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

lessons unlearned 147‘The CDM will be proneto fraud and fl uctuationsbeyond control of thedeveloper or the CDMboard.’ 293O.P.R. Van Vliet et al.,2003mention being made of the need to secure CDM funding beforehand,and was scheduled to be completed in 2006. Yet in a June 2005 applicationfor Xiaogushan to be considered as a CDM project, the WorldBank claims that without CDM support, the dam ‘would not havebeen able to reach financial closure, mitigate the high project risk,and commence the project constructions’. 283Similarly, CDM credits are being sought for the Bumbuna hydroelectricproject in Sierra Leone on the grounds that the project is unviablewithout them, although the project was approved for financingby the World Bank in 2005 as the least-cost project for the country’spower sector. 285 In one Latin American country, consultants tippexedout the name of a hydroelectric dam from a copy of a national developmentplan in an attempt to show that the dam was not alreadyplanned or ‘business as usual’ and therefore was deserving of carbonfinance. 286At an event arranged by the International Emissions Trading Associationin Milan in 2003, a representative of the Asian DevelopmentBank confided that his institution’s first reaction to the CDM was togo through its existing portfolio to see which projects’ funding mightbe topped up with carbon finance. No one was under any illusion thatcarbon money would be used for anything other than what the bankitself acknowledged to be business as usual. (For more examples, seeChapter 4.)In announcing its withdrawal from CDM projects in 2004, HolcimCement went as far as to warn that CDM carbon-accounting methodology‘will create other Enrons and Arthur Andersens,’ 287 referringto recent accounting scandals at the two firms. A year and a half later,even Einar Telnes, a Det Norske Veritas executive representing theforum of private firms that profit from validating and verifying carbonprojects, was publicly fretting that the big differences betweenhow different carbon accountants tallied up credits ‘could lead to alack of confidence in the market as such... . We don’t want an Enronscandal where excess CERs [CDM carbon credits] are issued withoutthe actual reductions taking place... . It is crucial that those verifyinghave the necessary knowledge. Many of them don’t.’ 288A UK Parliamentary Committee was less guarded, lambasting theexperimental UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which had paid morethan GBP 100 million to four companies ‘for keeping emissions downto levels they had already achieved’, as ‘bullshit’, ‘stupid’, a ‘mockery’,and an ‘outrageous waste of public money’ that undermined governmentemissions reduction policies. 290