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

156 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingevery thing that can go wrong actually going wrong are well-known– and uncertainty – in which they aren’t.The trouble with ‘carbon sink’ projects that attempt to commensuratebiotic with fossil carbon is that, to do so, they have to confuseuncertainty with risk – and try to convert the one into the other.But that’s not all. These projects also confuse risk with ignorance– a situation in which not even all the things that can go wrongare known. And, like other carbon-saving projects, they confuse riskwith indeterminacy, which applies in situations in which comparisonwith counterfactual scenarios makes the calculation of probabilitiesinappropriate.Hang on a minute. Let’s start at the beginning. What do you mean when yousay carbon sink projects confuse risk and uncertainty?In order to derive the single number the market requires, carbon sinkaccountants have to look at all the things that might result in carbonbeing released from trees into the atmosphere and calculate theirprobability. But they can’t do this.Why not?Straightforward inadequacy of data is one obstacle. To get an idea ofthe size of the problem, consider one detailed study done by the respectedInternational Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).According to the study, mean net Russian carbon balance in 1990(including flows into and out of the biosphere) can be pinned downonly to the range of minus 155 to plus 1209 million tonnes per year.That swamps probable changes in total Russian carbon flux balancebetween 1990 and 2010, which are expected to be only 142 to 371million tonnes (Figure 7). 323The IIASA concludes that knowledge of carbon flows among the atmosphere,biosphere and lithosphere is inadequate ‘to form the basisfor…any viable trading scheme.’ That makes the Kyoto Protocol‘completely unverifiable’ and a ‘cheat’s charter’. 324 Climatologist R. A.Houghton, similarly, has suggested carbon errors ‘as large as 500 percent in the forest inventories of northern mid-latitudes’. 325