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

lessons unlearned 145carbon money. Depending on discount rates, baseline vegetation estimates,carbon accounting systems and expected price variations, calculationsof the value of the carbon credits to be generated differed byas much as an order of magnitude. 272So measuring carbon credits is completely diff erent from measuring emissions.Yes. While scientists can usually agree about how to read dials, calibrategas detectors, and perform the other tasks necessary for directlymeasuring real emissions (assuming the necessary instrumentation ispresent), no consensus is attainable anywhere about how to isolateone single hypothetical storyline from among many possible storylinesand measure the hypothetical emissions associated with it.So while some scientific basis exists for markets in emissions, noneexists for markets in project-based ‘offset’ credits, or markets in whichemissions allowances and project-based credits are interchangeable.So there are likely to be diff erences of opinion about how many credits any particularproject generates, or whether it generates any at all.That’s putting it mildly. Try to imagine, for example, what wouldhave happened without a given tree plantation project in Brazil. Supposeyou hire an expert to extrapolate what kind of vegetation wouldgrow on the site without the project over the next 100 years. Peopleare going to disagree with your findings. Suppose you hire someoneto find out how the project will affect future investment at the companyreceiving the carbon credits. People are going to disagree withwhat you conclude. Suppose you hire someone to find out how theabsence of the project would change local carbon use over the nextcentury, looking into things like land speculation and land prices,land reform, road building, logging, soybean production, oil palmmarkets, changes in infl ation rates, the profitability of beef production,alternative investments, prices and times for transport, and soon. 273 People are going to disagree with those findings, too.Experts who back this market have themselves long admitted that estimatesof hypothetical ‘emissions reductions’ for many projects canbe expected to differ by hundreds of percent given only small changesin initial assumptions. 274 Michael Schlup of the Gold Standard, an organisationthat hands out a special certificate to CDM projects it considersof high quality, has claimed that up to 50 per cent of projectsare not really ‘additional’ but merely relabelled business as usual. CEEBankwatch, in a study of a World Bank Prototype Carbon Fund’s JIproject supporting small hydropower plants in the Czech Republic,recently argued that only six of the 16 installations involved repre-