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

lessons unlearned 151scrapped, the cars would be driven 4,000–5,000 miles annually for anadditional three years and that their owners would then replace themwith automobiles with ‘average’ emissions.Yet a SCAQMD audit found that many of the cars were at the endof their useful lives, and would have been destroyed through naturalattrition. Some 100,000–200,000 old vehicles are scrapped or abandonedin the Los Angeles area annually in this way without the interventionof pollution trading programmes. Most of the 23,000 carsthat were destroyed under the pollution trading scheme during itsfirst five years were arguably among those that would have been destroyedeven without the programme. After all, why sell your old carfor its usd 50 value as scrap metal when you can obtain usd 600 for itthrough a pollution trading scheme? 302Moreover, of the cars that were not at the end of their lives, in addition,many were not regularly driven and would not have been driven foranother three years. Inoperable cars were often brought to car scrappingfacilities and minor repairs made solely for the purpose of obtainingthe usd 600 payment from the scrapping program. Such cars werenot generating any pollution, but merely collecting dust. Non-existentautomobile pollution was transformed, through the market, into realpollution released from oil tankers or other sources. The end result wasto increase aggregate emissions across the region. 303In the ‘bubble’ trading system instituted by the US EnvironmentalProtection Agency, similarly, polluters almost never undertook freshpollution control projects to satisfy regulations. Instead, they claimedcredits for reductions that presumably would have occurred withoutthe regulation. For example, polluters often claimed credits for routinebusiness decisions to slow down production or shut down facilities. 305In the 1970s, states lured new industry by providing firms with ‘offsets’that the states themselves created – in one case credits for ‘anasphalt substitution process that already was occurring for non -environmental reasons’. 306 In the 1980s, similarly, Ashland Oil didn’twant to comply with a requirement that it lower emissions from certainstorage tanks. Instead, it petitioned to be allowed to reduce theallowable emission rate from a gasoline truck loading facility from50.7 to 19.0 tonnes per year – even though the facility was alreadyemitting only 4.4 tonnes per year. 307 Not surprisingly, such gambitswere heavily criticised by environmentalists.Nor were such absurdities confined to the US. The Global EnvironmentalFacility, which serves as a financial mechanism for both theUNFCCC and the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity, earlyon ran into similar accounting problems. The GEF was supposed tofund only that element of a project that resulted directly in the reduction