|
|
Magazine Issue 11 Summer 2000
|
||
The next international bash at solving the climate crisis will take place in the Netherlands this November. This event, COP6 of the UN Convention on Climate Change, will see free marketeers push their ‘solution’ of carbon trading. Here Larry Lohmann presents a critique of this approach - which turns the atmosphere into private property, awards the lion’s share to the rich, and empowers the well-off to buy up rights topollute even further on the condition that they seize and degrade vast tracts of land with tree plantations. For a century and a half, industrial societies have been moving carbon from underground reserves of coal and oil into the air. Today about 175 billion more tonnes of carbon are circulating in the atmosphere in the form of CO2 than before the Industrial Revolution, the great bulk having come from the North. At least six billion are being added every year. This transfer can't go on indefinitely. Some 4,000 billion tonnes of carbon in fossil fuels await recovery in the ground. According to current scientific consensus, adding as little as a few hundred billion tonnes of this to the air would result in a heatwave unprecedented in human history, bringing extreme storms, droughts and floods, disrupting agriculture, increasing pest infestations, drowning islands and coastlines and creating millions of ‘climate refugees’. Pumping out still more could trigger runaway heating endangering planetary habitability if methane is released from ocean bottoms and if peatlands and tropical forests dry out, ocean currents shift, and less sunlight is reflected from the poles. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, under which industrialised countries pledged to reduce emissions by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012, doesn’t go remotely far enough to stave off these dangers. One group of scientists calculates that even if the Protocol were ratified and fully implemented, it could not moderate an expected warming trend of 1.4 degrees C by 2050 by more than 0.05 degrees C. Questions of ownership Yet not only does the Kyoto Protocol fail to outline a strategy for keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations within prudent, specified limits, but it also fails to clarify property rights to the atmospheric recycling system. In practice, this sanctions those who are accustomed to using more than their fair share of the world’s carbon-dioxide-recycling capacity to go on doing so. Unsurprisingly, the Protocol has little concrete to say about how the North is to repay the immense ‘carbon debt’ it owes the South, and how the rich within each society are to repay the ‘carbon debt’ they owe the poor. What’s worse, by immediately opening the door to ‘market approaches’ without laying the proper groundwork, the Protocol threatens to stymie serious efforts to slow climate change. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how this happened. Forced to accept the idea of at least some minimal country-level emissions cuts, corporate lobbies at Kyoto instructed US delegates to secure a quid pro quo that would allow richer countries to pay their way out of having to make reductions. A Business Roundtable memo accidentally left on a photocopy machine in Buenos Aires in 1998 reveals that such lobbies have continued to play a crucial role in pushing the UN into accepting imminent carbon trading as the most ‘efficient’ way out of the climate crisis. The world is now reaping the whirlwind of this lobby offensive. Energized by the fashionable dogma that says that whatever the problems, trade must be the answer, an ever-growing number of organizations are now scurrying around to create a market to deal with climate change.
Today there are probably more carbon brokers on the scene than there are scientists or diplomats trying to understand atmospheric circulation. As Daphne Wysham of the Institute for Policy Studies caustically notes, climate meetings now resemble trade shows in which, "instead of focusing on how to prevent global warming, attendees jostle to get a piece of a lucrative emerging market". |
|||
| Invisible commodities The problem with this conjured-up market is that the commodity which it purports to trade in doesn’t yet exist. Take one comparatively ‘reasonable’ trade recently proposed by Britain. In March the UK found itself on course to exceed by 7.5% its Kyoto-derived target for reducing CO2 emissions by 12.5% by 2010. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott promptly announced that, should international carbon trading begin later this year, the UK might decide to sell the 8 million tonnes of surplus ‘emissions credits’ to the US for up to £120 million. Now the UK emissions reductions are surely a good thing. But could anyone argue that the climate would be stabler with Prescott’s proposed trade than without it? At best, the deal would merely prevent the UK and the US from collectively doing any better than to fulfill the insignificant pledges they made at Kyoto. At worst, it would provide an incentive for the UK and other countries to set low future emissions targets. That way, they would be able to exceed the targets with ease and sell off the difference. The situation might be different if the world had already committed itself to cut aggregate global emissions by the 60-70% that most climate scientists agree is necessary to prevent CO2 levels from exceeding twice what they were before the industrial revolution. Trading could then be used to achieve this goal marginally more efficiently. But unless it is conducted within a universally-agreed framework of meaningful reductions, a carbon market alone cannot function to alleviate climate change. As they stand, trades like the UK-US exchange are absurd in other ways as well. For one thing, you can’t trade something you don’t own. What John Prescott proposes selling to the US is, in effect, permission to use a sizable chunk of the atmosphere as its own CO2 dump. But who gave Prescott the right to sell this chunk and Bill Clinton the right to buy it? Everybody uses this portion of the atmospheric commons. Presumably it’s not only Prescott and Clinton who have the right to say how it will be disposed of. It’s like a local strongman ‘selling’ a multinational mining company a piece of common land he doesn’t own. If money is allowed to become the main determinant of who does and does not have legal permission to emit greenhouse gases, the rich will be able to buy the right to operate air conditioners and jet fleets while telling the poor to stop using firewood or farming rice in methane-emitting paddies. Sound like a joke? Think again. In March, TransAlta, Alberta’s largest energy utility, announced that it was financing a project to feed Ugandan cows supplements to reduce the volume of their farts, in order to buy itself time to upgrade three coal-fired generating stations. |
