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

146 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingsented anything other than business as usual. 275 Strife has also brokenout in the UN and in the corporate world. Most CDM carbonaccounting methodologies proposed to date have been rejected bythe CDM methodological panel for having implausible baselines. 276DuPont has accused its rival Ineos Fluor of overstating emissions ‘reductions’from abatement projects (using a methodology that was approvedby the CDM Executive Board) by a factor of three due toinfl ation of baselines. 277 Germany’s Steinbeis Foundation has starteda public campaign protesting CDM Executive Board decisions onpermissible baselines for municipal waste projects. 278 Project certifiershave expressed concern that UN rulebook’s inability to screenout ‘business as usual’ CDM projects makes it hard to calculate carboncredits.According to Mark Trexler, a carbon businessman with 15 years’ experience,the resolution of the debate about how to decide whethera project would have happened anyway ‘seems as elusive as ever’.‘There is no technically “correct” answer’, Trexler concedes. ‘Neverhas so much been said about a topic by so many, without ever agreeingon a common vocabulary, and the goals of the conversation.’ 279Speakers at an event arrangedby the International EmissionsTrading Association (IETA)during international climatenegotiations. IETA is acoalition of private companiesincluding AES, BarclaysCapital, ChevronTexaco,ConocoPhillips, DuPont,Ecosecurities, Gaz de France,Goldman Sachs, GujaratFluorochemicals, J-Power,KPMG, Lafarge, Lahmayer,RWE, Shell, Total, Toyota,TransAlta and Vattenfall.This lack of verifi ability would seem to open up a lot of possibilities for corporationsor governments to employ creative accounting in order to claim the maximumnumber of carbon credits.You can come up with almost any number you want. Both the incentivesand the opportunities are huge.As trading expert Michael Grubb and colleagues observed years ago,‘every government and every company’ 280 wanting carbon credits hasan incentive to try to get them for projects that it is already implementingor had planned even before carbon markets came along. Allyou have to do is hire an expert who is willing to make ‘business asusual’ appear as bad as possible. ‘The more conventional the baseline,the more additional funds or credits… can be recovered’ from yourcarbon project, note Hermann Ott and Wolfgang Sachs. 281The result, as one barrister and banker, James Cameron of ClimateChange Capital, notes bluntly, is that many carbon project proponents‘tell their financial backers that the projects are going to makelots of money’ at the same time they claim to CDM officials ‘that theywouldn’t be financially viable’ without carbon funds. 282In 2003, for example, the Asian Development Bank funded the proposedXiaogushan dam in China, portraying it as the cheapest andmost economically robust alternative for expanding electricity generationin Gansu province. Construction went ahead without any