A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 109fact involved 163 and even less innovation. Inaddition, the overachievement was small inabsolute terms. The US programme is expectedto cut sulphur dioxide emissions byonly about 35 per cent by its 20th anniversaryin 2010. In contrast, Germany cut powerplant emissions by 90 per cent from the firstproposal in 1982 to completion of its programmein 1998, without trading. 164Trading does not seem to have encouragedthe development of innovative technologiesunder the US’s less well-designed pollutionprogrammes, either. Southern California’sRECLAIM market, for instance, appears tohave sidelined the development of fuel cells,low-emitting burners and turbines, and soforth, whose development had previouslybeen subsidised by a percentage of car registrationfees. At least one innovative entrepreneurmaking low-NO x burners, Alzeta,probably lost rather than gained sales as aresult of the programme. 165 An emergingmethod of reducing NO x , SCONO x , wasalso thwarted. SCONO x is more expensivethan the dominant selective catalytic reductionmethod, but arguably could have penetratedthe market if there had been stringentregulation generating less ‘spatial flexibility’about where reductions were made.Innovations under the ‘bubbles’ of earlyUS pollution trading programs also tendedmerely to be rearrangements of conventionaltechnologies rather than the invention,development or commercialisation ofthe non-obvious technologies necessaryfor achieving a longer-term social or environmentalgoal. 166Similar lessons can be drawn from theinternal system of emissions trading institutedin 2000 by the Anglo-Americanoil firm BP Amoco, which committed itsbusiness units collectively to shaving 10per cent off their 1990s greenhouse gasemissions by 2010. (The emissions resultingfrom sales of the hydrocarbonsthe company extracted and refined werenot counted, although they of course arehundreds of times greater than the firm’sin-house releases.) 167BP Amoco’s trading system did help thecompany make the easy one-third of thecuts required more cheaply. These cutswere mostly in obvious areas like processefficiencies – finding and shutting downspare turbine generators, minimisingdowntime by cleaning machinery withoutshutting it down, steam and power cogeneration,and so forth.But in attempting to make the rest of thecuts, company divisions were able to avoidmore radical change simply by looking‘outside [BP’s] operations [to] see whatcan be done by working with others’ – forexample, by setting up cheap, low-tech,‘offsite carbon reduction’ schemes like allegedlycarbon dioxide-absorbing treeplantations in distant locations. 168 By 2002,the company expected half of its so-called‘emissions reductions’ to come from creditsbought in from outside. 169 At no point wasthere any move toward genuinely innovativetechnology.