|||
| Planting new problems Most emissions trades being explored today are even more ridiculous than the one proposed by John Prescott. Take, for example, the notion that a Northern country can license its burning of fossil fuels by buying trees to ‘absorb’ carbon dioxide, thereby making itself ‘carbon-neutral’. On this view, if US citizens use 20 times more of the atmosphere for CO2 dumping than their Indian counterparts, then they are also entitled to use 20 times more tree plantation land in order to compensate. An organisation called Future Forests offers a scheme which allows a British family of "two parents, two children with a car" to be able to claim it is ‘carbon neutral’ at a cost of a mere US$420 a year by planting 65 trees a year in Mexico or Britain. Inevitably, such land will be grabbed from poorer people, usually in the South, where real estate is cheapest. Ironically, the community evicted today by a company drilling oil to feed cars may find itself displaced again tomorrow – by tree plantations intended by the drivers of those cars to ‘offset’ the burning of that oil. What’s more, the idea that emissions can be traded for trees is scientifically fraudulent. While CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning can be measured reasonably accurately, CO2 removals by any given plantation project are impossible to predict with the necessary certainty over the century or more during which the emissions stoke climate change. Fire historian Stephen Pyne comments on one aspect of this unpredictability: "Taking the carbon exhumed by industrial combustion from the geologic past and stacking it into overripe living woodpiles is an approach of questionable wisdom. Biological preserves are not a kind of Fort Knox for carbon." In addition, as scientists pointed out last year, the hotter conditions of the next decades will accelerate the breakdown of plant matter and sugars made during photosynthesis, possibly resulting ultimately in net CO2 emissions from trees in carbon-‘offset’ plantations. |
|||
| Economic romance Another reason why emissions can’t be exchanged for trees is that tree plantations change the ‘carbon-behaviour’ of people as well as land. Villagers displaced by a given plantation may torch the site or deforest remote areas to replace lost farmland. They may be prevented by plantations from regrowing local forests, forming local defence committees against loggers, or conserving carbon in other ways. Some may be pushed into adopting more profligate carbon-consuming habits. Meanwhile, faraway consumers may be encouraged by news of carbon-‘offset’ plantations to delay crucial startup investments in technology to reduce their own emissions. To suggest that climate accountants will be able to do the research necessary to come up with a single believable number encapsulating all these possible effects of a tree plantation on carbon flows for the next century is sheerest economic romance. |
|||
| Renewable energy exchange The same goes for schemes to offer Northern buyers carbon credits if they fund ‘renewable energy’ projects in the South. Paradoxically, such projects are likely to help accelerate climate change insofar as they provide cosmetic cover for current efforts by fossil fuel corporations and the World Bank to promote a fossil-fuel-intensive development path in the South. This path is currently being urged on countries such as China in preference to the low-carbon alternatives that the Bank itself admits would be more effective in getting electricity to millions of needy rural residents. |
|||
| Logging Possibly most absurd of all are the schemes under which energy companies earn emissions credits by logging. The rationale for these trades is that the logging in question "causes less deforestation than would otherwise have occurred". For example, New England Electric Systems, a coal-burning utility holding company, has paid the Malaysian Innoprise Corporation to conduct ‘reduced-impact’ logging on a part of its concession, hoping that by doing so it will be seen to be ‘sequestering’ [sic] carbon - all at a price of less than US$2 per tonne of carbon. The relevant question for projects which produce climate credits by "emitting less CO2 than would be produced otherwise" is: who decides what "otherwise" is? This is a political issue. Consultancies whose future depends partly on certifying ‘emissions reductions’ are unlikely to decide that "what would have happened" without a new gas-fired generating plant would have a better outcome for climate. Urban intellectuals may well assume that without a commercial tree plantation, ignorant local rustics would scorch their land into oblivion. A World Bank official will not want to compare a pet Prototype Carbon Fund project with climate-friendly options which involve broader political changes, such as reducing demand for electricity or wood, or fighting corporate or state takeovers of smallholders’ land. As climate negotiators rub shoulders with corporate lobbyists, brokers, financiers, foresters and technocrats – all with something to gain from a carbon market, few such questions are being raised. Such are the stealthy ways in which, under cover of ‘tackling climate change’, land, water and the atmosphere are being enclosed in the 21st century. |
|||
| Much of the above information is extracted from Larry Lohmann’s ‘The Carbon Shop: planting new problems’ published by the World Rainforest Movement. Larry has also written a briefing on this subject for the CornerHouse (01258 473 795) |
