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

lessons unlearned 161But such credits are subject not only torisk, but to uncertainty, ignorance, and indeterminacyas well. For example:• How long will plantations last beforethey release the carbon they have storedinto the atmosphere again, through beingburned down or cut down to makepaper or lumber, which themselves ultimatelydecay? This is not simply a risk,in Knight’s sense, but involves uncertaintiesand ignorance that can’t be capturedin numbers. For example, it is stillnot known what precise effects differentdegrees of global warming will have onthe cycling of carbon between differentkinds of trees and the atmosphere.• To what extent will plantations affectthe carbon production associated withneighbouring ecosystems, communities,and trade patterns? Again, uncertaintyand ignorance, not just risk, stand in theway of answers.• How many credits should be subtractedfrom the total generated by plantationsto account for the activities that they displacethat are more beneficial for the atmospherein the long term, for example,investment in energy efficiency or ecologicalfarming? No single number canbe given in answer to this question, since‘it is inherently impossible to verify whatwould have happened in the absence ofthe project’. 355 That is, the answer is indeterminate.Uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacyare three reasons why it’s not ever goingto be possible to trade trees for smoke. Bymixing up ‘the analytically distinct concepts’356 of risk, uncertainty, ignorance andindeterminacy, schemes such as the CleanDevelopment Mechanism and Joint Implementationhave blundered into whatKnight would have called a ‘fatal ambiguity’.357 In this case, the fatality is the veryclimate commodity that carbon creditmarkets hoped to deal in.reductions commitments’ since changes to carbon stocks will ‘rarelybe verifiable.’ 359 In the end, despite industrialized countries’ efforts,credits from forest conservation projects were not allowed into KyotoProtocol markets 360 and carbon sink project credits barred from use inthe EU ETS, though they remained prominent in the Protocol.However, the fundamental impossibilities of carbon-sink creditshaven’t ever been faced squarely by business, UN specialists, or mostgovernments.For example, during its deliberations on land use, an IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change committee 361 stubbornly professedhigh confidence in certain global estimates of biotic carbon fluxesdespite its being pointed out that estimates of net global terrestrialcarbon uptake had a factor-of-five error bar (200 million tonnesgive or take a billion tonnes). Similarly, because acknowledging thehuge error bars surrounding estimates of tropical deforestation would