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

172 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingStop being silly. Nepal was never going to build a superhighway system.Cameroon was never going to invest in a space programme. And presumablyCosta Rica would have stopped Harken Oil from drilling for reasons otherthan the promise of carbon credits. How could you possibly verify and measurethe carbon credits from such projects?As demonstrated above, the CDM already cannot verify how manycredits its projects generate, and for just the same reason: it can’t provethat its projects are not business as usual. In accounting terms, thereshould be no difference between them and these other speculativeprojects. The silliness is all on the side of the CDM and other carbonoffsetprogrammes themselves. To cite these hypothetical examples isonly to throw that silliness into sharper relief.In fact, in the case of indigenous communities and the Costa Ricangovernment preventing oil exploitation, measurement is arguably agood deal easier than in the average CDM project, involving onlyquantification of the unexploited oil deposits.What qualifies you to be a carbon credit owner, in sum, is not thatyou are saving carbon. It is, rather, that you have the money to investin various piecemeal technical fixes in specific industries and to hireconsultants to calculate and ‘verify’ carbon credits, crunch numbers,fill in forms, monitor projects and so on. Carbon credits go to wellfinanced,high-polluting operations capable of hiring professionalvalidators of counterfactual scenarios. They do not go to non-professionalactors in already low-emitting contexts or social movementsactively working to reduce use of fossil fuels. (See box, p. 61.)Few rural communities in Northeast Thailand or the Peruvian Amazon,for example, are going to be able to afford the services of the expensiveprivate carbon consultants designated by the United Nations– such as Norway’s Det Norske Veritas, Germany’s TUV, Britain’sSGS or Japan’s JQA – to document, ‘validate’ and ‘verify’ their community-friendlyenergy schemes, even if the UN encouraged suchprojects. 391 In the distribution of property rights over carbon savings,there’s a clear bias in favour of wealthy corporations and governmentsand against communities, the poor, non-professionals and certainethnic groups.It hardly needs to be added that this prejudice – which often deservesthe title of ‘structural racism’ – badly serves the cause of climatic stability.It reinforces a system in which, ironically, the main entitiesrecognised as being capable of making ‘emissions reductions’ are thecorporations most committed to a fossil-fuel-burning future, suchas Shell or Tokyo Power, while indigenous communities, environmentalmovements and ordinary people acting more constructively