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

lessons unlearned 143So CDM schemes and other carbon projects don’t, in fact, ‘off set’ or ‘neutralise’industrial emissions?No.So they’re not emissions reductions after all?No. The putative commodity produced by CDM and similar ‘carbon-saving’programmes can’t be correctly referred to as ‘emission reductions’,‘carbon’ or ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’, or any similar term.Unlike conventional dumps receiving industrial waste, mine tailings,or nuclear materials, the purported new carbon dumps carved out ofthe biosphere or the future can’t even be verified to be dumps at all.So in fact no one should be allowed to trade CDM or JI credits for allowances.And British Airways should not be claiming that its passengers can ‘neutralise’their fl ights by giving money to tree-planters or effi ciency programmes in Indiaor South Africa.That’s right.Well, I’m looking forward to hearing how you justify that claim. Because theUN and the IPCC, together with thousands of experts, claim that there areno scientifi c obstacles to trading credits for allowances.The claim, unfortunately, is based more on free-market ideology andwishful thinking than scientific reflection. Just as in emissions trading,the ‘baseline and credit’ market’s requirement that so many diversethings be made numerically equivalent has turned out to be itsundoing. The difference is that the problems of trading systems thatinclude project-based credits are even more intractable even than theproblems of allowance trading alone.OK, give me the bad news.Accountants as storytellersLet’s begin with an insoluble quantification problem that’s commonto all carbon-’saving’ projects.As noted above, all such projects calculate carbon ‘saved’ by relyingon experts’ assessments of ‘what would have been the case withoutthe project’. The difficulty is that no expert has either the ability orthe right to determine a single scenario describing ‘what would havehappened without the project’.