections and precious little relationship to the struggle against environmental predation can get a nice internal combustion car, an air-conditioned office and a condo in Paitilla out of being an executive of a non-governmental organization that calls dibs on public assets and plays the carbon bond market. Across the planet honest environmentalists have blasted this sort of thing as another form of "greenwashing," but here in Panama the issue has hardly been debated.

Talk to many of Panama's indigenous leaders and they will denounce carbon trading as the means by which companies rake in the bucks from hydroelectric dams that are only marginally profitable in their own right, with one of the side effects being that rural communities are dispossessed of their land and their traditional access to water sources. They have a good point.

But serious environmentalists need to recognize carbon emissions trading for another thing that it is. Carbon trading, coupled with privatized rainforest protection, is a corrupting influence in the environmentalist movement. It's a means by which a predatory oligarchy asserts itself as the supposed leadership of a movement that needs to mobilize the non-privileged majority of Panamanians to accomplish vital public purposes.

(The Ministry of Economy and Finance concurs, so far as the notion of "environmental protection" right of possession is concerned. Its perspective is that nobody gets to grab vast tracts of public land without paying the government something approaching market value. The ministry also points to an case in which ANCON acquired a tract of right of possession land in Bocas del Toro for the purpose of protecting it from development, but then the group came upon hard times and sold it to developers and thus left it unprotected.)

In many ways, the movement to conserve the planet rises above all sorts of class and ideological differences and I have not had too many qualms about making common cause with groups like ANCON over important issues. However, at the coming special legislative session a coalition of 10 of Panama's wealthiest environmentalist groups plans to press for their "right" to claim and fence off the wilderness --- and receive the proceeds of those carbon emission bonds --- and I oppose them on this point.