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

lessons unlearned 171cen turies, yet are likely to have no share in the carbon profits that aformal landowner can reap.Similarly, indigenous communities, environmental groups, policymakersand even national governments have ‘invested’ in, and continueto invest in, innumerable carbon-saving activities such as preventingoil extraction or maintaining energy-efficient activities intheir territories. As Hermann Ott and Wolfgang Sachs point out, ‘acountry which, for reasons of equity, promotes biodiversity habitats,resource-light production, livelihood agriculture or the institution ofcommunity rights, may already avoid a great deal of emissions,’ 386 yetmay not own, or be able to sell, carbon credits for doing so. DouglasKorsah-Brown of Friends of the Earth Ghana once argued along similarlines that while Southern countries have effectively ‘loaned theirecological space to developed countries’, they ‘have received no creditfor avoiding emissions to date’ and ‘should be rewarded for not havingadopted dirty technology in the first place’. 387Well, but you can’t just give credits to somebody for not doing something.The Kyoto Protocol does it all the time. All CDM credits are generatedby not doing something. Remember that every project has to showthat it does not do ‘what would have happened without the project.’Some even have ‘avoidance’ in their name.Look, for example, at the Lages Methane Avoidance Project in Brazil,which was registered by the CDM board in April 2006. This projectgenerates credits by not landfilling wood waste and burning it instead.Or, to take another example at random: Japan gets carbon creditsfrom the Graneros Plant Fuel Switching Project in Chile, registeredin July 2005, because the plant does not use a certain amount of coalor oil, having switched to gas instead.If Japan gets credits for industries that do not use coal, and a Braziliancompany gets credits for not leaving wood to decay, then Costa Ricashould get credits for having prevented US companies such as HarkenOil from exploiting oil on its territory. 388 Indigenous communitiesshould get credits for having won the revocation of fossil fuel concessionsin their territories. 389In fact, why stop there? Nepal should put in an application to theCDM to get credits for not building a superhighway system. Cameroonshould get credits for not undertaking a space programme. Anybodyin a Southern or Eastern European country should be able to generatecredits for choosing to ride a bicycle instead of investing in a car. 390