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

174 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingExactly. And a final injury of carbon offset trading is that, by licensingmore pollution in already-polluted areas, it reinforces a pattern ofinequality worldwide.How does that happen?Some of the biggest buyers of carbon credits are industries that badlypollute their local communities – utilities, oil refineries, chemicalfirms, pulp and paper companies and the like. In fact, throughoutthe world, polluting industries and poor communities suffering discriminationof various kinds tend to be found together, for reasonsincluding weak pollution zoning restrictions and low real estate costs.Cheap carbon offsets help allow these industries to go on damagingtheir local environments.But the credits they buy are carbon dioxide credits. Carbon dioxide is not atoxic pollutant in itself.No, but, as mentioned earlier, the same processes that produce carbondioxide also produce a lot of co-pollutants that are toxic. By helpingindustries to go on producing carbon dioxide, cheap carbon creditsalso allow them to go on producing a range of toxic substances.Worse, a polluting industrial installation often gets a new lease onlife by buying cheap carbon credits from a project that damages thelives and livelihoods of local people elsewhere. In this way, the tradein carbon credits can use the oppression of local people whose landis being used for industrial plantations in Brazil, say, to prolong theoppression of other local communities in the vicinity of oil refineriesor power plants in Europe. Communities that should be uniting intheir battles for a transition away from the hydrocarbon economy arebeing pitted against each other by the trading system that pretends tooffer a solution. In the future, it may even happen that an indigenouscommunity fighting an oil company’s exploitation of its territory willfind itself at odds with another indigenous community down theriver providing carbon sink credits to the same company.Once again, the experience of offset markets in the US should haveprovided some lessons for the carbon trade. In Los Angeles County,for example, minorities are more than twice as likely as Caucasians tobe living in a census tract located within a one-mile radius of at leastone large-capacity toxic site, 396 and a majority of facilities emittingtoxic pollutants are in ‘Hispanic-dominated’ census tracts. 397 The LosAngeles RECLAIM offset trading programme described above reinforcedthis pattern.