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

142 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingThat might have some impact, but it’s unlikely to deter most well-off people fromfl ying. But if you encourage the same airline passengers to ‘off set’ their fl ightsusing that same USD 25, they can invest in all sorts of diff erent climate actions onthe ground. For example, a British Airways scheme off ers schemes to plant treesor subsidise an energy-effi ciency programme in rural India.The problem is that for such offsets to work, carbon credits have to beclimatically equivalent to carbon allowances. In other words, a carbonmarket that includes credits, like a market that includes only allowances,needs to ensure that the apples and oranges it is trading areclimatically equivalent to each other.Apples and orangesExcept that in the case of off sets, the apples and oranges are even more diff erentfrom each other than they were with emissions trading.Exactly. With emissions trading proper, the apples and oranges are,crudely speaking, emissions that come out of pipes in different locationsthrough different processes and contexts. With a market thatalso involves project credits, the apples and oranges are far more diverse.The credits derived from various ‘baseline-and-credit’ schemesare different both from each other and from the emissions allow ancesassociated with ‘cap and trade’ schemes. Destroying the industrialgreenhouse gas HFC-23 is not the same as investing in windmills.Making your chemical plant more efficient is not the same as supplyingefficient light bulbs to Jamaica. Planting trees is not the same asrefraining from flying to the Maldives for a holiday. Yet all of thesethings need to be verified to be ‘climatically equivalent’ for credittrading to work.In fact, the United Nations and other carbon trading advocates go sofar as to claim that the carbon projects they are promoting are not only‘equivalent to’, or ‘compensate for’, emissions reductions, but actuallyare emissions reductions. They assert that planting eucalyptus trees,building hydroelectric dams, burning methane or instituting efficiencyprogrammes are ‘reducing emissions’ just as much as halting the flow ofcoal into a boiler, even if no emissions are being reduced.So is there a problem? All these things are in fact climatically equivalent, aren’tthey?No. That can’t be verified.