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

150 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon trading‘Better than the Alternative’Development professionals have often triedto justify failed projects and policies byclaiming that at least they were better than‘what would have happened otherwise’.World Bank officials consistently used thisreasoning to justify their agency’s decadeslongpolitical intervention in Zaire in supportof the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko,who openly stole hundreds of millions ofdollars from his country. 300Justifying climatically-damaging carbon‘offset’ projects using the same reasoning ischild’s play by comparison.Why didn’t the marketeers see this coming? Were the signatories of the KyotoProtocol asleep? And what’s the excuse of the European governments who decidedto accept project-based carbon credits in the EU ETS?Those are all good questions. The impossibility of measuring pollution‘offset’ credits was already plain to see in the US’s earlier pollutiontrading programmes.Oh, no. You mean this is another case of ‘lessons unlearned’?I’m afraid so. In the US, they even had a term for meaningless pollutioncredits handed out to industry for actions that would have happenedanyway. They called them ‘anyway tonnes’.Could you give some examples?One instance was the Los Angeles Regional Clean Air IncentivesMarket (RECLAIM) described above. The South Coast Air QualityManagement District (SCAQMD) allowed factories and refineriesto avoid installing pollution control equipment if they purchasedcredits generated by licensed car scrappers who destroyed old, highpollutingcars. The idea was that it would be cheaper to reduce overallpollution by buying up and destroying old cars than by forcing stationarysources to make technological changes in their plants. It wasan early example of the ‘offset’ reasoning that’s now so prominent inthe Kyoto Protocol’s carbon market.‘In all the excitementover the imminent arrivalof a fully-fl edged carbonmarket, we may be losingsight of one fundamentalquestion – what, exactly,are we trading in?’ 297Environmental DataServices ReportIn other words, they were claiming that getting rid of cars was just as good forthe air as making factories cut down their pollution?Exactly – and that the two could be traded for each other. Unfortunately,car scrappers often generated fraudulent pollution credits bycrushing car bodies without destroying the engines, which they thensold for re-use. More to the point, the pollution credits generated byscrapping cars were based on the assumption that if they were not